Hear Dramatizations of H.P. Lovecraft’s Stories On His Birthday: “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Dunwich Horror,” & More

Hor­ror writer Howard Phillips Love­craft was a man who lived his life in fear—of peo­ple of oth­er races and nation­al­i­ties, of women, of real­i­ty itself. In a recent New York Review of Books write-up, Charles Bax­ter some­what deri­sive­ly char­ac­ter­izes Love­craft as a dis­en­chant­ed ado­les­cent (and favorite of dis­en­chant­ed ado­les­cents), who “nev­er real­ly grew up. ‘Adult­hood is hell,’ he once wrote in a let­ter.” Yet his fic­tion depicts more than a tor­ment­ed adult world, but an entire uni­verse brim­ming with name­less ancient horrors—and occa­sion­al­ly named ones like the crea­ture Cthul­hu, whose like­ness he once sketched out in a let­ter to a friend.

The cephalo­pod-faced mon­ster crys­tal­izes Lovecraft’s dis­gust with real­i­ty in all its strange­ness and, for him, all its vari­ety. It’s a per­fect image of alien­ation (just this past week we saw tongue-in-cheek spec­u­la­tion over whether octo­pus­es are aliens; a plau­si­ble con­ceit) and presents us with an ele­men­tal uncan­ni­ness that char­ac­ter­izes his entire body of work. “Fic­tion like Lovecraft’s can be bru­tal­ly hyp­not­ic,” writes Bax­ter, “the young read­er, intel­lec­tu­al­ly unde­fend­ed and eas­i­ly shak­en enters the writer’s fear-drenched uni­verse and can’t eas­i­ly get out of it.”

The Call of Cthul­hu — Part 1

Whether you dis­cov­ered Love­craft as a young read­er or an old­er one, you may have found your­self sim­i­lar­ly entrapped by the hor­rors of his imag­i­na­tion. And you could count your­self in the com­pa­ny of not only her­met­ic, mis­an­throp­ic, death-obsessed young men in punk bands but also of media friend­ly, death-obsessed writ­ers like Stephen King and Joyce Car­ol Oates. And, of course, thou­sands upon thou­sands of hor­ror fans across the world, includ­ing a great many actors, writ­ers, and direc­tors who over the years have adapt­ed Lovecraft’s fic­tion as old-fash­ioned radio dra­ma of the kind the author him­self might have con­sumed while iso­lat­ed from the wicked world in his New Eng­land home.

You can hear some choice exam­ples here: at the top of the post we have Richard Coyle’s read­ing of the novel­la At the Moun­tains of Mad­ness. (You can also hear his read­ing of “The Shad­ow Over Inns­mouth” here.)  Next, we have a 1945 drama­ti­za­tion of “The Dun­wich Hor­ror,” per­formed by Acad­e­my Award-win­ning actor Ronald Col­man. And then hear the infa­mous “Call of Cthul­hu,” parts one and two, pro­duced by the Atlanta Radio The­atre Com­pa­ny, who have record­ed no small num­ber of Love­craft radio plays. Just above, lis­ten to a read­ing of “Behind the Wall of Sleep” from old-time radio sci-fi read­ings archive Mind Webs (which we’ve cov­ered in a pre­vi­ous post). Final­ly, below, lis­ten on Spo­ti­fy to the HP Love­craft Radio Hour Vol 1, a col­lec­tion of dra­ma­tized Love­craft sto­ries. 

Should you hap­pen to tear through these record­ings and find your­self in des­per­ate need of more to feed your Love­craft obses­sion, fear not; you would have a very hard time exhaust­ing all the options. The World’s Largest H.P. Love­craft Audio Links Gate­way, for exam­ple, deliv­ers exact­ly what it promis­es. Should that expan­sive data­base some­how leave out a read­ing or drama­ti­za­tion, you’ll per­haps find it over at the H.P. Love­craft Archive’s size­able col­lec­tion. And you must, if you’re a Love­craft fan, vis­it the H.P. Love­craft His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety, who host plen­ty of Love­craft merch, and links to much more Love­craft audio, includ­ing albums inspired by his work and a pod­cast.

And on the off chance you knew lit­tle or not at all of Love­craft before read­ing this post, beware. You may, after lis­ten­ing to some of his weird tales of hor­ror, come away a devot­ed Love­craft cultist.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

H.P. Lovecraft’s Clas­sic Hor­ror Sto­ries Free Online: Down­load Audio Books, eBooks & More

H.P. Lovecraft’s Mon­ster Draw­ings: Cthul­hu & Oth­er Crea­tures from the “Bound­less and Hideous Unknown”

Love­craft: Fear of the Unknown (Free Doc­u­men­tary)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

David Byrne’s Personal Lending Library Is Now Open: 250 Books Ready to Be Checked Out

david byrne lending library

Just yes­ter­day we were mus­ing on perus­ing rock stars’ book­shelves, and today we learn it has become a real­i­ty, if you live in Lon­don. Poly­math and all-around swell per­son David Byrne opened the 22nd annu­al Melt­down Fes­ti­val this last Mon­day, and in the spir­it of London’s Poet­ry Library (which is host­ing this part of the event), the for­mer Talk­ing Heads front­man has shipped over 250 books to stock his own lend­ing library for the dura­tion of the fes­ti­val, until August 30.

In his Guardian essay explain­ing his deci­sion to let you rifle through his col­lec­tion of music books—some of which were used as research for his own How Music Works—Byrne wax­es about the library he loved in his teenage years in sub­ur­ban Bal­ti­more:

We were des­per­ate to know what was going on in the cool places, and, giv­en some sug­ges­tions and direc­tion, the library was one place where that wider excit­ing world became avail­able. In my lit­tle town, the library also had vinyl that one could check out and I dis­cov­ered avant-garde com­posers such as Xenakis and Mes­si­aen, folk music from var­i­ous parts of the world and even some pop records that weren’t get­ting much radio play in Bal­ti­more. It was tru­ly a for­ma­tive place.

A full list of the books has yet to sur­face, but a few peo­ple are tweet­ing pho­tos of titles, like Evan Eisenberg’s The Record­ing Angel: Music, Records and Cul­ture from Aris­to­tle to Zap­pa or Steve Goodman’s Son­ic War­fare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecol­o­gy of Fear. Squint­ing our eyes at the pro­mo­tion­al pho­to of Byrne sit­ting in front of the shelves, we can spot Lester Bangs’ Psy­chot­ic Reac­tions and Car­bu­ra­tor Dung, Eric Weisbard’s Lis­ten Again: A Momen­tary His­to­ry of Pop Music, Paula Court’s pho­to­book New York Noise: Art and Music from the New York Under­ground 1978–88; and Thurston Moore’s Mix Tape: The Art of Cas­sette Cul­ture. (Rec­og­nize some oth­er titles? Please add them in the com­ments.)

Byrne has set up a free-to-bor­row sys­tem with a cred­it card on file just in case you abscond with the book, although he does admit it may hap­pen and “so be it.” There’s also an added thrill:

Some of my books may have high­light­ed bits or notes scrawled in the mar­gins. I hope noth­ing embar­rass­ing.

Byrne’s pro­gram­ming for the Melt­down Fes­ti­val can be seen here. High­lights include an a cap­pel­la work­shop by Petra Haden, a show­ing of There Will Be Blood with live score by Jon­ny Green­wood and the Lon­don Con­tem­po­rary Orches­tra, the reap­pear­ance of Young Mar­ble Giants, Young Jean Lee’s band Future Wife per­form­ing We’re Gonna Die with David Byrne as spe­cial guest; and many oth­er selec­tions of “Things David Thinks You Should Hear.”

In the mean­time, here’s a pho­to from the fes­t’s open­ing of Mr. Byrne rid­ing a portable espres­so shop on wheels.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bri­an Eno Lists 20 Books for Rebuild­ing Civ­i­liza­tion & 59 Books For Build­ing Your Intel­lec­tu­al World

Pat­ti Smith’s List of Favorite Books: From Rim­baud to Susan Son­tag

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

David Byrne: How Archi­tec­ture Helped Music Evolve

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

How Can I Know Anything at All? BBC Animations Feature the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, Hume, Popper & More

How did every­thing begin? What makes us human? What is the self? How do I live a good life? What is love? We’ve all asked these ques­tions, if only with­in our heads, and recent­ly a series of BBC ani­ma­tions writ­ten by philoso­pher Nigel War­bur­ton and nar­rat­ed by a vari­ety of celebri­ties have done their lev­el best to answer them–or at least to point us in the direc­tion of answer­ing them for our­selves by not just telling but wit­ti­ly show­ing us what great minds have thought and said on the issues before we came along. Most recent­ly, they’ve tak­en on that eter­nal conun­drum, “How can I know any­thing at all?”

The already philo­soph­i­cal­ly inclined will have rec­og­nized this as the foun­da­tion­al ques­tion of epis­te­mol­o­gy, that for­mi­da­ble branch of phi­los­o­phy con­cerned with what we know, how we know, and whether we can know in the first place. Many famil­iar names in the his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy have stepped onto this field, includ­ing Lud­wig Wittgen­stein, with whose thoughts this series of extreme­ly brief explana­to­ry videos begins. It lays out his anal­o­gy of the bee­tle in a box, where­in each per­son holds a box con­tain­ing what they call a “bee­tle,” but nobody can look inside anoth­er’s box to con­firm whether their idea of a bee­tle aligns with any­one else’s.

In Wittgen­stein’s view, says actor Aidan Turn­er, “there can’t be more to the pub­lic mean­ing of a lan­guage than we’re capa­ble of teach­ing each oth­er, and the pri­vate ‘something’—the ‘beetle’—can’t have a role in that teach­ing, because we can’t get at it.” The next video, in ask­ing whether we should believe in mir­a­cles, brings in Scot­tish Enlight­en­ment thinker David Hume, who thought that “if we fol­low the rule of pro­por­tion­ing our beliefs to the avail­able evi­dence, there will always be more evi­dence that the eye­wit­ness accounts were mis­tak­en than not.” Hume’s pre­de­ces­sor George Berke­ley makes an appear­ance to weigh in on whether any­thing exists—or, more pre­cise­ly, whether any­thing exists besides our minds, which con­vince us that we expe­ri­ence real things out there in the world.

Final­ly, the series lands on a method we can use to know, one sci­ence has relied on, with seem­ing suc­cess, for quite some time now: Karl Pop­per’s idea of fal­si­fi­ca­tion. “Rather than look­ing for sup­port­ing evi­dence, Pop­per argued that sci­en­tists go out of their way to refute their own hypothe­ses, test­ing them to destruc­tion,” leav­ing those that remain, at least pro­vi­sion­al­ly, as knowl­edge. Though none of these videos exceed two min­utes in length, each one, dense with both philo­soph­i­cal and pop-cul­tur­al ref­er­ences, will leave you with more knowl­edge about epis­te­mol­o­gy than you went in with—assuming they don’t leave you dis­be­liev­ing in knowl­edge itself.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

140 Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

What is Love? BBC Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions Fea­ture Sartre, Freud, Aristo­phanes, Dawkins & More

What is the Self? Watch Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions Nar­rat­ed by Stephen Fry on Sartre, Descartes & More

How Did Every­thing Begin?: Ani­ma­tions on the Ori­gins of the Uni­verse Nar­rat­ed by X‑Files Star Gillian Ander­son

What Makes Us Human?: Chom­sky, Locke & Marx Intro­duced by New Ani­mat­ed Videos from the BBC

How to Live a Good Life? Watch Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions Nar­rat­ed by Stephen Fry on Aris­to­tle, Ayn Rand, Max Weber & More

How Can I Know Right From Wrong? Watch Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions on Ethics Nar­rat­ed by Har­ry Shear­er

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

18 Stories & Novels by Neil Gaiman Online: Free Texts & Readings by Neil Himself

Neil Gaiman might just be the most beloved fan­ta­sy author out there. He writes weird, twist­ed, exhil­a­rat­ing tales about hid­den real­i­ties and the bizarre, fan­ci­ful crea­tures that live in them. His works, like Sand­man, Frag­ile Things and Amer­i­can Gods, are pure escapism and a blast to read. No doubt, that’s the major rea­son why the author has devel­oped such a rabid fan base.

But per­haps anoth­er rea­son is that he is sim­ply more avail­able than most writ­ers. Sure, oth­er authors, like J. K. Rowl­ing for instance, might have inspired an entire gen­er­a­tion with her Har­ry Pot­ter series but she prefers to keep a cer­tain remove from her read­er­ship. Though she has a Twit­ter account, she uses it spar­ing­ly.

Gaiman, on the oth­er hand, is seem­ing­ly always on Twit­ter — he has, as of this writ­ing, tweet­ed at least nine times in the past 24 hours, inter­act­ing with fans, pub­lish­ers and the press. This is the guy who once report­ed­ly signed 75,000 copies of his book The Ocean at the End of the Lane, after all.

He has also post­ed a lot of his work for free up on the inter­net. Below is a list of Gaiman’s work that you can read, see or hear online. Many are read by Neil him­self. If you know of any miss­ing texts, please let us know and we’ll get them added to our list ASAP.

Above you can find videos of Gaiman read­ing the first chap­ter of his book Cora­line, and also the sto­ry “The Man Who For­got Ray Brad­bury.”

Audio & Video
Text

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

Neil Gaiman Reads “The Man Who For­got Ray Brad­bury”

Where Do Great Ideas Come From? Neil Gaiman Explains

Aman­da Palmer Ani­mates & Nar­rates Hus­band Neil Gaiman’s Uncon­scious Mus­ings

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

Michael Stipe Recommends 10 Books for Anyone Marooned on a Desert Island

stipe books

Image by David Shankbone

Michael Stipe’s tenure as front­man and lyri­cist for R.E.M. cer­tain­ly revealed a lit­er­ate mind. A for­mer art major at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Geor­gia and cur­rent art teacher at NYU, his best lyrics scan well as poet­ry.  One can imag­ine being invit­ed over for a din­ner par­ty to Mr. Stipe’s place, and, glass of wine in hand, absolute­ly hav­ing to nose through his book­shelf. What does the writer of “Nightswim­ming” read? With the his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ences that course through those ear­ly albums, would he have socio-polit­i­cal books about Amer­i­ca? Would he pull a book off the shelf and say, here, “You have to read this. It will change your life”?

Won­der no more, because Stipe was recent­ly asked to write down his Top Ten list of books to take to a desert island. The list was pub­lished in The New York Times. Find a skele­tal ver­sion here:

Some of these are classics—for exam­ple Ker­ouac’s On the Road, which Stipe calls “my band’s template”—and the one poet on the list, Rim­baud, is very much an ear­ly influ­ence on his writ­ing. Dhal­gren was also a favorite of David Bowie’s, who based a lot of Dia­mond Dogs on the nov­el. The Copeland and Did­ion choic­es stand out, most­ly by being less obvi­ous selec­tions from their bib­li­ogra­phies. And as he says that he’s cur­rent­ly read­ing the Pat­ti Smith book (now being turned into a series on Show­time), we can’t take the selec­tion too seri­ous­ly. Maybe he just wants to take it to the desert island to fin­ish it.

Stipe has includ­ed a few sen­tences on each book to explain his choic­es. Find them here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Pat­ti Smith’s List of Favorite Books: From Rim­baud to Susan Son­tag

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

Bri­an Eno Lists 20 Books for Rebuild­ing Civ­i­liza­tion & 59 Books For Build­ing Your Intel­lec­tu­al World

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

The Fascinating Whistled Languages of the Canary Islands, Turkey & Mexico (and What They Say About the Human Brain)

For some years now lin­guist Daniel Everett has chal­lenged the ortho­doxy of Noam Chom­sky and oth­er lin­guists who believe in an innate “uni­ver­sal gram­mar” that gov­erns human lan­guage acqui­si­tion. A 2007 New York­er pro­file described his work with a reclu­sive Ama­zon­ian tribe called the Pira­ha, among whom Everett found a lan­guage “unre­lat­ed to any oth­er extant tongue… so con­found­ing to non-natives that” until he arrived in the 70s, “no out­sider had suc­ceed­ed in mas­ter­ing it.” And yet, for all its extra­or­di­nary dif­fer­ences, at least one par­tic­u­lar fea­ture of Pira­ha is shared by humans across the globe—“its speak­ers can dis­pense with their vow­els and con­so­nants alto­geth­er and sing, hum, or whis­tle con­ver­sa­tions.”

In places as far flung as the Brazil­ian rain­for­est, moun­tain­ous Oax­a­ca, Mex­i­co, the Canary Islands, and the Black Sea coast of Turkey, we find lan­guages that sound more like the speech of birds than of humans. “Whis­tled lan­guages,” writes Michelle Nijhuis in a recent New York­er post, “have been around for cen­turies. Herodotus described com­mu­ni­ties in Ethiopia whose res­i­dents ‘spoke like bats,’ and reports of the whis­tled lan­guage that is still used in the Canary Islands date back more than six hun­dred years.”

In the short video from UNESCO at the top of the post, you can hear the whis­tled lan­guage of Canary Islanders. (See anoth­er short video from Time mag­a­zine here.) Called Sil­bo Gomero, the lan­guage “repli­cates the islanders’ habit­u­al lan­guage (Castil­ian Span­ish) with whistling,” replac­ing “each vow­el or con­so­nant with a whistling sound.” Spo­ken (so to speak) among a very large com­mu­ni­ty of over 22,000 inhab­i­tants and passed down for­mal­ly in schools and cer­e­monies, Sil­bo Gomero shows no signs of dis­ap­pear­ing. Oth­er whis­tled lan­guages have not fared as well. As you will see in the doc­u­men­tary above, when it comes to the whis­tled lan­guage of north­ern Oax­a­can peo­ples in a moun­tain­ous region of Mex­i­co, “only a few whistlers still prac­tice their ancient tongue.” In a pre­vi­ous Open Cul­ture post on this film, Matthias Rasch­er point­ed us toward some schol­ar­ly efforts at preser­va­tion from the Sum­mer Insti­tute of Lin­guis­tics in Mex­i­co, who record­ed and tran­scribed a con­ver­sa­tion between two native Oax­a­can whistlers.

Whis­tled lan­guages evolved for much the same rea­son as birdcalls—they enable their “speak­ers” to com­mu­ni­cate across large dis­tances. “Most of the forty-two exam­ples that have been doc­u­ment­ed in recent times,” Nijhuis writes, “arose in places with steep ter­rain or dense forests—the Atlas Moun­tains, in north­west Africa; the high­lands of north­ern Laos, the Brazil­ian Amazon—where it might oth­er­wise be hard to com­mu­ni­cate at a dis­tance.” Such is the case for the Pira­ha, the Canary Islanders, the Oax­a­can whistlers, and anoth­er group of whistlers in a moun­tain­ous region of Turkey. As Nijhuis doc­u­ments in her post, these sev­er­al thou­sand speak­ers have learned to translit­er­ate Turk­ish into “loud, lilt­ing whis­tles” that they call “bird lan­guage.” New Sci­en­tist brings us the exam­ple of whis­tled Turk­ish above (with sub­ti­tles), and you can hear more record­ed exam­ples at The New York­er.

As with most whis­tled lan­guages, the Turk­ish “bird lan­guage” makes use of sim­i­lar structures—though not sim­i­lar sounds—as human speech, mak­ing it a bit like sem­a­phore or Morse code. As such, whis­tled lan­guages are not like­ly to offer evi­dence against the idea of a uni­ver­sal gram­mar in the archi­tec­ture of the brain. Yet accord­ing to biopsy­chol­o­gist Onur Gün­türkün—who con­duct­ed a study on the Turk­ish whistlers pub­lished in the lat­est Cur­rent Biol­o­gy—these lan­guages can show us that “the orga­ni­za­tion of our brain, in terms of its asym­met­ri­cal struc­ture, is not as fixed as we assume.”

Where we gen­er­al­ly process lan­guage in the left hemi­sphere and “pitch, melody, and rhythm” in the right, Nijhuis describes how the whis­tled Turk­ish study sug­gests “that both hemi­spheres played sig­nif­i­cant roles” in com­pre­hen­sion. The oppor­tu­ni­ties to study whis­tled lan­guages will dimin­ish in the years to come, as cell phones take over their func­tion and more of their speak­ers lose region­al dis­tinc­tive­ness. But the work of Gün­türkün and oth­er bio­log­i­cal researchers may have fas­ci­nat­ing impli­ca­tions for lin­guists as well, cre­at­ing fur­ther con­nec­tions between speech and music—and per­haps even between the speech of humans and that of oth­er ani­mals.

via The New York­er

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Speak­ing in Whis­tles: The Whis­tled Lan­guage of Oax­a­ca, Mex­i­co

How Lan­guages Evolve: Explained in a Win­ning TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion

Noam Chom­sky Talks About How Kids Acquire Lan­guage & Ideas in an Ani­mat­ed Video by Michel Gondry

What Makes Us Human?: Chom­sky, Locke & Marx Intro­duced by New Ani­mat­ed Videos from the BBC

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

H.P. Lovecraft’s Monster Drawings: Cthulhu & Other Creatures from the “Boundless and Hideous Unknown”

Cthulhu_sketch_by_Lovecraft

If you’ve ever played Call of Cthul­hu, the table­top role-play­ing game based on the writ­ing of H.P. Love­craft, you’ve felt the frus­tra­tion of hav­ing char­ac­ter after painstak­ing­ly-cre­at­ed char­ac­ter go insane or sim­ply drop dead upon catch­ing a glimpse of one of the many hor­rif­ic beings infest­ing its world. But as the count­less read­ers Love­craft has posthu­mous­ly accu­mu­lat­ed over near­ly eighty years know, that just sig­nals faith­ful­ness to the source mate­r­i­al: Love­craft’s char­ac­ters tend to run into the same prob­lem, liv­ing, as they do, in what French nov­el­ist Michel Houelle­becq (one of his notable fans, a group that also includes Stephen King, Joyce Car­ol Oates, and Jorge Luis Borges) calls “an open slice of howl­ing fear.”

Read enough of Love­craft’s mid­dle-class east-coast pro­fes­sion­al nar­ra­tors’ mor­tal strug­gles for the words to con­vey what he called “the bound­less and hideous unknown” that sud­den­ly con­fronts them, and you start to won­der what these crea­tures actu­al­ly look like. The clear­est word-pic­ture comes in the 1928 sto­ry “The Call of Cthul­hu,” whose nar­ra­tor describes the tit­u­lar ancient malevolence—avoiding instan­ta­neous men­tal break­down by look­ing at an idol rather than the being itself—as “a mon­ster of vague­ly anthro­poid out­line, but with an octo­pus-like head whose face was a mass of feel­ers, a scaly, rub­bery-look­ing body, prodi­gious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, nar­row wings behind.”

And so mod­ern Love­craftians have enjoyed a new vari­a­tion of that giant octo­pus-drag­on-man form on “Cthul­hu for Pres­i­dent” shirts each and every elec­tion year. (You can find one for 2016 here.) While that phe­nom­e­non would sure­ly have sur­prised Love­craft him­self, con­stant­ly and fruit­less­ly as he strug­gled in life, I like to think he’d have approved of the designs, which align in fear­some spir­it with the sketch­es he made. At the top of the post you can see one sketch of the Cthul­hu idol, drawn in 1934 on a piece of cor­re­spon­dence with writer R.H. Bar­low, Love­craft’s friend and the even­tu­al execu­tor of his estate.

MadnessPlotOutlineFinal.jpg.CROP.article920-large

If “The Call of Cthul­hu” ranks as Love­craft’s best-known work, his 1936 novel­la At the Moun­tains of Mad­ness sure­ly comes in a close sec­ond. Just above, we have an illus­trat­ed page of the writer’s plot notes for this unfor­get­table cau­tion­ary tale of an Antarc­tic expe­di­tion that hap­pens dis­as­trous­ly upon the mind-bend­ing ruins of a city pre­vi­ous­ly thought only a myth – and the mon­sters that inhab­it it. It exem­pli­fies the defin­ing qual­i­ty of Love­craft’s mythol­o­gy, where, as Slate’s Rebec­ca Onion puts it, “ancient beings of pro­found malev­o­lence lurk just below the sur­face of the every­day world.”

Moun­tains fea­tured sev­er­al species of for­got­ten, intel­li­gent beings, includ­ing the ‘Elder Things.’ The sketch on the right side of this page of notes (click here to view it in a larg­er for­mat), with its anno­ta­tions (‘body dark grey’; ‘all appendages not in use cus­tom­ar­i­ly fold­ed down to body’; ‘leath­ery or rub­bery’) rep­re­sents Love­craft work­ing out the specifics of an Elder Thing’s anato­my.” That such things lurked in Love­craft’s imag­i­na­tion have made his state of mind a sub­ject of decades and decades of rich dis­cus­sion among his enthu­si­asts. But just the body count racked up by Cthul­hu, the Elder Things, and the oth­er denizens of this unfath­omable realm should make us thank­ful that Love­craft saw them in his mind’s eye so we would­n’t have to.

Note: The sec­ond image on this page was fea­tured in the 2013 exhi­bi­tion held at Brown Uni­ver­si­ty, “The Shad­ow Over Col­lege Street: H. P. Love­craft in Prov­i­dence.” The Brown Uni­ver­si­ty Library is the home to the largest col­lec­tion of H. P. Love­craft mate­ri­als in the world.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

H.P. Love­craft Gives Five Tips for Writ­ing a Hor­ror Sto­ry, or Any Piece of “Weird Fic­tion”

H.P. Love­craft High­lights the 20 “Types of Mis­takes” Young Writ­ers Make

H.P. Lovecraft’s Clas­sic Hor­ror Sto­ries Free Online: Down­load Audio Books, eBooks & More

Love­craft: Fear of the Unknown (Free Doc­u­men­tary)

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Watch Interplanetary Revolution (1924): The Most Bizarre Soviet Animated Propaganda Film You’ll Ever See

In 1924, Zenon Komis­arenko, Youry Merkulov and Niko­lai Kho­dataev pro­duced Inter­plan­e­tary Rev­o­lu­tion, which might just be one of the strangest Sovi­et pro­pa­gan­da films ever pro­duced.

First, the film is ani­mat­ed using not only tra­di­tion­al cel ani­ma­tion but also col­lage and stop motion, giv­ing the work a queasy, dis­ori­ent­ing feel. A bit like look­ing at a paint­ing by Hen­ry Darg­er.

Then there is the film’s sto­ry. As an inter­ti­tle pro­claims, this is “a tale about Com­rade Con­in­ter­nov, the Red Army War­rior who flew to Mars, and van­quished all the cap­i­tal­ists on the plan­et!!” This already sounds bet­ter that John Carter.

The movie, how­ev­er, is rather hard to fol­low with­out either the appro­pri­ate amount of rev­o­lu­tion­ary fer­vor or, per­haps, hal­lu­cino­gens. Inter­plan­e­tary Rev­o­lu­tion opens with a wild-eyed, ax-wield­ing bull­dog with a top hat – a cap­i­tal­ist, obvi­ous­ly. Oth­er cap­i­tal­ists, with swastikas on their fore­heads, suck the blood from a hap­less mem­ber of the pro­le­tari­at. Then the rev­o­lu­tion comes and a pant­less cap­i­tal­ist demon los­es his mind after devour­ing a copy of Prav­da. Next, the cap­i­tal­ists all board a giant fly­ing shoe and fly off into space. From there, the film gets kind of weird.

You can watch the whole thing above. It’s also added to our list of Free Ani­mat­ed Films, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Dzi­ga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Cam­era, Named the 8th Best Film Ever Made

Watch Sovi­et Ani­ma­tions of Win­nie the Pooh, Cre­at­ed by the Inno­v­a­tive Ani­ma­tor Fyo­dor Khitruk

“Glo­ry to the Con­querors of the Uni­verse!”: Pro­pa­gan­da Posters from the Sovi­et Space Race (1958–1963)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.