Monthly Archives: June 2014

Lovecraft’s connections

09 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts

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The Night Land Journal takes an interest in Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, who were late correspondents of Lovecraft who later married each other…

“…Lovecraft had borrowed some books from Moore, which he then loaned to Kuttner. Lovecraft gave Kuttner the address of “Sister Katy” (as Lovecraft called Moore) and asked Kuttner to return the books to Moore. Kuttner did, though he addressed the package to “Mr. C.L. Moore.” Catherine wrote back to Henry, telling him that she was definitely a “Miss,” not a “Mr..” This initial correspondence begat further New York to Indiana correspondence, which begat a Kuttner-Moore face-to-face meeting in 1938 (in California, which both were visiting at the time). The two wrote to each other for another year and a half before they married, in 1940.”

“A card here, a letter there, a years’ long correspondence becomes a romance, then a marriage that becomes the basis for one of the most remarkable literary combinations of all time. Kuttner, Moore, Lovecraft, et al. Combinations and connections. Book project, anyone?”

A visual infographic of all of the web of Lovecraft’s correspondence interconnections would certainly make for a fascinating giant wall-chart. Kickstarter, anyone?

Added to Open Lovecraft

07 Saturday Jun 2014

Posted by in Scholarly works

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* Joseph Young (2010), Secondary Worlds in Pre Tolkienian Fantasy Fiction. (PhD for the University of Otago, New Zealand. Has thirty pages on “H.P. Lovecraft’s Cosmic Witch Hunt”)

* Claes Thoren (2007), “Creating Real Imaginary Worlds: Mythopoeic Interaction and Immersion in Digital Games” (Masters dissertation for the University of East London. Detailed analysis of the now-classic videogame Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth)

* Brandon Jernigan (2010), “Forms of some intenser life”: Genre and imperialism at the turn of the century (PhD thesis for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Tangentially related. Seeks to detect critical attitudes to new global networks in the flexible and mutable genre fiction of Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker and Algernon Blackwood. Chapter Four is: “Hostile swarms and geo-insurgency in weird fiction”, although this looks primarily at Blackwood)

Claremont Review

07 Saturday Jun 2014

Posted by in New books, Odd scratchings

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There’s a new essay on Lovecraft in the latest Claremont Review of Books. Sadly it’s behind a paywall at present.

clare

But it will probably eventually be available in public, as the Claremont‘s texts rapidly become free as the issues get older. In the meanwhile, Hyperboreans may enjoy this Feb 2014 review essay which rather unfortunately gushes about books that take the “Atlantean Electro-Pyramids Discovered Antarctica!” approach to pre-history. A fun “what if…?” read, but what we know of the real story (and its tantalising millennia-long gaps) is better read up on in the excellent After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000—5,000 BC and by learning the hard facts about the recent discovery of Gobekli Tepe.

Marginalised Mainstream 2014: Disguise

05 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by in Scholarly works

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“Marginalised Mainstream 2014: Disguise. 3rd annual international conference held 28th–29th November 2014 at Senate House, University of London, UK.

This year’s conference will consider the varieties, motivations, and meanings of disguise. From secret identities to theatrical performances, from fictional fabrications to factual concealment, disguises of all sorts are part of mainstream culture. This event will explore various manifestations of disguise in popular fiction, media, and culture that have previously been academically marginalised.”

As usual in academia, a tight deadline. Announced on their blog 13th May, with a deadline of 30th May. Expect the deadline to be extended.

This conference might be of interest to Lovecraftians in academia, re: disguise in Lovecraft’s stories (“The Whisperer in Darkness”; “The Thing on the Doorstep”; the various covert behaviours of cultists, such as in “Red Hook”) or in other ways (seriously anti-religious messages disguised inside ‘juvenile pulp trash’; Lovecraft’s playful way with pseudonyms; Necronomicon forgeries/fabulations; later Mythos fiction and its attempted close imitations of Lovecraft’s themes and settings; maybe even Lovecraft’s poetry in terms of its anachronistic 18th century ‘disguise’; etc).

Clark Ashton Smith after Lovecraft

04 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by in Historical context, Podcasts etc.

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Dream Builder: Recognizing Clark Ashton Smith’s Legacy in Fiction.

Above: The Crypt, by Samuel Prout.

Smith’s “The Beast Of Averoigne” as a well delivered 29 minute audio reading. Weird Tales, May 1933.

“one of the most intelligent of the stories [in The Fantasy Cycles of CAS is] “The Beast of Averoigne,” [in which] religion and science meet each other, and religion comes up dangerously short.”