Lovecraftian Horror and the Alchemy of the New

Earlier this morning TOR.COM published my article, "Lovecraftian Horror and the Alchemy of the New" (fans of such writers as H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen Graham Jones, and Victor LaValle will definitely want to check it out).  The first few paragraphs follow:

When teaching the Literature of Science Fiction at CSU Long Beach, one of the key texts I often assign is At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, a short novel originally published in 1936 that points the way toward the blurring of genre boundaries so prevalent in the work of the most memorable fabulists of the past few decades, Steve Aylett, Steve Erickson, Jonathan Lethem, Thomas Pynchon, and Jack Womack foremost among them.

The students’ reaction to Lovecraft is often split down the middle; there are those who adore Lovecraft’s work and those who revile it. One student believed that, due to Lovecraft’s documented racism, no one should be allowed to read his work. Her fear, apparently, was that by exposing ourselves to Lovecraft’s fiction, we would in turn be laying ourselves naked to the author’s worst character flaws. It was as if she believed that reading H.P. Lovecraft might lead one to become H.P. Lovecraft, almost as if the supernatural phenomenon of body possession Lovecraft wrote about so often in his fiction (e.g., The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, “The Shadow Out of Time,” “The Thing on the Doorstep,” etc.) was possible in the real world. My syllabus, due to its inclusion of Lovecraft, was somehow putting the students at risk of having their precious bodily fluids spoiled irreversibly by transgressive notions forged way back in the Jazz Age.

Needless to say, this is an odd viewpoint for a student—particularly a Creative Writing major—to hold. If anyone could separate the work from the author, you would think it would be another writer. As a writer myself, I find such a puritanical stance to be completely antithetical to artistic expression. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, it shouldn’t be necessary to invoke the words of George Santayana (“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”), but apparently for some it is necessary. It should be obvious that only by remembering the past and building on it can any form of literature evolve....

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

THE CIA, THE WASP WOMAN, AND THE KILLER DWARF

From Kate Sheehy's 1-9-18 New York Post article entitled "The CIA Arranged an Affair for a King That Produced a Dwarf, and Then Things Got Weird," in which we learn that the Central Intelligence Agency recruited Susan Cabot (star of Roger Corman's 1959 cult classic science fiction/horror film, THE WASP WOMAN) to have sex with King Hussein of Jordan, sparking a "politically worrisome" international situation:

"The CIA introduced King Hussein of Jordan to a Jewish B-list Hollywood actress in 1959 — touching off an affair that produced a dwarf love child who later killed her, reports say.

"Sensational new details of the king’s relationship with actress Susan Cabot were revealed in a recently declassified government memo, according to USA Today.

"The CIA was bucking to curry favor with the randy young Mideast leader when it agreed to procure women for him during his visit to Los Angeles in April 1959, the three-page document shows.

"Hussein was 24 and had divorced his first wife about two years earlier.

"The young king 'was especially desirous of female companionship during his Los Angeles visit, and it was requested that appropriate arrangements be made through a controlled source of the [CIA’s] Office [of Security] in order to assure a satisfied visit,' according to the anonymously written memo.

"The CIA turned to a private eye in Los Angeles to ensure discreetness, which then led to a seasoned 'fixer' for eccentric pilot billionaire Howard Hughes getting involved.

"Cabot — known for her roles in such low-budget sci-fi flicks as 'The Wasp Woman' — was among those invited to a party for Hussein at the home of Hughes’ pal, oilman Edwin Pauley.

"Before she went to the gig, Cabot, 32, was told, 'We want you to go to bed with him,' according to the memo.

"'The actress said that she rejected the proposal but finally went to [the] party. She became quite taken with [Hussein] and found him to be most charming,' according to the document.

"A few days later, the king asked the CIA to arrange for him and his new girlfriend to get together while he was in New York City.

"The agency rented a house for them in Long Beach, LI, and also got her a room at the Hotel Barclay in Manhattan 'under an assumed name,' the memo says.

"Still, their relationship was not without a politically worrisome issue.

"Cabot, whose real name was Harriet Shapiro, was of Jewish heritage, a thorny issue given Hussein was Muslim, according to reports.

"As hard as the pair tried to keep their affair under wraps, details of it began to seep out, the memo shows [...].

"The CIA memo detailing how the king and Cabot met was released as part of a trove of documents declassified last month related to the government’s investigation into President Kennedy’s assassination.

"Hussein had nothing to do with the assassination. But the private eye enlisted to help land women for him had also been recruited by the CIA to try to find someone who could kill Cuba’s leader, Fidel Castro."

To read the entire article, click HERE.

Starseed Awakening

Yesterday afternoon I appeared on STARSEED AWAKENING, broadcast out of KCOR in Las Vegas, hosted by Miesha Johnston (author of COVERT ABDUCTION), Mary Munoz, and Hannah Thoresen.  Over the course of these scintillating two hours you will learn how to:

▪ remotely influence your enemies to beat the crap out of each other with skateboards while you laugh at them from behind your bedroom curtains;

▪ use baking soda, peanut butter, salsa, and Jell-O as offensive weapons against uptight, bureaucratic intelligence flunkies;

▪ annoy theocratic NCIS agents so profoundly that you bring the wrath of Big Brother on top of your skull;

▪ employ new and unlikely methods of manipulating the Freedom of Information Act to attain forbidden FBI documents;

▪ detect those pesky, telltale signs of near-fatal electromagnetic poisoning;

▪ buy a copy of my book CHAMELEO for much less than the ridiculous $58.25 price for which it's currently being offered on Amazon.

You can listen to the entire broadcast by clicking HERE (I enter the scene about seven minutes into the show).

George DeMohrenschildt & Gangstalking

In September of 1976, George DeMohrenschildt (one of the numerous colorful characters connected to Lee Harvey Oswald and the JFK assassination) wrote a letter to George H. W. Bush--who at that time was the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency--to ask for his help in getting rid of the gang of "vigilantes" that had invaded his privacy and insisted on following him and his wife "everywhere."  In this letter, DeMohrenschildt seems to be describing a phenomenon eerily akin to what is now known as "gangstalking."  Alas, DeMohrenschildt's request for assistance did not end well, as you can see for yourself by clicking HERE.

It's worth noting that in his bestselling 1989 book CROSSFIRE:  THE PLOT THAT KILLED KENNEDY, the late investigative journalist Jim Marrs wrote the following about DeMohrenschildt's untimely death:

"In mid-March [of 1977] DeMohrenschildt, convinced that evil forces were still after him, fled to a relative's Florida home leaving behind clothing and other personal belongings.  It was in the fashionable Manalapan, Florida, home of his sister-in-law, that DeMohrenschildt died of a shotgun blast to the head on March 29, 1977, just three hours after a representative of the House Select Committee on Assassinations tried to contact him there.

"Earlier that day, he had met author Edward J. Epstein for an interview.  In a 1983 Wall Street Journal article, Epstein wrote that DeMohrenschildt told him that day that the CIA had asked him 'to keep tabs on Oswald.'

"However, the thing that may have triggered DeMohrenschildt's fear was that Epstein showed him a document that indicated DeMohrenschildt might be sent back to Parkland [Hospital in Dallas] for further shock treatments, according to a statement by Attorney David Bludworth, who represented the state during the investigation into DeMohrenschildt's death.

"Although several aspects of DeMohrenschildt's death caused chief investigator Capt. Richard Sheets of the Palm County Sheriff's Office to term the shooting 'very strange,' a coroner's jury quickly ruled suicide" (p. 287).

American Weimar

You can listen to Steve Erickson, one of the finest American novelists living today, discuss his essay "American Weimar" as well as his latest novel SHADOWBAHN with (of all people) Alec Baldwin on this 11-6-17 episode of Here's the Thing.  Click HERE to listen.

The Man Who Cried I Am

It's wonderful to see John A. Williams' almost forgotten 1968 novel, THE MAN WHO CRIED I AM, receive some richly deserved attention after all these years.  I mentioned Williams' novel--and "the King Alfred Plan" discussed below--in Chapter Fifteen of my first book, CRYPTOSCATOLOGY:  CONSPIRACY THEORY AS ART FORM. 

What follow are the first three paragraphs of Merve Emre's 12-31-17 New Yorker article entitled "How a Fictional Racist Plot Made the Headlines and Revealed an American Truth":

In 1968, the African-American novelist John A. Williams published his third novel, “The Man Who Cried I Am,” a bitter, beautiful, and feverish depiction of the failed promises of the civil-rights era. The novel, which was a best-seller and went through six printings, narrates the lives of two writers, one of whom, Max Reddick, is a journalist whose career path resembled Williams’s own. Like Max, who had served in the Army during the Second World War, Williams had enlisted in the Navy, where he was almost killed—not by the enemy but by a gang of white American sailors. Both men later worked as beat reporters for New York magazines. Their shared suspicion of the subtle, yet omnipresent, racism of the white creative class and the black integrationists who mimicked its liberal politics led both of them abroad—first to Europe, then to Africa at the height of the Black Power movement.

The novel’s other central character, Harry Ames, is a celebrated black American writer of social-protest fiction who so closely resembled Richard Wright that the lawyers at Little, Brown expressed some concern that the author’s estate would sue. And yet there are elements of Williams’s own story in Harry’s, too. Like Harry, Williams had been nominated for a prestigious writing prize—the American Academy in Rome’s Rome Prize Fellowship—only to have it withdrawn without explanation. As Williams recalled, he had lost the fellowship after a racially charged interview with the academy’s director, an incident that seemed proof to him that most of the “good, white moderate people of the North and South” were privately “anti-Negro,” for to be so publically was “no longer fashionable.” “The vast silence—the awful, condoning silence that surrounded the affair fits a groove worn,” he reflected. “The rejection confirms my suspicions, not ever really dead and makes my ‘paranoia’ real and therefore not ‘paranoia’ at all,” he wrote in an article in Nugget. “That is the sad thing, for I always work to lose it.”

“The Man Who Cried I Am” is a novel about the kind of paranoia that proves to be entirely justified, a theme that culminates in its penultimate chapter, in which Harry, living in self-imposed exile in Paris, dies under suspicious circumstances. Before his death, we learn, he had recently discovered a briefcase containing “the King Alfred Plan”: a series of leaked documents outlining the measures that the U.S. government would adopt if the racial unrest and discord of the mid-nineteen-sixties turned into civil war—an “Emergency” that would involve “all 22 million members of the Minority.” “The Minority has adopted an almost military posture to gain its objectives, which are not clear to most Americans,” the plan read. “It is expected, therefore, that, when those objectives are denied the Minority, racial war must be considered inevitable.” The plan, which was named after the first Anglo-Saxon king of England, detailed how the government would “terminate, once and for all, the Minority threat to the whole American society, and indeed, the Free World.”

To read Emre's entire article, click HERE.

Spontaneous Human Combustion (Part Two)

From Christina Zhao's 12-28-17 Newsweek article entitled "A Second Man Mysteriously Bursts Into Flames in England, and Police Are Stumped--Again": 

"A man died after he burst into flames on a street in Hull, England, on Wednesday, two weeks after London police issued a plea for witnesses of another similar incident.

"Daniel Lingwood, a resident of Hull, looked out of his window to see flames across the road, according to a local newspaper. He immediately rushed outside to help the victim, who has not been named.

"'There were some women going round to get buckets of water to chuck over him, but I have done first aid before and I knew that would be bad for his skin, so me and another bloke tried to roll him on the ground to put the fire out,' reported The Hull Daily Mail.

"Detective Superintendent Dave Wood, a local policeman, said emergency services were called just after 8 p.m. following reports of a man on fire. According to The Hull Daily Mail, the man was unable to be saved and died at the scene."

To read the entire article, click HERE.

THE TRUTH UNDERGROUND

Earlier tonight I appeared on Jim Rivas' radio show THE TRUTH UNDERGROUND, which is broadcast out of New Orleans on WGSO 990 AM.  For at least two hours you can hear me discuss my book CHAMELEO, the privatized intelligence industry, Freemasonry, false flags, predatory Uber apps, and much more.  You can listen to the entire broadcast by clicking HERE.

ON THE UFO DISCLOSURE FRONT

On Portal To Ascension, STEVE BASSETT and GRANT CAMERON discuss recent developments on the UFO Disclosure front....

Investigative journalist Jon Rappoport has much to say about the recent spate of mainstream articles regarding UFOs in this 1-2-18 No More Fake News piece entitled "UFO Disclosure:  The Insider Game of 'Reliable Sources'."  Here's a brief excerpt:

"At any time over the past 40 years, the Times could have assigned a couple of reporters the job of assembling a history of bullet-proof UFO-encounter stories. For a major article. An article that would have settled the issue once and for all: UFOs, whatever they are, exist, and they exhibit extraordinary capabilities.

"But 'it wasn’t time.'

"Now, it is.

"The green light is on. But it is only glowing for certain people, and for chosen news companies.

"The Reliable Ones.

"Therefore, when the Times, or a comparable media operation, discloses UFO revelations, the stories—accurate or not—reflect a purpose that is hidden.

"That purpose is never the unvarnished and complete truth.

"Over the past 35 years, working as a reporter, I’ve spoken off-the-record with a number of mainstream journalists. They readily admit to making 'partial disclosures,' otherwise known as limited hangouts. They explain this as 'sticking to the facts at hand.' But that’s not true. They also admit their editors keep them from digging deeper on a story.

"Digging deeper would, of course, expose unpleasant scandals the public shouldn’t be aware of. And in the process, people who are deemed unreliable sources would be vindicated. If THAT happened, the whole proprietary media egg would crack.

"The public would understand, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that big media cherry-pick their sources, and mainstream news is a stage play."

To read Rappoport's entire article, click HERE.

Theme Music for 2018

A knowledgeable colleague, known to a select few as "The Director of Miscellaneous," has chosen the following selections as the theme songs for 2018 (and I wholeheartedly agree):

SUN CITY GIRLS:  "COOKING WITH SATAN"

CAPTAIN BEEFHEART:  "APES-MA"

EX-BLANK-EX:  "YOU'RE FULL OF SHIT"

Remember, kids:  "BUY LOW... SELL HIGH...."