H.P. LOVECRAFT’S “THE OUTSIDER”

I just had a nice little re-read of this very short Lovecraft classic and thought I’d do some googling. Behold: goodies! The music is particularly good, although it looks as though it’s been around for a while, so apologies if this is a mere memory jolt for you. I recommend enjoying it with a warm cat, a glass of red wine and a beat-up paperback.

What drives this character to keep going into the unknown is mystery. He has seen signs, warnings that what is coming will destroy any remaining sanity he has left. Yet, he trudges on through the darkness and into a room filled with some abject horror. He even reaches out to touch one of it gruesome paws before he turns and runs for his life. The Outsider is for those of us who have dreamed that those who raised us are mysterious and incompressible. When we finally forced to face our parents, truly understand who they are and what they are about, we are faced with a shockingly realization that we may never understand them. We can only see monsters and wonder how they came to care so deeply for us. – Aaron M. Wilson

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I’ve found some amazing atmospheric music inspired by Lovecraft by Michael Brückner. It’s available to buy as a digital album or on a CD, but you can also just listen to tracks here. With titles such as Haunter Of The Dark, The Call Of Cthulhu and Dreams At The Witchhouse, it makes for some genuinely creepy listening.

I actually had stumbled upon his name, upon musical adaptions of some of his stories, upon pastiches of lesser authors and even one or two of his oiginal stories before, but at this early encounters, it didn’t click – instead, for some reason, it hit me with the power of a crashing meteor from the depths of outer space when I was 19 or 20 years old, and in a state of utter fasciantion I had to devour any book by him that I could find (fortunately, most of his work was still in print then in excellent German editions back then). After being obsessed with his work for some time, I also started to take interest in Lovecraft’s unique – and quite strange – personality, studying any biographical information on the man I could find, and discovering that weird as he may have been, I could find many parallels in his life to my own troubles, problems and feelings. – Michael Brückner

And below is a great short film from Emerson College. I loved it!

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The old medieval Book of Hours is an amazing source of visual inspiration, wether you’re religious or not. Each book is unique and there are a lot of them around. Many museums, libraries and universities around the world have collections of the books.

I would love to stumble across an affordable one! Many have been taken apart, each page being sold separately. But why are they so popular? Scroll down and take a look at their magnificent pages!

Its content—textual and pictorial—can vary enormously from volume to volume… From the mid-thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth century, more Books of Hours were commissioned and produced, bought and sold, bequeathed and inherited, printed and reprinted than any other text, including the Bible… The Book of Hours is a prayer book that contains, at its heart, the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary, that is, the Hours of the Virgin. – Medieval Book of Hours