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Tentaclii

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

Tentaclii

Monthly Archives: December 2014

Lovecraftian New Year’s Eve Trivia Quiz

31 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

≈ 1 Comment

Fiendish Lovecraftian New Year’s Eve Trivia Quiz:

1. What was the name of the talented Lovecraft correspondent who went on to write Green Lantern comic book stories in the 1940s?

2. What was the name of the long-lived street cat Lovecraft often met, when he walked into the centre of Providence?

3. What was Lovecraft’s membership-card number for the UAPA?

4. In 1935 Lovecraft and Barlow designed faux letterhead stationery, for which fictional Lovecraft character?

5. In 1936 Lovecraft received in the mail a copy of the Forty-sixth Anniversary edition of the journal The Lovecrafter. When did this journal start its run?

6. The convivial Kappa Alpha Tau society, for which Lovecraft composed poetry and song, regularly met together at which prestigious venue in Providence?

Grand prize for those with all-correct answers: a copy of The S.T. Joshi Guide to Overcoming Writer’s Block: You Too Can Write 40 Books a Year (Hamster Wheel Media, 2014).

Dame Marina Warner

31 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Scholarly works

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Good to see that the leading scholar of fairy tales and myth Marina Warner has been made a Dame (the female version of a knighthood), in the Queen’s New Year Honours List…

Professor Warner was made a dame for services to higher education and literary scholarship, despite a year in which she resigned from the University of Essex in protest at a management style that she likened to “the world of Chinese communism”. She is now professor of English and creative writing at Birkbeck, University of London.”

2015 in movies

30 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Films & trailers

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A quick look-see at the 2015 movies roster, and a quick slotting into their likeliest categories:

Bound to be pretty good: Star Wars: Episode VII; Avengers: Age of Ultron; Spectre (James Bond, sort-of futuristic); London Has Fallen (British sequel to the excellent-if-only-seen-once Olympus Has Fallen).

Ambitious: Jupiter Ascending (Wachowski space opera); The Martian (Earth tries to rescue a failed human landing on Mars); Tomorrowland (optimism for a failed future).

Entertaining-but-forgettable: Ant-Man (Marvel superhero); Lobo (DC superhero); The Last Witch Hunter (Vin Diesel as an immortal witch-hunter in New York).

Big dumb reboots (yawn…): Terminator; Jurassic Park; Mad Max; Predator; WarGames; The Man from U.N.C.L.E; The Fantastic Four (again!?); The Jungle Book (…why?).

Believe it when I see it:
The Legend of Conan (Schwarzenegger!); 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Fox and Disney both, it seems)

Little star of hope:
The Little Prince (animated).

Nothing worth mentioning in horror or supernatural (other than Vin Diesel), and fantasy seems to have retreated into kiddie animation or big family-friendly Cinderella / Peter Pan remakes. The historical epic / bio-pic space seems to have been totally ceded by Hollywood to the TV mini-series directors.

Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema

29 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, New books

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This may be interesting, for those considering how the cultural climate of the 1940s interacted with the reception of Lovecraft in the decade after his death: Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade…

The 1940s is a lost decade in horror cinema, undervalued and written out of most horror scholarship. This collection [has an introductory overview of previous scholarship and] chapters focused on Gothic and Grand Guignol traditions operating in 1940s horror cinema, 1940s proto-slasher films, the independent horrors of the Poverty Row studios, and critical re-evaluations of neglected hybrid films such as The Vampire’s Ghost (1945) and “slippery” auteurs such as Robert Siodmak and Sam Neufield.”

Lovecraft in 2014: a review

28 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

≈ 2 Comments

This is my quick personal survey of notable Lovecraft items from 2014:


2014 seemed to be the year everyone wanted to use Lovecraft’s name to sell their stuff. Just the name, mind you, as many would-be producers appeared to be relatively ignorant of the man. The trend got so pronounced in 2014 that it wouldn’t have been at all surprising to learn that your granny’s dog was featured somewhere on Kickstarter, pitching Cthulhu flavoured doggie-chocs. Expect this odorous horde of naff T-shirts, RPGs, videogames, coffee-mugs, comics, key-fobs, TV series and board games to be shambling through the doors of your local thrift shops in 2015. And despite all that, there are still no H.P. Lovecraft pinball tables to be had, either in solid-state or digital form.

Far more culturally promising (judging by their generally good reviews) are the variety of adapted stage plays and fringe solo stage performances based on Lovecraft, including one play that was staged in Hollywood itself. The New York City Radio Theatre’s 2014 Lovecraft Festival seemed especially promising, in its scope and length. There was a three-day LARP, Lovecraft Legacies: Across the Vale of Years, a New England LARP, which one hopes might have been a dry-run for a fringe LARP festival alongside NecronomiCon 2015. There was even a circus, Dreams of Cthulhu, a H.P. Lovecraft Circus Spectacular, in Seattle.

A Lovecraftian music composer was nominated for a Grammy award, and the UCLA Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra is to premiere his imagined landscapes: six Lovecraftian elsewhere on the West Coast on 19th April 2015. 2014 also saw a CD release of Dreams in the Witch House: A Lovecraftian Rock Opera.

In films, the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival 2014 once again did good service in hoovering up all the screen-worthy footage and giving it a big screen showing. The scarce and collectable documentary Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown saw an affordable Kickstarter re-release in 2014, complete with its covetable extra 70 minutes of interview out-takes. Two of the biggest and best Hollywood sci-fi movies of 2014, Edge of Tomorrow and Interstellar, seemed to be underpinned by re-mixes of Lovecraft’s ideas and plots. The film director del Toro publicly conceded that his At The Mountains of Madness adaptation could after all be done as a PG-13 movie, reviving fannish hopes. George R.R. Martin (Game of Thrones) made a publicised visit to H.P. Lovecraft’s grave in Providence.

Major talent was at work in comics in 2014, albeit for 2015 releases. Alan Moore wrote the first ten issues of his graphic novel Providence, featuring Lovecraft and set in New England in 1919. Also hard at work in comics in 2014 was Jason Eckhardt, illustrating his substantial graphic novel of Lovecraft’s life. More generally, Lovecraftian art and illustration continued to thrive.

There were special Lovecraft-themed issues of various magazines, including the French-language Bifrost, the Italian Antares, and the free 3D art magazine 3D Art Direct. No issue of the Italian scholarly journal Studi Lovecraftiani appeared this year, it seems, but the Lovecraft Annual continued its regular appearance with a 2014 issue.

In Europe, Sweden saw its 4th Stockholm H.P. Lovecraft Festival, with city support. The major Lovecraft convention, NecronomiCon Providence, was announced for August 20th-23rd, 2015. Germany also announced a big Lovecraft convention in 2015. The fledgling tradition of the ‘HPL birthday present/mini-celebration’ continued to gain traction in 2014, the year of the 124th Birthday. Vermont, Marblehead and other Lovecraft-haunted places had small public lectures on Lovecraft’s local connections, perhaps planting seeds for the future.

The noted philosopher Graham Harman went on a speaking tour of the USA in early 2014, introducing university audiences to the uses of Lovecraft in Harman’s particular strand of academic philosophy. Interest in which appeared to continue to spread in 2014.

Much podcast and audio book goodness was released, both commercially and for free, including Dark Adventure Radio Theatre’s “The Dreams in the Witch House” and “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” as feature-length audio adaptations.

Doubtless much serious Lovecraftian fiction was produced, as usual. I don’t have either the time or the cash to be able to read such, but S.T. Joshi is presumably now ploughing through it all for his revised book The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Cthulhu Mythos (now firmly set for 2015 release, it seems). And the lawyer Leslie S. Klinger did great service for future Sherlock Holmes—Lovecraft mythos fiction mashups, by winning his legal appeal against the Arthur Conan Doyle Estate, over their played-out copyright claim to the Sherlock and Watson characters.

The John Hay Library at Brown University was reportedly re-opened after a major refurbishment, with the Lovecraft collection materials now able to be consulted in… “a new state-of-the-art special collections reading room in the area that formerly housed University Archives”. Though I’ve not yet heard what the new John Hay experience is actually like for Lovecraftian scholars, re: noise, light and comfort. In 2014 Brown University also sent out their first call for the S.T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship (application deadline: 31st January 2015) for Lovecraft studies.

2014 was the year when various amateur press collections, held in university archives, began to get some tentative cataloguing attention and little bits of funding. The Fossil continued to appear, and one of its 2014 issues was a special on amateur press collections held in the archives. The University of Iowa Libraries announced they would digitize their collection of 10,000 science fiction fanzines. Also at Iowa, Lovecraft scholar Ken Faig donated his amateur journalism collection to the Special Collections Department there.

Regarding the digitization of more commercial material, Lovecraft-era digital archives of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper and Popular Science became freely available online, aiding scholars. Scans of some Lovecraft era Weird Tales were available on Archive.org. Some of Lovecraft’s core classical reference works also came online. Hathi placed online a handy keyword search tool for the first edition of The Ancient Track. The wiki Wikithulhu continues to build into a valuable free online reference tool, developed by the author of the new book Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos. My own JURN search tool was cleaned and greatly expanded in scope, helping independent scholars of all types to easily find free full-text academic articles and chapters.

A variety of scholarly work on Lovecraft and the pulps appeared in articles, anthologies and solo books. The sheer volume of such work now merits a considered “The Year’s Work in Lovecraft” summary essay in the next Lovecraft Annual, but my own Open Lovecraft page at least tries to track work freely available online. Especially notable among the books was S.T. Joshi’s Lovecraft and a World in Transition: Collected Essays on H.P. Lovecraft, and the chunky H.P. Lovecraft: Letters to Elizabeth Toldridge & Anne Tillery Renshaw. Klinger’s weighty and oversize New Annotated Lovecraft must have decimated Canada’s forests for its wood-pulp, but it appears to have been worth the effort since it had mainstream press publicity toward the end of 2014. Klinger’s successful publicity blitz has helped counteract a summer of orchestrated online controversy, during which a few leftists tried and failed to effectively banish Lovecraft from fandom over his racial views and sentiments.

Robert M. Price completed a successful crowd-funder to save his house roof from vanishing into the fourth dimension, while producing a bundle of wide-ranging podcasts on Lovecraft. He was also filmed for a forthcoming feature-length documentary about his life and work, titled The Gospel According to Price.

Lovecraft would no doubt have been gratified that his fame may have helped prompt an excellent budget-cost Henry S. Whitehead anthology in 2014, in paperback and Kindle. The Collectors’ Book of Virgil Finlay was another such major book in 2014. Diversion re-published 14 Henry Kuttner book titles for the Kindle.

Finally, there was a plausible claim that the Lovecraft family bible had been found. The bible seemed genuine enough from a distance, but so far as I know no scholar has been allowed to examine it in person.

Antares No.8

27 Saturday Dec 2014

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

Here’s a quick and dirty translation, giving the gist of the scholarly contents in the new Italian journal Antares No.8, 2014 — a freely available H.P. Lovecraft special issue…

Editorial: the Copernican revolution of H.P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft, or the inconsistency of the real. [?]

Lovecraft and the traditions of New England.

The Key and the Mountain: the dream symbolism in Lovecraft.

HPL and the FBI: the anthrax hoaxes [seems to relate to the cases of hoax letters in Syracuse, USA]

Lovecraft, the quest of the genius who came from outside. [?]

The fall of Sarnath and the fall of Rome.

The “doors of perception” and the “cracks in the Great Wall” [possibly on HPL as the forerunner of psychedelic drug literature?]

“The Master of Cosmicism” – an interview with S.T. Joshi.

“The fantastic is the exception, not the rule” – an interview with Giuseppe Lippi.

Reviews:

* Renzo Giorgetti, Lovecraf e la sincronicita, presentazione di Sebastiano Fusco, Solfanelli, Chieti 2013, pp.128. [Lovecraft and synchronicity]
* Antonio Tentori, H.P. Lovecraf e il cinema, Edizioni Profondo Rosso, Roma 2014, pp.240. [Lovecraft and cinema]
* Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Parola di Lovecraft, a cura di S.T. Joshi, edizione italiana ampliata a cura di Pietro Guarriello, presentazione di Gianfranco de Turris, Societa Editrice La Torre, San Marco Evangelista 2012, pp. 156. [Seems to be a collection of Lovecraft’s autobiographical writings]
* Studi Lovecraftani, a.VIII, n. 13, inverno 2013. [The Italian eqivalent of the Lovecraft Annual]

anteres

Added to Open Lovecraft

27 Saturday Dec 2014

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Scholarly works

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* Daniel M. Look (2014), “Queer geometry and higher dimensions : mathematics in the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft”

* Bogdan Odagescu (2014), “Things that should not be : the quicksands of the gothic monster: Stevenson, Stoker and Lovecraft”

* Rik Spanjers (2011), “Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s progressive conservatism”, Prolepses blog, 20th November 2011. (Later reprinted, possibly revised or expanded, in the Dutch journal Simulacrum: Beyond the Horizon)

* Gianfranco de Turris, editor (2014), Antares : prospettive antimoderne — con inediti di Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Antares No.8, 2014. (In Italian. Antares No.8 is the second H.P. Lovecraft special themed issue of the Italian journal Antares, the first being issue No.00 in 2011. No.8 has numerous scholarly articles, an interview with S.T. Joshi, and short book reviews)

anteres

Happy Christmas from Tentaclii

19 Friday Dec 2014

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Housekeeping, Lovecraftian arts

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So the Yuletide season rolls around, for another year. Happy Christmas, and here’s a rather excellent illustration — which can serve as a Christmas card for readers…

ImagebyNELSONEVERGREENPicture: the UK’s Nelson Evergreen (the canvas name of Neil Evans).

Howling at the hyphens

19 Friday Dec 2014

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

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Amazon has bizarrely suppressed a werewolf novel for having too many hyphens — which apparently makes it “unreadable” (despite the author having spent £1,000 on proofreading). Whatever next, Lovecraft’s work banned for alleged unreadability? And let’s hope they don’t take a peek at Ulysses or On The Road, because then Amazon’s grammar-checker might just implode.

‘Lovecraft audio before digital’: additions

18 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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Additions to the ‘Lovecraft audio before digital’ gallery post. Many thanks to Dennis Weiler of Fedogan, for sending me more cover art from Lovecraft audio cassettes. Dennis writes of them…

“Our “Fungi From Yuggoth” is on [picture] 01, initially released in 1987 on cassette alone. As far as I know, it was the first HPL poetry recording ever released for sale. All of these J-cards are from cassettes in my possession. The R.M. Price recording is marked 1997, but I’ve no idea whether digital-format was released. It was a Necronomicon Press production, I think.”

J-cards 3 001

J-cards 4 001

J-cards 2 001

J-cards 1 001

“Strange and spacious realms”

18 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, New discoveries, Scholarly works

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It appears I was correct about George Fitzpatrick, an Australian Lovecraft correspondent (see my Historical Context #4 and also Lovecraft Annual 2013). Drs. Brendan Whyte & Martin Woods of the National Library of Australia looked into the Fitzpatrick bookplate collection, seeking the Lovecraft bookplate. They found it…

“I instructed him to see if the HPL bookplate was in the Fitzpatrick collection, and indeed it is. Attached are photos of it and the card to which Fitzpatrick attached it. The verso of the card, presumably typed (rather poorly) by Fitzpatrick from notes sent by Lovecraft, reads:

GENESIS.

The georgian doorway with a suggestion of a tall flight of outside steps, serves a three-fold symbolic purpose. 1. The doorway quality of all books, whereby they serve to admit the reader to strange and spacious realms. 2. It typifies the urban scene in which he has spent his life, the quaint hill streets of Old Providence scarcely changed in a century and a half, 3- symbolises his personal antiquarian tastes.

ARTIST. Wilfred Blanch Tolman.”

A note in pencil on the side states: “Don[or]. Mrs G. Fitzpatrick. 7.12.[19]49”

I would agree that the typed card must be Fitzpatrick’s summary of a Lovecraft letter which had accompanied the bookplate to Australia, and which had been discarded. The words “The doorway quality of all books, whereby they serve to admit the reader to strange and spacious realms.” certainly sound like they could be Lovecraft’s own.

070

069

072

073

One wonders if this was the limit of the correspondence, or if there were later letters between the two men?

Forthcoming, the Bloch-Lovecraft letters

17 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, New books

≈ 1 Comment

News of a new book of Lovecraft letters, from S.T. Joshi…

David E. Schultz and I are working hard on getting Lovecraft’s Letters to Robert Bloch ready for publication with Hippocampus Press. It will also include letters to Natalie H. Wooley, Robert Nelson, William Frederick Anger, Kenneth Sterling, Donald A. Wollheim, Wilson Shepherd, and Willis Conover. A fat book! This could be published as early as February 2015. After that — the joint correspondence of Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith!”

* Robert Nelson (1912-1935) isn’t in The Lovecraft Encyclopaedia. But there is information here. The blurb for a 2012 book collection of his work, Sable Revery: Poems, Sketches and Letters, gives a biographical outline…

Robert Nelson (1912-1935) was a contributor of verse to Weird Tales magazine in the mid-1930s, and of verse and prose to fan magazines like The Fantasy Fan. He was also a correspondent of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. … Also included [in the book] are five [1930s] letters by H.P. Lovecraft”

* Natalie Hartley Wooley corresponded 1933–37. She was a poet of the amateur journalism movement, with poetry in The Tryout and probably other amateur journals. She also had poetry and at least one “straight ghost story” in The Fantasy Fan, plus a lead essay on “The Adventure Story” in The Californian (Fall 1935) which had an early critical appraisal of a Conan story. Lovecraft’s letters to her appear to have had much to say on race relations, pungent extracts from which have already been published in Selected Letters.

* Wilson Shepherd was a friend of Wollheim, publishing the forerunner (Fanciful Tales?) to The Phantagraph. He corresponded 1936-37, and Lovecraft revised a couple of his poems. He published “A History of the Necronomicon” in pamphlet form in 1937.

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