They filtered down from the Web…

29 Friday Nov 2013

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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Weird Tales interviews Wilum Pugmire.

SF writer Charles Stross muses on What Scared Lovecraft (hint: a big weird universe).

An interview with Gabriel Blackwell about his book The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men: The Last Letter of H.P. Lovecraft.

LA Review of Books reviews S.T. Joshi’s latest, the The Cosmic Horror Colouring Book. Oops, no, my mistake… it’s Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction.

cos2

Neo-reactionaries

25 Monday Nov 2013

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A little over seventy years after Lovecraft’s death, there appears to be a modern political tendency that he might have felt at home with. It seems to me that these guys are being a little optimistic about the return to a human aristocracy, in the face of a future where untouchable ‘Computer says No!’ AI-augmented bots are effectively already the new aristocrats and poised to spread their rule to more and more parts of our lives.

Occult humanities

16 Saturday Nov 2013

Posted by in Scholarly works

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Only just heard about this. Occult Humanities conference, 18th-20th October 2013 in New York…

“The conference will present a wide array of voices active in the cultural landscape who are specifically addressing the occult tradition through research, scholarship and artistic practice. [from] a rich and expanding community of international artists and academics from multiple disciplines across the humanities who share an exuberance and excitement for how the occult traditions interface with their fields of study as well as the culture at large.”

Hopefully the organisers will summon up some of that occult ‘action at a distance’ thing, and put session podcasts online in the near future.

JURN updated

14 Thursday Nov 2013

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My JURN search-engine has just had its annual full check-and-repair. JURN lets you search inside 4,538 free ejournals in the arts & humanities, and the results gives full-text access to all articles. Rather handy for independent scholars who have no access to commercial academic journal collections.

My JURN Directory has also been also repaired and updated. This organised directory contains links to the home-pages of the 3,000 English-language ejournals included in JURN.

Lovecraft’s 1932 library list

13 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by in Historical context, REH

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A PDF of The Cross Plainsman (Autumn 2000) contains a transcript of the 1932 list of books owned by Lovecraft, sent to R.E. Howard. Presumably it was a partial list, items of interest to Howard?

“There are then appended the pages listing Lovecraft’s personal library at the time, August 1932. […] I append here the list of books in the 1932 HPL collection:”

Interesting to see that Lovecraft owned a pirated amateur edition of the famous Not at Night omnibus.

Also on the shelves in 1932 was “Theory of Pneumatology – Jung – Shilling”. Not, as you might think, the Jung. But rather Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling, a man of the late 18th century.

“This [The Theory of Pneumatology] is in reply to the question, what ought to be believed or disbelieved concerning presentiments, visions and apparitions, according to nature, reason and scripture. Contents: Introduction; Examination and Refutation of the Principles of Materialism; Remarks Upon the Nature of Man; On Presentiments, Predictions, Enchantments and Prophesying; On Visions and Apparitions; Brief Summary; Notes. Also included is a biographical sketch of the author, Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling.”