Monthly Archives: May 2014

1922 postcard

15 Thursday May 2014

Posted by in Historical context

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H.P. Lovecraft Original Handwritten Postcard 1922 on eBay. This sits between the 1922 and 1924 sections in the volume of collected New York letters.

Sent 12th October 1922 from Brooklyn NYC, to Galpin in Wisconsin. Lovecraft was at that time a guest of Sonia in NYC.

1922postcard

“Just read Belknape’s [Frank Belknap Long] epistle — for —’s sake chuck the free verse! Hope you got my letter all right. Have been tiring out my aunt — taking her to museums, Van Courtland mansion, & Columbia College [Columbia University, presumably to get a repeat of the exhaustive tour of the campus that Lovecraft had had some weeks earlier from Long, who was then a student there]. Tonight [11th Oct] the gang dines at Belknape’s — pipe de Jawn Hancocks [slangy: military / historical allusion + humorous dialect overlay. Meaning: ‘stand by to receive their fancy signatures’],
      Grandpa Theobald & aunt”

      Appended signatures: A.E.P.G. [Annie E. P. Gamwell, Lovecraft’s aunt] | Mrs J. B. Long [the host, Long’s mother] | Francois [Loveman??] | S.H.G. [Sonia] | Edgar A. Poe [Long?] | T.S. Eliot [Kirk?]

A “John Hancock” was then slang for an overly large and fantastic signature, after the standout Hancock signature on the Declaration of Independence.

“Once we fancied that a large, opaque body darkened the library window…”

14 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by in Scholarly works

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Lovecraft scholars will soon be able to access the major U.S. collection, which has been closed for a good while now. It’s been announced that the John Hay Library refurbishment at Brown University is on track, and that it…

“reopens in September [when] the Special Collections Reading Room will be available and reference services will resume.” The “magnificent first floor reading room” will become… “a new “open, welcoming study space”.

But it appears that the Lovecraft collection materials will be consulted in a new spot from September, in… “a new state-of-the-art special collections reading room in the area that formerly housed University Archives”.

“No recognised school of sculpture had animated this terrible object…”

13 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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Richard Swensson’s short film “Concerning Brown Jenkin”…

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81RJGtPJcmU?rel=0&w=500&h=375]

“Making of…”

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYjgnf6ctWs?rel=0&w=500&h=375]

Hat-tip to StopmoNick, who appears to be currently making a stop-motion short featuring Lovecraft, Poe, and Cthulhu…

GroupShotFullLength

HPLandBrownJcrop

Clockwork Empires

12 Monday May 2014

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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Back in summer 2012 I noted a planned PC game called Clockwork Empires.

“Lovecraft-laden steampunk city-builder” [in which the player is a Civilisation-style] colony-builder amid the grand idealism of Victorian discovery [but] with horrors, madness, wild species, and volatile science.”

Now there’s a demo ahead of the (maybe) summer 2014 release…

“Clockwork Empires uses Victorian-era horror and science fiction as a jumping off point. As in, jumping off a cliff because you joined a cult and went mad after summoning the old gods to your weekly meetings … It’s a crazy and incredibly weird game”

Any videogame that manages to combine Lovecraftian squid monoliths and bottle-kilns can’t be all bad.

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Clockwork-Empires-Union-Cog

The Marriage of Science Fiction and Egyptology

10 Saturday May 2014

Posted by in Historical context, Scholarly works

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In one of my recent books I noted the odd lack of any scholarly survey of the influence of Egyptian mythology on SF and fantastic literature. The only study that strays beyond the influence of 19th century Egyptomania is Phillip Barker’s fannish “Egyptian Mythology in Fantastic Literature”, published in the Fanscient fanzine in 1949 and not reprinted.

This gap has now been partly filled by Kevin McLaren, who has a new short survey essay “The Marriage of Science Fiction and Egyptology” in the undergraduate open access journal The Forum: Cal Poly’s Journal of History.

Scarab-WingedHello, those wings look familiar…

“Then he returned to the sepulchre…”

10 Saturday May 2014

Posted by in Housekeeping, New books

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Has it been that long? I took a two month springtime break from Lovecraft (the best time to do so), in order to do intensive work on my JURN open access academic search tool. Until 2014 JURN indexed only open access (free) academic journals in the arts and humanities. It now also indexes all known open ecology-related journals, open business journals, and biomedical/science. Also most of the main UK academic repositories, and key US and world repositories. JURN’s index was given a thorough spring-cleaning and a deep linkrot cure, along with the same for the JURN Directory of arts and humanities journals.

Many thanks to Kenneth W. Faig, Jr. for sending me a paper copy of his EOD mailing zine, containing his kind reviews of my summer 2013 books. I’m also in receipt of review copies of Steven J. Mariconda’s H. P. Lovecraft: Art, Artifact, and Reality, and David Goudsward’s H. P. Lovecraft in the Merrimack Valley. Thanks to David Goudsward and Derek Hussey for those — I’ll be reviewing those books in July or August.