Merry Christmas

 Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays! Thanks to everyone for reading the blog. 

Two 'Lovecraftian' movies

I noticed recommendations for two  movies recommended as "Lovecraftian." 

On Twitter, horror writer C.F. Page writes about 2020's The Empty Man, "Every so often I feel obligated to boost this movie. The studio made the trailers for this film look comparable to Truth or Dare, or the Bye-Bye Man, when in fact this is a well-written, well-acted, thought-provoking film that’s so secretly Lovecraftian that it doesn’t even tell the audience it’s Lovecraftian. In other words, it treats the audience like intelligent human beings. It is very bleak (you might have to follow it up with a lighthearted comedy). 

It’s based on a graphic novel, but I prefer the film."

Ong's Hat (e.g., Joseph Matheny) seconds, "Found this completely by accident and was pleasantly surprised when I watched it." 

Here's the Wikipedia article.  Just Watch says it's available on various streaming services.

Meanwhile, Gamerant reviews the movie Suitable Flesh, and says it is inspired by Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep." Reviewer Arianne Gift writes, "Directed by the visionary Joe Lynch and penned by the talented Dennis Paoli, this film brings Lovecraftian horror to life, weaving a narrative that explores the thin veil between sanity and ancient, malevolent forces. With a stellar cast including Heather Graham, Judah Lewis, Barbara Crampton, Bruce Davison, and Johnathon, this new horror flick ventures into the depths of psychological terror."

Just Watch says it's in some theaters and on some streaming platforms.

Lovecraft series podcast

 

Image from Ong's Hat account on X (i.e. Joseph Matheny). 

I spent the days before Halloween listening to the first season of The Lovecraft Investigations, the BBC drama podcast. ; it is a somewhat free  adaptation of "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward." I enjoyed it and I plan to listen to the other episodes.

Sitting Now has posted a podcast interview with Julian Sampson, the show's creator. 

A 'Notorious' performance of Lovecraft

The late rapper Christopher George Latore Wallace, known as The Notorious B.I.G. and Biggie Smalls, had managed a very successful rap music career before he died in 1997, a killing that is still officially unsolved. 

Thanks to artificial intelligence, his voice has now been used for a rap music performance of the H.P. Lovecraft poem "Nemesis." If you want to consume Lovecraft as an old school reader, the text of the poem is here. 

My Halloween reading, and RAW's

I like to read a bit of horror fiction during the Halloween season. This year, I'm reading a story collection, Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Vol. 2, edited by August Derleth, that's connected to Illuminatus! I bought it at Confluence, after Gregory Arnott spotted it in the dealer room and called it to my attention.

Gregory told me the book is mentioned in the appendix, and sure enough, it is, at the end of the appendices, in an entry on "George Dorn's older brother" who "had an adventure with talking dolphins before George did." The entry doesn't list which story, but it's "The Deep Ones" by James Wade.

There are other signs that Robert Anton Wilson read the book. Illuminatus! mentions an oddball "Starry Wisdom" church on the island of Fernando Poo. "The Haunter of the Dark" by H.P. Lovecraft in the Derleth anthology also has a Starry Wisdom church, and Robert Bloch's "The Shadow From the Steeple" also mentions Starry Wisdom, too. (Robert Shea was not particularly a Lovecraft fan; all of the Lovecraft references appear to come from Wilson).

By the way, the first story in the anthology, Bloch's "The Shambler from the Stars," kills a character who is apparently H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft returns the favor by killing "Robert Blake" in "The Haunter in the Dark."

H.P. Lovecraft, the Houdini connection

Harry Houdini in handcuffs in 1918.

If you are reading this blog, you  probably know that H.P Lovecraft influenced Robert Anton Wilson. You may not know that there was a connection between Lovecraft and escape artist Harry Houdini. I certainly didn't.

From the Guardian: "A long-lost manuscript by HP Lovecraft, an investigation of superstition through the ages that the author was commissioned to write by Harry Houdini, has been found in a collection of magic memorabilia.

"The Cancer of Superstition was previously known only in outline and through its first chapter. Houdini had asked Lovecraft in 1926 to ghostwrite the treatise exploring superstition, but the magician’s death later that year halted the project, as his wife did not wish to pursue it."

H.P. Lovecraft in 1934

The Guardian article says that Lovecraft and Houdini shared a common interest in combating that they saw as superstitious beliefs. Read more of the Guardian's article.

Hat tip, Ted Hand.

Ted remarks, "Houdini deserves a lot more attention as a central Bob Wilson concern. Bob is following in his footsteps and using magic as a metaphor for the manipulation of reality."

"Houdini is a big deal in the Schrodinger's cat trilogy," he notes. Ted sent me a passage to illustrate and remarked, "Breaking out of the trap of (dogmatism) being one of the central RAW concerns."

Getting high with H.P. Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft not only referenced marijuana in his fiction, he may have been the origin of 4:20 as code for smoking pot. Or so argues this piece at Cannabis Culture, "420, Lovecraft, Crowley, and Hashish connections!" by Chris Bennett, which finds the 4:20 reference in a Lovecraft story entitled "In the Walls of Erix."

Then there's this sentence: "There is the rumor that Lovecraft’s wife, Sonia Greene, had a 'friendship' with the British magician Aleister Crowley and information was exchanged between them."

Bennett is the author of a new book, Liber 420: Cannabis, Magickal Herbs and the Occult.

Hat tip: Charles Faris.

 

Email to the Universe Discussion Group, Week 10

By Gregory Arnott, guest blogger

Ambrose Bierce

Damnation by Definition

Robert Anton Wilson ever the arch-agnostic, was surprisingly consistent in his themes.  Although he notes that parts of Authority and Submission, an unpublished work written in his early-mid thirties, would be incorporated in Prometheus Rising and Illuminatus! the themes he covers can be found in nearly every other essay in this collection and throughout his oeuvre. The particular term “The Damned Thing” is derived by an Ambrose Bierce short-story that itself seems to have been partially inspired by Guy de Maupassant’s 1880s story “The Horla.” Both stories were an influence on Lovecraft who borrowed an array of themes and terms from Bierce’s stories or from other writers, such as Robert Chambers, who borrowed those terms from Bierce in their turn. The possibly trans-dimensional locations “Carcosa” and “Hali” were both derived from Bierce’s work as well as the name “Hastur” who would be morphed from a gentle shepherd deity to one of the more fearsome of the Great Old Ones. Alan Moore’s recent masterwork of Lovecraftian fiction/scholarship Providence highlights the contributions Bierce made to Lovecraft's fevered universe. Bierce and Chambers are both mentioned in the rising action of The Eye in the Pyramid with the former’s disappearance and the latter’s move to trite romance novels being used as evidence of the Illuminati’s nefarious activities over the years.

But this is mostly a political/social essay concerning the interactions between two possible models: the authoritarian and libertarian. Benjamin Tucker, the nineteenth century American anarchist quoted in the essay as saying “[a]gression is simply another name for government,” is mentioned earlier in the same class of thinkers as Lysander Spooner. I think it is typical of RAW, who is a very American author, to draw his philosophical basis for individualism from American writers instead of the more fashionable, or at least better known, Russian anarchists of the age such as Kropotkin or Bakunin. Although he does mention Tolstoy quite often.

                                                               Benjamin Tucker

I think the paragraph on pg. 184 where the young Wilson waxes into the grandiose language of liberty is beautiful:

“To say that liberty exists is to say that classlessness exists, to say that brotherhood and equality exist. Authority, by dividing people into classes, creates dichotomy, disruption, hostility, fear, disunion. Liberty, by placing us all on an equal footing, creates association, amalgamation, union, security. When the relationships between people are based on liberty and non-aggression, they are drawn together. The facts are self-evident and axiomatic. If authoritarianism did not possess the in-built, preprogrammed double-blind structure of a Game Without End we would long ago have rejected it and embraced libertarianism.”

The following two paragraphs explain much of the political thinking in the nation today as well as they did when the piece was originally written. Perhaps the reasons RAW toyed with the same ideas so often is that it takes humanity as a whole, regardless of information doubling or technology, a long time to move on from certain paradigms. No matter how idiotic or suicidal those ideas may be.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the essay for me was RAW’s correct prediction about the fate of television censorship made in the last line of the essay: “When a more efficient medium [Internet?] arrives, the taboos on television will decrease.” Many critics agree we are living in a Golden Age of scripted television and I am tempted to agree. It seems by moving television primarily onto the Internet, and with all the noise it seems most efforts to censor the Interwebs seemed doomed to failure in the West, the ideas of propriety have been cast away and shows have been allowed to experiment more often. I’d honestly rather watch one of the new seasons of Veep or It’s Always Sunny for their cleverness and character development rather than whatever schlock war film by Eastwood or Gibson or whatever technicolor CGI seizure lowest common denominator trash that dominate the movie box office today. What a run on.

The short essays between “Views of Monterey Bay #18 and #19” are devoted to RAW’s delight in the emerging techno-culture and vitriol against the escalating drug wars of the nineties.  Regrettably, RAW’s prediction that the acidheads would take over the business world seems to have been inaccurate.

H.P. Lovecraft's birthday today

August 20 is the birthday of the writer H.P. Lovecraft, an influence on Robert Anton Wilson who shows up as a character in Illuminatus!

I confess that I might have missed the happy occasion, but Chad Nelson wrote to me and sent me the above graphic promoting a birthday party in Lovecraft's city, Providence.

Using  your favorite search engine (I use DuckDuckGo — it doesn't track you) reveals other celebrations, including one in New York City.

Lovecraft site in Providence

Sign for H.P. Lovecraft Memorial Square. Photo by Chad Nelson.

Chad Nelson Tweets this photograph of H.P. Lovecraft Memorial Square, in Providence, Rhode Island.

Chad explains that this is located in the heart of the Brown University campus. A helpful article he sent me explains that his photograph shows a new bronze sign, installed last year using funding by Lovecraft enthusiasts, which has glow in the dark letters. It replaces an older wooden sign at the square, located at the intersections of Angell and Prospect streets. 

I don't know how much is available at Providence for Lovecraft tourists, but obviously there is something.

Chad remarks that the sign is "incidentally only a few blocks from Benefit St., which is referenced in one Illuminatus! scene."

In fact, that's the memorable scene in The Golden Apple, e.g. volume 2 of Illuminatus! which Robert Putney Drake pays a visit to Lovecraft:

Standing before the house on Benefit Street, Drake could see, across the town, the peak of Sentinel Hill and the old deserted church that had harbored the Starry Wisdom Sect in the 1870s. He turned back to the door and raised the old Georgian knocker (remembering: Lillibridge the reporter and Blake the painter had both died investigating that sect), then rapped smartly three times.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, pale, gaunt, cadaverous, opened the door. "Mr. Drake?" he asked genially.

"It was good of you to see me," Drake said.

"Nonsense," Lovecraft replied, ushering him into the Colonial hallway. "Any admirer of my poor tales is always welcome here. They are so few that I could have them all here on a single day without straining my aunt's dinner budget."

He may be one of the most important men alive, Drake thought, and he doesn't really suspect.

("He left Boston by train this morning," the soldier reported to Maldonado and Lepke. "He was going
to Providence, Rhode Island.")

Here's a photo of the "Shunned House" at 135 Benefit Street, where the scene apparently takes place:

For more on Lovecraft and Providence, please see my earlier Illuminatus! reading group blog post. 

From the comments: Lovecraft's College Hill Walking Tour. 

Week 33, Illuminatus online reading group

Howard Philips Lovecraft

(This week: Page 324 (And Semper Cuni Linctus, the very night he reamed his subaltern for taking native superstitions seriously" to page 334 "and tellers turned to stare at him.")

I love how this sections ties H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, and the man himself, into the plot of Illuminatus! There's also a nice nod to the American counterculture in the form of Hermann Hesse. I read Hesse in high school in the 1970s, although unforunately I have not read him since then. And it's a rather nice serendipity that I am writing this entry in October, the season of Halloween, which has become a major holiday and a time when writers such as Lovecraft come into their own.

I like to read at least one horror book each Halloween season, and I've just bought The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack, 40 stories written by Lovecraft and by other writers who also used Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos; by another serendipity, the lead story in the collection is Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness," which Illuminatus! credits as mentioning the Law of Fives (page 331).

This section contains one of the more clear explanations about the connection between the Illuminati (or at least the evil elements of it) and the otherworldly evil creatures who move from other dimensions into the common earthly ones. Hermann Hesse explains:

"As for these powers or being from Thule, they do not exist in the sense that bricks and beefsteak exist, either. The physicist, by manipulating these fantastic electrons — which, I remind you, have to be imagined as moving from one place to another without passing through any intervening space like a fairy or a ghost — produces real phenomena, visible to the senses. Say, then, that by manipulating these beings or powers from Thule, certain men are able to produce effects that can also be seen and experienced." (Pages 328-329).

And of course on Page 333, the Illuminati protect Drake — some Lovecraftian Cthulhu creature associated with the Illuminati get rid of four Mafia "soldiers" attempting to trail Drake.

For more on Lovecraft and the connections to Nazis in German, please see this blog post.

I don't know why Hermann Hesse is not identified explicitly in the text, but I'm pretty certain of my identification — Hesse won the Nobel prize for literature,  lived in Switzerland, and knew Carl Jung. Hesse detested the Nazis and they felt the same way about him -- his work was banned in Germany. All of this matches what we are told about the "famous novelist" who is talking to Francis Putney Drake in this section.

Lovecraft did not live on Benefit Street in Providence (although he did live in Providence), but this section of the novel cleverly references "The Shunned House,"  a story which is based on an actual house at 135 Benefit Street in Providence where Lovecraft's aunt once lived. (Lovecraft actually lived from 1933 to 1937 at 10 Barnes House in Providence, which you can also see in the Wikipedia Lovecraft bio.)

The "Shunned House" at 135 Benefit Street in Providence, Rhode Island. 

Dutch Schultz died on Oct. 24, 1935, and H.P. Lovecraft died on March 17, 1937 (from cancer, but of course Illuminatus! says that's what They want you to believe.) So the encounter between Drake and Lovecraft has to occur in the latter part of that time range, after Drake has returned from Europe and his conversations with Hesse but before Lovecraft's death. The Bogus Magus timeline places the encounter as sometime in 1936, which would fit. I am also not  contradicted by the Illuminatus! timeline in Eric Wagner's An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson. 

Robert Anton Wilson on H.P. Lovecraft (from the Lewis Shiner interview)

Shiner: Were you a Lovecraft fan before you got into Illuminatus?

RAW: I was a Lovecraft fan since I was about 12. I think it was when I was 12 I heard "The Dunwich Horror" with Ronald Coleman as the narrator. It impressed the hell out of me. I started looking for Lovecraft and I couldn't find any Lovecraft books, but I found a few short stories by him in anthologies. Then when I was 14 I found a whole book of Lovecraft, edited by August Derleth. So Lovecraft has been a passion with me most of my life. I like the way he uses techniques that make you think, "Gee, maybe this isn't fiction." That fascinates me, because doubt lasts longer than faith and provokes thought rather than discouraging it.

Surrealism fascinates me, too. The first Surrealist show, people had to come in through a garden where there was a taxicab, and it was raining inside the taxicab but not outside. When the audience — or victims — got past that, the first thing they saw in the building was a big sign that Andre Breton had hung up that said, "Dada is not dead! Watch your overcoat!" At that point the distinction between art and life had been completely obliterated. I aim for that in all my books.

I like happenings, I like that game I was telling you about earlier. I like to blur the distinctions, because most of what we think is perception is actually projection anyway. I like to make people more aware that they are creating the reality they inhabit. Lovecraft taught me a lot about how to do that, in a literary way.

Here are five places that helped inspire Lovecraft.  And here is a virtual walking tour of Lovecraft's Providence.  For a free complete works of Lovecraft in various ebook formats, go here.  To explore Lovecraft from the perspective of a Robert Anton Wilson fan, see Dan Clore's Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon.  LibriVox has some early works in audiobook form. 

(Next week: Page 334, "Kleopatra?" Simon Moon asked, to page 348, "And what was it Jung had said about power?")

R. M. Johnson on H. P. Lovecraft

OK, so I take a few days off -- off from work, off from the blog (I wrote all of last week's entries in advance), and I find there's cool stuff to get caught up on. Supergee is the guest of honor for a big convention! Obama is serious about this war thing!

But first, I wanted to say that I hope you didn't miss Michael Johnson's excellent essay on H.P. Lovecraft. Excerpt:

It's cool that maybe a few thousand MA and PhD theses will be written on Lovecraft, but for me: Contra the common claim of critics that HPL's style was "execrable," I love his baroque catachreses and mixed metaphors, his obscure words and borrowings from science and Egyptology and late 18th/early 19th century archaisms, his psychedelic mixture of factual content with the speculative and eldritch bizarre imaginings. If academics see fit to worm Cthuhu into canonicity, fine, but trying to assert that he's not tainted by "being" a science fiction or horror writer (declared declasse and out-of-bounds among the Highly Learned long ago) and rather his classification is now respectably "Weird" like someone in, I don't know.

More here.

Dan Clore plugs his Lovecraft book here. 

Providence City Council honors Lovecraft

The Associated Press reports that the Providence City Council has voted to name the intersection of Angell and Prospect Streets "H.P. Lovecraft Square" in honor of the writer.

"Lovecraft lived for years on Angell Street near Brown University. The Halsey House mansion on Prospect Street served as the fictional home of the main character in one of his better known works, 'The Case of Charles Dexter Ward'," the AP explains.

For Lovecraft and Illuminatus!, see my previous blog post.  I never got an answer to the question I posed on that entry.

Via Tyler K. McManus in the Robert Anton Wilson Facebook group.

Links: John von Neumann AND H.P. Lovecraft

Robert Anton Wilson recognized John von Neumann's important contributions to modern computer culture and often mentioned von Neumann. See for example RAW's short story, "Von Neumann's Second Catastrophe," in the anthology When the Music Stops, edited by Lewis Shiner.

A new book, Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson, emphasizes von Neumann's role in the development of the modern computer. I've run across several interesting reviews, including a new one in the New York Times.

Meanwhile, a horror movies blog has a compiled a list of the "Top Ten H.P. Lovecraft Inspired Horror Movies."

Lovecraft, giving advice

H.P. Lovecraft answers your relationship questions.

Via Supergee.

A Cthulhu Christmas

In honor of RAW's interest in H.P. Lovecraft, and because it's the season, here is a Cthulhu Christmas tree. (Via Ted Hand on Twitter, @t3dy).

H. P. Lovecraft's eldritch places

Robert Anton Wilson was a Lovecraft fan, and we're getting into the Halloween season, so here's a couple of links: Five places that helped inspire Lovecraft and a virtual walking tour of Lovecraft's Providence, Rhode Island.

ILLUMINATUS! has a scene (page 329 of the omnibus edition) in which Robert Putney Drake calls on Lovecraft in a house on Benefit Street. This may be either a mistake or a dramatic liberty; the Wikipedia entry on Lovecraft says that Lovecraft lived on Barnes Street until 1933; 135 Benefit Street is the address of "the shunned house," from the Lovecraft story. Does anyone know if Lovecraft ever lived on Benefit Street?

Free Lovecraft ebook

Ruth, aka Cthulu Chick, has created a free ebook of the Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft in two formats -- EPUB (useful for the Nook) and Kindle (as in the Amazon device).

EPUB is a standard for electronic publishing used on many different devices. To find out what you need to read the Complete Works on your particular computer, phone or gadget, see the Wikipedia article. You may need to experiment with different file formats and software book readers to find something that works with your particular device. Mobi seems to work better in Ubuntu than EPUB, at least on my machine.

If you've read ILLUMINATUS!, you'll probably remember that the plot incorporates the Cthulu Mythos and that Lovecraft himself appears as a character in the book.

For more on Lovecraft, see Dan Clore's Necronomicon site.

Lovecraft as a substitute teacher here (via Supergee.)

RAW on Lovecraft (from the excellent Lewis Shiner interview):

Were you a Lovecraft fan before you got into Illuminatus?

I was a Lovecraft fan since I was about 12. I think it was when I was 12 I heard "The Dunwich Horror" with Ronald Coleman as the narrator. It impressed the hell out of me. I started looking for Lovecraft and I couldn't find any Lovecraft books, but I found a few short stories by him in anthologies. Then when I was 14 I found a whole book of Lovecraft, edited by August Derleth. So Lovecraft has been a passion with me most of my life. I like the way he uses techniques that make you think, "Gee, maybe this isn't fiction." That fascinates me, because doubt lasts longer than faith and provokes thought rather than discouraging it.

Robert Anton Wilson -- staying power for paranoid readers?

Greetings from World Fantasy Con in Columbus, where I have seen renewed evidence that H.P. Lovecraft, whose work is featured in ILLUMINATUS!, remains an influential fantasy writer. My friend F. Brett Cox remarked that the two arguably most influential science fiction or fantasy writers in the last century were Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick, who both had a consistently paranoid vision of the world. Paranoia is also a consistent theme of Wilson's work, which teaches us to be suspicious of power.