Bobby Derie revisits The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft (1985), a memoir by his wife Sonia H. Davis.
Cover by Jason Eckhardt.
The Private Life revisited
24 Wednesday Jun 2020
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts
Author Archives: asdjfdlkf
Kittee Tuesday: It’s 1972 in South America…
23 Tuesday Jun 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s keen interest in cats.
It’s 1972 in South America. You’re dodging fugitive Nazis in one-tap villages and cantering over the wide-open pampas on your lama, in search of the lost Nazca Lines. The 1972 El que acecha en el umbral is the edition of Lovecraft that’s in your saddle-bags…
Dracula in Sweden
22 Monday Jun 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. He has a book-sale on now and, among other new book news, has details of: two late novels by Frank Belknap Long set to be reprinted by Centipede; his abridged Lovecraft biography A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in His Time, now available in translation in Brazil; a forthcoming 300,000-word English translation of the Swedish version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula — possibly… “from an early version of the novel that found its way to Sweden in the 1890s. This version does not survive in English”. The Dracula translation has been edited by Joshi.
2021 Peter Lang Competition in Science Fiction Studies
22 Monday Jun 2020
Posted in Scholarly works
Publisher Peter Lang is running a 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies…
Proposals are invited from early career scholars in Science Fiction Studies [planning to write] academic monographs [and to qualify you must] have been awarded a PhD between 2015 and 2020 or expect to be awarded a PhD in 2021.
The deadline is 30th November 2020.
Also of interest is the $500 John A. Lent Scholarship in Comics Studies, which should open summer 2020 and which will then be seeking…
a current student who has authored, or is in the process of authoring, a substantial research-based writing project about comics.
Refreshingly, you don’t have to have a thesis in hand, as… “all students of comics are encouraged to apply.”
Ex Libris Miskatonici
21 Sunday Jun 2020
Posted in New books
There’s a three-volume set of suitably pulpishly-illustrated Russian translations of Clark Ashton Smith.
The Weird angle
21 Sunday Jun 2020
Posted in Historical context
An unusual angle on Weird Tales. When Lovecraft mentions, in his letters of the mid 1930s, that the latest edition of Weird Tales is on his desk or shelf ‘hot from the news-stand’ this is what he saw, ready to lift and peruse.
Peruse somewhat reluctantly, as he is often heard bemoaning the unevenness of the magazine in its mid 1930s form. I get the impression from the Barlow / Bloch / Sterling letters that Lovecraft didn’t obtain his copy by subscription via the mail at this time, but preferred to walk down into town and patronise a local news-stand or store. Presumably he used the opportunity to browse the racks and shelves, casting a professional eye over the competition and near-rivals, while forming a rough idea of the state of ‘the slicks’. Incidentally, in his mid-1930s letters he refers several times to the ‘book-stalls’ of Providence, at which bargains could evidently be had by determined browsers such as Barlow, Loveman, Kenneth Sterling and himself. One imagines that, as the Great Depression set in, the four main bookstores of Providence saw competition from used book-stalls popping up in indoor markets and at regular fundraisers.
Talking of unusual angles, Black Gate has a short but perceptive review of the new academic book Weird Tales of Modernity (2019). The book’s author was also interviewed at length recently, on episode #140 of The Sectarian Review podcast.
Call: The Medial Afterlives of H.P. Lovecraft
20 Saturday Jun 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Call for Papers: The Medial Afterlives of H.P. Lovecraft. Deadline: 31st August 2020.
The book editors appears to be looking for studies of recent (post-2008) media adaptations in “comics, film, podcasts, TV, videogames”, rather than something trawled from the vast squishy hinterlands of earlier Lovecraft adaptation and Lovecraftian media.
“Just a second…”
19 Friday Jun 2020
Posted in New books
The Visual History of Science Fiction Fandom, last blogged here in March 2020, is now reported to have gone to a “Second Edition, Second Printing”.
‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: a cool ice-cream in a hot Red Hook
19 Friday Jun 2020
Posted in Historical context, Picture postals
‘Picture Postals’ from H.P. Lovecraft, part of an ongoing series.
Sabrett’s horse-drawn ice-cream cart in Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York City. Also selling coffee, candy etc. On the corner of Bush and Clinton Street, about a mile south of Lovecraft’s room in the notorious Red Hook.
“On December 31, 1924, I established myself in a large room … at 169 Clinton St.”
“Sometimes I get a dime’s worth of ice-cream for breakfast” (said of 1934, but just as likely after his walks in Brooklyn).
“It takes no effort at all [to imagine] that I am still 12 years old, and that when I go home it will be through the quieter, more village-like streets of those days — with horses and wagons, and little varicoloured street cars with open platforms…”
An interview with Brian Murphy
18 Thursday Jun 2020
Posted in Podcasts etc., REH, Scholarly works
A new podcast, Literary Wonder & Adventure Show #15: The History of Sword and Sorcery: A conversation with author Brian Murphy. [Link removed – dead]
I see Murphy’s book now has a handy £5 Kindle ebook edition.
And… what better excuse to post here the three classic Chris Achilleos covers for Panther UK’s three-part Skull-face paperback re-issue, which introduced many to Robert E. Howard.
I’m fairly sure I also had these, also from Panther…
NLP with Lovecraft
17 Wednesday Jun 2020
Posted in Scholarly works
Lovecraft with NLP. No, not the dodgy cultic ‘neuro linguistic programming’. NLP as in proper hardcore computer programming, in the form of ‘Natural Language Processing’ for digital humanities work. Towards Data Science currently has long articles showing exactly how to have a computer crunch the Lovecraft fiction corpus and thus help to answer questions such as…
Are the stories as negative as we thought? What are the most used adjectives, are they “horrible” and “unknown” and “ancient”?
Ideally the corpus would first be carefully chunked, split into distinct sections relating to his phases and places. Each would be probed separately. It’s probably big enough to chunk. Otherwise you’d get a bit of a smushy answer to such questions. “The Quest of Iranon” (1921) is not the same beastie as “The Shadow out of Time” (1935) etc.
Lovecraft with NLP: Part 1: Rule-Based Sentiment Analysis
Lovecraft with NLP: Part 2: Tokenisation and Word Counts
It looks like more parts are planned.
Update: Lovecraft with NLP: Part 3: TF-IDF and K-Means Clustering. At which point, having seen two articles, you hit the paywall.
Update: Lovecraft with NLP: Part 4: Latent Semantic Analysis.
Kittee Tuesday: Bloch’s “Bubastis”
16 Tuesday Jun 2020
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraft as character
A series of blog posts celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s keen interest in our fascinating felines.
In his final letter to Robert Bloch, Lovecraft notes the lad’s new story in the March 1937 Weird Tales, “The Brood of Bubastis”. The cat theme and the Cornwall setting were both an obvious nod to Lovecraft. Cornwall being the more American-recognisable stand-in for neighbouring Devonshire, to which Lovecraft traced many ancestors. Though the general idea of a Cornwall-Egypt link was not at all new by 1937.
I was hardly aware of the early Bloch beyond the story that inspired Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark”, but I know a bit more now. The Egyptian theme was obviously one that Bloch pursued in his early Lovecraftian stories in 1936-38. An entry for Bloch in Horror Literature through History: An Encyclopedia usefully lists the short cycle of Bloch’s ‘Lovecraftian Egypt’ stories, and from 1936-38 points to…
“The Faceless God”
“The Secret of Sebek”
“The Brood of Bubastis”
“Fane of the Black Pharoah”
“The Opener of the Way”
“The Eyes of the Mummy”
“Beetles”
… with a warning that some lack Lovecraft lore, though all are generally said to be in the style and manner of Lovecraft. So far as I know these have not yet all been collected in a single “Robert Bloch’s Lovecraftian Egypt” volume. Such a collection might make for a good audiobook.
Looking into these I found a long survey essay on the early Bloch at Dark Worlds Quarterly, that I had missed in January 2020. I thus inadvertently discovered yet another early appearance of Lovecraft as a character…
“The Dark Demon” (Weird Tales, November 1936) is another love letter to Lovecraft. Like “Shambler”, Bloch creates a character that is obviously HPL in Edgar Henquist Gordon. The man is tall and pale, writes horror stories for small magazines and is a bit of a recluse, though he has hundreds of correspondents.
Lovecraft had sent editor Farnsworth Wright a signed note saying that Bloch was permitted to portray and ‘murder’ Lovecraft in published fiction, and this must have permitted the story a slot in Weird Tales that it might not otherwise have had. Curiously enough, this issue of the magazine managed to get a cute kitten on the cover of Weird Tales…
