I scrutinise the remaining leaves of the ledger. They are precious few. My archival zeal has been so relentless, so thoroughly efficient, that I find I have whittled my history down to the final, dusty appendices. There is a peculiar, hollow irony in realising that my life, once so crowded with the minutiae of academic procedure, has been reduced to a set of supplementary indices.

YouTube video by Old Bloke New Music

Episode Three of Old Bloke: New Music, in which two more tracks are fed into the increasingly unreliable machinery of the Dad-o-Meter. This time it’s Man/Woman/Chainsaw and Big Truck. Two very different bands, two tracks, one Old Bloke, and the usual assortment of opinions, comparisons, bewilderment, and inappropriate dancing. No freebies, no paid promotion, and no guarantee that anybody sending me music will actually like what I say about it.

Episode two of Old Bloke: New Music, in which I continue my entirely unnecessary mission to find out whether there’s still new music capable of getting an old bloke out of his chair. Two more tracks go head to head, the Dad-o-meter gets another workout, and the production remains reassuringly held together with string, glitches, and misplaced confidence. This time it's Modern Woman and The Bleep Test... st...

I just started a channel reviewing new music. It’s called Old Bloke New Music and, yes, it’s a bit of a Ronseal deal. This is the first, slightly dodgy episode and, of the four I’ve made so far, by far the most primitive. I am, slowly but surely, getting the hang of the software. Each episode features two tracks in a dad-dancing face-off.

If I were to cross out my own name, what would be the consequence? Would I cease to function as the scribe, or would I cease to have been entirely? The philosophical implications were tedious in the extreme, yet the physical sensation was altogether unmistakable. My hand, the very extremity holding the pen, appeared to be receding, becoming a distant observation rather than an immediate, lived experience.

YouTube video by Old Bloke New Music

I arrived, eventually, at the middle section of the register, which was given over entirely to the mid-century archives. It was a tedious catalogue of names, a sprawling list of those who had attended a symposium so thoroughly forgotten that it felt an affront to even acknowledge its existence. I began at the very top of the page. Allcock, Bailey, Jones, Smith.

Creative Gambles and Corporate Euthanasia. One must eventually confront the evidence of one’s own aesthetic deviancy. My cinematic resume reads like a morgue of corporate aspirations, a curated collection of what the industry politely terms “commercial disappointments”. To look upon my list of recent favourites: Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Scooby-Doo, Eternals, The Marvels, Ghostbusters (2016), Josie and the Pussycats, John Carter, The New Mutants, and the patron saint of creative hubris, Hudson Hawk, is to see a history of the publicly pilloried.

To review the trajectory across these essays is to witness a profound chronicle of architectural and hauntological containment. We began within the dusty, subterranean vaults of the text itself, tracking how the archival past behaves like a biological parasite that consumes the contemporary subject. We then saw this temporal rot leak outward into the city's physical grid, transforming the colonial lanes of Providence and the damp wharves of Innsmouth into a recursive labyrinth where forward progress is revealed as a convenient fiction.

On returning after a rousing weekend of friendship and frivolity, I began to harbour the uncomfortable suspicion that my efforts were not those of an editor, but of an unspooler. I was not merely recording history, as was my usual position; I was actively unravelling the fabric of the present. Removing the stock from the soup. The ledger ceased to be a passive archive and became an agent of active negation.

The contemporary cultural landscape is haunted by an entity that bears only a superficial resemblance to Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Decades after he died in poverty and obscurity, the Providence writer has been subjected to a corporate and populist reanimation project that mirrors the clinical, misguided ambitions of his own fictional scientists. Because the vast majority of his core canon has slipped into the public domain, unburdened by copyright restrictions or central estate control, his mythos has become an open-source quarry.

My name is, perhaps was, Thomas Arthur Cannon. Of that, I am almost certain. I have been in the employ of Upton Campbell, archivist and librarian of my Alma Mater, since graduation, some eleven years prior. He is a good man, by and large. However, he does possess a regrettable fondness for the occasional, or perhaps more than occasional, sherry, which he consumes with a meticulousness that would make a chemist blush.

The communal play that defined the early growth of Lovecraft’s myth-cycle is often celebrated as a pioneering experiment in collaborative fiction. Yet, from a hauntological perspective, it represents the precise mechanism of the canon’s undoing. By actively inviting his inner circle of correspondents to borrow his fictional books, locations, and entities, Lovecraft created a shared world that was inherently unstable, decentralised, and resistant to codification.

If we apply the lens of psychogeography to Lovecraft’s Providence, we stop viewing the setting as mere backdrop for cosmic indifference and instead see the urban environment as an active participant in the haunting. The city operates as a palimpsest where every layer of history is not recorded but physically felt by the observer. Lovecraft performed a kind of involuntary psychogeography long before the Situationists formalised the drive.

I adore Godzilla films, whether the original Toho productions or the more recent Legendary Monsterverse incarnations. Especially Mothra who, along with the Groke, I see as my spirit animal. During the heyday of GeoCities, a small website called The Church of Mothra appeared. It treated Mothra as a curious blend of the Virgin Mary and Mother Earth of the kaiju universe, an absurd theological joke that somehow worked.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward offers the most coherent architecture of hauntological failure in the Lovecraftian canon. Ward is not a mere antiquarian; he is an agent of the unburied past. His research into the life and deeds of his ancestor, Joseph Curwen, is an archival endeavour that goes beyond simple historical recovery. It is a fundamental disruption of the present.

Providence is an series of essays that are nominally about HP Lovecraft. You find out why 'nominally' fits as the essays go on. This is the introduction essay. The rest will turn up inbetween other post as that many essays on one topic might be tiresome if they come all at once. That said, the next couple of posts will be 'Chapter One' followed by something else entirely.

The cultural artefact known as Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? represents a sustained and surprisingly rigorous interrogation of the late twentieth century landscape. To the casual observer, the first two seasons appear as mere Saturday morning diversions, yet a closer examination reveals a profound meditation on the nature of the suburban uncanny. The series operates within a world ghosted by the remnants of a fading industrial past, where every spectral apparition is ultimately revealed as a material fraud.

Why I know Skyrim Better Than My Home Town

Why the X-Men Never End — memory, seriality and myth. The mutant past is perpetually reimagined, transforming history into a shifting landscape of retroactive continuity. This instability of memory provides an exquisite metaphor for the precarious nature of mutant identity. If the genetic code is a text that can be edited, then the history of the species becomes subject to the editorial pen.

Haunting the Present — politics, surveillance and control. The paradoxes of mutant time are embodied in the recurring figure of the future mutant who returns to warn of a catastrophe yet to occur. The mutant lives within a temporal loop, unable to fully inhabit the present because they are perpetually haunted by futures they have already witnessed. Every struggle with their powers becomes a confrontation with the unsettling truth that they are not the masters of their own house.

The Haunted Genome — biology and identity. The X-Men represent a particular brand of spectrality, defined less by biological deviation than by the persistent presence of a future that refuses to arrive. They are haunted by the promise of integration, a future in which the line between Homo sapiens and Homo superior dissolves into harmonious coexistence. Yet that future is always deferred.

This pressure is often framed as rumination, but rumination implies choice, or at least agency. Under slow time, memory behaves more like background radiation. It fills the space left by a future that has stopped pulling its weight. What’s striking is not that the past appears, but that it does so without nostalgia. These memories are not necessarily warm or desirable.