#Lovecraft's students and scholars

[hplovecraftmuseum]

At top below are 9 members of the Surrealist movement. The photo was taken around 1933 in Paris, France. Lt - Rt they are: Tristan Tzara, Paul Eluard, Andre Breton, Jean Rap, Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Rene Crevel, and Man Ray. Below are some of the gentlemen that would power the major post-Derleth, H. P. Lovecraft scholarship movement beginning in the early 70s. Their names are listed in a previous Exhibit, but the importance to the serious investigation of Lovecraft's works and life by these individuals cannot be overstated. One has to wonder if the similarities of the later photo's composition was in answer to the older? (Exhibit 306)

[kamreadsandrecs]

Title: The Night Ocean

Author: Paul La Farge

Genre/s: historical, mystery, literary fiction

Content/Trigger Warning/s: racism, classism, antisemitism, homophobia, drug use, cheating

Summary (from publisher's website): Marina Willett, M.D., has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H.P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer’s life: In the summer of 1934, the “old gent” lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow’s family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends–or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he’s solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears. The police say it’s suicide. Marina is a psychiatrist, and she doesn’t believe them. A tour-de-force of storytelling, The Night Ocean follows the lives of some extraordinary people: Lovecraft, the most influential American horror writer of the 20th century, whose stories continue to win new acolytes, even as his racist views provoke new critics; Barlow, a seminal scholar of Mexican culture who killed himself after being blackmailed for his homosexuality (and who collaborated with Lovecraft on the beautiful story “The Night Ocean”); his student, future Beat writer William S. Burroughs; and L.C. Spinks, a kindly Canadian appliance salesman and science-fiction fan — the only person who knows the origins of The Erotonomicon, purported to be the intimate diary of Lovecraft himself. As a heartbroken Marina follows her missing husband’s trail in an attempt to learn the truth, the novel moves across the decades and along the length of the continent, from a remote Ontario town, through New York and Florida to Mexico City. The Night Ocean is about love and deception — about the way that stories earn our trust, and betray it.

Buy Here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-night-ocean-paul-la-farge/8614852

Spoiler-Free Review: This wasn’t entirely what I was expecting, but it was a pleasant surprise, especially since I blasted right through it. I honestly wasn’t expecting to be so compelled by the prose given the way the book appears to be formatted, but hey: it was very readable despite occasional moments of confusion regarding who was talking at any given point in time.

Just to get this out of the way: no, one doesn’t need to be deeply familiar with Lovecraft’s life, or even Robert Barlow’s, to understand and enjoy this book. As long as one knows that Lovecraft was a deeply racist, classist, misogynistic, and antisemitic person, and that these tendencies appear across all his writing, then one should be fine. And even if one DOESN’T know (though I find that hard to imagine, given that it is 2023 and the most recent brouhaha over Lovecraft’s politics happened way back in the late 2010s - which is around the time this book came out, incidentally), one will find out soon enough in this book. It’s probably one of the main “true” things that this book presents. Because what this book is about (among many other things), is truth and lies, and how the latter can sometimes be hard to differentiate from the former if it’s compelling enough.

In line with that, this novel also tries to tackle what happens when we figure out the truth - and the truth turns out to be undesirable or painful (or both). Lovecraft played around with the idea that there are some truths out there that are so destructive, they can literally drive a person mad; this is the most common fate met by the protagonists of his stories. This book does something similar, but the destruction is more on the level of the self, and one’s relationship with other people and the rest of the world. This was, in my opinion, the most interesting part of the novel, and where most of conflict springs from. Does one WANT to believe the story being told? What if it’s not true? How IMPORTANT is it to one that the story being told is true? What lengths will one go to, to determine if it is? And what happens when what one feels doesn’t align with external evidence? Is truth something one FEELS, or is it something one PROVES? Unfortunately, the difference between the two is not always clear - both in this novel and in the real world.

This book also plays around a lot with intertextuality: the way texts reference other texts in various ways both obvious and subtle. This book contains both, with references not just to Lovecraft’s work (though obviously the story references his work the most), but to the immense network of twentieth-century SFF fandom. If one is the kind of reader who’s deeply familiar with the names and faces of that period of SFF, then one will be able to tease out a LOT more references than I managed to, since I’m just not as familiar with all the people mentioned and referenced in this novel. Fortunately there are footnotes provided, so any vague references were at least explained, but I’m sure googling names will prove just as helpful.

Another idea this novel plays with is the idea of people AS stories: that is to say, what makes us who we are, as individuals and perhaps as cultures, is the stories we tell about ourselves, and maybe the stories we tell TO ourselves, too. Is it possible to entirely change who one is just by changing the story around oneself? An interesting question, not least in the age of the internet where it’s easy to change how one is perceived - and therefore, who one IS - just by telling a different story in a sufficiently compelling way.

Overall, this was a really compelling read in ways that I hadn’t expected, but was pleasantly surprised by. It asks a lot of interesting questions about truth and our relationship with the truth, framed around two bittersweet romances, one of which might, or might not, have happened.

Rating: five strange journals

[grandhotelabyss]

If asked to give a commencement speech at an ivy, what would you say?

I've never gone to an Ivy, so I'm not sure. I was only ever even on the campus of one once, 12 years ago, for a conference at Brown—the ACLA, I think—where I co-chaired a panel with a friend of mine on love or affect or something in contemporary fiction. Somebody did a Heideggerean reading of Fight Club. I was later chided by my colleagues for letting a scholar who'd come from Istanbul present a dazzling and incomprehensibly intelligent neo-structuralist reading of Orhan Pamuk for 45 minutes, despite the 15-minute limit on papers. She'd devised a rose-shaped diagram to represent the structure of love and narrative in Pamuk and passed out photocopies for us to study. She'd given the diagram her own first name, a scientific discovery: "The Çiğdem Rose." "You just let her talk because she was hot!" a fellow graduate student accused. (He had presented on Louise Erdrich. The refrain of his paper was, "Techne determines ethnos." Does it?) She was hot, but I let her talk because I dislike confrontation, and I was hoping the structuralism might come clear. I had already decided I had no future in academe, so I mostly skipped the conference, mostly skipped Brown, and just wandered the steep hills of that cloud-hung city under gray March drizzle, alone. Or sometimes in the company of an academic friend who'd written something on Erich Auerbach: another Turkish connection, Istanbul double-exposed upon Providence. I stared at monuments of Lovecraft, of Dante—Auerbach's beloved Dante, the first modern poet, now banished to the other side of an ocean he hadn't known existed, well beyond the Pillars of Hercules, another fragment (like me) of that "Italo-Semitic mob" Lovecraft would not have wished to see walking up and down his dream city and eating the salt bread of exile. In an Italian restaurant, where I considered ordering the clams casino but decided against, my colleagues and I debated the ethical propriety of criticizing Mitt Romney's Mormonism in the upcoming general election. The question arose because a scholar from Brigham Young had presented on Never Let Me Go, a paper written in the style of Kathy H's ingenuous narration. "I don't know how it was where you were," he began. My colleagues earnestly discussed Santogold on the damp nighttime streets, cobbled and smelling of the sea. Santogold: "I can say I hope it will be worth what I give up / If I could stand up mean for all the things that I believe..."

Anyway, that was the closet I ever came to the Ivies. Another memory, this one from 2006. On my first day of graduate school at my humble R1 alma mater, the Director of Graduate Studies, who would later be the supervisor of my dissertation, though I didn't know that then, made a speech to us. "Go over to St. Paul," she said, "and see the agricultural campus—see those grain silos. That's the money that will get turned into culture here." She told us, "You are the stewards of capital." A jejune leftist, I was scandalized at the time; I'd gone to graduate school work for the vanguard of the revolution, not to be the steward of capital. The little speech turned out to be a repurposed bit from the end of her book on gender, capitalism, expertise, and modernism. She'd written it in a more critical tone than she'd said it in:

Thus this book carries traces, both material and ideological, of those telltale marks of complicity I have taken pains to uncover in the modernists of this study and in the expert copies they made. Yet this conformation offers all the more reason to engage the subject and to gauge our involvement in such a way that, as descendants of these expert modernists, we see ourselves for the stewards and parvenus we decidedly are.

Now, would-be parvenu that I am, I only wish I had more capital to be the steward of. So "money gets turned into culture" and "you are the stewards of capital" are therefore probably the two things I would tell the assembled graduates of the Ivy Leagues, what I would say if I ever found myself back in Providence, way up on top of College Hill some fine day in May. "Go together, you precious winners all."

[residualdreams]

Rob nodded. “Yeah, that’s Latin. I’ll need to do a search to figure out what it means, though, my Latin’s no good. Too bad we don’t get cell service here.” He pulled his phone out of his jeans pocket and waved it with a rueful laugh before setting it on the edge of the desk.

Ann stepped around a pile of papers on the floor and reached for a book perched at the edge of one of the tables that lined the room. “Here’s a Latin dictionary, maybe this will help.” She reached past Guy to place it into Rob’s waiting hands, and without a second thought Guy passed her the whistle so she could have a look.

Guy watched Rob search the dictionary, flipping the pages while mumbling quietly under his breath, and he thought about what they were doing, him and Rob and Ann. It had been a small moment, the trading of the objects, but it was moments like those that made Guy feel like maybe they really did belong together; the three of them, a well-oiled machine. ~Rob, Ann, and Guy in The House on The Beach

Rob has inherited his great-uncle's beach house. The old man was a serious scholar of early American cults, and Rob hopes the study in the old house's basement will contain what he needs to complete his PhD. He's recently started a relationship with two former students, Guy and Ann, and he brings them along for a little vacation so they can all get to know each other better without the day to day worries of work and city life. Of course, things don't go as planned.

Will Rob find what he needs to finish his dissertation? Will Ann figure out what's up with the stones? Will Guy remember his dreams? Inspired by Lovecraft and M. R. James with a heavy splash of queerness, The House on the Beach is a slow creep that will keep you on the edge of your seat up until the end.

Also included in this book is The Unicorn, a shorter, darker story about a toxic triad who come upon what may or may not be a unicorn. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't go well for them.

Content warnings: Both stories feature polyamorous triads in more or less toxic relationships. Both include sex scenes although the scenes aren't particularly graphic and all are consensual. There is a mention of BDSM in The House on The Beach. There is a mention of past murder in The Unicorn.

The cover photo is "Ocean storm near Cape Lookout - Dee Brausch," by the Oregon Department of Transportation, 29 September 2019. Released under CC:BY 2.0 License.

[absynthe--minded]

So I'm excited about the POC characters in the LOTR show if nothing else. But many people in fandom are really nasty about that. Is there anything concrete in canon saying dark-skinned elves are possible existing?

so first off, whatever Tolkien says or does not say ultimately doesn't matter. the existence of people of color in real life is a fact and there is no reason why elves and Men and dwarves can't be racially diverse. it doesn't matter that it's Eurofantasy, it doesn't matter that it's "a mythology for England". nothing about the Legendarium is inherently white in a way that cannot or should not be racebent.

gonna say that again, louder:

it does not matter what the intent was. adding racial diversity to a cast is not dependent upon authorial approval. Tolkien is literally dead and I don't care if this would offend him. I don’t think it would offend him for the reasons I’m including below, but even if it would, that doesn’t matter, racial diversity and an inclusive imagining of this world are more important than the hypothetical feelings of the author.

now. Tolkien was racist. this is an undeniable fact that everybody has to engage with when they read his works. it is uncomfortable equal-opportunity racism where no matter if you’re Black, indigenous, or Asian, he’s said something gross and loaded about you. you cannot avoid this in The Lord of the Rings, though it’s much less present in the Silmarillion and the greater Legendarium. I’ve made a study of his life and I tend to come down on the side of “he wasn’t well-informed enough to be truly aware of the racist aspects of his work, and was echoing stereotypes held by his society or put forward in the literature he drew from as inspiration”. this is for two reasons:

when he did get called out on the antisemitic portrayal of the dwarves in The Hobbit by a Jewish associate he apologized and wrote Gimli in The Lord of the Rings with a care to not behave that way again; Gimli exists almost as an apology for former antisemitism. this demonstrates he can learn and grow when he’s made aware of what he’s doing, and that he’s not doing it on purpose.

he taught nonwhite students at Oxford and none of them have come out and said that he was cruel and racist to them, which indicates at the very least that he was at least capable of respecting their personhood and treating them fairly even if he held racist beliefs. he also spoke positively of at least one of his South Asian students, calling him one of the best English literature scholars he’d encountered, which shows he wasn’t personally malicious.

of course, none of these things matter if you’re a person of color reading his works and you encounter what he wrote. this does not make Tolkien less racist, at all. I am not trying to excuse his racism or say that it doesn’t matter, because it does, and if the fact that it exists is a dealbreaker for you that is fucking understandable. There are parts of The Return of the King that I genuinely cannot fucking read without getting sick to my stomach. The reason I’m trying to provide this context is to show why I, as a scholar, consider his work worth studying and examining and loving despite that flaw, and why I don’t think he’s on the level of someone like Hates Phoreigners Lovecraft. I can’t make that decision for anyone, but that needs to get out of the way first because before I start talking about the genuinely surprising diversity in Arda I need to acknowledge that the guy who was making it diverse didn’t have the best intentions all of the time.

now, onto the actual examination of things. (more below the cut, the tl;dr is ‘dark-skinned elves have exactly as much canonical precedent as Gil-galad being the son of Finrod + a Sinda named Meril, so there’s no reason to discount them. also, the mortal Men and hobbits in Arda have a canonically established range of skin tones even among the heroes, so elves and dwarves having those too makes complete sense.’)

Maeglin is the only elf whose skin tone is ever explicitly mentioned, and it changes between the drafts. In his earliest Book of Lost Tales appearance, he’s “swarthy” and dark-skinned, in his latest appearances he’s pale-skinned. BoLT’s draft has the benefit of being the only complete account of the Fall of Gondolin that we have, which makes it large and weighty and too great to be ignored. In The Shaping of Middle-Earth (I think, that’s off the top of my head but if it’s not in Shaping it’s in Peoples) he’s described as physically resembling his mother and mentally resembling his father. Shaping as a draft is relevant because this is what Christopher Tolkien pulled from to write the ‘Of Maeglin’ chapter in the Silmarillion. If Maeglin is interpreted as both dark-skinned and as resembling his mother, that means Aredhel was herself dark-skinned, and that means her family isn’t white.

(note: Christopher Tolkien, so far as I can tell, invented the idea that Idril and the Gondolindrim found Maeglin disgusting for wanting to marry his cousin from whole cloth. I’ve scoured the drafts and Vinyar Tengwar and all the tidbits I can find and I’ve found absolutely no indication that Tolkien included a taboo against cousin marriage anywhere in his actual writings. he in fact explicitly allows it in one draft of Laws and Customs among the Eldar. In Shaping, Turgon loves and trusts Maeglin but Maeglin is scheming for the throne, and in BoLT - where Maeglin is outright villainous and the most racially loaded - Turgon is opposed to his marrying Idril because he doesn’t think Maeglin will love his daughter, he thinks Maeglin will use her as a tool for political gain. this is not really relevant except to say that Maeglin being seen as disgusting by the Gondolindrim reads in a very loaded and problematic light, and it seems to not be present at all in the original text.)

In most cases, Tolkien doesn’t really describe skin tone, instead reverting to somewhat vague descriptors like ‘pale’ or ‘fair’. I will admit that in a strictly literal interpretation of the text, that does seem to indicate that there’s a relative dearth of heroic elves of color, but I’m going to repeat what I said above (authorial intent does not matter more than making Arda inclusive) and continue on with the fact that ‘pale’ can mean things other than ‘white’.

Plenty of people who are not white are pale, or pale compared to others in their family or community. if you’re committed to a racially diverse Arda, this genuinely should not stop you, and if you’re bothered by people playing with this, that’s a sign you should examine yourself. the same goes with ‘fair,’ which Tolkien uses just as often to mean ‘beautiful’ as to mean ‘light-skinned’ or ‘of a light complexion’. someone can be dark and fair (Lúthien comes to mind) and that’s not a contradiction. again, it does not matter what the author thought, and while this is an admittedly creative reading of the text, it’s certainly not impossible.

We have significantly more textual and paratextual evidence for nonwhite mortals, and frankly that’s what I would consider the biggest evidence for nonwhite elves. And it’s not just the evil Men, either!

Hobbits are a canonically ethnically diverse group with varying skin tones and a lot of intermarriage and ‘mixed-race’ (by contemporary Earth standards) individuals; the smallest Hobbit ethnic group (the Fallohides) is the white one. Sam is darker-skinned than Frodo is, and he’s the true hero of LotR according to the author. And, The Peoples of Middle-Earth confirms that the House of Bëor is brown-skinned, which means Tolkien’s own self-insert Beren is not a white person. If Beren isn’t white, neither are Barahir, Andreth, Emeldir, Aerin, Rían, or Morwen Eledhwen. This means that Dior wouldn’t necessarily be white, and that Elwing, Elrond, and Elros are mixed-race both in terms of their actual bloodline and modern conceptions of the term.

On top of that, Gondor is a canonically racially prejudiced society, but Gondor is racist based on blood and ancestry and not on skin tone and is diverse in terms of the people living there - the Rohirrim are described as paler and lighter-haired than they are, indicating they’re already not white, and when Pippin is watching the reinforcements come into Minas Tirith in the first chapter of RotK he observes that there are some warriors who are significantly darker-skinned-than-the-others but are counted as men of Gondor. Aragorn’s crown as drawn by Tolkien in his letters also bears a resemblance to Egypt’s double crown, and Gondor has a Mediterranean climate, which famously yields extremely white-looking people here on Earth (that’s sarcasm lmao) And if Gondor isn’t white, that means Arnor and the Dúnedain aren’t white either, which means Númenor wasn’t white (Unfinished Tales says that a lot of descendants of the House of Bëor ended up on Númenor, so...)

tbh this indicates to me that we have absolutely no reason why elves - and not just silvan elves or Sindarin elves, Calaquendi too! - can’t be diverse in terms of skin tone and the races of the actors. the only thing stopping anybody is their own racism and their own lack of commitment to diversity. Tolkien was racist, but he’s dead, his ability to impact the world now is dependent upon the fandom and the scholarly community, and I think the way forward is to embrace diversity and also to explore and acknowledge his racism and his failings. crafting a version of Arda where everyone is included is to me reclaiming a space that I was both welcomed by and excluded from, and the fact that this sometimes means standing in opposition to supposed ‘purist’ reads on the text is fine by me.

so... what are we left with?

well, it’s contradictory. we’ve got a racist guy who nonetheless makes his heroic characters explicitly brown, a society that could either be read as very racially segregated or very racially diverse, and a lot of mixed messages (I haven’t delved into his takes on colonialism yet, I do not have the strength for that). It’s a space that has just as much evidence for including people of color as excluding them, and as a result, I say to include. if you’re not for that, you’ve got some self-examination to do.

[weirdletter]

The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, edited by Clive Bloom, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Cover image by Angela Waye / Alamy Stock Photo, info: palgrave.com.

The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic is the most comprehensive compendium of analytic essays on the modern Gothic now available, covering the vast and highly significant period from 1918 to 2019. The Gothic sensibility, over 200 years old, embraces its dark past whilst anticipating the future. From demons and monsters to post- apocalyptic fears and ecological fantasies, Gothic is thriving as never before in the arts and in popular culture. This volume is made up of 62 comprehensive chapters with notes and extended bibliographies contributed by scholars from around the world. The chapters are written not only for those engaged in academic research but also to be accessible to students and dedicated followers of the genre. Each chapter is packed with analysis of the Gothic in both theory and practice, as the genre has mutated and spread over the last hundred years. Starting in 1918 with the impact of film on the genre's development, and moving through its many and varied international incarnations, each chapter chronicles the history of the gothic milieu from the movies to gaming platforms and internet memes, television and theatre. The volume also looks at how Gothic intersects with fashion, music and popular culture: a multi-layered, multi-ethnic, even a trans-gendered experience as we move into the twenty first century.

Contents: Introduction to the Gothic Handbook Series:​ Welcome to Hell – Clive Bloom     Global Gothics Latin American Horror – Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz Dark Tourism – Joan Passey Two Twentieth-Century Mexican Writers – Antonio Alcalá González Dark Urbanity – Tijana Parezanović and Marko Lukić Contemporary Australian Trauma – Jessica Gildersleeve Postcolonialisms​ – Gina Wisker Strains of the South – Naomi Simone Borwein Indigenous Alterations – Angela Elisa Schoch/Davidson Hillbilly Horror – Tosha R. Taylor Southern Agrarianism and Exploitation – Gerardo Del Guercio     Hostile Environments British ‘Hoodie’ Horror – Lauren Stephenson Green Trends in Euro-Horror Films of the 1960s and 1970s – David Annwn Jones Ecocriticism and the Genre – Emily Alder and  Jenny Bavidge The Wilderness – Kaja Franck ‘Queer’ Representations of Rural and Urban Locations – Paulina Palmer James Herbert’s Working-Class Horror – Simon Brown Re-defining the Genre with Mo Hayder – Sian MacArthur Stephen King – Brian Jarvis     Occult Gothic Aleister Crowley and Occult Meaning – James Machin Aleister Crowley and the Black Magic Story – Timothy Jones     Gothic Romance The Gothic Romance – Holly Hirst Georgette Heyer – Holly Hirst The Body in Pieces Abjection and Body Horror – Xavier Aldana Reyes Torture Porn – Tosha R. Taylor Clive Barker’s Hellraiser – Mark Richard Adams     Psychological Gothic The Asylum – Laura R. Kremmel Psychopaths, Sociopaths and the Psychotic Mind – Lauren Ellis Christie Beyond the Unfeeling Narcissus to Patrick Bateman – Robert K. Shepherd     Zombie Gothic Zombie Folklore to Existential Protagonists – Kelly Gardner The Sentient Zombie – Kelly Gardner     New Vampire Gothic Transmedia Vampires – Simon Bacon The Post-human Vampire – Simon Bacon Monstrosity, Performativity, and Performance – Laura Davidel     Young Gothic Encounters with the ‘Hidden’ World in Modern Children’s Fiction – Chloé Germaine Buckley Gender and Sexuality in Young Adult Fiction – Michelle J. Smith and Kristine Moruzi Horror Hosts in British Girls’ Comics – Julia Round Lemony Snicket – Valeria Iglesias-Plester     Gothic Film Ghostly Gimmicks:​ Spectral Special Effects in Haunted House Films – Laura Sedgwick Universal Horror – Brian Jarvis Arthouse Cinema – Stacey Abbott The Horror Genre in Balkan Cinema – Tanja Jurković Slavic Cinema – Agnieszka Kotwasińska Gender Politics in a High-Camp, Lowbrow Musical – Joana Rita Ramalho Roger Corman – Murray Leeder David Lynch – Brian Jarvis     Gothic Television Doctor Who:​ Identity, Time and Terror – J.S. Mackley Nigel Kneale and Quatermass – J.S. Mackley Dark Costume in Contemporary Television – Stephanie Mulholland Wildlings, White Walkers, and Watchers on the Wall of Northumberland’s Borderland – Chelsea Eddy Grand Guignol, Inside Showtime’s Penny Dreadful Demimonde – Tanja Jurković     Gothic Music The Blasphemous Grotesqueries of The Tiger Lillies – Joana Rita Ramalho The Return of the Past in the Lyrics of Black Metal – Antonio Alcalá González     Interactive Gothic Interactive and Movable Books in the Tradition – Jen Baker The Evolving Genre of the Vampire Games – Jon Garrad The Digital Haunted House – Erika Kvistad Anxiety in the Digital Age – David Langdon Horror Memes and Digital Culture – Tosha R. Taylor Virtual Desert Horrors – Alison Bainbridge Immersive and Pervasive Performance – Madelon Hoedt     Gothic Lifestyle Fashion Gothwear – Victoria Amador Walking with the Lancashire Witches – Alex Bevan The Influence of the Genre in High Fashion – Jennifer Richards The Geisha Ghost – Jenevieve Van-Veda     Theoretical Gothic Three French Modernists – Giles Whiteley Dark Modernisms – Matt Foley     Post Modern Gothic The Postmodern Genre – Joakim Wrethed Heterotopian Horrors – Marko Lukić and Tijana Parezanović The New Batman – Michail-Chrysovalantis Markodimitrakis     Post Human Gothic Global War from Tokyo to Barcelona – Naomi Simone Borwein Posthuman Interstellar Gothic – Holly-Gale Millette Degeneration in H.​P.​ Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson – Antonio Alcalá González Lovecraft, Decadence, and Aestheticism – James Machin List of Contributors   Index

[ucflibrary]

Chapter: Storage Options: Making Decisions about Print Materials

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Year: 2020.

Publisher: American Library Association.

Chapter: Unraveling Julian Karswell’s Runic Curse in Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon.

Authors: Michael Furlong.

Book: Terrifying Texts: Essays on Books of Good and Evil in Horror Cinema.

Editors: Cynthia Miller and Bow Van Riper.

Year: 2018.

Publisher: McFarland.

Chapter: Gendered Power: Comics, Film, and Sexuality in the United States.

Authors: Michael Furlong.

Book: Ages of Heroes, Eras of Men.

Editors: Julian Chambliss, Thomas Donaldson, and William Svitavsky.

Year: 2013.

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Chapter: Improving Circulation Services through Staff Involvement.

Authors: Cynthia Kisby and Marcus Kilman.

Book: Best Practices in Access Services.

Editors: Lori L. Driscoll and W. Bede Mitchell.

Year: 2009.

Publisher: Routledge.

Chapter: Formalizing Staff Development from Inception to Implementation at University of Central Florida Libraries.

Authors: Cynthia Kisby and Suzanne Holler.

Book: An Introduction to Staff Development in Academic Libraries.

Editor: Elizabeth Connor.

Year: 2009.

Publisher: Routledge.

Chapter: Preserving Your Community’s Memories: Developing Librarians for Digital Preservation.

Authors: Vanessa Neblett and Shane Roopnarine.

Book: Creative management of small public libraries in the 21st century.

Editor: Carol Smallwood.

Year: 2014.

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield.

We hope you enjoyed reading about book chapters from our library faculty and staff. This is the second post in a series of library employee author spotlights. Our first post features books written, edited, and translated by us. For questions, please reach out to Lily Dubach.

[starrywisdomsect]

In 1931, Robert Barlow and Lovecraft began their friendship in the same manner that many of Lovecraft’s friendships began, through written correspondence. Barlow was a fan of Lovecraft’s regular contributions to Weird Tales, and asked all the usual fanboy questions, inquiring as to when he began to write, if he was working on anything currently, and of course, that age-old question, ‘is the Necronomicon real?’

Within the next week, Lovecraft had written him back, as it is a well-known fact that Lovecraft was a voluminous correspondent. In his relatively short lifetime, he wrote more than fifty thousand letters, second only to Voltaire in surviving correspondence. This letter was the beginning of a rather strange friendship, one that changed the course of Robert Barlow’s young life, and changed Lovecraft’s life as well.

Robert Barlow, whose father was an army colonel, had grown up on various military bases in the Southern United States, until increasing paranoid delusions ended his father’s military career, and the family settled in a “sturdy and defensible” home in Florida. With this recent relocation and the nomadic lifestyle of his early years, Barlow had no friends, and he would have been hard-pressed to find anyone nearby with interests similar to his own.  He played the piano, sculpted in clay, painted, and collected weird fiction. When the mood struck him, Barlow was also known to hunt snakes and bind books with their skin.

In a memoir about the summer he spent with Lovecraft, Robert Barlow wrote: “I had no friends nor studies except in a sphere bound together by the U.S. mails.”

Barlow and Lovecraft’s friendship grew, as Barlow typed several of Lovecraft’s manuscripts, and Lovecraft revised several of Barlow’s stories. Eventually, in the spring of 1934, Lovecraft received an invitation from Barlow to visit his family in Florida. Lovecraft acquiesced, but was surprised to be greeted by a sixteen year old boy when he alighted from the bus in DeLand, Florida. Lovecraft was forty-three, and Barlow had never mentioned his age.

The two of them certainly made a strange pair, the older man in a rumpled suit, and the slender, bespeckled youth, as they composed couplets together, rowed on the nearby lake, and collected berries in the woods.

Lovecraft enjoyed the Florida weather, writing: “I feel like a new person—as spry as a youth,” and enjoyed Barlow’s company. “Never before in the course of a long lifetime have I seen such a versatile child.”

In fact, Lovecraft made a return trip to Florida the following summer, in 1935, and stayed for an extended period of more than two months. On this vacation, he and Barlow worked on the construction of a cabin on the family property, and explored a nearby cypress jungle. The following summer, Barlow visited Lovecraft in Providence, and together they visited Salem and Marblehead, two locales Lovecraft had featured heavily in is fictional output.

 Some Lovecraft and literary scholars have speculated that Lovecraft was secretly gay, but the defining feature of his sexuality was how blasé his attitude appeared to be towards sex. Lovecraft’s former wife, Sonia Greene, described him as an “adequately excellent lover,” which is certainly faint praise. However, Lovecraft regularly associated with younger gay writers, such as Barlow himself, Samuel Loveman, and Hart Crane, though he was quick to condemn homosexuality in his letters, and would later discourage Barlow from writing homoerotic fiction.

Robert Barlow, on the other hand, was gay, and apparently sexually active during his adult years. A line in the published version of his 1944 memoir reads: “Life was all literary then.” However, the unedited typescript includes a more telling version of that sentence. “Life, save for secret desires which I knew must be suppressed, and which centered about a charming young creature with the sensitivity of a… was all literary then.”

Barlow came to Providence immediately upon receiving a telegram from Lovecraft's aunt Annie Gamwell about Lovecraft's death. Lovecraft's "Instructions In Case Of Decease", a separate document from his will, appointed Barlow his literary executor. This was intended as an honor, but for Barlow it was an unmitigated disaster.

Two of Lovecraft’s devoted literary followers, Donald Wanderi and the infamous August Derleth, demanded that Barlow give them Lovecraft’s manuscripts, and jealously spread rumors that Barlow had stolen them without legitimate permission. When a fellow member of the Lovecraft Circle, Clark Ashton Smith, heard these rumors he wrote to Barlow: “Please do not write me or try to communicate with me in any way. I do not wish to see you or hear from you after your conduct in regard to the estate of a late beloved friend.”

The effect of this letter, Barlow wrote, “was of cutting out my entrails with a meat cleaver.” He had lost all of his friends and literary acquaintances, and was practically in exile. He pondered suicide, but instead began to study anthropology at Berkeley.  In 1943, Barlow moved to Mexico and travelled to the Yucatán to study the Mayans, and to western Guerrero, to study the Tepuztecs. He taught anthropology at Mexico City College, founded two scholarly journals, and published around a hundred and fifty articles, pamphlets, and books.

However, he was constantly unhappy.

Barlow had written as early as 1944 that he had "a subtle feeling that my curious and uneasy life is not destined to prolong itself.” This presentiment came to pass, when in 1950, after a disgruntled student threatened to expose him as gay, Barlow committed suicide at his home in Azcapotzalco on the first or second of January.  On that afternoon, he locked himself in his room, took twenty six capsules of Seconal, leaving pinned upon his door in Mayan pictographs "Do not disturb me. I want to sleep a long time."

Though Lovecraft’s legacy continues to resound through horror fiction to this day, his friend, fan, and frequent collaborator Robert Barlow is all but forgotten. His greatest piece of weird fiction, “The Night Ocean,” is almost entirely attributed to Lovecraft now, though he added merely a few sentences to Barlow’s story. Perhaps, as we Lovecraft aficionados celebrate pride month, we can spare a few moments to read one of R.H. Barlow’s spooky stories, and raise a glass in memoriam of a promising life cut short by the homophobia of an unkind world.

 Sources:

 La Farge, P. (2017). The Complicated Friendship of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Barlow, One of His Biggest Fans. The New Yorker.

R. H. Barlow. (2019). In: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

[weremarkable]

Wounds Reviews

Mixed reviews about the film but Armie's performance is generally well-reviwed. Let's see how it builds up.

THE BOTTOM LINE : It's Hammer time in the Big Queasy.

Opens 2019-March-3

Armie Hammer stars as a New Orleans bartender who opens a portal inviting demons into his world in this second feature from 'Under the Shadow' director Babak Anvari.

Anyone with a cockroach phobia might want to consider this a trigger warning because Wounds contains a multitude of them. A festering marriage of H.P. Lovecraft and David Cronenberg, the movie tracks the spiraling descent of Armie Hammer's charming but shallow New Orleans bartender Will after he unsuspectingly lets madness into his head, infecting his romantic relationships and friendships while giving him a disturbing view into the empty abyss of his own soul.

Writer-director Babak Anvari, who sparked excitement at Sundance in 2016 with the terrific domestic-possession shocker set in his native Iran, Under the Shadow, is in less distinctive territory with this March release from Annapurna. But even if it's a disappointment on those terms, voracious genre consumers should get off on trying to decipher the densely textured film's murky ambiguities.

Based on the novella The Visible Filth, by dark fantasy writer Nathan Ballingrud, Wounds swiftly sets up Will as an ordinary man who has opted out of any meaningful investment in life, preferring to coast by on his good looks, cocky manner and the enviable way he fills out a T-shirt. Since dropping out of Tulane University, he has found his niche working the night shift at roach-infested neighborhood dive bar Rosie's. Unlike some of his customers, he seldom gets wasted but prefers a steady booze intake throughout the day, to "maintain the buzz."

Will lives with grad student Carrie (Dakota Johnson), but is not too deeply committed to flirt aggressively with Rosie's regular Alicia (Zazie Beetz), ignoring her blossoming relationship with Jeffrey (Karl Glusman).

When oil-rig worker Eric (Brad William Henke) rolls in one night on a rowdy bender, a vicious fight breaks out over the pool table and Eric gets his face slashed open with a broken beer bottle. One of a group of probably underage college students drops a smartphone while fleeing the scene, and Will pockets it, intending to return it to the owner. But later at home alarmed texts start appearing from one of the freaked-out millennials, and gruesome images in the device's photo storage lead Will on a macabre journey into the unknowable, with Carrie getting caught up in it too.

Audiences familiar with Ballingrud's story will be better equipped than the uninitiated to make sense of all this, particularly the more arcane mumbo-jumbo elements. Those include an ancient, multi-volume tome on gnostic rituals, human sacrifices and the power of flesh wounds to transcend physical boundaries, not to mention a mesmeric web page of a cavernous tunnel.

The more relatable fear of a cell phone becoming a vessel for evil works better (who hasn't thought of their iPhone as a fast track to demonic possession?), in calls that unleash the ear-splitting howls of an inferno, or others that induce vivid hallucinations as the device appears to melt into an infestation of creepy-crawly bugs. Not recommended while driving.

The gist of it is that basically, Will's mounting terror is rooted in a sudden invasive awareness of who he is, where he's at in his stagnant life and how superficial his connections are to the people around him. Carrie drives that home when she calls him an empty shell: "There's nothing there to satisfy."

Of course, that would be more effective if Johnson didn't deliver such a flat, vacant performance. (Making Carrie a T.S. Eliot scholar follows in the great tradition of Denise Richards playing a nuclear physicist in the Bond film, The World is Not Enough.) Beetz brings a more alive, sexy presence, her character simultaneously drawn to Will while keeping him at arm's length, but neither of the women are given much substance.

This is very much Hammer's film and he gamely loses himself in the sweaty panic of the role, subverting his golden matinee-idol persona to explore the gnawing sense of inadequacy eating away at Will and steadily filling him with overwhelming rage. He also gets some memorably visceral body-horror moments, notably an itch that turns nasty, directly recalling the armpit orifice of the early Cronenberg entry, Rabid.

There's nothing here that comes close to the fascinating cultural specificity, the sobering political perspective or the elevating personal connection of Anvari's first feature, set in the Tehran of his childhood, near the end of the protracted Iran-Iraq War. But the director nonetheless remains a skilled craftsman, subtly tapping into the flavorful history of New Orleans as a hub of dark magic, while wrapping the entire action in a soupy soundscape of ambient dread.

Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Midnight)

Cast: Armie Hammer, Dakota Johnson, Zazie Beetz, Karl Glusman, Brad William Henke, Kerry Cahill, Terence Rosemore

Production companies: Two & Two Pictures, AZA Films

Distribution: Annapurna Pictures

Director-screenwriter: Babak Anvari, based on the novella The Visible Truth, by Nathan Ballingrud

Producers: Lucan Toh, Babak Anvari, Christopher Kopp

Executive producers: Megan Ellison, Jillian Longnecker, Andrew Harvey, Brian Pitt

Director of photography: Kit Fraser

Production designer: Chad Keith

Costume designer: Meagan McLaughlin

Editor: Chris Barwell

Casting: Mark Bennett

94 minutes

JANUARY 27, 2019 

Hollywood Reporter ▶

Babak Anvari’s “Wounds” opens with a “Heart of Darkness” quote about the evil wilderness that whispered to Colonel Kurtz, and how it “echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.” And, uh, that’s a pretty bold choice for a movie about a demonically possessed cell phone that’s trying to contact the emptiness inside of Armie Hammer.

Alas, the trouble with this silly horror exercise — Anvari’s follow-up to his unnerving 2016 debut, “Under the Shadow” — isn’t that it’s pretentious, but rather that it doesn’t take itself seriously enough. The film’s threadbare story runs parallel to some compelling ideas about masculine insecurity, internalized pain, and the price of genetic privilege, but Anvari’s well-calibrated jump-scare machine is too preoccupied with gross effects, unmotivated jolts, and that strange rash that’s growing in Hammer’s left armpit to engage with any of them. The film may have been conceived as a love letter to the likes of David Lynch and Nicolas Roeg, but — amusingly disgusting finale notwithstanding — it has far more in common with the jittery, skin-deep horror fare that’s filled the massive void those giants have behind after departing for television or the great beyond...

(....)

mysterious evil force is just a metaphor for its characters’ inner ugliness, the clearer it becomes that none of these people are real enough to carry that kind of weight. It’s telling that the most interesting scene is the one in which Hammer just sits at his laptop and Googles some generic occult nonsense — there’s a chance he might stumble across the plot of a better film. He doesn’t. Some wounds never heal.

Grade: C-

Indiewire ▶

[antoniwrites]

𝐅𝐈𝐋𝐄: 𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐄𝐂𝐑𝐀𝐅𝐓, 𝐄𝐌𝐌𝐄𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐄

𝐁𝐀𝐒𝐈𝐂𝐒.

full name.    Emmeline Lilith Lovecraft

nicknames / aliases.   ‘em’, ‘loser’, ‘angel baby’, ‘lovecraft’

size.   5′6″

age.    verse dependent; 18

spoken languages.   english, latin, demon (in some verses)

species.  witch

𝐏𝐇𝐘𝐒𝐈𝐂𝐀𝐋 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐑𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐒.

hair colour.   brown

eye colour.  green

body type.  slender

dominant hand.  right

𝐂𝐇𝐈𝐋𝐃𝐇𝐎𝐎𝐃.

place of birth.   greendale, usa

siblings.   ( redacted )

parents.   ( redacted )

𝐀𝐃𝐔𝐋𝐓 𝐋𝐈𝐅𝐄.

occupation.  verse dependent; student, advisor, scholar, professor

current residence(s).  greendale, usa.

financial status.  has money (large family wealth and years of working)

driver’s license.  yes

𝐒𝐄𝐗 & 𝐑𝐎𝐌𝐀𝐍𝐂𝐄.

sexual orientation.    bisexual

preferred sexual role.   switch

𝐌𝐈𝐒𝐂𝐄𝐋𝐋𝐀𝐍𝐄𝐎𝐔𝐒.

hobbies to pass time.  reading, practicing various subjects of witchcraft, yoga / meditation, boxing

abilities. basic witchcraft powers

𝐁𝐈𝐎

Emmeline was born to a witch and warlock, signing her name in the Book of the Beast at 16, like everyone does. She’s about as opposite from Prudence as you can get, bright, nice and funny. She was jealous of Sabrina, that she got a choice to live a mortal life. Her grandmother drags her to Black Mass every once in a while, but hates the establishment full of misogyny that Father Blackwell had created. Emmeline does pride herself in knowing a lot of varieties of subjects so she’s well informed. She knows that Father Blackwood will have the upper hand due to his age and information that he has available. She is a star student, but Father Blackwood loathes her, what she stands for.

[hplovecraftmuseum]

Part 2. Richard Gilman Huber - your curator - perhaps comes at the evaluation of Lovecraft from a different perspective than many other critics and students. My interest in world art, world religion, my own study of imaginary demons, cryptozoology, the more esoteric concepts of theology, philosophy, anthropology, and my familiarity with the books, and attitudes of the cultural revolution of the 1960s - 1970s and the psychedelic movement of that time perhaps gives me an advantage over those who come at Lovecraft from a background primarily concerned with the pulp fiction writers of the 1930s alone. Also those who are true scholars coming at Lovecraft's life and fiction from a more practical, rational, and analytical viewpoint might likewise be somewhat hampered in their evaluations of HPL. I will admit that I myself have made some glaring missteps in my explorations, but as Albert Einstein was rumored to have stated: "Nothing is infinite but human stupidity". (Exhibit 436)

[statecryptids]

Now that the Halloween season has passed- well, HAS been passed for almost a month now- it seems like it should be time to put away all the ghosts and witches and other creepiness and start getting ready for the winter holidays*

But the season of hauntings and creepy things lurking in the woods is far from over. It’s only just beginning, in fact. For many cultures, winter is a time when the walls between worlds grow thin and beings from Another Place step into our plane of existence. If you look into Yuletime traditions outside of America, you’ll find hordes of ghosts, witches, trolls, household spirits and other supernatural things creeping around the outside walls or hiding behind the stove.

One of the better-known examples of Yuletide spookiness is the British tradition of telling ghost stories around Christmas. When you hear  “Christmas ghosts” you probably think of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” (and maybe also the line about how “there’ll be scary ghost stories” from the song “It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” sung most famously by Andy Williams).  But this was just one in a long history of tales. And indeed, it wasn't the only Christmas ghost story Dickens’ wrote.  

Winter ghost stories have been told in Europe for centuries, but in Britain, the tradition really took off in the Victorian period. These tended to be what you might call “cozy” stories. The protagonists were often well-to-do or at least comfortably off. The hauntings frequently took place in or around a stately manor or otherwise well-furnished dwelling. There was little of the macabre alien horror of William Hope Hodgson, Arthur Machen or the later pulp writers like Lovecraft. Nor did Christmas ghost stories possess the desperate, psychological horror of Edgar Alan Poe or Mary Shelley. These were tales meant to spook, but not horrify. Something to create a little creepy fun on a cold winter’s night.** A good example of this scary but ultimately harmless haunting is M.R. James' "Oh Whistle And I'll Come To You, My Lad", available to read here.

James, by the way, is one of the better known ghost-story writers. Head academic administrator first at King's College in Cambridge, then at Eton College at the beginning of the 20th century, he was renowned as a medieval scholar and antiquarian, as well as a prolific author. Each year around Christmas he would write a new ghost story then invite his close friends, academic fellows and favored students to his rooms at the College where he would read the tale out loud by the flicker of a candle or a crackling fireplace.

There are many, many more creepy things lurking in the shadows around the winter holidays. I’ll detail a few more of them in future posts.

For now, here are a couple of great articles that delve deeper into the origins and traditions of the British ghost story:

Why Do People Tell Ghost Stories on Christmas?

Ghosts of Christmas Past

Ghosts on the Nog

7 Best Ghost Stories by Charles Dickens... Not Including A Christmas Carol

*(If you’re into that, of course. I personally love Christmas, but I know there are plenty of people who aren’t big on this time of year. For some, it’s the constant barrage of commercialism. For others, Christmas is a time of painful memories and loneliness. Some just aren’t that into it. I can understand all those points.)

** As with any literary genre, of course, there are plenty of exceptions to the "cozy haunting" style of Christmas ghost. See, for example, Dickens' strange "To Be Read At Dusk"

[skepticaloccultist]

The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

The Voynich Manuscript (2016) by Raymond Clemens & Deborah Harkness

There are few books left in this world that elicit the sense of awe and mystery that surrounds the Voynich Manuscript. A rarity among rarities the manuscript is one of those items that continues to confound even the sharp edge of science's razor. The more we know about it, the less we understand it. Its text an unlocked code, lost cipher or forgotten language. Analysis indicates it isn't just gibberish, but whatever it is remains unknown even today.

I had first heard mention of the Voynich via L Sprague de Camp's early 1970s biography of HP Lovecraft. His mention of it sent me into a whirlwind of pre google research. Attempting to locate it, trying to discover if it could be accessed. Luckily there was an internet even in the late 1980s and the library at Yale had an email address. Via the work of a librarian I was able to obtain, for the princely sum of $10, a photocopy of a microfilm version of the Voynich Manuscript in order to peruse its pages.

This crude document, a black on white reduction of otherwise subtle hues and tones to a binary meant for examining the text, was the start of my long fascination with the Voynich. Attempts to decipher it using some University of Michigan dormroom laboratory chem student's cooked up dmt derivatives led only to the realization that this copy I had was not enough.

By the early 2000s the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale had begun to publish scanned colour images of certain pages of the Voynich online. Though eventually representing all of the pages they were still cropped, meant to be consistent rectangles of a very non-symmetrical document. While much more satisfying than my early 90s photocopies I was still left cold by their detachment.

Which brings us to this, the first release of a fully scanned and imaged documentation of the Voynich Manuscript as it truly is. Released by Yale in an exquisite binding, the Voynich Manuscript contains full colour highres scans of each page at 1/1 scale, with commentary and annotations outlining the document's history, myths, and legends. The book includes half a dozen multipage fold outs of oversized portions of the original, including a large six page size poster spread of the constellation image.

The illustrations of the book are central to its mystery. While on the one hand they are crude, lacking the kind of technical sophistication of similarly illuminated manuscripts from the Italian Renaissance, the details of the images and their peculiar formations leave the reader puzzling. Baths of women connected together by tubes, alien and unknown species of flora, star systems that don't quite line up with the world as we know it. All rendered in an iron gall ink and colored with a wide range of subtle and rich hues. Like the illuminated holy book of some mad prophet from another dimension.

The still undeciphered script has been the fascination of alchemists, cryptologists, scientists, and occult horror authors for centuries. Written from left to right in an unknown script and heavily illustrated throughout the book contains five distinct sections - Herbal, Astronomical, Biological, Cosmological, Pharmaceutical, with a final section of recipes.

The manuscript takes its name from Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912. It has been carbon dated to the early 15th century and was rumored to be in the possession of John Dee and Roger Bacon, though this speculation is without evidence. What we do know is that it was in the collection of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor in the late 16th century eventually making its way into the hands of the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher sometime in the mid 17th century.

The Beinecke has done a great service in this exquisite reproduction. Bringing at last the subtle hues and tones of the original into the hands of a wider audience. Beautifully bound, with a translucent dust jacket reminiscent of vellum, the animal skin parchment of the original. I would love to see other manuscripts in the possesion of the British Library and the Folger Collection released in similarly detailed full scale high resolution editions.

The Voynich Manuscript is an important addition to the library of those who seek to discover the answers to the unknown. For in the world of books there are few secrets that are kept as tightly locked as those still contained within the Voynich.

  Get it here: The Voynich Manuscript

[weirdletter]

Dark Pedagogy: Education, Horror and the Anthropocene (Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment), by Jonas Andreasen Lysgaard, Stefan Bengtsson and Martin Hauberg-Lund Laugesen, Palgrave Pivot, 2019. Cover image: PjrStudio/Alamy, info: palgrave.com.

Dark pedagogy explores how different perspectives can be incorporated into a darker understanding of environmental and sustainability education. Drawing on the work of the classic horror author H.P. Lovecraft and new materialist insights of speculative realism, the authors link Lovecraft’s ‘tales of the horrible’ to the current spectres of environmental degradation, climate change, and pollution. In doing so, they draw parallels between how humans have always related to the ‘horrible’ things that are scaled beyond our understanding and how education can respond to an era of climate catastrophe in the age of the Anthropocene. A new and darker understanding of environmental and sustainability education is thus developed: using the tripartite reaction pattern of denial, insanity and death to frame the narrative, the book subsequently examines the specific challenges of potentials of developing education and pedagogy for an age of mass extinction. This unflinching book will appeal to students and scholars of dark pedagogies as well as those interested in environment and sustainability education.

Contents: 1. Introduction: Living in Dark Times – Jonas Andreasen Lysgaard, Stefan Bengtsson and Martin Hauberg-Lund Laugesen     Part I: The Horror of Education 2. Denial – Jonas Andreasen Lysgaard 3. Insanity – Martin Hauberg-Lund Laugesen 4. Death – Stefan Bengtsson     Part II: Towards Dark Pedagogy 5. Dark Pedagogy Between Denial and Insanity – Jonas Andreasen Lysgaard 6. Dark Pedagogy in the Anthropocene – Martin Hauberg-Lund Laugesen 7. A Pedagogy of Vulnerability – Stefan Bengtsson Index

[liberalcom-blog]

Key of Solomon the King: Clavicula Salomonis

https://liber-al.com/?p=40601&wpwautoposter=1568726603 A magical grimoire of sigils and rituals for summoning and mastering spirits, The Key of Solomon the King is the most famous, or infamous, of all magick books. It has influenced everything from the revival of magick and the Western Mystery Traditions (tarot, alchemy, astrology, etc.) to fictional works such as Lovecraft’s The Necronomicon. Purported to have been penned by King Solomon himself, the book provides instruction for incantations, rituals, and sigils used to call upon and control spirits and demons. Those practicing magick have used it extensively through the centuries, but its true origins and purpose have been lost in the mists of time. No library of the contemporary occult student or practicing magician is complete without this tome. It remains a standard of esoteric lore by which others are measured. This edition includes a new foreword by noted esoteric scholar Joseph Peterson.

[kayawagner]

Holiday Festivity [BUNDLE]

Publisher: Skirmisher Publishing

This very special 99% off customer appreciation bundle contains 12 titles, including Gold and Platinum bestsellers, for just 25 cents and will be available for only a short time! Skirmisher Publishing would like to wish you a merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, jovial Saturnalia, joyful Yule, frugal Festivus, and an otherwise great holiday season however you choose to observe it and hope some of our great publications will bring you some enjoyment during it.

100 Oddities for a Hung Stocking Regular price: $0.99 Bundle price: $0.01 Format: Watermarked PDF This "100 Oddities" holiday mini-sourcebook will only be available until the end of the holiday season!  When the holiday season comes around why shouldn’t the heroes in your campaign get in on the action?Why not roll up a few random treats and tricks using this table of random items, any of which might be found in a stocking hung over the fireplace, a goody bag at a birthday party, a bucket of Halloween candy, or any other time when gifts are in the offing?  Oddities are intended to aid storyteller creativity, turning possibly bland areas or gaming episodes into something more, and the goal of this publication is to make things more fun and to take your imagination in directions it might not otherwise have gone. They fill in the corners of a bookshelf, a room, a level... 100 Oddities for a Wizard's Library Regular price: $0.99 Bundle price: $0.01 Format: PDF Welcome to 100 Oddities for a Wizard's Library, third entry in Skirmisher Publishing's ever-expanding series of curiosities designed to fill the empty corners of your campaign worlds!  Oddities may clutter a shelf or lie forgotten in a corner but are not defined by where they are so much as what they are and are unusual by their very nature. A dead rat in the basement of an abandoned building is not an oddity, but the same dead rat with its eyes sewn shut is. Oddities make you think about why they exist, how they ended up there, even what the hell they are, questions that are key to an engaging and invigorating roleplaying experience.  Oddities are intended to aid GM creativity and turn possibly bland areas or gaming episodes into something more. The goal of this... Age of Night (Volume 1: Business Between Brigands) Regular price: $4.99 Bundle price: $0.05 Format: PDF Join Drake, runaway avatar of the God of Night, Rhonwen, a naïve mage of the White Order, Thelonius, a spy and assassin hiding from the Shadow Houses, and Kamaria, a thief with ties to no one but her companions, as they embark on their journey! In their quest to free Drake from his bonds to the Covenant of Mandra they will journey across the Republic of Amathea and face many challenges and enemies along the way. Search for freedom. Find your place. This edition of the graphic novel includes a bonus short story and appendices of sketches and work process, some theological notes on the goddess Mandra, and a character profile of Drake. ... Carnivals, Theaters, & Other Entertainment Places (City Builder Volume 3) Regular price: $1.99 Bundle price: $0.02 Format: PDF City Builder Volume 3: Entertainment Places is the third in a series of 11 complementary books designed to help guide Game Masters through the process of creating compelling and exciting urban areas and places within them for their campaigns. It is not specific to any particular game setting and is designed to be compatible with the needs of any ancient, Dark Ages, Middle Ages, Renaissance, or fantasy milieu.  Contents of this book include: An Introduction that describes the scope of the series and how to use the material in this volume; Individual sections devoted to descriptions of Carnivals, Menageries, Museums, Parks, and Theaters; and One or more Adventure Hooks tying in with each described sort of place. This download includes both low-resolution screen-frien... Cthulhu Live’s Mysteries of the Mythos: Murder at Miskatonic Regular price: $2.99 Bundle price: $0.03 Format: PDF Miskatonic University, that ivy league institution of higher learning that has produced many a fine young adult ready to shape the world the way they see fit. With diverse courses such as Peruvian Basket Weaving, Modern Occult Legends, and Ancient Languages, Miskatonic has a class for any student. And with the award-winning sports team, the Fighting Cephalopods, even the athletic scholar can find his path to a brighter future among these hallowed halls.  There is, however, a class not in the curriculum that one person on campus is about to earn a masters in. That class is Murder 101. This class has only one test, but the final is a real killer. Who will pass this course? Will it be the jock? What about the bookworm? And let us not forget about the professional rival! Only time an... Earth Dog (A Monster for 5th Edition) Regular price: $0.50 Bundle price: $0.01 Format: Watermarked PDF In honor of the 2018 lunar Chinese New Year, Skirmisher Publishing is proud to announce the release of “Earth Dog: A Monster for 5th Edition”!  Earth Dogs are elemental animals look like sturdy, well-formed, hairless mastiffs that vary in color from beige or brown to orange or even yellow. They are gregarious, loyal, and exuberant and respond well to life with various intelligent species, and are therefore often kept as pets, animal companions, or guards by Earth-dwelling beings like Dao. On the Prime Material Plane, Earth Dogs are most likely to be found in places like mountains, rocky ravines, gemstone mines, and the temples of deities with which such places are affiliated, where they typically serve as guardians. In cultures that observe the Lunar New Year and adhere... Forbidden Monsters of Foree: Brainlashers (Cardstock CharactersTM) Regular price: $2.24 Bundle price: $0.02 Format: PDF Behold the strange and terrible world of Foree! Awful and nonsensical are the rules of this inhospitable world, where Wizards alone reserve the right to utter the names of certain monsters. But we have dared to mention here one of these fell creatures, the Brainlasher, and to present its fearful likenesses for your consideration. Using their alien technology, psionic abilities, and mind-shattering abilities, the Brainlashers are among the most loathsome and formidable of monsters. While they have long inhabited the known worlds, the Brainlashers have been used to populate the world of Foree with no acknowledgement of this. They are, in fact, the brainchildren of H.P. Lovecraft, Brian Lumley, and the other luminaries of the Mythos and those inspired by it. This set of 12 full-color p... Lives of Kos (Swords of Kos Fantasy Campaign Setting) Regular price: $3.99 Bundle price: $0.04 Format: PDF Welcome to Lives of Kos, the fifth volume of the highly-anticipated Swords of Kos Fantasy Campaign Setting! This book contains 118 system-free biographies of personages who live on the island of Kos or the lands surrounding it and are mentioned or appear as characters in the related sourcebooks or stories about the campaign setting. All of them can be used either individually or in conjunction with one another, and within the context of the Swords of Kos campaign setting or as part of any other milieu. This book follows Kos City, Kos Island, Lands Beyond Kos, and Encounters and is fully compatible with and expands upon concepts that appear in them. The Swords of Kos Fantasy Campaign Setting has deliberately been designed to be system free... Orc Raiders (Little Orc Wars/Cardstock CharactersTM) Regular price: $1.49 Bundle price: $0.02 Format: PDF This set of downloadable Cardstock CharactersTM miniatures contains three variations on five different figures, a Champion, Infantryman, Javelineer, Boar Rider, and War Boar. They are the ideal addition to any sort of tabletop fantasy RPG or wargame and can be used to enhance encounters or even serve as the basis for them. The different variations can also be used to easily reflect different levels and capabilities and one of the factions has blank shields that can easily be customized.  These miniatures were designed specifically for both the tabletop and video versions of the H.G. Wells' Little Orc Wars miniatures game. We hope you and your players will enjoy battling with them! ... Stevenson At Play Regular price: $1.49 Bundle price: $0.02 Format: PDF Famous as the author of such great works of literature as Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson was also a dedicated war gamer. Stevenson at Play, one of the lesser-known works of this “Grandfather of Modern Wargaming,” describes a complex strategic wargame that the author and his stepson, Samuel Lloyd Osbourne, played in the early 1880s.  Skirmisher’s edition of Stevenson at Play includes an Introduction by Osbourne, a Foreword by publisher and wargame designer Michael O. Varhola, and several period pieces of art, including some hand-drawn sketches by Stevenson himself. This download includes low-resolution screen-friendly and high-resolution... The Christmas Inn Regular price: $0.50 Bundle price: $0.01 Format: PDF This short story set in Medieval England during the turbulent War of the Roses tells how the events of one cold and stormy winter night caused an old and storied inn for travelers to have its name changed. It includes some pleasingly evocative imagery, particularly with regard to the proprietors of the inn and the men-at-arms that converge upon it.  “The Christmas Inn” was written by author Ella F. Mosby and illustrated by acclaimed English-American artist R.B. Birch and was originally published in 1892. Modern readers may find the tensions described in this story strikingly familiar but take heart at the way they are set aside during the holiday season. ... Wisdom from the Wastelands Issue #39: Unique Superscience Artifacts Regular price: $0.99 Bundle price: $0.01 Format: Watermarked PDF Imagine — barely 50 years ago — pulling out your smart phone in Dallas to take a selfie as President Kennedy passed by. The technology people casually sit on today might have gotten you disappeared by an alphabet agency, for possessing alien devices and/or photobombing by the Grassy Knoll gunman. A hundred years ago, talking into your hand could have landed you in an asylum. Three centuries ago, they would have burned witches for catapulting surly birds at petulant pigs. This idea, Clarke’s Second Law, is a powerful philosophical/imaginative concept and a very useful tool for Mutant Lords. In Mutant Future, it translates into superscience: Ancient equipment so advanced it seems supernatural, able to break the laws of physics and engineering. Wisdom from the W...

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