15 Saturday Feb 2020
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
Deutsche Lovecraft Gesellschaft, the German Lovecraft forum, brings news of Lovecrafter Nr.6, December 2019. The main article, in German, is “From Sauk City to Arkham – 80 years of Arkham House”.
15 Saturday Feb 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
I’d overlooked a book in summer 2019, Shapeshifters: A History. A short, but seemingly sound, historical survey of this cultural phenomenon. There appear to be no journal reviews of it, but then these days journal editors are increasingly refusing to review titles not published by a university or prestige press.
But looking for such a review led me to discover a new journal I wasn’t aware of, Gramarye: The Journal of the Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction from the University of Chichester in the south of England.
It has produced 16 issues so far, balancing articles with a healthy crop of reviews.
The latest Gramarye is issue 16 and has “In Search of Jenny Greenteeth” by Simon Young and “‘A Fairy, or Else an Insect’: Traditions at Fairy Wells” by Jeremy Harte, both topics on which I mused a couple of years ago (“On Jenny Green-teeth”, “‘Lady Wells’ in the High Peak”, “Mothlach”, and “On The Butts, Baggins, and Butterflies”). The same issue also has the review of Shapeshifters: A History.
As such I’m inclined to get No.16, but… it’s not on Amazon in either ebook or paper. It’s available from the university, but instead of a simple PayPal connection the eager buyer goes to one of those annoying clunky “sign-up before you can buy” shopping-carts. Which it appears only takes credit-cards. Then, a departmental assistant manually emails you the purchased PDFs. It’s not ideal.
It’s a pity that departmental journals are not also assigned an ‘impact rating’, in the same manner as a dept’s scholarly article-output. Such a official rating (which affects their taxpayer income) might chivvy up the publicity and distribution for such journals, and see a few summer interns or apprentices assigned to tasks such as getting them all on Amazon as ebooks. But of course the ideal in terms of ‘impact’ would be a big crowd-funder which would ‘buy out’ all the back-issues and make them open access, and then for a small legacy or bequest to ensure the journal continues to be open access.
Anyway, nothing very ‘Lovecraft’ except tangentially in some of the reviews. But other items of interest to me in other issues of Gramarye:
#14. ‘From Ogre to Woodlouse: A Journey through Names’, Jeremy Harte. [Presumably on the noted Gawain word ‘woodwose’].
#13. ‘Tolkien’s style’, Colin Manlove.
#6. ‘The American Fantasy Tradition’, Tom Shippey.
Shippey has always been a bit sniffy about Howard’s Conan, so it would be interesting to see his take on that aspect of fantasy and its place in the American tradition.
A two-year subscription to the PDF version of Gramarye is £20, about $26. The paper edition is not much more. It appears you can’t back-date a subscription and have it start from, say, #13.
14 Friday Feb 2020
Posted in Scholarly works
Marzaat is currently undertaking an issue-by-issue description and review of Sargasso: The Journal of William Hope Hodgson Studies, and has reached #2…
14 Friday Feb 2020
Posted in Historical context, Picture postals
I can’t imagine that Lovecraft-the-Roman never once sought out this fine bronze statue of ‘Cesare Augusto’ on the Brown University campus.
The statue stood in front of Rhode Island Hall, an exact replica of an ancient statue of Caesar Augustus in Rome. It was installed at Brown in 1906, a gift from M. B. I. Goddard, and by the 1920s and 30s the statue’s surface and pedestal would likely have become somewhat softened in tone by natural weathering.
Standing before it, many aspects of the man would have flashed in Lovecraft’s mind. Not the least of which would be that here was monument to a fellow writer…
… it would pay to study other languages … Even Latin literature can be known pretty well through good English renderings of Caesar, Cicero, [etc, though] not all of them [to be read] complete, of course, but in balanced rations as recommended.
Encyclopedia Brunoniana reveals that after 1915 the Hall housed the Philosophy Department on the first floor and the Geology Department on the ground floor and in the basement. One then wonders if a visit to Providence by the geologist Morton might once have enabled Lovecraft to go inside the building with him, and be given a tour of the Geology dept.? Thus also admiring the statue on the way in and out. The statue stood there until 1952.
Predictably, toxic leftists are now demanding it be removed from the campus.
14 Friday Feb 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
New to me, a regular scholarly journal on Fantasy Art and Studies, which has already reached seven issues. Mostly in French, but the editors appear to try to have at least one English article in each issue. It looks robust and sound, for instance with an R.E. Howard translation in the Spring 2019 ‘Pop Norse’ issue. The latest issue is on Arthurian works.
They have a current Call for texts and illustrations for an issue on Animaux Fabuleux / Fabulous Animals / Amazing Beasts. Which might perhaps lend itself to an illustrated study of the creatures of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, and perhaps also the tightly integrated extension of such in The House of the Worm (1975).
13 Thursday Feb 2020
Posted in Historical context
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13 Thursday Feb 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Have you been looking for the well-regarded book of Dreamlands tales The House of the Worm (1975)? S.T. Joshi has referred to it as (I paraphrase from memory) ‘an exercise in how closely one can write like Lovecraft’. Which, to me, is a kind of recommendation. Thus I was pleased to discover that the book is now a Kindle ebook titled The Country of the Worm: Excursions Beyond the Wall of Sleep (2013). In early 2020 this ebook edition is currently on a heavy discount, at a somewhat affordable £7.60.
The Country of the Worm is Myers’s long-awaited follow-up to The House of the Worm. It contains that first book in a corrected edition, together with all the stories in the same fantastic vein that Myers has written in the forty-three years since.
“Corrected” because the Arkham edition of 1975, though said to be nicely printed and collectable, was also reportedly riddled with typos.
Note also that recent issues of Crypt of Cthulhu (#111 and #122) appear to have had short Dreamlands fiction by Myers, which I’m guessing from their titles may be new or newly-published post-2013 tales? These issues are also available in ebook format.
In 2012 the Miskatonic Debating Club & Literary Society blog usefully reviewed the original Arkham The House of the Worm, adding some detail on how… “Chaosium has milked it dry for inspiration for their own compilations”, re: commercial RPG game books for the Dreamlands setting.
In Norwegian, there’s also the blog review “Gennem den dybe slummers porte”, which shows some of the interior illustrations from the 1975 edition.
13 Thursday Feb 2020
Posted in Scholarly works
The Mythopoeic Society’s scholarly Mythcon 51 is a hot ticket! No really, it’ll be hot. Hot as in… Albuquerque, New Mexico, from 31st July – 3rd August 2020. Although the place is apparently at a high altitude, which means it won’t also be humid. The 2020 theme is “The Mythic, the Fantastic, and the Alien”, which opens it to musings on Lovecraft and his circle. Registration is now open, but no call for papers yet.
12 Wednesday Feb 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is a classic videogame from 2006, and despite its age and glitches one would expect to find it in any ‘top 20 Lovecraft games’ list. I’m pleased to see that a 5.5Gb HD textures mod has just landed for it.
All textures are original, so the atmosphere is preserved, upscaled to 4x resolution with neural networks. All game textures are upscaled.
Also, Hyperborea Live (Italian sword & sorcery) has just posted a long appreciation of the game, “I Miti del Tubo di Ilario Gobbi – Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth”. In Italian, but a translator-bot is only a click away.
11 Tuesday Feb 2020
Posted in Scholarly works
H.P. Lovecraft Returns to Buttonwoods…
Haverhill native and author David Goudsward is presenting “H.P. Lovecraft in the Merrimack Valley,” Thursday, April 2, 7 p.m., at Buttonwood’s Museum, 240 Water St., Haverhill.
11 Tuesday Feb 2020
Posted in Odd scratchings
A small commemoration of Lovecraft’s epic trek to and around old Quebec, and also his subsequent extended travelogue and (effectively) guide-book.
Never have I beheld anything else like it, & never do I expect to! … I can scarcely believe that the place belongs to the waking world at all. A mighty headland rising out of a mile-broad river & topped by a mediaeval fortress—city walls of cyclopean masonry scaling vertical cliffs or towering above green table-lands — great arching city gates & frowning bastions — huddles of pointed red-tiled roofs & silver belfries & steeples — archaic lanes winding uphill or lurking in the beetling shadow of precipices…
The walls in landscape context.
Lower and Upper Town, Quebec.
A lane in Lower Town in the 1920s.
View over Lower Town in the 1950s.
10 Monday Feb 2020
Posted in Podcasts etc.
New on LibriVox, The Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe, including a cast of voices where required. Also includes a Memoir and three essays.