HPLinks #5.
* Applications for The S.T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship in H.P. Lovecraft, at Brown University in Providence, are due by 17th January 2025.
* I note that Brown University has a list of theses and dissertations that were done at Brown and relate to Brown and the parts of Providence adjacent to the university campus. Of possible interest to Lovecraft researchers are: Fox Point: the disintegration of a neighborhood and the related Community building: The Azorean, Cape Verdean, and Continental Portuguese in Fox Point, 1900-1940; Arsenic contamination in Providence’s East Side (relevant to “Colour”?); The problem of academic reputation at Brown University in the 1930’s which might perhaps marginally illuminate Lovecraft’s presence on the edge of the campus at that time; and Choosing Genes: the eugenics of Herbert Eugene Walter [1867-1945]. The latter was a full Biology professor at Brown from 1923, a leading heredity expert, and he later also taught at the Marine Biological Institute of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. As such he sounds like a rather interesting figure to include as a character, or to at least reference, in a 1930s New England Mythos adventure.
* H.P. Lovecraft Film Fest Kickstarter, live and… already funded in a flash! The event is now set for 3rd-6th October, and note that the online “Streaming Program is 18th-22nd October” 2024.
* Nighttide Mag has a report on Dreams of Light and Shadow: TL Wiswell’s Shadow Puppet performances… “At this year’s NecronomiCon, Tonnvane ‘TL’ Wiswell performed shadow play adaptations of two of H.P. Lovecraft’s weirder short stories.”
* The Rise of Cthulhu blog has the post “NecronomiCon Providence 2024 part 1” which has notes on the panels he attended. Part two remembers the spectacular Lovecraftian WaterFire parade of 2013 in Providence.
* In France, Actualitte takes a closer peep at the handsome new Druillet et Lovecraft artbook.
* An Italian Lovecraftian points out that Lovecraft and Barlow did alarmist ‘global warming’ fiction first, with “Till A’ the Seas” (January 1935, for publication in the Californian for summer 1935).
* A call to contribute to The Pulpster #34, which for 2025 will have the theme of ‘Masters of Blood and Thunder’. The theme centering being the writers Edgar Rice Burroughs (John Carter of Mars, Tarzan etc), Rafael Sabatini (Captain Blood), and Edgar Wallace (Sanders of the River, crime novels, original King Kong movie script). The editors also seek articles on your favourite villain from the pulps.
* The new paper “The Law is Weirder than AI” (2024)… “Primarily through the lens of author H.P. Lovecraft’s weird tales, I argue that the law is very weird [and this then leads me] to an assessment of the weird claims surrounding ‘artificial intelligence’.” Freely available online.
* From the Ukraine, a new short discussion paper on “The horrors of Lovecraft: disgust and repulsion”. In English and freely available online.
* Egregoric Times has a blog post that briefly considers “H.P. Lovecraft, Horror Writing and ‘Transliminality’. The author wonders if there may be neurological basis for openness to what appears on the surface to be “paranormal or extrasensory experiences”, especially in certain conducive places and atmospheres. I recall I read a weak one-page guest-article on a very similar topic, in New Scientist magazine, a few weeks ago.
* DMR reviews The Best of Jules De Grandin by Seabury Quinn, one of the most popular Weird Tales writers… “I kept thinking, ‘How on earth was this guy more popular than Robert E. Howard or H.P. Lovecraft?'”.
* Coming in October from Hippocampus, the book Where the Silent Ones Watch, a chunky anthology in which… “twenty-seven authors and poets visit William Hope Hodgson’s worlds and concepts, to dig deep into his mythologies and delve into fresh mysteries in unexpected times, locations, and interpretations.”
* The following paperback covers are completely new to me. I had thought (though not as a collector) that I was broadly familiar by now with the 1970s paperbacks of the British publisher Panther. But who knew they put out two volumes of Machen? Not me. Vol. 2 being dated 1975. Neither appeared later in the used bookshops I frequented, in all the time I was assiduously browsing and purchasing. Ah, for the long-lost days of the 50-pence second-hand paperback, or ‘three for £1’…
* Also new to me, I see The Meeplesmith has a nice line in Lovecraftian miniatures for tabletop gaming. Lots of them, relatively affordable and nothing ‘sold out’ as yet. There’s a tiny figure of Lovecraft himself. But there’s no stylised Lovecraft Circle (imagine: a bespectacled young Barlow, the old anarchist Morton, the New York dandy Belknap Long, straight-man Leeds leading his freak-show friends, etc) as yet, and no Erich Zann-like figure that I could see. Which seems a missed opportunity.
* A real-life “Sahara Expedition – In Search of the Unknown 2024”, happening 23rd – 27th Oct 2024 in Tunisia. A 1930s Lovecraftian LARP adventure in a real desert.
* And finally, the sometime-Lovecraftian creative Alan Moore on language…
Q: Could you disclose to our readers some of your favourite and most interesting occult artifacts?
A: My most powerful, without a doubt, is the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, unabridged. That is the best book anyone will ever read. To understand language is to understand what is hidden, which is to say, the occult.