Monthly Archives: August 2014

The Providence Amateur Press Club, 1914-1916 – new second edition

26 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works

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I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve recently been collaborating with Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., a leading and veteran Lovecraft researcher, on the second edition of his The Providence Amateur Press Club, 1914-1916. Ken has very kindly encouraged me to take a co-credit on the title page, although I should point out that the overwhelming bulk of the scholarly work was his. The PDF of this new second edition is now being hosted here, and is available for free in PDF.

Download The Providence Amateur Press Club, 1914-1916 (PDF link, 2Mb). Revised second edition, with new illustrations.

Disorders of Magnitude: A Survey of Dark Fantasy

26 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by in New books

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Shipping now, Jason V. Brock’s new collection of essays, Disorders of Magnitude: A Survey of Dark Fantasy. Sadly it comes from a $80-a-book publisher which aims at sales to university libraries and tenured professors rather than the fans, but Amazon ships it slightly cheaper than the list-price and some used paper copies are now filtering onto Amazon at somewhat lower prices. There’s also a Kindle ebook edition, but it’s a ridiculous $76.65.

brock

I’ve highlighted the items of likely interest to Lovecraftians…

Contents:

Section One: The Darkest Age

The Smoldering Past: The Creation of the Modern from Frankenstein and Dracula to the Great War and Beyond
“Cosmic Introspection”: Lovecraft’s Attainment of Personal Value by Way of Infinite Insignificance
Forrest J Ackerman: Fan Zero
Gathering Darkness: In Appreciation of the Artists of Weird Tales
Frank M. Robinson: First Fandom and Beyond

Section Two: Things Become

The Burden of Now: Welles’s “Panic Broadcast,” World War II, and Creeping Anomie
Ray Bradbury: The Boy Who Never Grew Up
Cinematic Dream Logic: How Movies Permanently Altered the Fabric of Reality
Individual Sexual Liberation Becomes Social Emancipation: Playboy Changes the World
Harlan Ellison: L’Enfant Terrible (Sort Of)

Section Three: The Rise of the Speculative Mind

Rod Serling: Articulating the American Nightmare
A Howling at Owl Creek Bridge: Observations on Two Important Twilight Zone Episodes
George Clayton Johnson: A Touch of Strange
L’Age d’Or to Gotterdammerung: How Bradbury, Serling, Beaumont, and “The Group” Shaped a Pop Future
Roger Corman: Socially Conscious Auteur
Finding Sanctuary: Running from the Zone to Logan
The Long Nuclear Shadow: Atomic Horror, Godzilla, and the Cold War
The Horror of It All! EC [comics] and the Beginnings of Modern Media HOOHAH!
Madly Yours, Al Feldstein
An End, a Middle, a Beginning: Richard Matheson and His Impact

Section Four: Slashers, Blockbusters, and Bestsellers

Riding the Dark Wave: The Role of Dystopian Science Fiction in Popular Culture
Celluloid Asylum: O’Bannon, Romero, Carpenter, and the Liberals Lose (and Find) Their Collective Minds
Terrible Beauty: Slasher Film Connections to Conservatism, Pornography, and Misogyny
King of the Dead: Filmmaker George A. Romero on Politics, Film, and the Future
Dan O’Bannon: Not Gone, Not Forgotten
H.R. Giger: A Darkness Faster Than Light
The Emperor’s New Book [on the decline of horror publishing]
The Doctor Is In: F. Paul Wilson
Sounds Horrific: Art Rock, Soundtracks, and the Zeitgeist

Section Five: A Century of Speculation

Carnivora: The Dark Art of Automobiles
David J. Skal: Monster Kid Ambassador of Horror
Seasons in Hell
Kris Kuksi: Dark Horizons in the Realm of the Senses
Bluewater Comics’s Darren G. Davis: On the Run in the Digital Age of Comics
The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival: Cosmic Chaos on the Silver Screen
S.T. Joshi: Champion of the Weird Tale
Marc Scott Zicree: As Timeless as Infinity

Section Six: From (and Into) the Beyond

Fangoria’s Chris Alexander: Cinephilia, Music, and All the Rest of It
Bruce Campbell: From The Evil Dead to Burn Notice and Beyond
The Inner World of William F. Nolan
The Mammoth Book of Body Horror
Two of a Kind: Lee-Anne Raymond and Demetrios Vakras
“Cthulhu, a Vampire, and a Zombie Walk into a Bar…”: Why These Themes, Why Now, and What’s the Matter with Hollyweird?
John Shirley: The Tao of Identity
Ray Harryhausen: A Note on the Passage of Giants
Kneeling at the Dandelion Shrine: An Appreciation
William F. Nolan and Ray Bradbury: Reflections
Introduction: The Pope of Speculative Fiction
Future Shock? (De)Parting Thoughts

Appendices
Index
About the Author

The Floor of the Oceans

26 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by in Historical context, Maps

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Tharp and Heezen’s mid-1950s “The Floor of the Oceans” map, in hi-res. Just in case Mythos writers needed to research a location for an underwater city or something.

Note especially the curious shape of Greenland. Presumably envisaged that way to show the sub-glacial meltwater lake area, possibly with life, which lies deep beneath the now-thickening ice cap (the thickening is why more ice is falling off some of the edges, since the weight of the inner mass pushes it off).

oceanmap

In Lovecraft’s day the ocean depths were mysterious unmapped places, plumbed primarily by submariners and those laying undersea telegraph cables. The weirder denizens of the deep were better known, having been hauled up by the likes of the Challenger Expedition and also by occasional startled fishermen. And hunted by the likes of the Arcturus Expedition. The bathysphere (metal diving sphere) was essentially still just an interesting one-off novelty in the mid 1930s. The first modern textbook on oceanography was not published until 1942, after Lovecraft’s death. Only after the Second World War — with war-surplus Navy ships and sonar at the disposal of scientists — could sea-bed mapping be undertaken in detail and over wide areas.

Boston subway, 1915

25 Monday Aug 2014

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts

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1280px-Tremont_and_Boylston_Streets_by_ACGoodwinPicture: Entrances to the Boston subway line, Tremont and Boylston Streets, Boston (1915). Painting by Arthur C. Goodwin.

“Lynch & I were the last to go. His toothache excited my sympathy, but sympathy could not cure it. He left the [tram] car at the Boylston Street subway station, & thereafter I was alone.” — Lovecraft on attending the Hub Club Conference on 5th September 1920, Boston, at which he met Morton for the first time.

“Then we split up into narrow columns, each of which seemed drawn in a different direction. One disappeared in a narrow alley to the left, leaving only the echo of a shocking moan. Another filed down a weed-choked subway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad.” — H.P. Lovecraft, “Nyarlathotep” (1920).

“God, how that man could paint! There was a study called ‘Subway Accident,’ in which a flock of the vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boston Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform.” — H.P. Lovecraft, “Pickman’s Model” (1926).

Added to Open Lovecraft

23 Saturday Aug 2014

Posted by in Scholarly works

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* David Javet (2010), “The Pen that Never Stops Writing: the Lovecraft Mythology or the expansion of a literary phenomenon” (Masters dissertation)

* Jelena Maravic (2014), “Atavism on the tongue of cognition”. (The influence of Darwin on Lovecraft)

* David Goudsward (2014), “A Visit to Haverhill”, The Fossil, #360, July 2014. (Originally in Wave-Lengths #58, and later incorporated in Goudsward’s book H.P. Lovecraft in the Merrimack Valley)

* Sonja Jauernig (2011), “H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” in zwei deutschen Ubersetzungen”. (Masters dissertation for the University of Vienna. In German with English abstract. Discusses two German translations of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Call of Cthulhu”)

* Alberto Agosto (2012), “The topic of dream in the work of H.P. Lovecraft”. (In Italian, appears to be a Masters dissertation for the University of Torino)

Six Foot Plus, NecronomiCon 2013 special podcast

22 Friday Aug 2014

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, NecronomiCon 2013, Podcasts etc.

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Late HPL birthday present…

In honor of H.P. Lovecraft’s birthday this week, we’ll put up this NecronomiCon 2013 formerly exclusive episode [of the Six Foot Plus horror music podcast] for one week only.”

Track list:

01. Zombeast, “Cthulhu”
02. Rudimentary Peni, “The Horrors of the Museum”
03. The 3-D Invisibles, “Dreams of Poe”
04. Sebadoh, “Calling Yog Soggoth”
05. White Flag, “Cthulhu Calling”
06. Dayglo Abortions, “The Spawn of Yog Soggoth”
07. Gwar, “Horror of Yig”
08. The Red Hook Horrors, “The 5-Point Plan of the Pentagram”
09. The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, “Going Down to Dunwich”
10. Moon Ra, “At The Mountains of Madness”
11. The Dagons, “You Kill The Dream”
12. Lustmord, “Dreams of Dead Names”
13. The Difference Engine, “The Floods of Vermont”
14. Alex K. Redfearn and the Eyesores, “The Way of All Flesh”
15. Hellbilly Club, “The Village of Insmouth”

6ftplus

Geologic Time

22 Friday Aug 2014

Posted by in 3D, Lovecraftian arts

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“Geologic Time”, an eight-minute animation by Julius Horsthuis.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6lZJvEDQI4?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

If you want to explore the software behind this, Mandelbulb is free.

“As a mining engineer, I have some knowledge of geology, and can tell you that these blocks are so ancient they frighten me.” — H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow out of Time”.

Kuttner in cheap volumes again

21 Thursday Aug 2014

Posted by in Historical context, New books

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A bizzare rider to the history of Henry Kuttner…

Kuttner met his wife, the writer C.L. Moore, through a mutual correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft; when he died, she became his literary executor, then married a non-writer who ordered her to stop writing, and insisted that she suppress future publication of Kuttner’s work”

Sad to say that there appears to have been a similar fate in store for a few of the other writers in the Lovecraft circle, Munn for instance. But in the case of Kuttner, it’s now the case of ‘ebooks to the rescue!’. Gateway (Gollancz, they of the famous yellow dustjackets) re-published The Best of Henry Kuttner in May 2014, along with a number of Kuttner books they still have the rights to. And now Diversion has just re-published 14 further Kuttner titles as Kindle ebooks, including The Book of Iod: Ten Cthulhu Stories.

iod

New Fossil

21 Thursday Aug 2014

Posted by in Historical context, Scholarly works

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The latest issue of The Fossil is out now July 2014, #360. Including a detailed round-up of snippets of news on the status of various collections of amateur journalism items from the Lovecraft period, which are very slowly starting to get some basic indexing work done on them…

Joseph Ditta, Reference Librarian at The New York Historical Society’s Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, replied to an inquiry about their collections. “Our collection of amateur periodicals is fairly sizable, filling 28 boxes on 12 shelves. It is not cataloged, unfortunately, but in 2010 an intern went through most of the collection and created a spreadsheet listing the titles found in each box. Her list does not include holdings information, or dates, and she stopped at the second box of ‘S’ titles. Still, this partial list includes over 1,500 titles, which gives some sense of the extent of the collection.”

Library of Congress’s [amateur journalism] collection … After viewing Excel spreadsheets that Ivan Snyder and Tom Parson are in the process of creating to track their collections, I created one that lists the 6,804 publications held by the LoC. Although it is preliminary, I would be glad to share a copy upon request”

It seems the LoC’s ‘X Collection’ PDFs (on archive.org) were created simply as an initial index to their boxed collections of pamphlets and emphemera, to aid physical retrieval for scanning when an item is requested by a scholar. Presumably as individual items are scanned on request, the scans will then start to pop up on Archive.org. Inklings is perhaps one of the journals runs it would be most interesting to have in full.

Also included in The Fossil issue #360 is “A Visit to Haverhill” by David Goudsward, which covers almost the same ground as Goudsward’s recent book. And David M. Tribby on the “United APA: Gone But Not Forgotten”, the United Amateur Press Association being Lovecraft’s amateur alma mater.