Monthly Archives: November 2014

Added to Open Lovecraft

08 Saturday Nov 2014

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* Geza Arthur George Reilly (2014), “”Escape from the prison-house of the known”: reading weird fiction in its historical contexts” (PhD thesis, University of Manitoba. Proposes that useful new scholarly perspectives can be gained by the analysis of… “weird fictions via their specific historical locations [and] placement within specific historical milieus [in regard to the work of] Lovecraft, Smith, Howard, Bloch, and Ligotti”. The first chapter examines traces of the First World War in Lovecraft’s stories)

* Ludwig Karlsson (2014), “The Statement that is Randolph Carter: growth in a nihilistic universe” (Masters dissertation, Stockholm University. The recurring character of Randolph Carter seen as a prism of Nietzschean virtues)

* Iago Mosquera Gonzalez, and Xavier Moron Dapena (2014), “El Necronomicon visto desde el Aleph: pseudointertextualidad en Lovecraft y Borges” (In Spanish. “The Necronomicon seen from the Aleph: pseudo-intertextuality in Lovecraft and Borges”, in Sobrenatural, Fantastico y Metareal: La Perspectiva de America Latina, pp.39-46)

* Andre Roberto Tonussi Arnaut (2013), “Onde fica a Rue D’auseil? A primazia do horror sobre a aporia, de Levinas a Lovecraft” (Seems to be a Masters dissertation for the Department of Philosophy at the University of Brazil. In Portuguese. An attempt to understand Levinas and Lovecraft via the use of elements of contemporary European philosophy)

The Call of Tsathoggua

05 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Historical context

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A Lovecraft envelope, postmark 9th June 1934, with a note to Clark Ashton Smith on the back…

casenv

Ar-Ech-Bei [Barlow] wishes you would fcall [phone? call / tell?] him as much as possible about H2UICQU01QMN2HAH [Hziulquoigmnzhah], the paternal uncle of Tsathoggua – cf. “Door to Saturn”.

My guess would be that this might relate to tweaking Smith’s “Door to Saturn” (pub. Jan 1932) before a reprint, so as to align it with the emerging Tsathoggua aspect of the mythos…

I have done what I could toward elucidating the genealogy of Tsathoggua, and am sending Ar-Ech-Bei [Barlow] the result of my delvings into the Parchments of Pnom, the chief Hyperborean authority on such matters. Pnom [R.E. Howard?] has much more to say about Tsathoggua than about Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth and Azathoth; but no doubt you have access to other records, mainly concerning these entities; and I’d be glad of more specific information about them. As I am pointing out to Ar-Ech-Bei, Pnom’s account of Ts. can be reconciled with the legendry told to Zamarcona in ‘The Mound.’ The myth, through aeons, was varied in the usual mythopoeic fashion by the cavern-dwellers, who came at last to believe that merely the images of Tsathoggua, and not the god himself, had emerged in former cycles from the inner gulf. Ts., travelling fourth-dimensionally from Saturn, first entered the Earth through the lightless abyss of N’kai; and, not unnaturally, the Yothians regarded N’kai as his place of origin. Undoubtedly the god now resides in N’kai, to which he returned when the ice overwhelmed Hyperborea.” (thanks to Will Murray for the 1934 Lovecraft to Smith letter extract)

An interesting insight into the care Lovecraft took, in co-ordinating the merging of the emerging mythos.

New Fossil

04 Tuesday Nov 2014

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The latest issue of The Fossil is available now, and page 6 has a short article on the Ken Faig collection of amateur journals, now safely in a university archive…

KEN FAIG DONATED HIS amateur journalism collection to the Special Collections Department of the University of Iowa in Iowa City.” [includes the run of] “Nyctalops, George Record’s The Dark Brotherhood Journal, Robert M. Price’s Crypt of Cthulhu, many journals published by Marc Michaud’s Necronomicon Press, and a complete set of the mailings of the Esoteric Order of Dagon…”

It also appears that the Library of Congress is seeking, in paper format… “a run of THE FOSSIL from 1965 on” (see p.11).

The Lost History of Esoteric Writing

04 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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A weighty new book from the University Of Chicago Press looks interesting, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing. According to a review, this is is a…

compelling, surprising, and persuasive defense of Strauss”[‘s claim that…] “virtually all philosophers up until the early 19th century wrote their books ‘esoterically’ — that is, using a rhetoric of concealment, with a surface teaching meant for general readers and a hidden teaching for those who were intelligent, clever, and tenacious enough to uncover it.” [The author] “supplies a mountain of evidence in support of Strauss’ claims — quotes from just about every major philosopher (and many other writers) from ancient Greece to 19th-century Germany testifying to the reality of esotericism.” — Damon Linker, The Week.

a landmark work in both intellectual history and political theory” — Wall Street Journal.