{"id":732,"date":"2006-10-05T19:48:00","date_gmt":"2006-10-05T19:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=732"},"modified":"2006-10-05T19:48:00","modified_gmt":"2006-10-05T19:48:00","slug":"unspeakable-blasphemous-horror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=732","title":{"rendered":"Unspeakable blasphemous horror"},"content":{"rendered":"

From “The Heroic Nerd<\/a>,” a review essay by Luc Sante in The New York Review of Books<\/em>, discussing works by and about H.P. Lovecraft:<\/p>\n

He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering\u2014the things that did not frighten him would probably make a shorter list. He evidently took pleasure in his fears, at least those on the creepy-crawly end of the spectrum, and although he really did suffer from his fear of cold, for example, this did not prevent him from exploiting that fear in a couple of stories, one of them (“At the Mountains of Madness”) his best.<\/eM><\/p>\n

H\/T: 3 Quarks Daily<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From “The Heroic Nerd,” a review essay by Luc Sante in The New York Review of Books, discussing works by and about H.P. Lovecraft: He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-bO","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11466,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=11466","url_meta":{"origin":732,"position":0},"title":"Thelema, New York, and Esoteric Publishing: A Quick Review of “In the Center of the Fire”","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 27, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"James Wasserman, In the Center of the Fire: A Memoir of the Occult 1966\u20131989 (Lake Worth, Fla.: Ibis Press, 2012). (In the cover photo, Wasserman is in back and his business and magickal partner Bill Breeze in the foreground.) Before I found my first Wiccan coven, a friend connected me\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"books\"","block_context":{"text":"books","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=books"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1377,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1377","url_meta":{"origin":732,"position":1},"title":"Apollo, God of Coffeehouses","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 12, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Back when Enchant\u00e9 was a zine rather than a blog, Brightshadow did a series of articles on \u201cgods of the city.\u201d These were representations of the Old Gods in statuary, architecture, etc., primarily in New York City, where he lives. New York has no monopoly on them, of course. I\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Colorado\"","block_context":{"text":"Colorado","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=colorado"},"img":{"alt_text":"Solar Roast Coffee, 226 N. Main St., Pueblo, Colorado","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/03\/solarroast-190x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6302,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6302","url_meta":{"origin":732,"position":2},"title":"New York’s ‘Occult Revival’: Everything Old Is New Again","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 26, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"From The Revealer (see blogroll under Religion and Journalism): \"Chapel Perilous: Notes From The New York Occult Revival.\" There\u2019s been a magical revival happening in New York City for two to three years,\u201d Damon Stang, the \u201cshop witch\u201d for Catland Books in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, told the New\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7724,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7724","url_meta":{"origin":732,"position":3},"title":"Core Books in Pagan Studies","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 4, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"I recently completed an article on contempoary Paganism for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, so when it appears, I can at least say that I have been published by Oxford UP. Yay me. But is there still a market for academic encyclopedias in this day when undergrads must be\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"magical religion","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/magical-religion.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1173,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1173","url_meta":{"origin":732,"position":4},"title":"John Keel Has Died","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 7, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Author and Fortean John Keel died Friday in New York.Not long after his signature book, The Mothman Prophecies was published, I saw on the Colorado Springs downtown library's new-books shelf and passed it by--repeatedly--because the title sounded too weird.From the Cryptomundo obituary:After years of writing parts of the story in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"books\"","block_context":{"text":"books","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=books"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=chascli-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0765341972","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5825,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5825","url_meta":{"origin":732,"position":5},"title":"Defining Paganism (1.5)","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 13, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"The first definition of Paganism that I offered, that of Prof. Michael York, should be placed in its context, which was primarily the academic study of religion. (Amazon link to York's published books.) When it was published in 2003, academic interest in the study of contemporary (or neo-) Paganism had\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}