Towards the Visionary Antipodes

04 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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Towards the Visionary Antipodes of the Human Psyche is a short essay series examining the claims for Lovecraft and his circle as heralds of the 1960s psychedelic experience:

Part 1: Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft Anticipate the Psychedelic Experience.

Part 2: H.P. Lovecraft and the Door in the Wall, on H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction as a precursor to the psychedelic experience.

Part 3: H.P. Lovecraft, Psychedelia, Ancient Astronauts, and Occult Theories of Creativity.

The cats on the walls

02 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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Awesome Teutonic kittee furniture that Lovecraft would have adored…

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The house of his friends Mrs Miniter and Miss Beebe had a series of “cat ladders” built into its walls, although only one of the many cats there knew how to use them.

“The Rats in the Walls” was written September 1923, before Lovecraft first visited the Beebe/Miniter household in June 1928, so the whimsical thought that it might originally have been “Cats in the Walls” and inspired by the cat-ladders is impossible.

On sex and poetry

02 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by in New books

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A new blog post by S.T. Joshi. News that…

“Hippocampus Press has decided to publish a biannual journal devoted to weird poetry, entitled Spectral Realms [with] reviews and articles on the subject [in addition to poetry] … We hope to have the first issue ready by July [2014]”

Also news of a new scholarly book…

“Bobby Derie’s Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos, a serious and very perspicacious study of this subject. Derie, a young British critic, has analysed not only Lovecraft’s life and work for its sexual overtones and implications, but also the work of Lovecraft’s contemporaries [with publication planned for] later this year [2014] from Hippocampus Press”

More Open Lovecraft

01 Saturday Feb 2014

Posted by in Scholarly works

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* Patricia Garcia (2012), “The fantastic of place and the fantastic of space: two models of transgression”, Letras & Letras, Vol.28, No.2 (2012). (Part of a substantial special issue on horror and the fantastic. In English, with Spanish abstract).

* Brian S. Matzke (2013), All Scientific Stuff: Science, Expertise, and Everyday Reality in 1926. (PhD thesis for The University of Michigan. One short section is relevant: “Amazing Stories’ weird tale: “The Colour out of Space””.

* Elisa Gorusuk (2013), “Science et mythologie dans les oeuvres d’Howard Phillips Lovecraft”. (Masters disseration in French, examines the interplay of science and mythology in four key works).

The Shadow over the Invisible Lovecraft Pinball Table

29 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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Nope, sadly it doesn’t exist, seemingly being just a concept mock-up for a total makeover of a classic old Ghost Busters solid-state pinball table from the 1980s. It seems the guy went with a straight refurbishment rather than a Lovecraft mod.

It’s rather amazing to realise there’s no digital pinball table for the PC for any Lovecraft story. There was a very obscure, but well-reviewed, Sega Saturn game made by Japanese, Digital Pinball: Necronomicon. Today it looks more than a little basic, compared to the latest Marvel Doctor Strange pinball table…

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So there seems a whole lot of room for a Kickstarter here, to develop a nice three-table Lovecraft pinball game. One of the tables might even be based on Lovecraft the man, maybe with a “get back home to Providence from the hell of New York” theme: subways, trains, towers, libraries, night-walks, lack of money, all providing natural game elements.