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Tentaclii

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

Tentaclii

Monthly Archives: November 2014

Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange

30 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books

≈ Leave a comment

The earliest Arabic tales of the weird, Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange, published in English for the first time.

…it lay unread and gathering dust, a ragged manuscript that no one even knew existed, until 1933 when Hellmut Ritter, a German Orientalist, stumbled across it and translated it into his mother tongue. An Arabic edition was belatedly printed in 1956.”

The stories…

dealt with all things that challenged human understanding, including magic, the realms of the jinn, marvels of the sea, strange fauna and flora, great monuments of the past, automatons, hidden treasures, grotesqueries and uncanny coincidences. … The sheer mad inventiveness of “The Story of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle”, with its jumbling of Muslim, Christian and pagan beliefs and rituals would take some beating. Here we have a mechanical vulture, visionary dreams, conversation with a pagan god, magical transformations, thrones of wrath and of mercy, an enchanted gazelle, a herder of giant ostriches, lustful jinn, speaking idols, a queen of the crows, a weeping lion, a fortress guarded by talismans, a crocodile with pearls in its ears, the sacrifice of virgins to the Nile and much else.”

The hardcover seems to have sold out, but a Kindle edition is available.

Reiniger-achmed30-bigStill from Reiniger’s Achmed.

Added to Open Lovecraft

30 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

* Erik Davis (2014), “H.P. Lovecraft” (from the book The Occult World, Routledge 2014. A concise overview of Lovecraft’s portrayal of the occult in his fiction, and the later claims made by some modern occultists about H.P. Lovecraft)

One+One Filmmakers Journal

25 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Scholarly works

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The latest issue of One+One Filmmakers Journal includes a short interview on Lovecraft…

Dominic Fox interviews Graham Harman and they find subversive, philosophical and materialist dimensions in the works of H.P. Lovecraft.”

Lovecraft and Interstellar

18 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts

≈ 2 Comments

Perhaps I’m just over-sensitised to H.P. Lovecraft’s ideas, but it seems to me that the excellent new sci-fi blockbuster film Interstellar has some interesting elements drawn from Lovecraft’s fiction. I was expecting epic civilisation-building space opera on the Foundation scale, yet the film is anything but that. It’s much more down-to-earth, more of a deft melding of Sagan’s Contact and Clarke’s 2001 series. Click on to read spoilers… Continue reading →

An Impression of Arthur Machen

18 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Scholarly works

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A full scan of On Strange Altars: a book of enthusiasms (1924) by Paul Jordan-Smith, containing his essay “Black Magic—An Impression of Arthur Machen”. A hat-tip to the Son of Yog-Sothoth, who writes that…

The second part of the essay is, perhaps to me, the most unexpected: the author had in 1920 travelled to England and visited Arthur Machen and his wife, where Machen briefly spoke of his acquaintance with Oscar Wilde. It seems to me that I must have read something of this in one of the essays or biographies of Machen, but I’ll leave tracking that down to some other day.”

This may interest some, as it’s a view of Machen by an American who discovered him a few years before Lovecraft did. Lovecraft first discovered Machen’s work in the summer of 1923 (S.T. Joshi, I Am Providence, p.454).

Paul Jordan-Smith’s Cables of Cobweb book, listed facing the title page, sounds like a supernatural novel but apparently isn’t…

A young Virginian, revolting against his parents conservatism, experiments with radicalism but with maturity becomes conservative”

Likewise his novel Nomad, which seems to have been a sort of light-hearted philosophical quest story, with the hero and his companions moving through and exemplifying various philosophies. It sounds like Pilgrim’s Progress meets Gulliver’s Travels?

L’Art Etrange de Clark Ashton Smith

17 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books, Scholarly works

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A descriptive note on a scholarly French book L’Art Etrange de Clark Ashton Smith (2013).

artsran

Open Lovecraft link-checked

15 Saturday Nov 2014

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Housekeeping

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The Open Lovecraft page, on this blog, has had its annual link-check and repair.

Lovecraft in The Pinfeather

14 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

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H.P. Lovecraft in The Pinfeather, November 1914…

hpl_pinfeather_nov1914

Collected Prose Poems and Artwork of Clark Ashton Smith

13 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books

≈ 1 Comment

Now on Amazon from Centipede, The Eldritch Dark: Collected Prose Poems and Artwork of Clark Ashton Smith for pre-orders.

eldark

Wonderlands

12 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Scholarly works

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Call for papers:

“Wonderlands: reading, writing, telling fairy tales and fantasy”: a one day symposium in Chichester, England. 23rd May 2015.

We are seeking papers which explore all aspects of reading, writing, and telling fairy tales and fantasy. In particular, we invite discussion of wonder lands in fantastical literature, classic and modern fairy tales, and contemporary oral storytelling.

Possible topics of focus include, but are not limited to:

Other worlds, otherworldliness, Wonderland, and wonder lands
Relationships between reading, writing, and/or telling fantasy
Contemporary scholarship in children’s and adult’s fantasy literature
Storytelling as a vehicle for the fantastic
Practice and performance of fairy tales
Fantastical non-fiction
Relationships between real and imagined wonder lands
Meta-textual conversations with classic fantasy literature
Imagining the fantastical world through illustrations and picture books

We also welcome paper submissions or panel presentations which include a creative or performative element.

Deadline: 31st January 2015. Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words (or panel proposals of 1,000 words) and a short personal bio to the organisers, Joanna Coleman, Joanne Blake Cave, and Rose Williamson at wonderlands.symposium@gmail.com Registration dates will be announced on the Sussex Centre website in the near future.

Feline Classics

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, New books

≈ 2 Comments

Feline Classics (Eureka Productions, Aug 2014, 144 pages), a new anthology. It melds new art and comics with public domain stories and poems. When you flip it over, it reverses into being Canine Classics on dogs — which is not so Lovecraftian. In the kittee section Lovecraft is represented by his poem “The Cats”, alongside an illustration for it. There’s also an essay on cats by Robert E. Howard, “The Beast from the Abyss”, on the rough lives of the semi-wild cats of a Texan oil town.

• Ancient Sorceries – by Algernon Blackwood
adapted by Alex Burrows and Randy DuBurke

• The Beast from the Abyss – an essay by Robert E. Howard
illustrated by Peter Kuper

• Dog, Cat and Baby – by Joe R. Lansdale
illustrated by Lance Tooks

• A Little Fable – by Franz Kafka
illustrated by Vincent Stall

• Tobermory – by Saki
adapted by Trina Robbins and Lisa K. Weber

• The Owl and the Pussy-Cat – a poem by Edward Lear
illustrated by Mary Fleener

• The Cat and the King – by Ambrose Bierce
illustrated by Johnny Ryan

• Fog – a poem by Carl Sandburg
illustrated by Skot Olsen

• The Cats – a poem by H.P. Lovecraft
illustrated by Allen Koszowski

• The King o’ the Cats – by Joseph Jacobs
illustrated by Pat N. Lewis

• What I learn from Cats – a poem by John Lehman
illustrated by Milton Knight

“Pushing through the ice…”

09 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context

≈ Leave a comment

The theme of Lovecraft’s New York story “Cool Air” was strong prompted by his own fear of cold and need for heat, and by his friend Leeds’s precursor story. But I wonder if the following historical snippet might be relevant to the slight stress that Lovecraft places on the increasing demands of Dr. Munoz for more cold and ever more ice…

At the peak of the trade in the 1870s, cargoes of New England ice worth hundreds of thousands of dollars went south annually from Charleston to Calcutta … ice was cut in winter [for export around the world] on every pond and river in the region” (from Reflections in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England, University Press of New England, 2000)

So could there be a slight touch of historical satire in “Cool Air”, only to be picked up on by those aware of the role of the ice trade in New England history? I hasten to add that I’m not the first to make a suggestion along these lines, as S.T. Joshi has pointed to the possibility of a few deftly humorous touches in the story…

“There is, to be sure, a perhaps deliberate undercurrent of the comic in the whole story, especially when Munoz, now holed up in a bathtub full of ice, cries through his bathroom door, “More—more!” (A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft)

more_ice

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