This is Aaron Nugent. I don’t know if you get notified after I leave this. Hopefully you do.

I’m in grad school at the U of A for English. I’m in a Science Fiction Film class and us grad students have to present on one movie. I chose John Carpenter’s They Live. I haven’t read any HP Lovecraft books, but Carpenter was really interested and inspired by Lovecraft and his world view.

One of his characters in They Live is named Frank Armitage, after a character in one of HP’s novels. Carpenter also made a movie called In the Mouth of Madness. I haven’t seen it, but it’s on my list.

I like your blog, and I found the short video from India on here too.

Do you have a contact page on here? Or a new email address? I’d like to get in contact with you since I’m back in Fayetteville for a while.

Thanks,

Aaron Nugent

My jaw literally dropped when I read this. I have been unhealthily obsessed with Lovecraft since my early twenties and every October I pull out his books and devour them with ghoulish pleasure. I just read “The Shunned House” and “The Shadow Out of Time” again last night. I could bestow upon you such a colossal wave of geekdom regarding Lovecraft that would make you ashamed to know me.
In fact, I once had a photography exhibition of tremendously complex images under the name Abdul Al-Hazred. The exhibition was called, Ceremony of Secret Names. I never once indicated in any of the press or at the show that I was involved with the images. They were very strange images that reflected vague and disturbing narratives using everything from inverted deer heads to hanging coffins. I wrote this elaborate “artist’s statement” to accompany the show that described this long story about how Abdul was able to get such images. Best of all, the opening reception for the show was Friday, October 13!

Anyway, the gallery director was happy to keep my secret and did so until the end of the show. Here’s the statement I wrote for the show….

At the peak of Autumn, 2003, seven individuals gathered in the ancient city of Jericho to finalize a process they had begun over twelve years earlier in the desert of Rub’ Al Khali.
This process inevitably manifested as a ceremony that spanned the length of three days. These photographs are a partial document of those three days.

Many of the original authors of this ceremony as it exists in its contemporary form, died in the years between Rub’ Al Khali and Jericho. Often, their deaths were cloaked in a quiet acceptance among authorities who had long yearned for their demise as they felt that their mere presence in the community was poisonous and entirely damnable. There i

As I mentioned, I am pursuing English very diligently right now; however, the English department at St Olaf is saying that the classics are no longer relevant and are instead turning to poetry classes on MTV music videos, Gay/Lesbian/Multicultural literature, Surrealism, etc, while doing away with the old survey classes which are run by old white men — they want to make the English major an interdisciplinary major that deals with more politics. I want to study the 18th and 19th century novel and poetry as well as Fitzgerald. Do you know of any institutions that would be good for that traditional focus that I am looking for, particularly any state schools outside of Arkansas? Also, what do I say when I am being picked on for wanting to be an English professor over something practical like marketing?