Monthly Archives: December 2018

New album: The Scythe of Cosmic Chaos

27 Thursday Dec 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.

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A very positive review for the heavy Lovecraft tribute album The Scythe of Cosmic Chaos (Dec 2018) by German band Sulphur Aeon. The ‘death metal’ form of heavy metal isn’t my thing, but I’ll take the word of the reviewer that this new release is something very special within the sub-genre. The album is also of interest here because it’s from one of the few bands who only focus on Lovecraft…

[The band] Sulphur Aeon stand as debatably the single best musical entity drawing inspiration from the Cthulhu Mythos. […] The Scythe of Cosmic Chaos, continues their conceptual obsession […] This is premium, nearly flawless death metal, building on every positive attribute of their previous work to create something titanic and utterly sinister. It’s one of the best metal adaptations of its source material, and also happens to be one of the single best death metal releases of 2018.

Other reviews are equally as positive and the sample track, at the foot of the review, is certain an impressive listen. Even a bit of a melodic toe-tapper, rather than the expected wall-of-noise-and-screaming. If this is death metal, at its best, then I may have misjudged it somewhat.

Apparently the focus of the album is a sonic evocation of Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark”, and the lyrics are in English. It appears to be available in full(?) and free to stream on BandCamp…

The album’s cover artist signs himself “Ozarsson”, which makes him un-findable in Google, but he’s online as Ola Larsson of Sweden.

Vastarien

27 Thursday Dec 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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S. T. Joshi has a new blog post. He notes a new and apparently high-quality literary journal on the macabre, which includes essays…

Vastarien, containing my essay “Richard Gavin: The Nature of Horror” (a chapter of 21st-Century Horror). This superbly produced journal, edited by Jon Padgett and published by Grimscribe Press, is a wonder to behold.

The content-lists make it rather difficult to tell what’s an essay and what’s not. For instance, is Christopher Mountenay’s “Bequeathing the World to Insects” an essay on this post-human notion in imaginative literature (the far-future ‘mighty beetle civilisation’ of Lovecraft, etc), or a story?

The Kindle ebook issues can also be had on Amazon at £3.50 (about $5) each, and there are 10% free samples.

Giuseppe Lippi

27 Thursday Dec 2018

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Newly published online, “An interview with Giuseppe Lippi”, one of the leading Italian Lovecraftians, who passed away before Christmas after a short illness. Lippi was a prolific translator and editor and, according to his Italian Wikipedia page, his edited volumes include the 1993 Italian edition of Lovecraft’s letters from 1915-1937, and the definitive edition of Lovecraft’s entire fiction in Italian in four volumes.

Following the recent departure of Giuseppe Lippi, who passed away on Saturday 15th December, we would like to share this interview with Andrea Scarabelli. The interview was done for the magazine Antares, a special issue which focused on the work of H.P. Lovecraft and the role and importance of the fantastic imaginary for today’s world. Our most heartfelt thanks go to Lippi for all he has done.

The interview is a re-publication from Antares No. 8, 2014.

Other immediate short news and tributes are: Giuseppe Lippi: addio al curatore di Urania e traduttore di Lovecraft; Addio a Giuseppe Lippi, esperto di narrativa fantastica e curatore di “Urania”; and Remembering Giuseppe Lippi (English). Doubtless there will be more considered obituaries in the New Year.

Perhaps an English Wikipedia page would also be a fine tribute, if someone can get past the Wikipolice re: the strictures on starting a new page these days. If someone cares to jump that hurdle, please post the link here and then I’ll bulk up the page.

Apparently he also edited Clark Ashton Smith, and had a hand in the late 1970s and early 80s Warren magazine reprints in Italy (the comics from Creepy, Eerie, and their science-fiction title 1984 went far and wide in Europe, translated and often with new masthead titles). Lippi is also said to have been the editor of the first Italian magazine dedicated to that nation’s rich seam of horror and macabre cinema.

Review: Aquaman (2018)

26 Wednesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts

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WARNING: SPOILERS!

Aquaman (2018).

So… there’s this story that starts at an old lighthouse. One stormy night the lighthouse keeper gets to mate with a sea-visitor. They produce a hybrid child, then there’s a submarine attack on a sunken alien city… and there’s a devolved race of monstrously fishy trench-dwellers, a giant trapped sea-monster under the ocean that’s a octopus-dragon-squid hybrid… then a mysterious stone codex with ancient lettering on it, and to decode this our heroes need to discover a hidden ancient city under the Sahara. It’s Lovecraft, right?

Nope. It’s the big-budget Aquaman. Having been told the new Aquaman movie is “surprisingly Lovecraftian”, I’ve now seen it. While it certainly has broadly Lovecraftian moments and elements, at its core it’s the stock-formula pulp that Lovecraft was writing against: those 1920s pulp tales which tiresomely re-worked well-worn themes of politicking medieval kingdoms, over-proud war-hungry princes, treacherous councillors, beautiful princesses who fall for the flawed and banished hero-prince, and a hidden ancient Sword That Will Unite the Kingdom. The pulp authors merely placing these stock elements in some hidden underground realm, on Venus, at the poles, or in this case underwater. Read a half-dozen good ones, and you’ve basically read them all.

That said, Aquaman is generally very enjoyable for what it is, and is full of very well-made visual spectacle. The amount and duration of high-end CG is amazing, and there is a ton of money on the screen. After recent disasters DC must have ‘bet the farm’ on this one, and it’s paid off. Despite the CG it’s all very believable and coherent, and in terms of the physical acting involved in doing ‘underwater’ I saw no flaws. The design values are very high in terms of how things look, and the costumes, vehicles and creatures are all well integrated into a tight example of movie world-building.

Is it Lovecraftian? Not really, certainly not as much as some have claimed. Though it has its moments:

* the opening of the movie echoes the opening of “Innsmouth”, in terms of the submarine attack on the underwater reef. This attack is, of course, a ‘false flag’ attack in a hijacked submarine. Aimed at helping the wicked power-hungry prince to stir up a war against the hated surface-dwellers.

* almost nobody will notice, but we see that Aquaman’s dad has been reading “The Dunwich Horror” before he mated with the Fishy One From The Sea (who after some initial puking very quickly turns from bedraggled mermaid to primped Glamour Queen). The book is under the snow-globe that emotionally grounds the movie’s opening scenes. The book should probably have been “The Shadow over Innsmouth” for thematic congruence, but I guess Hollywood felt that might be a little too politically incorrect.

* then there’s an undecipherable carved stone with a hidden message in it, and it needs to be taken to an ancient ruined city of the forgotten ones under the Saharan desert. But Aquaman and his companion princess have an Atlantean GPS to reach its hidden entrance, which is kind of lame. They could at least have used some kind of mystic ‘water-sense’ to follow the vast amount of water that’s said to be sunk beneath the desert.

* the secondary baddie starts quoting Lovecraft directly (“Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men”), when he surfaces for his big second-act battle with Aquaman. However, his costume looks so utterly ridiculous and camp that you just can’t take him seriously. He’s obviously disposable and just there for Aquaman to beat up, half way through the movie. The need to fit with the DC universe meant that the movie’s makers lost a huge opportunity to make him a deluded Cthulhu-worshipping cultist, whose secret double-crossing aim is to release the…

* giant Cthulhu-like mountain-sized Kraken-y sea monster that has been trapped below the sea for aeons. This monster is, of course, released… though no cultists are involved in making this happen.

* we get the briefest mention of a crucial bit of back-story involving Atlanteans who survived the famous deluge of Atlantis and remained pure-bloods and the Trench dwellers who did not remain pure and fell into a “savage regression” biologically. While the visual look of this devolved race is Lovecraftian, when it’s eventually revealed, the cultural nod is actually more to H.G. Wells and his famous devolved Morlocks. This is confirmed when we learn that the Trench dwellers hate light, and can be driven back merely with lighted distress flares.

* there’s ten minutes of a nightmare encounter at sea with this devolved deep ocean race. These are definitely Derleth-Lovecraftian in appearance, and we’re told they were once Atlanteans but that they devolved in a “savage regression” to fishy bestiality over the millennia. This scene has its moments, but the monsters are again only really there for Aquaman to battle past… so that he can reach a tropical Thunderball-like Paradise Island… where the Magic Trident of All Power power-up thing is resting.

* the Magic Trident of All Power power-up thing is in a cave behind the Glowing Waterfall, where it’s guarded by a giant tentacular being. But Mrs Squiddy talks, in a manner more akin to Tolkien’s Smaug the dragon than to anything in Lovecraft. Anyway… there’s little time for a chat, as War Is Brewing.

Except for about 30 seconds in the dark Trench, the ocean conveys no sense of a vast and eerie darkness, and there’s no unfathomable ‘cosmic awe’ akin to outer space. So, it’s not Lovecraftian in that sense.

Is it DC, then? I have no clue at all about that, not being a DC fan. I know absolutely nothing about the DC comics version of Aquaman, other than that he’s DC’s equivalent of Marvel’s Sub-Mariner character. I thus probably missed many DC-tastic Easter Eggs, but I guess they’re in there. I only noticed how Aquaman positioned itself to dovetail with other blockbuster properties. Disney’s Tron: Legacy is probably the biggest debt it owes, and that debt is massive. But this viewer didn’t mind in the slightest, since the movie re-works the best bits of the Tron sequel so beautifully, at such duration and on such a vast scale. In terms of the hero’s own personality and style it’s very obviously pitched as a rival to Marvel’s Thor. As ‘screen fun with a coherent story’, Aquaman even manages to hold its own against the excellence of the latest Thor: Ragnarok movie. Those who know the Lord of the Rings movies will also spot visual nods in Aquaman, such as the distant shot where a tiny Gandalf falls silently into the inky depths of Moria.

Overall Aquaman is entertaining fun, and if you have a strong bladder it’s worth seeing at the cinema purely for the visuals. It deserves its “top movie of Christmas 2018” box-office cash take. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t an Oscar in the offing for the costume designers and/or the action scene story-boarders. Although in terms of ‘action Oscars’ they’ll have tough competition from the latest Mission Impossible.

The story and dialogue is… still messy, but it’s an enjoyable mess. It veers wildly between jaw-dropping fanboy ridiculousness, over-the-top camp homage, and a surprisingly sugary moms-iness. But this isn’t meant to be a movie that one thinks about deeply. It’s just a good adventure romp and zips through at a fast pace. The Thor-like hero is engaging and of the ‘clever guy who hides it under goofy-and-dumb’ type, and his Atlantean princess is winsome-but-tough. Their dialogue might have popped and surprised just a little more. But on the other hand the script editors have kept the talkiness and jokes under control. There are some three-minute “let’s talk about our feelings” family reunions, but there’s no turgid lecture-mode that slows things down every ten minutes (as in the interminable second movie of The Guardians of the Galaxy series). The usual worthy ‘messages’ from the Hollywood elite are in there, but only briefly and at a very basic level:

* don’t put plastic and effluent in the sea;
* ‘place all humanity above the needs of one nation’;
* modern pirates are bad people;
* human/Atlantean half-breeds can become King, if they prove themselves worthy by their actions.

The latter point raising the question of what, exactly, some of the surviving Atlanteans were mating with in order to devolve into Trench dwellers — thus raising in the remaining pure Atlanteans such an abject horror of hybridity that they never once pause to make the obvious distinction between humans and lobsters. By the look of it, the rogue Atlanteans were sneaking off to snuggle up to the primitive Giant Crab People on dark nights. Which, in a way, is very Lovecraftian.

The return of Morton

26 Wednesday Dec 2018

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I’m pleased to see that the Kindle ebook edition of Letters to James F. Morton has returned to Amazon UK and USA. The ebook had vanished in the summer. I’ve corrected my recent post on Lovecraft’s 2018: a year in brief review accordingly, and the text now reads…

“Several ebooks vanished from Amazon, such as Lovecraft’s Letters to James F. Morton, and H.P. Lovecraft: New England Decadent. So did the Arthur C. Clarke biography, which is of interest re: the early Lovecraft influence. The Morton letters later returned to Amazon, at the end of the year, but such vanishings suggest it is perilous for scholars to assume that once an ebook is published it will always remain available.”

Sadly it seems this has blanked the keyword-search ability, inside the book. My old Kindle 3 ebook of Morton can still be keyword searched. The same book on my Kindle Fire HD cannot be searched. I suspect this is because the Kindle Fire HD is set to auto-update a book to the latest edition, and the Kindle 3 isn’t. This then illustrates one of the perils of ebooks over paper books.

Inside the Ladd Observatory, in colour

25 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Astronomy, Historical context, Lovecraftian places, Picture postals

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“The late Prof. Upton of Brown, a friend of the family, gave me the freedom of the college observatory, (Ladd Observatory) & I came & went there at will on my bicycle. Ladd Observatory tops a considerable eminence about a mile from the house. I used to walk up Doyle Avenue hill with my wheel, but when returning would have a glorious coast down it. So constant were my observations, that my neck became affected by the strain of peering at a difficult angle. It gave me much pain, & resulted in a permanent curvature perceptible today to a close observer. My body has ever been unequal to the demands of an active career. […] I no more visit the Ladd Observatory or various other attractions of Brown University. Once I expected to utilise them as a regularly entered student, & some day perhaps control some of them as a faculty member.” — Letter to Kleiner, 16th November 1916.

[During my time at Ladd] “I had a chance to see all the standard modern equipment of an observatory (including a 12” telescope) in action, and read endlessly in the observatory library. The professors and their humbler assistant — an affable little Cockney from England named John Edwards — often helped me pick up equipment, and Edwards made me some magnificent photographic lantern-slides (from illustrations in books) which I used in giving illustrated astronomical lectures before clubs.” — Letter to Duane Rimel, 29th March 1934. (My emphasis)

I’ve newly colourised two interior pictures, one showing the Observatory library in which the young Lovecraft spent so much time:

“As a boy I used to haunt the Ladd Observatory of Brown University — looking through the 12″ refractor now & then, reading the books in the library, & probably making an unmitigated nuisance of myself through my incessant questioning of everybody present. Curiously enough, the assistant there was one of your grandfather’s humbler compatriots — a Cornishman named John Edwards, whose capacity for mis-placing h’s was limitless. Scarcely less limitless was his mechanical skill, & in his infinite kindness he fixed me up all sorts of devices (a long-focus celestial camera, a set of photographic lantern slides, a diagonal eyepiece for my telescope, etc. etc.) at no more than cost price. I still have the slides somewhere — as well as lunar & other photographs I took with the camera. He is dead now — as is Prof. Upton, the director in those days [Winslow Upton], our acquaintance with whom gave me my passport to that dark-domed enchanted castle. My third victim there — Associate Prof. Slocum — is now head of the observatory at Wesleyan U. in Middletown, Conn. I would have carried astronomy further but for the mathematics — but I hadn’t quite the right stuff in me.” — Letter to Jonquil Leiber, 29th November 1936.

He continued to bicycle until the summer of 1913 (age 22) long after most other boys of Providence would have had given it up (to cycle after about age 18 was deemed ‘not the done thing’). So presumably from 1913 to 1918 he walked to the Observatory or took a trolley car.

There was a biography of Lovecraft’s Ladd mentor Winslow Upton, An Earth-bound Astronomer: Winslow Upton, A Memoir (1971), and his “A Visit to Kilauea” (1883) is online. Kilauea is the active volcano on Hawaii, and the model reed-boat seen in the picture above is likely both a souvenir of the trip (ultimately to observe an eclipse, some 1000 miles to the south) and a conversation-starter with shy students. Or possibly it was from a sabbatical in Peru. As well as being an astronomer Upton had also been interested enough in storms in the 1880s to publish two papers, “An investigation of cyclonic phenomena in New England” (1887) and “The storm of March 11-14, 1888” (1888), which might perhaps interest those looking for a ‘hook’ for a Mythos story.

Lovecraft’s recall of John Edwards as a Cockney (working-class Londoner) is perhaps more to be trusted than the late recollection that Edwards was a Cornishman. However, a highly intelligent lad from remote and rural Cornwall might soon find himself in London, circa 1865 or thereabouts, and picking up the Cockney speech from the local lads. Which could mean that both were true.

In the mid 1930s some in fantasy and science fiction fandom heard rumours that Lovecraft had once been the director of the Providence Observatory. He had to write to The Phantagraph (Nov-Dec 1935) fanzine to correct the misapprehension…

“Your statement that I was once director of the Providence Observatory flabbergasted me a bit, insomuch as there has never been any ‘Providence Observatory’! Then after a moment, it dawned on me that you must have seen one of my kid publications of 30 or more years ago — when I used to call my own small telescope and other astronomical apparatus ‘THE PROVIDENCE OBSERVATORY’ and publish (by hectograph or typewriter) important looking ‘bulletins’ and ‘annuals’. Thus do the exaggerations of youth bear misleading fruit in old age.”

He refers to his boyhood ‘astronomy newspapers’, mostly made when a preteen, containing his own observations from the rooftop of his house…

“The roof of 598 Engelstrasse [Angel St.] is approximately flat, and in the days of my youth I had a set of meteorological instruments there. Hither I would sometimes hoist my telescope, and observe the sky from that point of relative proximity to it. The horizon is fair, but not ideal. One can see the glint of the Seekonk through the foliage of Blackstone Park, and the opposite bank is quite clearly defined. With a terrestrial eyepiece of fifty diameters on my telescope, I can see some of the farms in the heart of East Providence, and even Seekonk, Mass., across the river. One in particular delights me — a typical bit of ancient agrestick New England with eighteenth century farmhouse, old-fashion’d garden, and even archaic well and well-sweep—all this bit of primitive antiquity visible from a roof in the prosaic modern town!! […] A good telescope, or even a binocular glass, is a great pleasure when one has a wide vista. I am fortunate in having an almost ideal battery of optical aids, including a Warner and Swasey — hell, no, I mean Bausch and Lomb—prism binocular which cost me $55.00 about twelve years ago. Ah, them golden days when I didn’t have to worry about what I spent! I’d like to see meself buying a $55.00 plaything today!!!” — Letter to the Gallomo, 30th September 1919.

Toward the end of this life in the summer of 1936, ill and in a generally weak condition, Lovecraft returned to the Ladd telescope…

“Had an interesting view of Peltier’s Comet on July 22 at the Ladd Observatory — through the 12″ refractor. The object shewed a small disc with a hazy, fan-like tail.”

Katharsisdrill’s CC Lovecraft art

24 Monday Dec 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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Scandinavian artist Katharsisdrill kindly places his work under full Creative Commons Attribution. Attribute uses to Katharsisdrill and mention “Made with Krita“.

* A Nordic-style Christmas Card and ‘Christmas Card from R’lyeh’…

* Abdul Alhazred…

* Nyarlathotep…

* Those in search of interior ornaments for their book will also like his Squid mandalas, and the Kraken dividers, under the same licence.

These can be all reworked, with colouring etc, and commercially used on book covers and suchlike. You just need to credit Katharsisdrill and mention he uses the excellent free open source Krita 4.x software.

He also does an episodic Mockman / Corben-style comic strip, which is also at his blog. Some pages of which are ‘not safe for work’. I’d also warn that he uses a deeply unintuitive blogging system, on the Danish social site datataffel.dk, and perusing and finding links to the individual posts and full-size images is not at all easy. It’s not quite as bad as Tumblr, but nearly.

Masterplots in PDF on Archive.org

23 Sunday Dec 2018

Posted by in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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Frank N. Magill’s 1964 15-volume Masterplots is now partially at Archive.org, in open public PDF download. It offers short and precise point-by-point plot summaries of great works, for use by writers needing ideas, for scholars needing a reliable recap, and for the general reader in search of worthy reading.

The series seems likely to be of interest to writers who read my blog, especially as many of the works summarised are now in the public domain. Their plots are thus available to be directly re-worked in new genre-shifted forms and formats. The summaries are far superior to those to be found on the likes of Wikipedia, which often have strong political biases and omissions or are simply inadequate.

15 volume Masterplots:

Masterplots Vol. 5 — Essa-Grea.

Masterplots Vol. 7 — Huon-Last.

Masterplots Vol. 13 — Scho-Sunk.

Masterplots Vol. 14 — Supp-Unfo.

Masterplots Vol. 15 — U.S.A.-Zule.

Archive.org also appears to have the missing volumes available for Archive.org members to ‘digitally borrow’. Although the books usually have poor metadata, often extending even to the titles, which can make it difficult to work out which volumes they are without actually going through and laboriously borrowing each one.

Digest edition (?):

* Masterpieces Of World Literature In Digest Form. This appears to be a one-volume A-Z digest of Masterplots?

Series Two:

Added 500 more plots, of works which had been “crowded off” the original list of 1,000 or so, with older and antique works being here much more noticeable…

* Masterpieces Of World Literature In Digest Form: Second Series — A-Lay. (This is also at Hathi in public flipbook form and Hathi also has the second ‘Laz-Z’ volume in the same format).

Series Three:

Added an additional wealth of world literature including notable essays, biography and autobiography, some poetry, and key works of Chinese and Japanese literature. Here the format necessarily often becomes the concise essay-review…

* Masterpieces Of World Literature In Digest Form, Third Series.

Lovecraft’s 2018: a year in brief review

22 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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Lovecraft’s 2018: a year in brief review:

* In 2018 many translations were either seriously underway or newly published in Europe. These including S.T. Joshi’s monumental biography I Am Providence as Je Suis Providence in France (due in 2019, with early advance PDFs out now for subscribers), and Lovecraft: Leben und Werk in Germany (the second and final part of which is due in early 2019). Cthulhu kalder: Fortaellinger 1926-1928 gave Danes the Lovecraft stories in their native Danish. Teoria dell’orrore [The Theory of Horror] gave Italians writings by Lovecraft on the theory of horror and the weird. A fine edition of Lovecraft’s selected poems appeared in Polish, and the best of his essays was published in Spanish as Confesiones de un incredulo: y otros ensayos escogidos. Joshi’s book collection Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft appeared in Italian as Contro la religione. The Hungarian Lovecraft Society is currently well into translating Lord of a Visible World, Lovecraft’s ‘autobiography in letters’.

* Leading Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi published his usual small mountain of new books, including: his critical survey 21st-Century Horror: Weird Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium as an affordable Kindle ebook (in the face of leftist threats of a boycott of any publisher who dared publish it); his very entertaining and pithy What Is Anything? Memoirs of a Life in Lovecraft; and the fourth edition of Lovecraft’s Library: A Catalogue (end Dec 2017). Joshi’s older H.P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West, a clear exposition and study of Lovecraft’s philosophical and political thinking and development, also became usefully available on Amazon in 2018 as a budget ebook. The chunky collection of Lovecraft’s letters, Letters to Maurice W. Moe and Others, was published in print and includes the Dwyer letters and Samuel Loveman material. The journal Lovecraft Annual launched a strong new issue, with Joshi at the helm as usual. The S. T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship in H. P. Lovecraft opened for 2019 applicants.

* The usual scholarly work proceeded at all levels, from student dissertations to the Lovecraft Annual #12, through to expensive $110 essay collections destined for academic libraries and elite paywalled research databases. Strong works on Lovecraft’s historical context appeared, such as the excellent business-history book Secret Origins of Weird Tales which looked at the early years of the title, and the academic survey collection Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939. A book seemingly well-suited to the undergraduate classroom appeared from McFarland, H.P. Lovecraft: Selected Works, Critical Perspectives and Interviews on His Influence. The Journal of Geek Studies was an especially notable appearance among open journals, and the open Brumal: Research Journal on the Fantastic called for contributions to a future “monographic issue on The Fantastic in Lovecraft’s Universe”.

* Several ebooks vanished from Amazon in the summer, such as Lovecraft’s Letters to James F. Morton, and H.P. Lovecraft: New England Decadent. So did the Arthur C. Clarke biography, which is of interest re: the early Lovecraft influence. The Morton letters later returned to Amazon at the end of the year, but such vanishings suggest it is perilous for scholars to assume that once an ebook is published it will always remain available.

* A two-day symposium on Lovecraft was held in January 2018 at Jean Monnet University, Saint-Etienne, France. A major Spanish cultural and literary event, the 10th Algeciras Fantastika, was a Lovecraft themed special. A low-key Stockholm H.P. Lovecraft Festival appears to have been held in Sweden. Planning appears to have proceeded for NecronomiCon 2019, and some initial publicity and art was released.

* The venerable Robert M. Price robustly re-booted his role as Crypt of Cthulhu editor, producing three substantial new issues in 2018. The new Crypt stuck to the tried and tested formula by mixing fiction with a wealth of highly informed new scholarship from independent scholars. Price also supervised a raft of republications as PDF downloads, and most of the Crypt back-issues are now available as ebooks at the Necronomicon Press website. However, Price’s popular The Lovecraft Geek podcast went silent in early summer 2018.

* The large Hevelin Collection of fanzines opened up for public online transcription. Lots of nice scanned material turned up on Archive.org, for free, including good 1920s Weird Tales and some Lovecraft Studies scans. Brown University continued to scan and place online its wealth of Lovecraft archival material.

* Providence’s new life-sized Lovecraft statue was completed in and looks great, and is presumably now wending its weary way through the bureaucratic elements of the site permits and installation procedures in the city. Thanks to the work of Dave Goudsward, ‘Tryout’ Smith — an Amateur Journalism friend and publisher of Lovecraft — finally had a grave marker/headstone along with a dedication event in his native Haverhill.

* Lovecraft himself did well in comics this year with two very high-quality graphic-novel biographies in paper and ebook, He Who Wrote in the Darkness and Une nuit avec Lovecraft, which joined 2017’s similar Some Notes on a Nonentity: The Life of H.P. Lovecraft. There were also more general adaptations of the fiction to comics, perhaps the most notable being Maroto’s Lovecraft: The Myth of Cthulhu.

* The usual wealth of 2D visual art and sculpture continued to be produced, and might in future usefully be collected in a curated “Best Lovecraft Art of 2019” POD/ebook. Despite the availability of such art the standards of book cover design continued to decline, often to dismal levels, with notable exceptions among the stylish Italians.

* A major orchestral work by Guillaume Connesson premiered in Germany as “The Cities of Lovecraft” (aka “Les Cites de Lovecraft”, aka “Les Trois Cites de Lovecraft”) and was broadcast by the National German Radio service (NDR). A strong series of blog articles explored “The Music of Harold Farnese”, an early classical composer for Lovecraft. In rock music 2018 was judged an outstanding year for the Lovecraft-infused ‘death metal’ genre of heavy metal, with the leading album being “The Scythe Of Cosmic Chaos” by Sulphur Aeon. This album was ranked many reviewers as one of the best ever produced by the sub-genre, and it forms an extended evocation of Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark”.

* Theatre and radio-theatre continued to be a small but productive niche for Lovecraft adaptations, and the London Lovecraft Festival was again staged. In 2018 some biographical material emerged, with stage or radio dramas of Lovecraft-and-Sonia being either published (Howard, Mon Amour) or broadcast, and S.T. Joshi also announced he is working on a Sonia screenplay titled The Lovecrafts.

* Quality audiobooks of Lovecraft’s work continued to become available, including previously unavailable items such as good readings of the collaborations and revisions. It now seems to be quite fashionable for a new crop of young Generation Z fans to do an impromptu ‘reading aloud of a Lovecraft story’ for posting on YouTube.

* Two members of Lovecraft’s circle did well in terms of high-end cinema. The long-awaited feature documentary Clark Ashton Smith: The Emperor of Dreams was released on DVD and streaming services, and has been well reviewed. The acclaimed Robert E. Howard biopic The Whole Wide World was released on a basic DVD, albeit in cut form with a couple of scenes missing including one in which Lovecraft is discussed. In the big-budget productions, Lovecraft’s ideas continued to feed in to many movies and some TV, in either acknowledged or unacknowledged ways. The popular Aquaman was probably the Hollywood movie that put ‘Lovecraftian horror’ on the screen most expensively in visual terms in 2018, albeit within the framework of a great deal of fun absurdity and stock pulp heroics. There was also a strong rumour, late in the year, of a major future production in 2019 of “The Colour Out of Space” and it was said that the major actor Nicolas Cage had signed on for the project. Independent producers continued to make enough new indie films to feed the annual H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.

* There was a lot of activity in games, as usual, in their various forms: digital, tabletop RPGs and card games. The most notable release was the big-budget Call of Cthulhu videogame which offers players a fairly faithful interactive 3D mystery-horror visit to what is effectively Innsmouth. The game was produced under a Chaosium licence, and appears to have landed fairly well and its retail reception was not ‘thrown off’ too much by the usual haters.

* And of course, the return of the Tentaclii blog, after highly productive sojourns with H.G. Wells, Tolkien, and the Gawain-poet. On a daily posting schedule, new discoveries have so far included an early un-noticed Lovecraft appearance in fiction in Long’s “The Black Druid”, and the probable reason for Wright’s crucial rejection of “Cool Air”, plus more new biographical details about Lovecraft’s circle and correspondents.

Onward to 2019!

Foxx’s London Overgrown

22 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by in Films & trailers, Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc.

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Here’s a calming electronic-orchestral neo-romantic album which some readers may care to explore in the hectic run-up to Christmas and the New Year, London Overgrown by John Foxx (2015, 52 mins). It’s one of his best ambients, and is free in full and ad-free via an ordered YouTube playlist.

Foxx is solo and purely instrumental here and he revisits the mood — though not the rapid electro-pulses and singing — of his early classic post-Ultravox album The Garden. Those who know Eno’s best ambient and the instrumentals on early albums — such as Before and After Science and Another Green World — may hear small homages and nods to the master on several tracks in the first half of the album. In the second half it becomes even more eerily becalmed and frankly almost dull in places, but in a rather British ‘sublimely beautifully decay’ way. The album has a rather downbeat trailing-off ending, and some listeners may like to segway the final track into something similar but a bit more upbeat from Foxx, perhaps suggesting a return or awakening from dreamland wanderings.

* Foxx’s sleevenotes for London Overgrown.

* Some booklet pictures for London Overgrown.

* My anthology London Reimagined: an anthology of visions of the future city, which you may care to dip into while listening.

* Amazon download for London Overgrown, with better quality audio than on YouTube.

The album’s cover suggest the post-apocalyptic, something I’m not a great fan of. Though this isn’t part of the tiresomely relentless wave of post-apocalyptic science-fiction. In which an old-school genre wild west story gets retooled with a thin sci-fi veneer, punky haircuts and some sub-Riddley Walker slang, and an uber-violent gang of Bad Men who menace a peaceful enclave of tofu-knitting eco-hippies. Similarly I have little time for the escapist neo-primitivist future-fantasies of ‘total re-wilding’, to be found among both the anarchist eco-left and in certain theoretical grouplets of the continental far-right, and which sometimes also feed into science-fiction.

But in the case of Foxx’s London Overgrown album we have something different, I think, and with different intellectual roots. His is a poetic idea of wandering, walking in an abandoned and partially overgrown empty city, taking in the sublime sunset vistas and pondering the garden-clad architecture of a lost civilisation. Psychogeography, if you like, but without the tired old leftist politics it’s often been freighted with by the London school.

Such exploration was of course a theme that Lovecraft explored in both his night-walks and his fiction, and he did so on the back of the many very real archaeological discoveries of ruined cities in the 1870s-1930s — think, for instance, of his Nameless City, Mountains of Madness, Kadath, and other works. Lovecraft would have made a fine pith-helmeted archaeological explorer, I think, had his constitution been more robust. He would have revelled in the heat involved in somewhere like Mexico, then the ‘hot ticket’ to career success for Americans such as his friend Barlow. Still, at least he paced the ancient cities in his imagination and dreams, to our great benefit.

Thus, though Foxx’s album cover montage of St. Paul’s dome implies that the album is a projection into ‘a future ruined’, it seems to me more of a nostalgic recovery in music of a Richard Jefferies (Wild England) / H.G. Wells (Time Machine) vision of an overgrown London. Foxx’s album arises from the poetic response to the real ruined cities that were encountered in the days of Empire. In which explorers entered the silent empty ruins of great cities unseen for great ages, and there pondered and wove poetry on the inevitable fading away of all Empires. As such the album seems an echo of a real lived moment in cultural time, rather than a future-fantasy.

As Foxx states in his sleeve-notes, his music also evokes another more recent reality — the way he’s lived through something comparable, namely the 1974-2014 de-industrialisation and restoration of those parts of our English landscapes that had been made primarily by the industries of steel, coal, and heavy manufacturing. Restoration sometimes by heroic but unsung human reclamation works, sometimes by natural over-growing aided by the carbon-fertilisation effect, often a bit of both. Again, this has been a lived reality, as cities such as Stoke-on-Trent — once the most polluted in Europe — really have changed over 40 years from industrial wasteland to relative verdancy. And done so at such a slow pace that the mental preconceptions of their car-driving residents (who usually only see the place from a few routinely-travelled grotty main roads) have yet to catch up with the changed realities and newly verdant terrains which lie behind the houses and the tawdry store-fronts. To coin a psychogeographic phrase: “Behind the storefront, the forest!”