Mind and madness

07 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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How does Lovecraftian madness read in cultures that have differing conceptions of mind?

The Lao, like many communities in Southeast Asia, have only recently become familiar with Western notions of psychology and sanity. This leads to an interesting discussion of how Lovecraft’s recurring themes of the cosmic threats to sanity and an ordered, consistent sense of the cosmos may be an utterly alien topic of terror. One can almost imagine a Lao reader going “Ha ha ha. Oh. You lost the American version of your mind? That’s it?”

More Open Lovecraft

03 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by in Scholarly works

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New additions to the Open Lovecraft page…

* Negin Ghodrati (2013), “The Creation, Evolution and Aftermath of Lovecraftian Horror” (Masters dissertation, University of Oslo).

* Gabriela Birnfeld Kurtz (2013), “Cibercultura e H.P. Lovecraft: historias de horror no tempo da inteligencia coletiva”, Revista Tematica, Sept 2013. (In Portuguese. Lovecraft’s ideas and networks related to the concepts of cyberculture, collective intelligence and culture fandoms, with special reference to contemporary Facebook activity).

Shoggoth biology

03 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by in NecronomiCon 2013, Scholarly works

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Part five of the NecronomiCon 2013 talk on the biology of Lovecraft’s creatures: Shoggoths, with two more sections on shoggoths still to come…

“I see the Shoggoth as a endosymbiotic organism as well, being far more complex than the lichen (or human for that matter). Given their extreme plasticity and adaptability, the Shoggoth is probably a conglomeration of eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells.”

Northern Illinois HPL collection

01 Tuesday Oct 2013

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Northern Illinois University has a Lovecraft collection, including letters? Yup…

“The collection consists of Lovecraft’s fiction writing, letters, poems, scientific articles, pulp magazine stories, books about Lovecraft, collections of Lovecraft stories, titles of books known to have lived in Lovecraft’s personal library, and a few miscellaneous items, including several manuscript letters.”

No online finding aid to exactly what the collection holds, it seems. Fandom Directory, 2000, confirms there are only “a few letters”.