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Tentaclii

~ News and scholarship on H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937)

Tentaclii

Monthly Archives: June 2013

Lovecraft University

30 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Scholarly works, Summer School

≈ Leave a comment

Last month Mark Bauerlein peeked into the padded cell of the contemporary university English Dept. His article, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, took a look at exactly what gets taught in first-year English classes…

The fundamentals of the tradition (Shakespeare, Milton, Romantic poets, modernist poets) are missing [from the basic introductory English courses in universities], and so are the fundamentals of literary reading (prosody, rhetoric, figurative language, structure, genre, etc.) Here we see the internal destruction of English as a field. […] Unlike other disciplines, English no longer distinguishes degrees of difficulty and significance. It turns an introductory course into something else — a hasty acquaintance with complex ideas such as différance [Derrida], a quick indoctrination in complex identity matters, a hip involvement with edgy novels — and most students who receive it, I would guess, discern the decadence of the enterprise.

I’ve noted in passing the strange insularity that this vanguardist approach seems to have caused in the Gothic Studies wing of English Literature. Wilum Pugmire wrassled a few days ago with the crude Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style pointing-and-screaming about race, which sometimes results from such courses…

I am searching this book of 468 pages [Lovecraft Remembered], which is made up mostly of memoirs of H.P. Lovecraft by people who knew him as personal friend or correspondent, for mention of his racism. I am grown tired of this new dreary fixation of commentary on Lovecraft that identifies him primarily as a racist writer. I find such emphasis misguided to the point of perversity. Lovecraft’s racism was grotesque and ignorant, and it echoes indeed throughout his fiction; but there is much more to Lovecraft’s genius that is far more vital and interesting. This new school of judgmental critics, who emphasis first and foremost that Lovecraft was racist, and then follow this up to explain why he was “a good bad writer,” shews the absurdity and ineffectiveness of much [mainstream academic] modern Lovecraft critique, critique that reveals far more ignorance regarding Lovecraft and his work than anything else.

In defence of mainstream academia, there is a steady flow of sound dissertations and theses each year (though only sometimes from straight Eng Lit departments, and then usually from outside America). And now a small crop of Lovecraft course module-documents are available online, mostly for one-semester courses being taught mostly in American universities. I occasionally come across these course documents while searching the Web, and they seem encouraging. Most seem well designed and at least minimally aware of the historical context (if only the context of the genre’s tradition). Though I’d imagine that more than a few of these are the products of enthusiastic hourly-paid visitor or adjunct lecturers, rather than cautious faculty. How well they play in the classroom I have no idea. I guess they encounter people lacking in a historical framework and fundamentally unequipped in actual techniques of doing in-depth historical scholarship, something that seems to me implicitly required to adequately study the political dimensions of historical texts and authors. If a student or even their teacher has no idea of the actual historical structures and trajectories of the racial categories and regrettable racisms of Lovecraft’s time, then the default politically-acceptable ‘year zero’ approach will be the only one available to them.

Seems to me that this is part of a wider erasure of history from the study and understanding of creativity — something evidenced by the shrinkage or closure of art history depts, and an increasing ‘the history doesn’t matter much’ approach in other departments teaching creative students. That’s bound to have a snowball effect, as graduates of these courses move up the career chain, being less likely to value the history side of teaching because they lack a real grounding in it themselves. And management doesn’t push history, because the students don’t like being asked to do historical essays and forcing them to do it increases the student drop-out and failure-rate in the department. The rise of joint Masters degrees (History and English, etc) may help somewhat, but some radical bunker-busting among the disciplines would probably be needed to help such courses make a useful combined impact on a student in the nine months available to a one-year Masters course.

These various factors make it highly unlikely that a young mainstream academic of today will invest the time and expense needed to even begin to become a fair Lovecraft scholar (several years of close reading, of books and journals that could cost $2,000 or more to amass). In a system dominated by career advancement and management strictures, mainstream academics tend to need ‘quick wins’ that ‘tick the boxes’ and add ‘impact’ to the key assessments on which departmental funding depends.

These and other barriers seem destined to further bifurcate the field into: i) long-standing independent Lovecraft scholars and philosophers, operating mostly outside the academy, and ii) mainstream academic ‘dabblers’ who dip into Lovecraft either to make a quick buck for their publisher or to make their slim young C.V. a little more hip — but who consequently get basic things wrong and thus are chuckled at and ignored or scourged by the Lovecraftians. That said, I recognise that I started as a ‘dabbler’ myself, and know that — if one keeps at it — then it can lead to better things.

What is to be done? In the age of the virtual classroom, video lectures and Skype, one wonders… could Lovecraft scholars start a self-funding online ‘Lovecraft University 101’ summer school, for say six weeks or so each year? Perhaps with the aid of the likes of the turn-key infrastructure on offer at Coursera or Udacity or edX. I’ll contribute a headmaster’s mortar-board for Robert Price.

Lord Dunsany, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury: Spectral Journeys

29 Saturday Jun 2013

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

Newly announced from Scarecrow Press… Lord Dunsany, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury: Spectral Journeys by William F. Touponce.

“examines what these three masters of weird fiction reveal about modernity and the condition of being modern in their tales. In this study, Touponce confirms that these three authors viewed storytelling as a kind of journey into the spectral.”

Sadly out of my reach at a whopping $75 🙁

lovecrad

Pugmire in Nightmare

27 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

W.H. Pugmire article in Nightmare Magazine, spring-boarding from the receipt of…

“the current issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland [#267], which I ordered because S.T. Joshi wrote two articles for it. The issue amazed me, because none of the articles cover film adaptations of Lovecraft’s Works. Two articles (“Lovecraft’s Acolytes,” by Robert M. Price and “The New Mythos Writers,” by S. T. Joshi) discuss those writers who were influenced by his fiction and have written tales therein, from the time that Lovecraft was alive to the present day; and one article (“The Language of Lovecraft,” by Holly Interlandi) looks at Lovecraft’s prose style and sentence structure!”

Good old Mac

25 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books

≈ 1 Comment

Coming soon, a new book: Good old Mac: Henry Everett McNeil, 1862-1929. A Collection and Biographical Essay.

It opens with my new 10,000-word biographical essay on the core member of the Kalem Club and Lovecraft’s good friend in New York. Followed by a selection of his previously uncollected articles and stories. Judging from Joshi’s Lovecraft bibliography, this will be the first ever scholarly essay/book on McNeil’s life and career.

If anyone has unpublished information on him, that’s perhaps been sitting in a drawer for years, I’d welcome seeing it.

goodoldcover-thumb

Club of 7 Dreamers “found” (or not)

24 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings

≈ Leave a comment

A comment from Robert, here at this blog, which I think deserves to be worked up as little guest post…


Robert of Innsmouth Mania in France, writes:—

Here is a Web link to details of a very strange event which occurred in France over a decade ago, in 2001. The article is at http://clefargent.free.fr/wb_7rev.php. It is in French, but I will summarize it for you. It’s about an email which circulated on the Web for a few weeks, accompanied by a picture (which you can see on the website). This email said:

“Mail to all Lovecraft fans. It has been discovered recently in a Parisian bookseller, a copy of an unknown novel of Lovecraft, translated in French! This is the cover. Translation was made by Gabriel Lautrec, correspondent of R.H. Barlow, who has translated it at the end of the 1930’s. You will find the entirety of the text soon, on our website, which is under construction at the moment. The address will be given to you in another email soon.”

And then there was silence…

The title was the Club of 7 Dreamers, a book that Lovecraft thought of writing at some point (S.T. Joshi and others have noted it), but which he never did it. Gabriel Lautrec really existed and was indeed a known translator. The deep analysis of the cover showed that it was not a cut-and-paste made in Photoshop — it seems that the guy really printed the cover. But there was no trace of any such book in the catalog of the editor, nor in the archives of the French National Library, which is the equivalent of your British Library or Library of Congress.

It’s a fake, but a really good one, since in those days it would have taken months for people to search and get all the information, and then eventually conclude it was a prank. But during this time France had produced an unknown book by HPL! Like the title, we dreamed…

wb_7rev

Blue Pencil Club 1916

23 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, New discoveries

≈ 1 Comment

blue-pencil-1916

Many of the Lovecraft’s amateur press friends come together in Brooklyn in February 1916, for an annual dinner. Brooklyn NY Daily Eagle.

Goodenough’s farmhouse in colour

23 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, New discoveries

≈ 2 Comments

A colour painting of the farmhouse of Arthur H. Goodenough, the elderly amateur press man and friend of Lovecraft living near Brattleboro…

lot154-2

From the auctioneer: “D. POWERS: PASTEL PAINTING OF A COLONIAL HOME IN BRATTLEBORO VT (GOODENOUGH FARM)”

lot153

lot153-2

From the same auctioneer: “BERT G. AKLEY, OIL ON ARTISTS BOARD OF AN INDIAN MAIDEN PADDLING A BIRCH BARK CANOE BY MOONLIGHT 1917”. This is by the rustic naif artist-recluse Bert Gilman Akley (1871-1946) who Lovecraft visited at his farm and who gave his name to Akeley in “The Whisperer in Darkness”. Although a local article suggests…

“For Akeley’s home, however, Lovecraft seems to have drawn from his experience visiting another isolated Vermonter, the poet Arthur Henry Goodenough.”

A monstrous Prospect Street

22 Saturday Jun 2013

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context

≈ Leave a comment

A monstrously large scan of a sharp 8″ x 10″ photographic negative showing Prospect Street in 1906, in which you can almost see every pebble and leaf.

4a13603apreview

From the same super-large set, Brown University and the Crawford St. Bridge one the bridges Lovecraft would have crossed from the East Side into the city centre. Anyone know if there are more from this set online?

Chris Perridas has postcard views showing the views of the commercial river from Crawford St. Bridge.

[ Hat-tip: Robert ]


Update: I colorised it…

prospect_st_providence_1906

Update: Postcard version from eBay, also dated 1906 thus confirming the date…

Free InDesign 6″ x 9″ book template

21 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

≈ 1 Comment

Here’s my new free quick-start template, for self-publishing authors starting to use Adobe InDesign CS6. I couldn’t find one at all that was in the classic book style, so I made one.

It’s a simple 6″ x 9″ book template, with a style modeled on vintage book design.

It’s set up with the correct margins for the Lulu.com print-on-demand service. Autoflow of pasted text is already fully set up for you, and footnotes are fully set up and spaced. Should accommodate about 55,000 words or so, in its 104 pages. You may want to remove the auto-hyphenation of some words at the end of lines.

promo-small

Download.

It’s freeware. Small donations are welcome, if you find it useful.

Those wanting to import a scholarly book or dissertation into InDesign from a straight Word file might also take a look at this useful tutorial on importing a Word document with footnotes intact and correctly placed, and still “dynamic”.

Thunder on the horizon

21 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books, REH

≈ Leave a comment

The limited hardcover of Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard is about to make the transition to a Lulu.com paperback. The main R.E.H. blog reports today…

“It will be available for purchase any day now, both at the Lulu storefront and Amazon.com.”

finnhoward

Out of Luck

21 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books

≈ 1 Comment

S.T. Joshi reviews the new volume of Lovecraft stories from Oxford University Press.

Lovecraft’s librarian

20 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context

≈ 2 Comments

Just before his return to Providence from his sojourn in New York City, in discussing his threadbare finances, Lovecraft notes in a letter that his Providence library card is set to expire. He notes that his stacks card (presumably the card that grants him access to the library stacks, meaning the storeroom) for the library has already expired, but that the librarian…

   “good old William E. Foster has been tolerant of lapses before” (Lord of a Visible World, p.286)

The proximity to the discussion of money appears to suggest that a small annual fee was paid for membership of the public library?

There’s a detailed short biography of Lovecraft’s librarian heading the description of the William Eaton Foster Papers collection. It turns out that William Eaton Foster (1851-1930) was the driving force of the Providence Public Library from its inception, and a pioneer in many aspects of the modern library. He once even rivalled Dewey in devising a general classification system. The biography omits that he was also… “an admirer of the Roman poet Horace and collector of his works”, something which would have endeared him to Lovecraft-the-Roman. Foster retired February 1930, the same year as this photograph of him…

William_E_Foster_Providence_1930

And as he may have looked to the young Lovecraft…

His book The first fifty years of the Providence public library, 1878-1928 is now available free online.

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