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NecronomiCon 2015 schedule

06 Monday Jul 2015

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Available now: the NecronomiCon 2015 schedule along with the panel schedules for the Scholarship Symposium. If I were not stuck in England, the following filleted timetable would be my approx. route through the three days. Hopefully the academic papers will be collected in a book at some point, and most of the panels will get a listenable audio recording of some kind…

FRIDAY:

9am – 10:15am:

* Space and Place in the Lovecraftian milieu:

“The Sombreness of Decay: Lovecraft in Wilbraham, Mass.” Christian Haunton.
“Tentacles in the Madhouse: The Role of the Asylum in the Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft” Troy Rondinone.
“Architecture in the Lovecraft Archive” Connor Pitetti.

10:30am – 11:45am

* Panel: “How is art presented in Lovecraft’s fiction?”

1pm – 2:15pm

* Panel: “The Annotations of Madness”. What are the rewards of both reading and writing annotations of Lovecraft? What are the challenges?

2:30pm – 3:45pm

* Human Subjects: Lovecraft and the disciplines:

“Lovecraft and Folkloric Methodology” Ken Van Wey
“Darwin and the Deep Ones: Anthropological and Evolutionary Anxiety in Lovecraft” Jeffrey Shanks

4pm – 5:15pm

* The Language of Lovecraft:

“Terrores innombrables: Lovecraft and the Hispanic World” Juan L. Perez-de-Luque
“Divers Observations on H.P. Lovecraft’s Names and Name-Building” Steve Walker

5:30pm – 6:45pm

* Panel: Lovecraft and insanity.

SATURDAY:

9am – 10:15am

* (Re)considering the mythos:

“Reordering the Universe: H.P. Lovecraft’s Subversion of the Biblical Divine,” Jess Weise

10:30am – 11:45am

* “Beyond the Lovecraft Circle”:

“A Closet Quetzalcoatl: Intimations of HPL and Same Sex Desire in R.H. Barlow’s ‘The Wind That Is in the Grass’” Jarett Kobek
“It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came’: Shared Authorship in the Discourse Community of the Lovecraft Circle” Nicole Emmelhainz

2:30pm – 3:45pm

* Panel: Lovecraft and Ancient Rome

4:00pm – 5:15pm

* Lovecraft and the aesthetic experience:

“’The Inside’ of H.P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in the Visual Arts” Nathaniel Wallace
”The Suffering Intellect: HP Lovecraft’s Weird Epistemology” Daniel Holmes

SUNDAY:

9am – 10:15am

* Philosophical aspects of Lovecraft’s fiction:

“’Shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles’: H.P. Lovecraft and the Plasticity of Users and Tools” Jason Ray Carney
“H.P. Lovecraft and the Dimensions of Speculation” Anthony Camara
“H.P. Lovecraft’s Optimism” Matthew Beach
“Lovecraft, Rand and the Abyss of Opportunity” Rolf Maurer

10:30am – 11:45am

* In the dark manner of others: Lovecraft in literary context:

“Rarebit Dreamers: the Poetics of Lovecraft, Poe, and Winsor McCay” Miles Tittle

2:30pm – 3:45pm

* Panel: New England Gothic.

4:00pm – 5:00pm

* Panel: “A final chat with some of the organizers of NecronomiCon Providence and friends”

(Fly-by Web surfers please note: the above is not the full schedule, just my selection from it).

Lovecraft Annual No. 9

06 Monday Jul 2015

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Lovecraft Annual No.9 (2015) can now be pre-ordered on the Hippocampus Press store. Weighing in at around 240 pages.

lovekatPicture: Back cover, reproducing a Lovecraft letter that included a sketch of a heraldic shield for the K.A.T.

Letters to Marian F. Bonner
H. P. Lovecraft

Miscellaneous Impressions of H.P.L.
Marian F. Bonner

Can You Direct Me to Ely Court?: Some Notes on 66 College Street
Kenneth W. Faig, Jr.

66 College Street
David E. Schultz

The Thing (Flung Daily) on the Doorstep: Lovecraft in the Antipodean Press, 1803–2007
Brendan Whyte

Charles Baxter on Lovecraft
S. T. Joshi

Six Degrees of Lovecraft: Henry Miller
Bobby Derie

Cassie Symmes: Inadvertent Lovecraftian
David Goudsward

Clergymen among Lovecraft’s Paternal Ancestors
Kenneth W. Faig, Jr.

Lovecraft and Houellebecq: Two Against the World
Todd Spaulding

Donald A. Wollheim’s Hoax Review of the Necronomicon
Donovan K. Loucks

Reviews

Science Fiction Theology

05 Sunday Jul 2015

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Alan Gregory, Science Fiction Theology: Beauty and the Transformation of the Sublime, Baylor University Press, 2015.

“To the extent that science fiction has appropriated ― and reveled ― in the sublime, it has persisted in a sometimes explicit, sometimes subterranean, relationship with Christian theology. From its seventeenth-century beginnings, the sublime, with its representations of immensity, has informed the imagining of God. When science fiction critiques or reinvents religion, its writers have engaged in a literary guerrilla war with Christianity over what is truly sublime and divine.”

theol

Also: Theology & Science Fiction: A Syllabus.

Tentacles Longer Than Night

04 Saturday Jul 2015

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Tentacles Longer Than Night: Horror of Philosophy, Vol. 3…

Extending the ideas presented in his book In The Dust of This Planet, Thacker considers the relationship between philosophy and the horror genre. But instead of taking fiction as the mere illustration of ideas, Thacker reads horror stories as if they themselves were works of philosophy, driven by a speculative urge to question human knowledge and the human-centric view of the world, ultimately leading to the limit of the human — thought undermining itself, in thought.”

tenta

Added to Open Lovecraft

03 Friday Jul 2015

Posted by in REH, Scholarly works

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* Patrick Burger (2014), The Political Unconscious in the Works of Robert E. Howard and Ernst Junger, Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Publishing, 2014. (The book form of Burger’s PhD thesis for the Faculty of Language, Literature, and Culture, Justus-Liebig University, Germany).

* Ksenia Olkusz and Aleksander Rzyman (2011), “Titanic, Mysterious, Forgotten: cities in Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s stories, Svet Kresleny Slovem, 2012. (In English. Presumably Svet Kresleny Slovem is a Polish academic journal).

* Justin Woodman (2015), “Becoming a Part of the Lurking Evil” : occultural accelerationism, Lovecraftian modernity, and the interiorization of monstrosity. (Forthcoming as part of a Punctum Books volume in 2016, Dark Glamor: Accelerationism and the Occult, edited by Ed Keller, Tim Matts and Benjamin Noys).

Lovecraft was right, part 724

25 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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New science suggest that “unlighted” and “pallid” stars may generate the “thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes”, while remaining “voiceless”…

When they are accumulating new material stars could generate sound in a very similar manner to that which we observed in the laboratory — so the stars might be singing — but, since sound cannot propagate through the vacuum of space, no-one can hear them.”

… whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods—the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.” (“Nyarlathotep”)