S. T. Joshi has a new blog post. He’s visited ‘Clark Ashton Smith country’ in sunny California, and has photos…

“we made an exhaustive tour of the CAS sites”.

One of the commemorative plaques for Clark Ashton Smith uses a word I had not heard used before… “isolationist” (i.e., a recluse)”. It’s certainly not a British word, used in that context. Though I had known it from commentators and scholars of American history and foreign policy, where it’s used to encapsulate a national policy stance.

A 1982 book on the poet Wordsworth noted… “It was the thought of writing The Recluse that supported Wordsworth in his isolationist position.” One can find the word in Writers Workshop (1961), talking of poets who ‘live what they believe’ and thus… “they are truly isolationist, recluse”. Further back it’s found in The American Journal of Individual Psychology (1953)… “The isolationist belongs here [in this category], the hermit, the recluse”. That’s the earliest I can find it used in that sense, and my feeling is it probably a new-coined meaning which emerged from psychology or psychological ‘writing about writers’, shortly after the war, rather than from some pre-1945 religious tradition of hermitage.

Joshi’s new blog post also notes a new book…

The PS Book of Fantastic Fictioneers is finally close to publication by PS Publishing in the UK. This immense two-volume compilation presents a series of essays on notable authors of weird and speculative fiction (including several filmmakers and contributors to other media), all lavishly illustrated with interesting documents and other items. I contributed four or five essays. This project has long been in the works, and I am gratified to see it finally appear.