New free audio reading of Lovecraft’s “The Moon-Bog” (1921). 22 minutes, 3,400 words.
Above: artwork by Stephen Fabian.
New reading of “The Moon-Bog”
10 Thursday Nov 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
Monthly Archives: November 2011
On Dover beach…
10 Thursday Nov 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Yet more H.P. Lovecraft theatricals. Dover Players in the USA get hip with the remix culture, and freely combine and remix “Cool Air”, “Dreams in the Witch House” and “The Rats in the Walls” to make a new Lovecraftian work for the stage…
“the play’s climax perfectly expresses the moral-emotional tone and thematic fixations of a Lovecraft story. The tone is dark, and the themes decidedly bleak. […] But the project is not mere sensationalism. Evangelista’s undertaking is the most ambitious community theater of recent memory, and his boldness pays off for both the Lovecraft devotee and open-minded and strong-stomached theatergoer.”
Lovecraft’s poetry set to music
09 Wednesday Nov 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
H.P. Lovecraft’s poetry, set to music in folk, jazz, bluegrass and country styles on the new album Back to Lovecraft…
“Back to Lovecraft” is an album by four Corsican artists (Frederic “Tonton” Antonpietri, Paul Cesari, Armand Luciani, Marie Ange Tosi-Abbati) […] finalised in London at the Abbey Road Studios.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JD46JBxWTHc&w=560&h=315]
New York City before TV
09 Wednesday Nov 2011
Posted in Historical context
SF author William Gibson interviewed in The Paris Review…
“It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve already been there and nobody paid any attention. That world is gone.”
Actually… H.P. Lovecraft was there, he paid attention. So did Helen Levitt and many other artists and writers. There had also been a wave of recent academic books on many aspects of the culture and times of New York City in the 1910-1930 period.
Morphology of the Unknown
08 Tuesday Nov 2011
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Hannes Storhaug-Meyer has just published his M.A. dissertation as a printed book, The Morphology of the Unknown: The Narrative Technique of H. P. Lovecraft…
“This thesis shows that the unknown actually forms the core of a narrative technique which we can identify in most of Lovecraft’s works. Through close readings of three of his most famous texts, “The Call of Cthulhu”, “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”, this thesis analyzes the central role that unknowns play in them. It highlights how unknowns are created, maintained and resolved in the course of the narrative. The analyses also show how these unknowns affect the narrative flow and how the reader is affected by their presence. Ultimately, this thesis describes a narrative technique or model which is centered on the unknown and which is commonly found in Lovecraft’s texts.”
“Hannes Storhaug-Meyer is a teacher of English at Honefoss High School in Norway. He has studied British and American literature at the University of Oslo and received his M.A. for the thesis ‘The Morphology of the Unknown’.
The old used bookstores
08 Tuesday Nov 2011
Posted in Unnamable
Lovecraft is Missing‘s polished evocation of those old used bookstores that don’t seem to exist any more…
“All those stores are gone now, the buildings torn down for urban renewal; the store owners are gone to their reward as well. I have to say I miss them. They were all eccentrics, and maybe that is what I find so disagreeable in the local Book Rack or Paperback Shack, usually located in malls, manned by well-meaning but featureless men and women, the air scented with Glade, or worse, incense. I guess I miss the cat pee and the mold.”
The new Conan movie
07 Monday Nov 2011
Posted in Odd scratchings, REH
I saw the new Conan movie yesterday. A paint-by-numbers Hollywood plot, but certainly not as bad as the newspaper reviewers say. It’s very watchable entertainment if you know what “pulp” is, and it’s not as smothered with political correctness as I’d feared. It starts very well indeed, anchored by the memorable Ron Perlman and by the accomplished boy actor who plays Conan as a child. The film’s world-design is well established, and the editing is first-class. The action sequences all look terrific throughout the film, are exciting, and are crisply shot and edited. As with many action movies, it’s the ‘love interest’ who drags it down. Here we get a dull ‘Hollywood eye-candy’ female lead with a hideously contemporary American accent — you’ll yearn for the moments when she stops talking with Conan and gets into some fighting. The dialogue in general occasionally creaks badly as the film progresses. The mattes and scenery are very accomplished, and imaginative within the genre restrictions. The narrators’ voiceover lacks gravity or conviction, and the sense of travelling long distances is not conveyed effectively — there’s a great map in the intro but we never see it again. The sound design is workmanlike, but doesn’t add to the movie in any real way. The music does its job but is completely unmemorable. Overall it’s a rather flawed but entertaining sword & sorcery movie, and one that’s surprisingly faithful to the spirit of the Robert E. Howard stories as I remember them.
Weird Fiction Review – new webzine
07 Monday Nov 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Fresh from leaving Weird Tales, the former editors have just started an online publication Weird Fiction Review. They state that…
“This site exists in a symbiotic relationship with S.T. Joshi’s print journal The Weird Fiction Review but does not share staff.”
One of the articles that opens the new webzine is a short Exclusive Interview: Neil Gaiman on The Weird.
Dead Reckonings #10
06 Sunday Nov 2011
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Issue 10 of Dead Reckonings: a review of horror literature, out now. Includes an index to the first ten issues.
Los Nuevos Mytos de Cthulhu
04 Friday Nov 2011
Posted in New books
The Spanish Association of Horror Writers has a new collection of the best Lovecraft Mythos stories in Spanish, Los Nuevos Mytos de Cthulhu. On sale on the 2nd of December 2011, and it’s the flagship title of their new Edge Books imprint.
H.P. Podcraft pods saved
04 Friday Nov 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The H.P. Podcraft full-story readings were teetering on the verge of toppling and sinking below the black mire of iTunes bandwidth…
“from this point forward, our full story readings will no longer be appearing as Podcast episodes – they’ll only be available exclusively from the site, and will be disappearing from the iTunes feed in the future.”
But they’re been rescued by Michael Walker, and will still be available on the site. Nice one, Michael! Currently available full readings for download: “From Beyond”; The Picture in The House”; “The Haunter of the Dark”; “Cool Air”, and “The Cats of Ulthar”.
I don’t use iTunes, but I’m puzzled why bandwidth should be an issue there. Is it that… when bandwidth for free iTunes stuff exceeds a certain amount, Apple pulls the plug and makes you offer it for payment?
Ernst Haeckel
04 Friday Nov 2011
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, REH
Genius British comics artist Hunt Emerson provides a lovely new portrait of Ernst Haeckel, Zoologist and Painter, on the Steampunk and Phenomena profile of Haeckel.
Haeckel’s full set of Kunstformen der Natur plates are available on Wikimedia. These are likely to have visually influenced Lovecraft and Giger, and Haeckel is cited as one of Lovecraft’s “chief philosophical influences” via Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe (1899). He was also an influence on R.E. Howard (circa 9th August 1932, Howard told Lovecraft that he… “used to be a violent admirer of Haekal”). There’s also a 60 minute documentary on Haeckel, Proteus (2004).
