Added to Open Lovecraft

08 Saturday Nov 2014

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* Geza Arthur George Reilly (2014), “”Escape from the prison-house of the known”: reading weird fiction in its historical contexts” (PhD thesis, University of Manitoba. Proposes that useful new scholarly perspectives can be gained by the analysis of… “weird fictions via their specific historical locations [and] placement within specific historical milieus [in regard to the work of] Lovecraft, Smith, Howard, Bloch, and Ligotti”. The first chapter examines traces of the First World War in Lovecraft’s stories)

* Ludwig Karlsson (2014), “The Statement that is Randolph Carter: growth in a nihilistic universe” (Masters dissertation, Stockholm University. The recurring character of Randolph Carter seen as a prism of Nietzschean virtues)

* Iago Mosquera Gonzalez, and Xavier Moron Dapena (2014), “El Necronomicon visto desde el Aleph: pseudointertextualidad en Lovecraft y Borges” (In Spanish. “The Necronomicon seen from the Aleph: pseudo-intertextuality in Lovecraft and Borges”, in Sobrenatural, Fantastico y Metareal: La Perspectiva de America Latina, pp.39-46)

* Andre Roberto Tonussi Arnaut (2013), “Onde fica a Rue D’auseil? A primazia do horror sobre a aporia, de Levinas a Lovecraft” (Seems to be a Masters dissertation for the Department of Philosophy at the University of Brazil. In Portuguese. An attempt to understand Levinas and Lovecraft via the use of elements of contemporary European philosophy)

The Call of Tsathoggua

05 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Historical context

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A Lovecraft envelope, postmark 9th June 1934, with a note to Clark Ashton Smith on the back…

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Ar-Ech-Bei [Barlow] wishes you would fcall [phone? call / tell?] him as much as possible about H2UICQU01QMN2HAH [Hziulquoigmnzhah], the paternal uncle of Tsathoggua – cf. “Door to Saturn”.

My guess would be that this might relate to tweaking Smith’s “Door to Saturn” (pub. Jan 1932) before a reprint, so as to align it with the emerging Tsathoggua aspect of the mythos…

I have done what I could toward elucidating the genealogy of Tsathoggua, and am sending Ar-Ech-Bei [Barlow] the result of my delvings into the Parchments of Pnom, the chief Hyperborean authority on such matters. Pnom [R.E. Howard?] has much more to say about Tsathoggua than about Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth and Azathoth; but no doubt you have access to other records, mainly concerning these entities; and I’d be glad of more specific information about them. As I am pointing out to Ar-Ech-Bei, Pnom’s account of Ts. can be reconciled with the legendry told to Zamarcona in ‘The Mound.’ The myth, through aeons, was varied in the usual mythopoeic fashion by the cavern-dwellers, who came at last to believe that merely the images of Tsathoggua, and not the god himself, had emerged in former cycles from the inner gulf. Ts., travelling fourth-dimensionally from Saturn, first entered the Earth through the lightless abyss of N’kai; and, not unnaturally, the Yothians regarded N’kai as his place of origin. Undoubtedly the god now resides in N’kai, to which he returned when the ice overwhelmed Hyperborea.” (thanks to Will Murray for the 1934 Lovecraft to Smith letter extract)

An interesting insight into the care Lovecraft took, in co-ordinating the merging of the emerging mythos.

New Fossil

04 Tuesday Nov 2014

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The latest issue of The Fossil is available now, and page 6 has a short article on the Ken Faig collection of amateur journals, now safely in a university archive…

KEN FAIG DONATED HIS amateur journalism collection to the Special Collections Department of the University of Iowa in Iowa City.” [includes the run of] “Nyctalops, George Record’s The Dark Brotherhood Journal, Robert M. Price’s Crypt of Cthulhu, many journals published by Marc Michaud’s Necronomicon Press, and a complete set of the mailings of the Esoteric Order of Dagon…”

It also appears that the Library of Congress is seeking, in paper format… “a run of THE FOSSIL from 1965 on” (see p.11).

The Lost History of Esoteric Writing

04 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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A weighty new book from the University Of Chicago Press looks interesting, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing. According to a review, this is is a…

compelling, surprising, and persuasive defense of Strauss”[‘s claim that…] “virtually all philosophers up until the early 19th century wrote their books ‘esoterically’ — that is, using a rhetoric of concealment, with a surface teaching meant for general readers and a hidden teaching for those who were intelligent, clever, and tenacious enough to uncover it.” [The author] “supplies a mountain of evidence in support of Strauss’ claims — quotes from just about every major philosopher (and many other writers) from ancient Greece to 19th-century Germany testifying to the reality of esotericism.” — Damon Linker, The Week.

a landmark work in both intellectual history and political theory” — Wall Street Journal.

Speaking of Lovecraft…

30 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by in Podcasts etc.

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Fascinating Nouns has a new podcast interview with S. T. Joshi on Lovecraft. The interviewer is a newcomer to Lovecraft, so I expect Joshi spends a lot of time covering the Lovecraft 101 basics.

Joshi’s latest blog post reports that according to John Trimble “an elderly science fiction fan”, the SF ur-fan Forrest Ackerman once owned a tape of Lovecraft reading one of his stories…

He [Trimble] said things we all know — Lovecraft’s voice was high pitched, he pronounced Cthulhu oddly, and added that HP was a lousy reader (as a dramatist).

I would note that Ackerman was a correspondent from 1931 and that the Ackerman archive is as yet unprocessed. Is a Kickstarter needed, to pay for someone to process it, and perhaps find the tape?

“Scientists to the last”

30 Thursday Oct 2014

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Why, gosh — one could almost imagine that the folks at Brown University were channelling H.P. Lovecraft. In the news this month…

“Researchers at Brown University have shattered an electron wave function, that near-mythical representation of indeterminate reality, in which an unmeasured particle is able to occupy many states simultaneously”.

“A team at Brown University called BrainGate is at the forefront of the real-world movement to link human brains directly to computers”.

“Brown University is part of a team looking at the environment’s influence on human adaptation and how it changes biology… Genes can shape culture and political institutions, which in turn can shape biology and physiology, passing on certain traits to future generations.”

And becoming world experts on creatures that look like this…

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Fruit Hill

30 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by in Historical context, Maps

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“Around the All-Hallows period I unearthed a highly picturesque district on the city’s very rim — Fruit Hill [now the Our Lady of Fatima Hospital, its grounds, and the adjacent Captain Stephen Olney Memorial Park], from one point of which I caught a view of almost incredible loveliness which included a twilight-clad descent of walled meadows (with a wood and glimpses of a sllnset-litten river at the bottom), dim violet hills against an orange-gold west, a steepled village in a northward valley, and over the rocky eastward ridge a great round Hunter’s Moon preparing to flood the scene with spectral light. Since then there has been some cold weather — even a premature touch of snow — but yesterday was warm again, and I took a walk through the same Fruit Hill region, now pretty well toned down to bare boughs and grey and brown effects. My season of hibernation looms close — but in my present ancient hilltop quarters I do not mind an indoor existence as badly as I might.” (Lovecraft to Richard Ely Morse, 14th November 1933, in Selected Letters IV, p.318)

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From: large scale topographical map of Providence, 1935.

S.T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship – open for applications

29 Wednesday Oct 2014

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Applications are now open for the new S.T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship, for research on H.P. Lovecraft and his circle. The lucky recipient gets to spend six weeks at Brown University, with $2,500 to cover travel and expenses. Application deadline: 31st January 2015. The email address below was from the initial announcement, and I’m assuming it’s still the one for contact.

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