04 Tuesday Aug 2020
Posted in Kittee Tuesday
We’ve entered the silly-season for news, and I’ll take what I can get. So this week’s ‘Kittee Tuesday’ post is a forthcoming videogame set on an uninhabited island in Maine, USA. It mixes “science fiction and alternative history”, and all the characters are… cats. What more could you ask from a game? Well, if you’re going to be a cat, perhaps that there are plenty of nice fat salmon basking in the shallows of the river…
04 Tuesday Aug 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Cthulhu on the cover of the Revue de la BnF, the substantial journal of the French National Library. Sadly it’s not open access. The issue, #59 (October 2019), was a world-building special issue and led into a 2020 ‘year of comics’ for the Library.
What is open access and public is the Library’s shorter quarterly ‘lobby magazine’ Chroniques. Issue #87 (January-March 2020) of Chroniques was their special BD (comics) / fantasy / Tolkien issue (they had the big Oxford Tolkien show visiting, and made it even bigger).
The #87 issueof Chroniques well worth a look, even though it’s all in French. I’d recommend a translator software but, amazingly, in 2020 it’s still impossible to translate the text of a PDF in place, without uploading it to some Cloud service or doing a half-baked conversion to MS Word first. Sure, the PDF format is hard to parse. But how difficult can it be to take a 3000px snapshot of a page, OCR and translate the text on it, erase the original text, then return the translated text into the erased area? Project Naptha can do that, though only for English… so why can’t at least one desktop PDF reader software do it? On a page such as this…
Anyway, it may also interest some readers to know that the Library’s CNLJ (children’s literature dept.) produces a very long-running journal in French La Revue des livres pour enfants (Review of Books for Children). This has a two year rolling paywall, during which only free samples are available online. After that it’s open access all the way back to 1965. This back-list reveals choice items such as Nº 242: a Nicole Claveloux special-issue.
03 Monday Aug 2020
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works
H. P. Lovecraft: Letters to Family and Family Friends is now listed on the Hippocampus Press website. Nice and chunky at 1,110 pages, mostly because of the immense amount of letters to his aunts Lillian Clark and Annie Gamwell. These letters are here given “complete and unabridged” and also in a meticulously annotated and indexed form. There are also “previously unpublished letters written by Lovecraft’s grandfather, Whipple V. Phillips, to his grandson in the 1890s”.
Quite reasonably priced, at $60 for both in paperback. There’s an “Add to cart” button on the page, so I assume they’re shipping now. No sign of them yet on either Amazon USA or UK or eBay, but no doubt they’ll appear there in due course.
The books have a pleasing cover design by Daniel V. Sauer, around evocative art by David C. Verba.
03 Monday Aug 2020
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
Thanks to Ken Faig Jr. for telling me that there’s a new July 2020 edition of The Fossil, journal of the Historians of Amateur Journalism. This is freely available online.
There are two items of Lovecraftian material in the issue. David Goudsward offers “A Postscript to Myrta Little” in which he explains some of the context for Lovecraft’s apparent love poem “To Phillis”. This article might have perhaps been a touch longer, and also briefly considered Lovecraft’s sonnet to Whitehead’s young friend & guest Allan Grayson.
The main article is the biographical “A Memory of Andrew Francis Lockhart”…
“an early acquaintance of H.P. Lovecraft who is mainly known in literary circles for having written the first article about the famous horror writer.”
Lockhart was an ardently anti-liquor man and was admired by Lovecraft for his tussles with local rum-runners, and well as for his poetic and amateur endeavours. Lockhart was the subject of Lovecraft’s poem “To Mr. Lockhart, on His Poetry”, aka “To A.F. Lockhard”, and is enshrined in the travel account “Little Journeys to the Homes of Prominent Amateurs: II. Andrew Francis Lockhart”. The latter is available as a reading on Librivox.
02 Sunday Aug 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Super news from S.T. Joshi’s Blog…
I have plunged into the treatise that I have been promising for years to write: The Recognition of H. P. Lovecraft: His Rise from Obscurity to World Renown. In this month alone I have written about 50,000 words — and I’m only up to the year 1980!
Great, we need a good scholarly study digging in to his 1938-1974 ‘afterlife’ in fannish circles, and how he was understood and (often fruitfully) mis-understood in those decades. Ideally that would also survey the early use of ‘Lovecraft as character’, and briefly survey the more notable early Lovecraftian artists and book-cover designers and their approaches. But that’s because I’m rather more interested in the history of recognition by the fans, fan-creatives and small-presses than by the sniffy establishment. It would be ‘icing on the cake’ to also get a brisk account of the later 1975-2015 period, in terms of the more easily-surveyed life-research and scholarly criticism, his wide diffusion outside the English-speaking world, and the slow and often reluctant uptake of Lovecraft by university academics and mainstream publishers.
Joshi also reports a fine new set of Lovecraftian fiction, and some essays and letters, due soon-ish in French from “French publisher Mnemos”.
01 Saturday Aug 2020
Posted in Historical context, New books, Podcasts etc.
The paranormalist ‘X’ Zone Radio Show podcast interviews Lovecraftian David Goudsward…
his next publications will include H. P. Lovecraft in Florida (Bold Venture Press), Horror Guide to Southern New England (Post Mortem Press) and Sun, Sand, and Sea Serpents: A History of Florida Sea Monster Sightings.