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Possible Bubbles of Spacetime Curvature in the South Pacific

08 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by in Scholarly works

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Spoof Halloween submission to arXiv Physics…

Benjamin K. Tippett, “Possible Bubbles of Spacetime Curvature in the South Pacific”…

“In 1928, the late Francis Wayland Thurston published a scandalous manuscript in purport of warning the world of a global conspiracy of occultists. Among the documents he gathered to support his thesis was the personal account of a sailor by the name of Gustaf Johansen, describing an encounter with an extraordinary island. Johansen’s descriptions of his adventures upon the island are fantastic, and are often considered the most enigmatic (and therefore the highlight) of Thurston’s collection of documents. We contend that all of the credible phenomena which Johansen described may be explained as being the observable consequences of a localized bubble of spacetime curvature. Many of his most incomprehensible statements (involving the geometry of the architecture, and variability of the location of the horizon) can therefore be said to have a unified underlying cause. We propose a simplified example of such a geometry, and show using numerical computation that Johansen`s descriptions were, for the most part, not simply the ravings of a lunatic…”

The Dark Side of the Poles

31 Wednesday Oct 2012

Posted by in Historical context, Odd scratchings

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The Dark Side of the Poles: Dreams and Nightmares in Polar Exploration runs until 3rd November 2012 in the UK, as part of the University of Cambridge Festival of Ideas…

“Throughout the Festival, explore our trail of polar dreams and nightmares. Find untold secrets hidden in drawers and strange objects that have crept into the cases.”

The BBC has a companion essay on the topic, from Fred Lewsey of the University of Cambridge.

R.E. Howard’s Lovecraftian stories

31 Wednesday Oct 2012

Posted by in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc., REH

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I thought I might read R.E. Howard’s six ‘Lovecraft influenced’ stories, for Halloween. As best I can make out from twenty minutes of cursory research, the R.E. Howard Lovecraftian-ish tales are…

* The best two:

  “The Black Stone”

  “The Children of the Night”

* Lesser two:

  “The Cairn on the Headland”

  “The Thing on the Roof”

* Two tangential stories:

  “Worms of the Earth” (Generally said to be the best Bran Mak Morn story, with a few Lovecraftian bits and bobs mentioned?)

  “The Fire of Asshurbanipal” (Reportedly, only the ending is relevant?)

All six are available in the audio book form in the collection The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard [on Amazon USA], read by veteran audio-book reader Robertson Dean. “The Black Stone” is also available for free as a less memorable audio reading.

It’s been quite a long time since I read Howard’s Conan et al, and it’ll be interesting to see what the original Howard experience is like in polished audio-book form. I read Howard as a boy, at about the same time I first read Lovecraft, via the UK Panther paperback collections: Skull-face; The Valley of the Worm; and The Shadow Kingdom. From there I went to the UK Sphere King Kull collection, Tigers of the Sea (Cormac mac Art in the UK paperback), then into the numerous UK Sphere Conan paperbacks (one or two of which were quite rare at that time, and it was difficult to gather a full set) and the Solomon Kane stories (possibly via a tatty import copy of the U.S. Centaur Books paperback). More recently I read one of his werewolf stories, but that’s been it until now.

Selected Letters

30 Tuesday Oct 2012

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H.P. Lovecraft’s Selected Letters I, II, III, IV, V, all first editions, plus an envelope with Lovecraft’s name and return address written on the back. A snip at £1606.35. Even the most judicious shopper would have to pay about £250 for a set of the later editions, these days, so I guess it’s the envelope that’s costing around £1,200.