Bloomberg review and New York Times review of the just-opened Brooklyn exhibition Divine Felines: Cats of Ancient Egypt.

I’ve often thought that the psychedelic orator Terence McKenna (1946-2000) was influenced by Lovecraft and, now we have his new biography from his brother The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, it’s now provable…

“We knew we were on a quest; we knew we were seeking something unknown, transcendent, and possibly quite terrifying. So, we were setting out to explore the Screaming Abyss, and we became, humorously, the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss. I think the genesis of it came from H.P. Lovecraft, the early 20th century horror writer that Terence & I both read extensively as teenagers.”

My impromptu jotting of a few similarities:

* Cosmicism: McKenna presented a positive human-centred version of cosmicism (mp3 link) and transcosmicism, in which enlightened humans are the pinnacle and whole point of the cosmos’s “conservation of novelty”. This bit of his thought certainly makes for an interesting answer to Lovecraft. Although this point could be reconciled with Lovecraft, by stating that: although the human brain appears to be the pinnacle of the universe’s ever-ramifying complexity, that doesn’t therefore mean the cosmos cares about us.

* Dimensions just out of reach: McKenna perhaps channels Machen here, a little more than Lovecraft. What Terence called “self-transforming machine elves” are deemed to be beside us, in hidden dimensions only visible on drugs… “Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien.” (McKenna). Compare with the Necronomicon‘s “Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold.”; the dimensional intersections of “Dreams in the Witch House”; and “From Beyond” etc.

* Cthulhu calls his cultists: McKenna conceived of time as a wave rather than a linearity. With a being-like “dwell-point” or “hyperdimensional object” ahead of us in this “manifold” of time, a point that is attracting the enlightened portion of humanity toward a singularity-like transformed state — beyond which all will be unspeakable and unknowable. Only sensitive dreamers and artists get the psychic call about this coming apocalypse of ultimate-complexity, especially if they use visionary psychedelics.

To this he added a here-and-now kicker that recalls the Cthulhu cult: before the end-of-time arrives, psychedelically-enlightened humans can best survive the stressful “dominator culture” end-times by retreating into an “Archaic Revival” that involves orgiastic sex, psychedelic drugs, electronic music, and shamanic ritual, indulged in in natural settings — all with the aim of dissolving ego-boundaries and so preparing for the coming end-of-time. Nice work, if you can get it.

If you haven’t heard him compellingly explaining all this, it all sounds very whacky. It is, although he was also scientifically trained so it’s usually unpinned with levels of rationality and interesting ideas about an evolutionary symbiosis of ethno-botany and language/culture. It’s best to think of Terence rather as Lovecraft probably thought of the Theosophists. As a set of extremely well-presented and rather fun tripped-out beliefs to mine for use in weird fiction.

News just in from the Providence Journal…

“The Providence City Council has voted [for a] resolution to call the intersection of Angell and Prospect streets “H.P. Lovecraft Square” [the resolution] was approved unanimously earlier this month.”

The Location on Google Street View…

When your new horror book is this fat, it might be time to trim out some of the padding — before your readers can’t actually physically hold your books in front of them any more…

Top ten cautionary lessons to be learned from Mr. Lovecraft:

1. Don’t eat the cheap canned stuff.

2. Don’t choose a day-job that’s too similar to your creative work.

3. If you must work for idiots, at least get the payments up front.

4. Writing faux-antique poetry may not be the most certain route to fame and influence.

5. Don’t let the wife give up her day-job as soon as you’re married.

6. Candy bars are not a breakfast.

7. Keep carbon copies of all letters.

8. Don’t give your family’s money to an uncle to invest in a ‘sure-fire’ scheme.

9. When naming a cat, stick to traditional names like “Fluffy”.

10. Don’t correlate the contents.

Here’s my new free quick-start template, for self-publishing authors starting to use Adobe InDesign CS6. I couldn’t find one at all that was in the classic book style, so I made one.

It’s a simple 6″ x 9″ book template, with a style modeled on vintage book design.

It’s set up with the correct margins for the Lulu.com print-on-demand service. Autoflow of pasted text is already fully set up for you, and footnotes are fully set up and spaced. Should accommodate about 55,000 words or so, in its 104 pages. You may want to remove the auto-hyphenation of some words at the end of lines.

Download.

It’s freeware. Small donations are welcome, if you find it useful.

Those wanting to import a scholarly book or dissertation into InDesign from a straight Word file might also take a look at this useful tutorial on importing a Word document with footnotes intact and correctly placed, and still “dynamic”.

I’m looking for a scan of a work by Everett McNeil, Lovecraft’s friend in New York and Kalem Club member:

* “A Student of Psychology”, short story in The White Elephant Sep 1897, reprinted Mystery Magazine 1st Feb 1918.

New Alan Moore interview in the June 2013 The Believer. No new news on the 1919 Lovecraft graphic novel. But he’s writing a 600,000 word…

“noir crime narrative based upon the Northampton pastor James Hervey [1714-1758], whom I believe was the father of the entire Gothic movement”

The early Hegel specialist James Hutchinson Sterling, in 1865, famously describing Hegel’s thought in Lovecraftian terms…

“Shall I be able to conduct you through this vast Cyclopean edifice this huge structure this enormous pile this vast mass that resembles nothing which has yet appeared in France or England or the world? One of those vast palaces, it is, of Oriental dream, gigantic, endless court upon court, chamber on chamber, terrace on terrace, built of materials from the east and the west and the north and the south marble and gold and jasper and amethyst and ruby, old prophets asleep with signet rings guarded by monsters winged and unwinged, footed and footless, there out in the void desert, separated from the world of man by endless days and nights, and eternally recurrent and repeating solitudes, lonely, mysterious, inexplicable, a giant dreamland, but still barbaric, incoherent, barren!”