Monthly Archives: December 2018

Call for papers: Brumal’s ideology issue

15 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by in Scholarly works

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The Spanish journal Brumal has a new call for papers on ‘the fantastic and ideologies’. Deadline 15th June 2019.

The call makes for a very difficult read in English. So I had a quick go at making it comprehensible, as well as far less verbose…

[Original]

Academics often assume that genre content is an industrial product, made to be a fleeting entertainment for juvenile minds. Another common assumption is that artists who use imagination in the form of ‘the fantastic’ are mere escapists, and that these artists and their audiences are to be condemned for seriously betraying their expected ideological commitments. While several outstanding works try to identify ideologies in the fantastic, we do not yet have a toolset which allows a meaningful dialogue between researchers. This is unfortunate, given i) the current immense popularity and range of ‘the fantastic’ and ii) the great power that media is alleged to have to infuse ideologies into young minds. Thus we call for papers on themes such as:

* The ideological critique of fantastic motifs.

* Conceptualization of values by means of fantastic metaphors.

* Comparison of ideological elements in fantastic fiction that belong to different literary systems.

* Outward expressions of particular ideologies in fantastic works: nationalism, liberalism, feminism, anarchism, socialism, etc.

* Authorship of fantastic texts and ideological construction.

Cephalopods of the Multiverse

15 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by in Censorship, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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As the new Aquaman movie apparently romps to worldwide success, the oceanic tentacular becomes even more alluring. What better time for a comprehensive survey of the tentacular aspects of the popular game Magic the Gathering. It’s newly published in the Journal of Geek Studies as “Cephalopods of the Multiverse” by Mark A. Carnall, curator at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

On Aquaman, I’ve not seen it yet but it apparently throws DC’s usual preachy ‘grimness and angst’ overboard, in favour of a well-made fun adventure with epic CG sets and lively CG sea-monsters with Lovecraftian tendencies. And let’s face it, that’s really all we want from most superhero movies. It’s been lightly censored for gore, in UK cinemas, so as to get a 12A rating.

Where No Fear Was: A Book About Fear

14 Friday Dec 2018

Posted by in Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc.

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New on Librixov in free chaptered audiobook, A. C. Benson’s Where No Fear Was: A Book About Fear (1914).

Benson was the Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. A writer of short stories, including what are said to be ghost stories in the English tradition and the Edwardian style. An occasional translator of the macabre into English. A poet and a writer of at a least one popular song lyric. He published his diaries in 1926.

Partial contents listing.

His 1914 book on fear was admired by the likes of Wilfred Owen, who read it while recovering in a bleak northern war hospital in 1917. One assumes that Lovecraft perused the book at some point, out of professional interest. Although it’s not listed in the edition of Lovecraft’s Library that I have access to. He would almost certainly have a read at least one review of it, in the likes of The Spectator.

Lovecraft was aware in passing of Benson’s essays, since he noted them in the United Amateur in July 1917 while profiling another amateur…

“Apart from fiction, Miss Barnhart is fond of books on travel and of light essays such as those of Mark Twain, Stevenson, and Arthur Benson.”

If he had read these same essays is another matter. But he did read his equally prolific brother, E.F. Benson, who also wrote rather more impressive ghost and horror stories among much else. Lovecraft read and admired these stories, noting Benson’s work in his “Weird Story Plots” work-book. He also mentioned Benson in his survey “Supernatural Horror in Literature”.

MN90: Wandrei

12 Wednesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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MN90 does tiny blipticles on Minnesota history, spoken audio micro-articles in 90 seconds as downloadable MP3 files, with music and FX. One of their latest is “Pen Pals with H.P. Lovecraft”…

In 1926, Donald Wandrei was a 19-year-old university student when he decided to write a fan letter to H.P. Lovecraft. Britt Aamodt has an account of Wandrei’s summer hitchhike trip to visit the horror writer and how that friendship led Wandrei, years later, to found Arkham House to publish and preserve Lovecraft’s fiction.”

I like the idea, but they probably need to get MN90’s uploaded to YouTube as videos with static pictures. Then people can easily make and share their own playlist compilations of the episodes. 90 seconds seems too short, judging by this Wandrei release. I’d say 3 minutes would be a better format.

Incidentally I’m pleased to see the Hevelin Fanzine Collection appears to have switched from tiling their fanzine page-images, switching over to big static single page scans. Tiling is no protection for big public domain images, as there’s a fairly easy capture/re-assembly workflow. But my guess would be that the apparent changes at Hevelin’s transcription portal are to accommodate transcribers who want to download and OCR. OCR can increasingly be machine-learning trained to work with awkward things such as hand-lettered comic books and also, one assumes, the stencil-punched and ink-leaked words on old Gestetner duplicated fanzine pages. But the change also has the effect of making it easier to extract, clean and fix fannish artwork… such as this from Virgil Partch in The Acolyte for Winter 1945, depicting Donald Wandrei in uniform…

Picture: Virgil Partch sketch of Donald Wandrei in The Acolyte for Winter 1945. Newly extracted and cleaned.

The Secret of The Stone Frog

11 Tuesday Dec 2018

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A Lovecraftian interlude in the children’s 80-page graphic novel The Secret of The Stone Frog, a book in which 7-9 year-old advanced or assisted readers get a very palatable and gentle lead-in to a later sampling of Spirited Away, Alice in Wonderland, and even H.P. Lovecraft (the end of “The Festival”)…

Secret of The Stone Frog was the debut hand-drawn book by David Nytra of Canada, in 2012. I liked the art and layouts but wasn’t overly keen on the main dialogue lettering, which often seemed too computerised for my taste. If you’re going to the trouble of hand-drawing everything, why spoil the effect with digital lettering? But I guess school library sales are important at this end of the publishing market, and librarians probably assume they need ‘lettering clarity’ for ease of reading by their less able patrons. Currently the book is only available in paper.

It would be a fine Christmas stocking filler for intelligent and imaginative 7-9 year olds. If the primary dialogue were to be re-lettered, the whole book colourised in a soft watercolour underlay, and a better cover added, then it would probably sell nicely as a Kindle ebook.

Nytra took the same characters on a similar but fantasy medieval-themed 120-page dreamlands outing in 2015, Windmill Dragons, but I haven’t seen that one.

Lovecraft 3D review

11 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by in 3D, Lovecraftian arts

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A preview of a new review of the “H.P. Lovecraft 3D” character from Meshbox, currently sold for $12.95 at their Miyre store with royalty-free commercial use for renders (in Poser 11).

My short-but-detailed technical test-review will appear in the next issue of the free monthly Digital Art Live magazine (December 2018, #35). Sign up to the mailing-list to be emailed a link to your free PDF copy, as soon as the issue is released.

New Book: Italian Sword & Sorcery

10 Monday Dec 2018

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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A new Kindle ebook of 239 pages, just published, surveys Italian Sword & Sorcery: La via Italiana all’heroic fantasy. It’s in Italian, and appears to be from independent scholars. Here’s the blurb translated and tweaked…

Francesco La Manno, aided by Annarita Guarnieri, aims to outline the boundaries of sword and sorcery. The lead essay makes an analysis of the core constituent elements of sword and sorcery. It does this firstly by an examination of the main characters of heroic fantasy as crafted by the Master of Cross Plains (Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn and James Allison); then through a survey of the cycles of Clark Ashton Smith (Hyperborea, Poseidonis, Averoigne and Zothique) and Thongor of Lemuria by Lin Carter; then a look at some recent commercialisations of the genre. Finally, there is a survey of ‘the new heroic Mediterranean fantasy’ and its [bishops = authors and curators?]. The volume also contains essays by Adriano Monti Buzzetti, Gianfranco de Turris, Mario Polia and Paolo Paron.

Added to Open Lovecraft

10 Monday Dec 2018

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, New books, REH, Scholarly works

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Added to Open Lovecraft…

* Philip Emery, “Revivifying the Ur-text: a reconstruction of sword-&-sorcery as a literary form”, PhD thesis at Loughborough University, UK, 2018. (The author is a North Staffordshire writer, of several horror novels. Here he asks if, given this literary genre’s relative neglect in recent decades, it is possible to identify the genre’s core characteristics and then use these “to create a work that realizes the form’s potential to exist as literature”. Explores the structural development of the Ur-genre as it emerged in the stories of R.E. Howard (influenced by Lovecraft in terms of the horror elements), then surveys de Camp’s later contributions and distortions, and generally seeks to identify the “pristine elements” at the core of the genre’s once-flourishing form which are still available to creative writers).

On Abe this week

10 Monday Dec 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings

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New on AbeBooks this week…

* W. Paul Cook, H. P. Lovecraft: A Portrait. With an essay on Cook himself.

* Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., H. P. Lovecraft: His Life, His Work. With Chronology of the Life, as known in the late 1970s.

* An Archive of Mailings from the ‘Necronomicon”, the Howard Phillips Lovecraft Amateur Press Association.

* “At the Mountains of Madness” in Astounding Stories, February-April 1936.