09 Thursday Jan 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
From the music press, news that…
Dark ambient label Cryo Chamber are releasing a two-hour dark soundscape album recorded by over 20 ambient artists to pay tribute to H.P. Lovecraft. […] The label is keen to stress [the album] is not a compilation, rather a collaboration — and a huge undertaking.
Casey Douglass has a review.
08 Wednesday Jan 2020
Posted in Historical context, Podcasts etc.
The excellent in-depth podcast EconTalk sprang a Christmas surprise. 90 minutes with Joe Posnanski on the Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini…
Journalist and author Joe Posnanski talks about his book, The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Posnanski explores the enduring fame of Houdini who remains an iconic cultural figure almost a century after his death. Topics discussed include the nature of celebrity, the nature of ambition, parenting, magic, and the use of public relations to create and sustain reputation and celebrity.
07 Tuesday Jan 2020
Posted in Podcasts etc.
The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast Archive. A combined 7Gb, on a new .torrent at Archive.org.
07 Tuesday Jan 2020
Posted in Odd scratchings, REH
A new post from Robert E. Howard Days gives an early outline of the structure of Howard Days 2020. Sadly there’s no British delegation set to fly a classic 1930s airship across the Atlantic and land it in a field next to REH’s house, but apart from that it looks excellent.
07 Tuesday Jan 2020
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Odd scratchings, REH
The Library of America selected a prime “R.E. Howard writes Lovecraft” story as their Free Story of the Week: “The Black Stone”. At the end of 2019 it proved to be at #5 in their end-of-year tally of their most popular stories.
Here it is in Weird Tales for November 1931.
The cover of this issue is also interesting. C.C. Senf provides a bristling black kittee that must have delighted the cat-loving Lovecraft when he saw the picture.
06 Monday Jan 2020
Posted in Podcasts etc.
Another item I missed in the Christmas ker-fluffle. Episode 3 of the new run of The Lovecraft Geek podcast with the venerable Robert M. Price, which he released just before Christmas 2019.
He refers to Lovecraft’s massive daily output of the written word as “graphomania”, a rare word I don’t think I’d encountered before and was thus pleased to learn. There’s also “typomania”, which I guess is the correct modern keyboarding form today, though it wouldn’t apply to Lovecraft since he deeply disliked typing. Also mentioned in the podcast is a relatively-soon re-publication of an old out-of-print Starmont critical book on the Lin Carter mythos and other works (Lin Carter: a Look Behind His Imaginary Worlds, Starmont Studies in Literary Criticism, No. 36), and the publication of the long-unpublished Annotated Lovecraft.
05 Sunday Jan 2020
Posted in Scholarly works
The New England Regional Fellowship Consortium has its 2020 application deadline approaching, and there are also a couple of others…
NERFC grants for new archival and museum research into regional topics including… “literature, history and art history, anthropology, oceanography”. Lovecraft research could potentially encompass several such areas.
04 Saturday Jan 2020
Posted in Odd scratchings
Released a few days ago, the new Official Roy Thomas Database of characters, concepts and creations.
03 Friday Jan 2020
Posted in Podcasts etc., Unnamable
Sir Alec Guinness reads H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”, with a little help from some A.I. machine-learning speech-synthesis.
Guinness was the superlative British actor who had a career that stretched from early b&w screen gems such as The Card and The Man in The White Suit, through to playing Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars.
02 Thursday Jan 2020
Posted in Odd scratchings
Wondering what’s in the public domain from 1924? The mainstream media seem to be doing a very poor job of covering the matter this year, but I had a post back in the summer that looked into it in depth for the USA and elsewhere. As for Lovecraft…
for Lovecraft, 1924 brought publication of […] the notorious Eddy necrophilia collaboration “The Loved Dead”; and the ghost-written Houdini tale “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”.
This raises the question of if the Eddy estate can any longer prevent “The Loved Dead” (Weird Tales, May/July 1924) from appearing in U.S. collections of Lovecraft’s ghost-writing collaborations.
I also imagine the tale would, with a few additions and some tweaking, provide someone with an over-the-top comics adaptation in 2020.
02 Thursday Jan 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
I’m late in getting to the very trippy hippy-tastic poster for the release of the movie of Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space. The poster slipped out and got lost in the razzle-dazzle of the run-up to Christmas. The movie’s cinema release is on 24th January in the USA, so you should have about a month or so to catch it. Then the 4k Blu-ray and DVD is due a month later on 24th February 2020.
02 Thursday Jan 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
“Wrightson Collector: A collection of ALL things Bernie Wrightson”. A dedicated website with a large gallery, including fanzines and small magazines with photos of interior pages with art.
