23 Saturday Jul 2011
Posted in Housekeeping
I’ve decided to change this blog to a much better WordPress theme, a very lovely one by Ignacio Ricci that has only appeared in the last few weeks. Reading posts should be a little easier, and I now have a more comfortable 520px width for images…
The ‘Lovecraft on the Web’ directory of 330 Web links, that was previously on the sidebar, now has its own page.
The current header image is a crop from my own photomontage.
23 Saturday Jul 2011
Posted in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts
Dejan Ognjanovic interviews the director of Arkham Sanitarium (an anthology film of: The Thing on the Doorstep, The Shunned House, The Haunter of the Dark), at the close of filming…
“we’re also faithfully recreating a number of Lovecraftian locations including The Shunned House, The Church of the Starry Wisdom, The Crowninshield Place, and Arkham Sanitarium itself (based largely on Danvers).”
23 Saturday Jul 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
So what would liven up Lovecraft? Show tunes! …
“a musical performance of horror writer H.P.Lovecraft’s 1920s short story “The Outsider” […] through live music, dance, and singing, calling upon Stu Watson to narrate, gymnast Jasmine Daly, choreographer Michelle Moya, Venezuelan folk punk musician Yva Las Vegass, Mason’s band Little Band of Sailors, and more to weave the story together. Performers wearing cat masks played guitar and even performed a yoga dance …”
They had me running away screaming at “Venezuelan folk punk”.
23 Saturday Jul 2011
Posted in Odd scratchings, Summer School
Assignment Four, Vacation Necronomicon School: “Secrecy in horror”.
“Today’s assignment […] It’s difficult to have any amount of horror without secrets […] Without furtive whispers and things unseen, we would have very little to discuss here, so your assignment today is to discuss some aspect of secrecy in horror, using “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” as a starting point.”
On Secrecy and Secretions
Lovecraft was among the first generation of human beings who were able to write and publish in a fully open manner on religion and ideas. He may have realised this, for he had spent much of his youth clinging to an attic life-raft made of books from the 18th century — a century during which secrecy and dissembling were basic health-and-safety requirements for those imaginative free-thinkers who created the Enlightenment. Codes, cryptic allusions, substitutions, hints, subtly indicative inversions and elisions, private-edition books passed covertly from hand to hand — all the subterfuges variously and routinely forced on writers by intolerant authorities who could forcibly “make windows into men’s souls”, if given a sniff of written evidence. From these 18th century writers Lovecraft must have learned more than style. He must also have learned some techniques for speaking the unspeakable.
When an old technology dies, it often becomes aestheticised by the young and made part of some new and curious bricolage. Literary and religious secrecy was a technology, of a kind. Lovecraft had seen established religion, and its tediously obstreperous counter-sects, start to fade in the light of science and the bedding down of the American experience of intellectual freedom. As a consequence, the counter-measures devised by the intelligent against religion were also increasingly obsolete. The way was open, and Lovecraft deftly aestheticised the old secrecy into new syncretic horrors.
Of course, the censor’s pen continued to strike out from little islands of moral panic until the mid 1960s — but even these would be washed away in time, revealing an abundant coral reef of beautiful queer fish and strange limpet-like creatures dwelling fixedly amid their abundant secretions. Lovecraft never lived to see that carnival of repressed secrets, and he was appalled enough by the fumblings of the literary avant-garde of his own time. So he was only able to deal with personal and psycho-sexual secrets in a hidden manner. Most of his implicitly semi-autobiographical fiction was thus a wash of simultaneous revealings and concealings — rather like a receding tide that reveals a hidden reef on which the reader can sometimes glimpse Lovecraft’s own lived experience flopping and writhing about, far off and forlorn. Lovecraft never expected that we would glimpse it, let alone that one day there would be a whole fleet devoted to trawling in his personal depths, using curiously-shaped contraptions to surface eye-bulging secrets never meant to be seen.
I increasingly think that Lovecraft may have kept another category of secrets. I think he had his own dark reef of influences and sources, a reef unspoken of and still hidden somewhere off the deep water of his imagination. In the 18th century a writer would have had trouble concealing his sources, since there were so relatively few of them. Those living and writing in the 18th century had a serious literature one could read through completely in about fifteen years, if one was keen, including the key works from classical antiquity. The outlets for publishing and intellectual discourse were few and populated by those who were inclined to be capaciously knowing, and this would also make it difficult to conceal sources. By contrast Lovecraft was living in a different world, for all that he pretended otherwise. He was immersed in the fecund abundance of early 20th century popular culture, much of it ephemeral. He was also familiar with the grave-robbers’ paradise of the New York used book dealers and libraries — in which the curious browser could pull down a dusty book and open a window into a dark vista unseen since the 19th century. This must have been a very tempting combination of environments for Lovecraft. Now, of course it would be ridiculous (although rather delicious) to suggest that Lovecraft kept a second, secret Commonplace Book filled with jottings about the tentacles of H.G. Wells (surely topping the Wandrei reading-list in Spring/Summer 1927) and obscure popular arcarna destined for insertion into his stories. Claiming a secret history for which there is no public evidence is exactly what Lovecraft’s work so delightfully pokes fun at. I have little or no evidence to back up my suspicion, and the evidence may never be found, even if there was any reason for it to exist. But I can’t help think that the secrets of writers, like secretions, sometimes leak out onto the printed page and leave stains.
Further reading:
Stahl, John Daniel (1996). “The Imaginative Uses of Secrecy in Children’s Literature”. IN: Only Connect: Readings on Children’s Literature. Oxford University Press.
Roberts, M. and Ormsby-Lennon, H. (Eds.) (1995). Secret Texts: The Literature of Secret Societies. AMS Press.
Calinescu, M. (1994). “Secrecy in fiction: textual and intertextual secrets in Hawthorne and Updike”. Poetics Today, Vol.15, No.3, Autumn 1994.
Liste-Noya, Josand (2011). American Secrets: The Politics and Poetics of Secrecy in the Literature and Culture of the United States. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Alliker Rabb, Melinda (2008). Satire and Secrecy in English Literature from 1650 to 1750. Palgrave Macmillan.
Pionke, Albert D. (2010). Victorian Secrecy. Ashgate.
Meyer Spacks, Patricia (2003). Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self. University of Chicago Press.
Gunn, Joshua (2005). Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century. University of Alabama Press.
22 Friday Jul 2011
Posted in Historical context, New discoveries, Scholarly works
My new 8,000 word essay on the historical context of one of science fiction’s most famous stories, ‘Some Notes On the Origins of Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space”‘ will be available in my forthcoming paperpack Lovecraft in Historical Context: further essays and notes.
22 Friday Jul 2011
Posted in Summer School
Assignment Three, Vacation Necronomicon School: “The Elder Sign”.
“Today’s assignment […] The Elder Sign is one of the only things known to man that can provide any measure of protection against the Deep Ones. I felt it would be prudent to make one …”
On The Elder Sign:
The Elder Sign is mentioned five times in Lovecraft’s work.
1). In “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath” (written 1926) it is a genuflection, presumably made with the hands, of simple folk in the Dreamlands when these people are asked by Randolph Carter about the Earth’s gods and the rememberance of their dancing on Lerion (the mountain source of the River Skai)…
“Once he stopped at a farmhouse well for a cup of water, and all the dogs barked affrightedly at the inconspicuous Zoogs that crept through the grass behind. At another house, where people were stirring, he asked questions about the gods, and whether they danced often upon Lerion; but the farmer and his wife would only make the Elder Sign and tell him the way to Nir and Ulthar.”
The earlier story “The Other Gods”(1921) implies that the Other Gods have long since displaced or captured Earth’s gods to unknown Kadath (“The other gods! The gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble gods of earth!”), so that the simple folk in “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath” are indeed making a warding sign against the Other Gods, rather than against Earth’s gods. The Other Gods are identified with the monsters of the Cthulhu mythos, since Lovecraft refers in his fiction to “Nyarlathotep, horror of infinite shapes and dread soul and messenger of the Other Gods”.
2). In the Lovecraft story fragment “The Descendant” (1927) the elder sign is also a genuflection made with the hands, seen used by Atlanteans living near the sea in the British Isles during the Roman occupation…
“Gabinius had, the rumour ran, come upon a cliffside cavern where strange folk met together and made the Elder Sign in the dark; strange folk whom the Britons knew not save in fear, and who were the last to survive from a great land in the West that had sunk…”
The story refers to Stonehenge and other circles being built by these people. Here again the sign seems to be a ‘warding’ against evil. It also associates the sign with stones. There have been various cranky ideas that the actually-existing stones at Stonehenge contain “hidden” symbols revealed only in certain angles and types of lights, but these theories are only now being seriously tested by archeologists in summer 2011…
“Despite the vast amount of archaeological activity and academic study into Stonehenge and its landscape over the centuries, relatively little is known about the lichen-covered surfaces of the sarsens and bluestones that make up the stone circle. The availability of high resolution laser scanners that can produce highly accurate surface models means that it is now possible to record details and irregularities on the stone surfaces down to a resolution of 0.5mm. It is also hoped that secrets hidden underneath the thick cover of lichens may be revealed in the analysis using sophisticated software.” (English Heritage)
3). The elder sign is also depicted as a ‘warding’ genuflection in Lovecraft’s ghost-written work “The Last Test” (1927)…
“with face convulsed, he called down imprecations from the stars and the gulfs beyond the stars; so that even Surama shuddered, made an elder sign that no book of history records, and forgot to chuckle.”
4). August Derleth, in The Lurker at the Threshold (1945), suddenly leaps in with the notion that R’lyeh is sealed with an Elder Sign. But S.T. Joshi has shown that very little of Derleth’s novel is sourced from Lovecraft. Presumably Derleth knew the short Lovecraft poem “The Messenger“, in which the Elder Sign is linked to the opening of a sealed boundary containing evil…
“The thing, he said, would come that night at three
[…]
The Elder Sign, bequeathed from long ago,
That sets the fumbling forms of darkness free.”
But this small poem is dedicated to “Bertrand K. Hart, Esq.”. The biographical details involved, as excavated by S.T. Joshi, clearly point to this being a humourous poetic squit against Hart, written with much skill but little thought, and meant to be read with a knowing smile by Lovecraft’s circle. It implies that the Elder Sign is a key rather than a ‘warding’ or a ‘seal’ for evil things, and as such it goes against all Lovecraft’s other uses of the term.
5) As for the modern inclination to make runic-style stones for the ‘sign’ — which ridiculously draws the Mythos into the territory of flaming pentangles and similar pseudo-occult nonsense — this arises via the later story “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1931). The actual term “elder sign” is not used in this story, but the sign-stones in the story are obviously meant to have ‘warding’ powers. They are learned of thus: the veteran sea captain “Cap’n Obed”, the one who first summoned the Deep Ones to Innsmouth, encounters a small volcanic island in the South Sea Islands in the early 1800s. The story of this was later spun to the drunk Zadok, seemingly by Obed’s First Mate — and Zadok then ramblingly relates it to the protagonist many decades later…
“old magic signs as the sea-things says was the only things they was afeard of.”
“In some places they was little stones strewed abaout—like charms—with somethin’ on ’em like what ye call a swastika naowadays. Prob’ly them was the Old Ones’ signs.”
“We didn’t hev them old charms to cut ’em off [i.e.: stop them from coming ashore] like folks in the Saouth Sea did”
These are then clearly sign-charms on small stones, or things that are so old as to appear to be stones. These sign-objects were made by the “Old Ones” [the Elder Things in At The Mountains of Madness] and they have the power to keep the “Deep Ones” away from land.
There are some similarities here with the marked green soapstones that feature prominently in At The Mountains of Madness…
“groups of dots in patterns […] on the queer greenish soapstones dug up from Mesozoic or Tertiary times”
Animals are shown in Mountains to be instinctively fearful of the stones, and similar stones may have had a similar effect on the animalistic amphibian Deep Ones.
Assignment:
So, what would be a scientifically valid ‘warding’ instrument, one that could be held in the hand? What about a cup of coffee – the coffee mug being of stoneware (often patterned), being held up before oneself in the hand (rather like a genuflection), and of course the coffee having a genuine ‘warding off’ effect against sleep and thus nightmares. This latter point would thus link it back to Lovecraft’s Dreamlands.
The symbol is from the alphabet-style Vinca sign system, found in Southern Europe and as old as the pyramids. It has never been translated.
21 Thursday Jul 2011
Posted in Summer School
Assignment Two, Vacation Necronomicon School: “A Study in Emerald”.
“Today’s assignment […] Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald”, [a] story that combines the Cthulhu mythos with the world of Sherlock Holmes […] discuss any aspect of this story you’d like …”
The story is available free online as a PDF (direct PDF link). It is also available for the Kindle ereader on Amazon’s Kindle store, as part of Gaiman’s collection Fragile Things.
For those who prefer audio books, there’s a professionally produced audio book edition on Audible with excellent British accent-work. Until recently this one-hour audio book was free, and it may still be floating around the Web in that form — but it now has a price-tag of $4.30. Also available from various sources are the audio book versions (CD, download, Audible) of Gaiman’s collection Fragile Things, which includes the same reading of the story.
The cheapest way to obtain the story in print form is a used copy of Gaiman’s Fragile Things collection, which can be had used from Amazon for about $4 including shipping. The story is also available in print in the mixed-author Shadows over Baker Street anthology of Lovecraft / Sherlock Holmes mash-ups, and this may be a better purchase for Lovecraft fans.
The Angelus Theatre adapted and performed “A Study in Emerald” in what appears to have been a substantial stage play, 29th May 2010. There appears to have been no graphic novel or animated adaptation, as yet.
Completed assignment: (as a PDF)
The Case of the Purloined Prose
19 Tuesday Jul 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Summer School
There is still time to sign up for the Lovecraft Summer School 2011 — Wednesday the 20th is the sign-up deadline. Today’s assignment comes in the form of advance notice of the Final Project, which involves participants reading Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book of story ideas…
“Your final project can be any form of creative output: a story, a painting, a poem, a song, a work of collage, or a very short video — whatever appeals to you. Simply choose a concept from Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book and find a way to make it your own.”
Here’s my choice, if I were possibly to make some CG/Photoshop illustrations…
21. A very ancient colossus in a very ancient desert. Face gone — no man hath seen it.
61. A terrible pilgrimage to seek the nighted throne of the far daemon-sultan Azathoth.
110. Antediluvian—Cyclopean ruins on lonely Pacific island.
114. Death lights dancing over a salt marsh.
129. Marble Faun — strange and prehistorick Italian city of stone.
172. Pre-human idol found in desert.
178. A very ancient tomb in the deep woods …
189. Ancient necropolis — bronze door in hillside which opens as the moonlight strikes it — focussed by ancient lens in pylon opposite?
213. Ancient winter woods — moss — great boles — twisted branches —dark—ribbed roots — always dripping….
214. Talking rock of Africa — immemorially ancient oracle in desolate jungle ruins that speaks with a voice out of the aeons.
… although I think I’m inclining toward a story or poetry.
19 Tuesday Jul 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
19 Tuesday Jul 2011
Posted in Historical context, New discoveries, Summer School
Assignment One, Vacation Necronomicon School: “The Haunter of the Dark”.
“Your assignment today is to discuss insanity as an inevitable consequence of encountering the unknown”
“The Haunter of the Dark” was written 5th-9th November 1935 and published in Weird Tales in December 1936. It was a late Lovecraft story, written as a response and sequel to a story by the teenage Robert Bloch. Bloch had ‘killed’ Lovecraft in his Weird Tales story “The Shambler from the Stars”. Lovecraft replied in a sequel that ‘killed’ Bloch. Bloch later added a third story to make a trilogy that, in reading order, is: “The Shambler from the Stars” (1935), “The Haunter of the Dark” (1935), and “The Shadow From the Steeple” (1950). The title bears a similarity to a key line in the leaden but Arctic-set 1935 film adaptation of Rider-Haggard’s She… “You Haunters of Darkness!”.
The trilogy of stories has not been collected together as an audio book, and only “The Haunter of the Dark” appears to be available in that form. A free audio version of “Haunter” is Andrew Leman’s excellent full-reading podcast on H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast.
All three stories in the trilogy were adapted for comics in 1973, when they appeared sequentially in Marvel’s Journey into Mystery 3, 4 and 5. The first is eight pages and the art appears to have been ‘a rush job’ by Jim Starlin which the inker fails to rescue due to the cramped layouts. Horror veteran Gene Colan despatches the Lovecraft story in just ten pages, with deliciously flowing artwork and inks. The final tale was adapted in nine pages, very dynamically laid out by Rick Buckler.
John Coulthart’s acclaimed ‘semi- graphic novel’ adaptation of the story appeared in The Haunter of the Dark: And Other Grotesque Visions (1999). There appears to be no faithful film or animated adaptation, although the 2010 feature film Pickman’s Muse apparently used elements of the story.
Winds of insanity:
The first horror novel, Beware the Cat (1584), is partly an anti-Catholic text. One has to wonder if Lovecraft’s “Haunter” was continuing in this tradition. S.T. Joshi states that the church depicted in “Haunter” was St. John’s on Federal Hill, a real Catholic church whose steeple was destroyed in a lightning strike in June 1935. The church fathers had decided not to rebuild, and had merely capped the tower. Was “Haunter” and its depiction of Catholics partly a subconscious ‘revenge’ by Lovecraft, for this marring of the view from his writing room?
Some quick online research also uncovers another very interesting source. It seems that Lovecraft was sitting in the middle of a record-breaking hurricane season in Sept-Nov 1935, while writing “Haunter”. The strongest hurricane in history had struck the USA in September 1935. It made landfall in Florida and then curved around northwards to exit into the Atlantic over Norfolk, Virginia — whereupon it again reached hurricane status on 6th September over the seas off New England. Quite possibly Lovecraft felt the remnants of this storm rattling his storm-windows in Providence just two months before he wrote “Haunter”, and had felt the winds’ effects upon his nerves. He would most certainly have read about the storm and heard about it on the news reports for weeks afterwards. For more details on this major weather event, one can now consult several books:—
Drye, Willie (2003). Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. National Geographic.
Scott, Phil (2005). Hemingway’s Hurricane: The Great Labor Day Storm of 1935. Ragged Mountain.
Knowles, Thomas Neil (2009). Category 5: The 1935 Labor Day Hurricane. University Press of Florida.
There was also a lesser storm while Lovecraft was writing “Haunter”, as described in “The Meteorological History of the Hurricane of November 1935” (Monthly Weather Review, Vol 63, No. 11, pp.318-322). The paper talks of long easterly winds stretching down from polar regions (“a strong outflow of polar air”), presumably passing over New England, making the Bermuda hurricane a most unusual one.
One imagines that the very strong winds would have put the ailing and depressed Lovecraft on edge, on both occasions. He may even have pondered the links between extreme winds and insanity. Some nations, notably Switzerland, apparently have laws that permit the blowing of extreme winds (“Foehn”) as mitigating evidence in court after a crime. Hans Christian Andersen also noted the malign effects of this same “Foehn”. Doubtless much folklore might be uncovered on ‘evil’ and ‘malign’ winds deemed to provoke madness and crime.
There is also fiction that attributes madness-inducing powers to extreme winds. One instance relevant to Lovecraft will suffice here. It is Dorothy Scarborough’s anonymous supernatural novel The Wind, published in 1925. Here the dry winds of Texas become…
“a demon personified, that eventually drives her [the heroine] over the brink of madness.”
The novel is a rural… “blend of realistic description, [and] authentic folklore” … set in the 1880s, just like Lovecraft’s own classic “The Colour Out of Space”. It might even seem to prefigure the elements of ‘madness caused by a semi-invisible and pervasive element’ in “Colour”. Even if he had not read The Wind, Lovecraft would have had his memory of the novel jogged when the film version was announced in the press (film buffs online state that… “production was shot early in 1927”) just as he was writing “The Colour Out of Space”.
But The Wind may also have been an influence on “Haunter”. Scarborough’s supernatural novel was a sensation that gained national publicity after the West Texas Chamber of Commerce raised a hue and cry about its harsh depiction of the state. As such it would have been remarkable if Lovecraft had not even read reviews of the novel. He had certainly read Scarborough’s The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917) in March 1932, and it would seem odd had he not also read her own very American classic of the supernatural at some point before November 1935.
The film adaptation was released as a major Lillian Gish feature-film in November 1928. This is a classic of the late silent cinema, but apparently it fared badly at the box office because the audiences were then being wowed by the first “talkies” and because the producers had by then also started heavily promoting Greta Garbo. Despite a hastily tacked-on happy ending, the film was probably not helped at the box office by its overall grim tone. Film buffs state that… “the original cut was even more depressing” than the version we have now. Bo Florin’s 2009 academic paper “Confronting The Wind: a reading of a Hollywood film by Victor Sjostrom” describes the film as depicting an…
“increasing degree of psychic instability, and culminating in a violent storm at night, where all boundaries are being transgressed.”
That sounds very much like “The Haunter of the Dark”. Or am I mad?
17 Sunday Jul 2011
Posted in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi has a new page on his website, a listing of forthcoming publications he has authored or edited. Looking especially interesting is the Joshi-edited collection of in-depth essays Dissecting Cthulhu: Essays on the Cthulhu Mythos (Miskatonic River Press, announced Spring 2011 and apparently due Fall 2011) which is set to sit nicely alongside his earlier book The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos (2008). I’m currently coming to the end of the first volume of Joshi’s Lovecraft biography I Am Providence, but probably won’t be spending that kind of money again on new hardbacks in the near future. But other Joshi books are certainly now on my “wants” list, if I can pick them up cheaply in used form. I think the Joshi-edited Lord Of A Visible World: An Autobiography In Letters seems likely to be my obvious follow-on from I Am Providence.
17 Sunday Jul 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
IDW has announced a comic adaptation of “The Dunwich Horror”, by author Joe R. Lansdale and artist Peter Bergting. This team are a big deal in the world of contemporary comics, and Lansdale has won the Bram Stoker Award seven times. The aim is to produce… “a modern update” and it seems it’ll run to about 100 pages. The adaptation will first appear as a four-issue mini-series, and then be collected as a paperpack with the addition of Robert Weinberg’s adaptation of “The Hound” with art from Menton3.
