New on Archive.org today, a Morgoth’s Review podcast lecture on “Lovecraft, Nyarlathotep And Our Changing World”. This turns out to be a YouTube podcaster with a slightly-difficult accent and obvious high intelligence, who has discovered Lovecraft’s fiction via the Warhammer game of all things. Here he’s bowled over by Lovecraft’s prose-poem “Nyarlathotep”, and points out the congruence of the short tale with our current times, and many pithy points are made. An entertaining and illuminating view from a Lovecraft newcomer.

But worthy of automatic censorship? He does seem to be from that wing of the Christian-Right which believes in the existence of evil-as-an-active-force (but presumably doesn’t frown on the likes of Warhammer as an abode-of-demons?). But there’s nothing objectionable in his lecture and partial reading that I can hear. Nevertheless spotting it popping up on Archive.org made me aware of the existence of the curious ‘Deemphasized Collections at Internet Archive’ category, to which the lecture has presumably been auto-added by bots rather than the uploader. The category includes “Adult and Mature Comics” and “Vintage Men’s Magazines”, and in general is an amazing collection of weirdness and smut. All of which is presumably suppressed in searches. But which Archive.org then allows you to search all in one go, very conveniently for some.

Here ‘lovecraft’ means something very different, though a search for his name does sometimes give a few results in contexts other than a tawdry scan of a 1970s Busty British Bar-maids Vol. 1 and suchlike. For instance I see that Thomas Ligotti’s acclaimed The Conspiracy Against The Human Race and even Lovecraft’s Collected Works languishes in this suppressed category, nestling against the ‘Ancient Aliens’ Collection and other such high weirdness. Possibly the crap front-cover and the word “Conspiracy” in the title were enough to damn a great writer, but who can fathom the unexplained caprices of censorship these days? A lone copy of a 1920s Weird Tales is even consigned to the category, once deemed suitable fare for juvenile readers and distributed to every city news-stand in America.