Booking now. Monday, 21st July 2014: Obscura Society NYC: Lovecraft in Brooklyn — A Moonlit Mausoleum Reading…

We’ll be navigating our way through historic Green-Wood’s winding pathways and elaborate memorials by lantern light, featuring several of the cemetery’s most atmospheric locations along the way. … an intimate reading of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook” … Our evening exploration will culminate with a private cocktail reception by the Suydam mausoleum, typically locked and off-limits to the public.

It’s cool when worlds collide. Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week blog, which I know of through my work on JURN (SVPoW recently inspired me to add coverage of open-access dinosaur academia to my JURN academic search-engine) has a new blog post on pathological rodent teeth and Cthulhu…

in my experience, in the Venn diagram of life, the “interested in paleo” [dinosaur fossils] and “interested in Lovecraft” circles overlap almost entirely.

His post links out to his superb 2013 post on What Cthulhu should look like.

I won the Public Domain Review caption competition. Looking around for a place to have them send the prize, I alighted on the Merrimack River Feline Rescue Society. Should anyone need a relatively local-to-Providence no-kill cat shelter to donate Lovecraftian competition / event surplus proceeds to, that might be it. They seem like a pretty solid organisation, and are just about the nearest such to Providence / the Necronomicon convention.

I had a really bad eBay experience with buying a Lovecraft item from “circusofdeadgoats”. I know, I know… I should have been warned by his name. I strongly advise Lovecraftians not to purchase from this vendor via eBay.

The Call of Cthulhu

Some men found
new treasuries of data
received with suspense and astonishment
just before the stars were right
oh they worshipped
so
they
said——

the precise words
spoken in the night
so
they
said——
and then all dreamed
phantasies
standing evoking spirits
atop the mountains of China
—— each so so convinced
that his correspondence was corroboration
of what he imagined

Professors whooo-boy! they dun jived at those
voodoo meetings
yass sairr!
had their heads so full of waterfront rum
yass sairr!
they never questioned
them terrifying vistas
while horrors that none
of them had ever seen
——outsiders——
took advantage of the convocation
to offer blasphemous questions
for correct answerings
yass sairr!
those outsiders they bore out
the queer and the poets
when the pertinent answers
came——

So convinced
some still remained
so fascinated
and in their future years
even the Great
could not induce them to speak
for they feared sinister ears
——only mumbled in vague suggestions

Professor! —
this manuscript
places caution before audacity
the trees were thinner
these stars are wrong
the brooding voodoo —— not proven!

through the winter of the human mind
something moved sensitive among them
seeking hints
of morbid habitation
then in one nauseous rout
succeeded in tracing
the first to be approached

The man on the Newburyport boat
he knew
enough to keep away

so outer powers did not find the key
—— just found a very old man
with a dream he had never spoken
but he remembered
a morbid and long lost statue
whose origin was the sea

“The films of old, weird, Britain”, considered in a lead feature in the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound cinema magazine…

A nice bit of techno-hauntology from the UK…

“Shadowing, a project developed [in the old port city of Bristol, England] by Jonathan Chomko and Matthew Rosier, uses infrared tracking and triggered projections to replay the shadow of a previous passerby to the next person who walks under a modified streetlight. The design duo hopes that the reanimation of the city streets with ghostly time-travellers will be a playful experience for everyone, but also recognises the potentially darker side of the shadows.”