07 Friday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Black Gate magazine has just posted “The Beauty in Horror and Sadness: An Interview with Darrell Schweitzer”, scholar of the fantastic and also a practitioner with poems, stories and novels.
It’s part of their “interview series which engages contemporary authors & artists on the theme of ‘Art & Beauty in Weird/Fantasy Fiction'”.
07 Friday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
I see that the new graphic novel of H.P. Lovecraft’s life is available now for the Kindle, titled He Who Wrote in the Darkness. The book is by Alex Nikolavitch and Gervasio-Aon-Lee, and is due in hardback 2nd October 2018 from Pegasus Books. $26 / £19 for 112 pages.
However, Amazon UK has a Kindle edition which is available right now. Nice to see a book get its Kindle edition first, although sadly the price is hardly lower than the hardback. I’ve asked the publisher if it’s possible to send my Kindle HD 10″ a digital review-copy.
“He Who Wrote in the Darkness” opens with a partial but factual recounting of Lovecraft’s New York City period. The reader also sees scenes from his earlier life and the stories, deftly woven into the pages at the points in time when Lovecraft dreams them up or remembers them. The art is simple but clear, and the faces are expressive in the samples. The toony style reminds me a little of the Dreamlands / Kadath comics adaptations which were nicely done in the 1990s by Jason Thompson and published in full in 2012. It looks very promising.
Incidentally, what is the short name for a comic book bio-pic? For movies it’s obviously bio-pic, for graphic novels… not sure. ‘Biography’ seems too grand for many rather slight and under-researched graphic novels, though some (such as the recent chunky Alan Turing one, The Imitation Game) do deserve the term. ‘Bio-comic’ is too clunky and also dismissive sounding. ‘Graphic novel biography’ is both clunky and too ponderous. ‘Life story’ is not going to cover all biographies, which may only cover part of the life. Comixology hasn’t cracked it, putting The Imitation Game under ‘biography’ and ‘historical’. Combining biography and comic as ‘biomic’ sounds like the name of a Saturday Morning Animation’s kid-robot. So I guess we’re stuck with ‘biography’.
06 Thursday Sep 2018
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
The Wormwoodiana blog has just posted a new long interview with James Machin, about his new book Weird Fiction in Britain 1880-1939. It’s the same book I had a quick look at yesterday. I must say that Machin makes the book sound much more interesting than the promo blurb and dry chapter-abstracts from the publisher…
The one thing I really lit on is the foundational and persistent influence of literary Decadence … Brian Stableford remarked somewhere that the Decadence of the 1890s never really died, it just moved to the U.S. with Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, etc. This observation really struck me, and in a way the entire book is more or less built on Stableford’s insight here.
… genre snobbery is of course still very much with us: I’m amazed at the contamination anxiety, and the pains some prominent contemporary writers will take to insist that their science fiction or fantasy novels aren’t science fiction or fantasy novels. They endlessly tie themselves up in knots, desperate to avoid the stigma of genre.
Yes, a recent Lovecraft Geek podcast had a question about why Asimov apparently disdained Lovecraft. Robert Price didn’t suggest what I think was the underlying reason — I suspect it was mostly a fear of genre contamination. Asimov had seen horror invading science-fiction in the cheap 1950s drive-in movies, and he and his fellows such as Arthur C. Clarke didn’t want the same thing to happen in the literary ideas-led world of science fiction as well. Thus, Lovecraft had to be kept out of the pantheon.
06 Thursday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
“The Human Fear of Total Knowledge”, an excellent long article in The Atlantic for June 2016, which surveys the idea of “infinite libraries” in science fiction and fantasy.
Be warned that the article casually slips in a huge spoiler for two of the most outstanding episodes of the classic David Tennant years in Doctor Who, “Silence in the Library” / “Forest of the Dead”. These run a story back-to-back across the two episodes, and are well worth watching as your first-ever Doctor Who episodes.
06 Thursday Sep 2018
Posted in Censorship, Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts
The Whole Wide World is set for release as a Blu-ray disc on 18th September.
“When a feisty teacher falls for an eccentric pulp writer [Robert. E. Howard], the two begin a tumultuous affair and find they have nothing in common but their passion.”
Currently only listing on Amazon USA, but the page there notes that “This item ships to the United Kingdom”.
For those expecting a depressive gloomy angst-fest about small-town small-mindedness, frontier violence and family illness, ending in tragic suicide… it’s a brighter movie than you might expect.
I read that the 106-minute DVD edition had vital scenes cut. In one Howard discusses his views on racial memory, and in another part Lovecraft is talked about. I hadn’t known about those scenes. It seems that many had seen these scenes in the big-screen version that screened at Sundance and in its cinema run, felt they were integral to the movie, and had expected to see them on the DVD. One hopes that it wasn’t the DVD distributor who demanded they be cut, to forestall a leftist twitterstorm about race. Back in 2012 Bobbie Derie’s blog commented that…
There are certain aspects of the film that make little sense without them [the deleted scenes]
The deleted scenes had been uploaded to YouTube in 2012, and were apparently available until 2015, but have now vanished from the Web. Nor does there appear to be a full script available online.
So we might hope that the Blu-ray has the five or six minutes of deleted scenes on it, which were not on the DVD.
However, I can nowhere find details of Blu-ray having any extras at all. None are mentioned by Multicom in its survey of its summer 2018 releases. It looks to me like it’s just a bare-bones Blu-ray, with the 106-minute cut-down movie shown in a higher resolution than it was on the DVD.
06 Thursday Sep 2018
Posted in Unnamable
Announcing PulpFest 2019. Thursday 15th – Sunday 18th August 2019, just north of Pittsburgh, USA. No theme, but there’s a mention of “Children of the Pulps and Other Stories” which I’m guessing might suggest a planned focus on spin-offs, revivals and the later afterlives of pulp characters?
06 Thursday Sep 2018
Posted in New books
David Brussat’s Lost Providence, August 2017. A deep and well-researched book on the tragic destruction of “buildings of architectural merit” in Providence, and their replacement with various types of hideous concrete carbuncle. H. P. Lovecraft pops up in the story here and there, as an early pioneer of preservation in the city.
06 Thursday Sep 2018
Posted in Podcasts etc., REH
Newly online free Mythmoot V recordings of talks. Mostly these talks are of interest to Tolkien scholars, but there’s also an excellent hour with the great SF/fantasy scholar Tom Shippey, titled “The Hero and the Zeitgeist”. This ranges widely across the nature of heroes and the state of the culture, and is outstanding in both delivery and content.
The playlist omits a good focussed 90-minute round-table discussion of Tom’s new book on Vikings, titled Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings (Reaktion, 2018), with the author. It also has clear and listen-able audio. Those interested in the background of the long R.E. Howard – Lovecraft discussion on Nordics and barbarians may find this one especially interesting.
As I mentioned here a few posts ago, for auto-downloading of YouTube playlists as .MP3 audio files on a desktop PC, I highly recommend MakeHuman’s Free YouTube to MP3 Converter. Just make sure you fiddle with its Settings after install to: i) turn on ‘Expand Playlist Automatically’ and; ii) tighten up the privacy by turning off ‘send anonymous usage statistics’.
06 Thursday Sep 2018
Posted in Housekeeping, Scholarly works
My Open Lovecraft listing has updated, with a basic 2016-2018 survey of ‘open access’ scholarly and academic work which is free and public. About 25 new links added, as yet with minimal commentary and fill-out.
The rest of the links on the page haven’t yet been link-checked, so they probably have some link-rot. Around 15% link-rot is usual on academic papers on the open Web, after a couple of years.
06 Thursday Sep 2018
Posted in Censorship, Odd scratchings
Two recent posts on the increasing perils of having to rely on libraries, thrift stores and mainstream bookstores, to find local paper copies of Lovecraft:
1) “Where Have All the Books Gone?”…
Entire oeuvres of authors work have disappeared from the [local library] shelves, including Sheri S. Tepper, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Patricia A. McKillip – to name but a few of my favourites. I knew the main Library at least had a copy of The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories. That is, after all, where it started. If I couldn’t find anything new, I’d just reread that, it’s been a while. [But] The one known Lovecraft book is gone.
Replaced by an ebook option, it seems. Nice if it’s free, is the same bona fide Joshi-edited Penguin Classics edition, and one has an dedicated ereader such as the original Kindle 3. Otherwise not so good. Even if you have one of the new budget Kindle Fire HD 10″ tablets, reading a long book on a glaring screen is not going to be as pleasant as it would be on a proper eInk ereader. But I’m guessing the library’s app probably only works on a tablet. One can see how these sort of tiresome logistics could get increasingly tangled, for the computer-phobic library user.
2) Also, found on an online Chess Forum, posted August 2018…
In my local used bookstore, I was looking for H.P. Lovecraft volumes and couldn’t find any. I asked about this at the front desk, and they said “Oh we keep these behind the counter.” I asked “Is that because you are afraid you will be boycotted and shamed for selling racist books?”
“No,” they lied. “He is so popular that people were stealing his books.”
I bought all they had — three volumes. It is only a matter of time before HPL is purged from school libraries as well as bookstores.
Of course, it seems faintly ridiculous — in the age of $60 digital tablets, eBay with local store pickup, and free Wayne June audiobooks all over YouTube — to go trudging down the town High Street looking for Lovecraft stories. Nevertheless, these two posts do point to the possibility that some sort of quiet and informal purge might be underway. I don’t think that’s actually the case. It seems more probable that it really is just about the global shift to ebooks and about Lovecraft’s popularity among light-fingered teenagers. But the possible evaporation of Lovecraft in locally accessible paper form is something we might usefully be alert to, in our own localities and districts. Can HPL still be found in your local library and bookstore?
05 Wednesday Sep 2018
Due for publication from Palgrave in about five days, Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939.
The book is pitched as a wide-ranging study of how and where ‘the weird’ emerged from the Victorian supernatural tale, in a British context. Some theory, but it’s Bourdieu which is fine by me. It looks promising, though the price is set at a regrettable £79 (£57 with the introductory discount) — it’s yet another of those high-priced books aiming for sales to university libraries.
It appears to be concerned with policing the genres/canon and as such seems to be fairly author-centric — judging by the Springer abstracts of each chapter. There doesn’t appear to be a sustained wider consideration of the impact on authors and readers of things like: the re-discovery of folklore and the popularisation of folk tales; the re-discovering of the strangeness of ancient history; and the inspirations taken from the fringe pseudo-religions and cranky spiritualisms of the time.
If Chapter 5 is a sound and deeply researched historical study of the impact of Weird Tales in Britain, on both readers and authors, then that would be of great interest. Yet the materials with which to undertake that have probably now slipped from history, and the Palgrave abstract for Chapter 5 makes it appear rather less promising than that…
Here Machin [the book’s author] turns to what is regarded as both the culmination of the ‘high phase’ of weird fiction, and one of its definitive iterations: the 1920s and 1930s run of Weird Tales magazine. He specifically looks at this period of Weird Tales through the lens of his previous investigation of fin-de-siècle British weird fiction. Machin argues that, contrary to some claims, Weird Tales was part of an existing tradition and a continuation of fin-de-siècle literary Decadence in the age of Modernism. Underlying this discussion, and concluding a structural theme of the entire thesis, is a consideration of canonicity, and of the polluting of neat boundaries between notions of high and low culture.
Still, the book like a good and welcome survey, if set within fairly narrow bounds.
05 Wednesday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Providence’s new Lovecraft statue is today reportedly ‘done’, and now just needs gilding and placing at its site. Latest picture…
And how the sculptor visualised the final look and setting…
