31 Wednesday May 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
Newly listed on the Hippocampus site, Dead Reckonings: A Review of Horror and the Weird in the Arts (No. 33, Spring 2023). Reviews of Celtic Weird: Tales of Wicked Folklore and Dark Mythology, The Earliest Bradbury, and the recent Howard Days 2023 event in Texas, among others.
30 Tuesday May 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
Publications of the annual FantaelX event in Spain. Including four free annual volumes of scholarly work on the fantastic in PDF and in English. The TOC for the latest (2022) gives a flavour of the approach…
Looks like a rather groovy event, combining a conference with a film festival.
29 Monday May 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings
A new addition to my “Views of Providence” post, on the Providence photography of Beth Murray. Another card in her Book Shop set has been found, which was unavailable at the time of my post.
This is, of course, where Lovecraft tried to play “Yes, We Have No Bananas” on the church organ.
29 Monday May 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
The worthy Signum University plans a New England Moot, to be themed as “Perilous Realms & Haunted Spaces”, Set for 21st October 2023 and a little place called Derry, which the map shows translates as “25 miles north of Boston” or about “45 miles north of Providence”.
New England Moot is excited to spirit you away to Perilous Realms & Haunted Spaces. Whether threshold-realms are real or imagined, Faerian or horrifying, deadly or whimsical, mysterious or lucid, they are the playgrounds for imaginative exploration of what is possible. Discovery, danger, failure, and transformation occur in such interstitial spaces.
Whether you are inspired by the Bifrost, the Bermuda Triangle, Wonderland, or an ordinary-looking Wardrobe, we welcome you to question how to define Perilous Realms & Haunted Spaces. How do you know when you’ve entered one? How does the experience of the unknown inform artistic creation? Join us as we traverse the blurry edge of boundaries and venture into the wildlands beyond. You may not be the same when you leave as you were when you arrived…
The Team are currently looking for proposals for “creative presentations, academic papers, or discussion panels”. The Studio Lab physical venue is said to have a 5,376 × 1,344-pixel video-wall. The Moot will also be a hybrid physical/online event.
The deadline for submissions is 7th October, and I’m assuming that’s 2023.
29 Monday May 2023
Posted in Lovecraft as character, New books
News to me, Malign Providence (2022), a new Centipede Press book offering a “collection of stories by Jonathan Thomas”…
sixteen tales that depict a time and place from our recent past that is at once familiar yet distorted through Thomas’ cosmic horror lens. His Providence isn’t just that of Lovecraft’s home, but of his own brand of mythos [and the] creatures of Lovecraft’s most revered work are only present in whispers and rumblings.
Has titles such as “King of Cat Swamp”, although I’m uncertain if Lovecraft himself puts it some sort of appearance. Yet I know that Jonathan Thomas has written at least one story in which (it is said) the shade of Lovecraft rises to revisit modern Providence. Thus this book seems close enough for me to use the “Lovecraft as character” tag for the blog post.
Unfortunately for those wanting a copy, the 500-copy edition has sold out.
28 Sunday May 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
I’m always partial to a bit of good song-and-dance musical theatre, and so was pleased to hear of a new musical version of Lovecraft’s story “The Call of Cthulhu”. Albeit done with puppets, in a Muppets style. Sounds fun, and it runs for two hours under the title of Cthulhu: the Musical! (R-rated). You can catch it touring America with the ‘Puppeteers for Fears’ troupe, a puppeteer troupe based out of Oregon, USA. They’re now a month away from setting out on a 2023 post-lockdown summer tour, with a banner tour headline of “Back from the Dead”. Also on the road with them will be a full rock band, multimedia projectionists and (one hopes) some cute 1970s-style groupies.
Booking now.
27 Saturday May 2023
Posted in Podcasts etc.
LibriVox has a new second version of Robert E. Howard’s
(1906 – 1936) “Red Shadows”, read by Phil Chenevert and under a Public Domain licence. The earlier version was read by Paul Siegel.
Also new is E.F. Benson’s story collection Visible and Invisible (1923).
26 Friday May 2023
Posted in AI, Lovecraftian arts
Readers will recall the young Lovecraft roaming in Cat Swamp, Providence. It was also a richly wild and raggedy hunting-ground for botanists, at around the same time (c. 1900), and thus the plants of the swamp were both drawn/painted and preserved as botanical pressings. Brown University now shows many of these in their online Herbarium catalogue.
So, something a little different for this Friday’s ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’.
Using some of the Brown (literally brown) scans of the botanical plant-books as sources, and sprinkling a little magic AI pixie-dust over them brings them back to horrible Lovecraftian life…
25 Thursday May 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings
Catching Marbles takes a tour of the North Burial Ground, Providence, and has a fine gallery of photographs. Visiting the graves of Chester Pierce Munroe, James Tobey Pyke and others known to Lovecraft.
25 Thursday May 2023
Posted in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts
A new upload of Lovecraft’s fave movie, Berkeley Square (1933) and it looks like slightly better quality (less over-sharpened) than the version uploaded last October. These are the only two versions on Archive.org.
Neither is the 2011 restored 35mm print, though, by the look of it. So far as I can see that version still languishes in the archives, and hasn’t had a DVD release.
24 Wednesday May 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A Lovecraft film festival in Mexico. The ‘Festival Nocambulante Lovecrafiano’ is a camping overnighter on 17th June 2023, in the Xochimilco Ecological Park (about 15 miles from Mexico City). 20 movies will be shown. It looks a little like the Dark Swamp in places, so hopefully the organisers have booked a big solar-powered midge-zapper. Or perhaps big outdoor cinema screens come with such things built-in, these days.
24 Wednesday May 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A nice scan of a supposed “H.P. Lovecraft” novel, newly popped up on honest Abe’s sales site. The cover demonstrates that, even as late as 1993-95, the average person could pick up a Derleth paperback at a news-stand book-spinner rack… and think it was by Lovecraft. In fact, just over 1,000 words by Lovecraft, with the rest of the novel by Derleth.
The British publisher Panther was rather more honest in 1973-75, admitting up-front on the cover that it was likely to be a Derleth stitch-a-thon.
Interestingly, for a book that supposedly shifted some 100,000+ copies in all, an Amazon UK search suggests it’s now thoroughly out-of-print and has no audiobook. Are the currently owners of Derleth’s estate missing a trick there?