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The Wandering Earth

06 Thursday Jun 2019

Posted by in Films & trailers, Odd scratchings

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I’m liking the sound of the new $700m Chinese science-fiction epic movie, The Wandering Earth. A three-star review (three of five) in the latest Sci-fi Now magazine made me realise that this way-too-long-awaited movie had actually been released at long last. That’s the problem with too much hype too early, something also seen happening with the H.P. Lovecraft game The Sinking City for the last year. That game will probably be very good when released (it’s from the guys who made the superb Sherlock Holmes games, but this time they’re doing Lovecraft). But once the actual release happens many have long since switched off their attention for it, due to the years of vapid hype for something not yet available. I’m thinking that there’s a market for a magazine or website that only covers new stuff that’s actually released and fully complete, as a huge time-saver for busy people.

Anyway, Sci-fi Now talks of “the irony-free bombast of the whole thing”, and describes The Wandering Earth as “a gigantic, ludicrous over the-top disaster movie” — making it sound like a Chinese Independence Day. Great. That, and “irony-free”, is a very good thing in my book. Some other reviews (skimmed, to avoid plot spoilers) grudgingly admit it’s good romping save-the-world heroic entertainment. But one often gets the impression the reviewer feels that it’s not politically-correct or career-advancing to be seen to like such ‘gung-ho / can-do’ stories of sentimental heroism.

Despite the movie being slammed by IndieWire as “unwatchable” and unceremoniously dumped on Netflix with no publicity at all, one intelligent review confirms another reason for my interest it it. Its sheer difference from Hollwood pap such as the dire new Godzilla…

The Wandering Earth is a breath of fresh air. Its basic assumptions are sufficiently different from those of a Hollywood film that this increases our enjoyment of all the surprising turns, while making us think about the way in which certain civilisational differences can lead to new forms of artistic expression.

The characters in The Wandering Earth are engineers, workers of physical reality. Pleasure for them will come after their work is done. The Western viewer may be surprised that the movie contains no hint whatsoever of romantic or erotic interests.

Sounds even better, then. Proper sci-fi adventure, and not contorted by adding ‘love interest’. Johnny Depp’s awful nanotech sci-fi movie Transcendence (2014) was a prime example of that destroying a movie. There’s also that tedious new mode of… “We need to repeatedly bring the action to a grinding halt for eight minutes, to Talk Deeply About Our Feelings”, as seen in the second Guardians of the Galaxy movie, and the early series of Game of Thrones (until they got a bit more action-oriented).

It’s said that the American-English dub for The Wandering Earth significantly shifts the characterisation toward camp cheesiness, and also is rather American. Thus presumably the subtitled version is the one to try to watch the first time around, even though the vocal shadings will be lost (social class, emotional overtones etc) on a Westerner. Then see the English dub as one’s later ‘second viewing’ of the movie.

Joshi in France – the report

06 Thursday Jun 2019

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Odd scratchings

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S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated with an illustrated report on “A Trip to France”, made to promote the French translation of his monumental Lovecraft biography. Among much else, he ventured down into the Catacombs of old Paris…

Traversing this site was a suitably grisly experience for a devotee of the weird and macabre.

Suitably primed, he later discovered the young artist Laurent Gapaillard, who does epic architectural prints in the Piranesi and Prout style, and from my cursory searches seems to be known in France for his book illustration and concept art for videogames.

The French ‘Lovecraft & Sonia’ play Howard, Mon Amour is being translated to English, and Joshi hopes to find a publisher for it.

Also, Joshi has had a copy of his The H. P. Lovecraft Cat Book in print. The hardcover first edition has sold out already.

NecronomiCon 2001

06 Thursday Jun 2019

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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Snagged from a sale listing, a pretty good scan of a NecronomiCon convention cover. Done in very pleasing pen and ink by an unknown artist, for the 2001 convention. Search doesn’t immediately land me on the artist’s name.

Update: the artist has been suggested, by the style, as the British artist Dave Carson. Following that I’ve found a credited Dave Carson piece which has the same maker’s mark on it, so this cover is indeed by him.

Forefathers of Sword and Sorcery

04 Tuesday Jun 2019

Posted by in Doyle, Historical context, REH

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DMR has a developing series of short blog posts which introduce a set of “Forefathers of Sword and Sorcery”. The latest up for consideration, Arthur Conan Doyle. I must say I’d never even considered him as an influence on R.E. Howard, except in the vaguest way.

In addition to enjoying his Holmes stories, Doyle is also interesting to me for being another of the great names who have Birmingham and Staffordshire connections, alongside Wells, Tolkien, Borges and the Gawain-poet. For instance, I’ve reviewed Sherlock Holmes in the Midlands, which is the book you want if you’re interested in that topic or decide the take a literary touring holiday in Birmingham, Staffordshire and out into the neighbouring Welsh Marches.

Until reading DRM’s post I’d always thought of Doyle in terms of the always-re-readable Sherlock Holmes + some Edwardian horror stories. Even the fairy-world spiritualism of his dotage is of interest, because it tells one something about the pits of fraudulent charlatanry that opened up as religion faded, and how these could swallow up even highly intelligent people. This then reflects on the paths available to the early Wells, the young Tolkien, Kipling, Lovecraft and others, re: the cultural terrain they were navigating.

I must admit that I’ve never once encountered Doyle’s Professor Challenger adventure books, which DMR mentions, nor the various adventure and historical novels which the Doyle bibliography reveals. Professor Challenger is three novels, and two stories, apparently. Ho hum, yet another set of books to get around to… eventually! Ideally when a full-cast unabridged audiobook of such appears, and perhaps with Phil Dragash-like levels of avoidance of modern cynicism and hipster overtones in its vocal delivery.

Lovecraft’s “Memory”

04 Tuesday Jun 2019

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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Librivox’s latest Short Ghost and Horror Collection 033 has appeared, and has a wealth of amateur Lovecraft readings. Including “Memory” which is a very short prose poem written in 1919.

This led me to discover that the excellent reader Ian Gordon has also done a new free 10 minute reading of “Memory” by H. P. Lovecraft. This was posted by him on YouTube, a couple of months ago. The story itself is quite brief and followed by music.

“The difficulty of this search leads me to suspect that none have been unearthed…”

04 Tuesday Jun 2019

Posted by in Housekeeping

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Tentaclii is back at No.1 on Google…

Though is still not indexed on Bing or DuckDuckGo, apart from (bizarrely) just two random PDFs. It’s been that way for years. As it’s no longer possible to submit a blog to Bing, I don’t see any way of changing it.

Tentaclii is present on the first page of results at Yandex. Yandex is a pretty reasonable search-engine and supplies DuckDuckGo. The Duck being a blend of Bing and Yandex, as you can see here…

… but a lot gets censored from Yandex before it gets fed to the Duck. Tentaclii is presumably one of the elements being filtered out, which suggests it’s flagged as ‘undesirable’ in some way. It may be being bounced partly because Bing doesn’t index it?

Tentaclii is the top result on the worthy but eclectic Gigablast, which is the only other one that vaguely matters. Mojeek being worthy as a standalone indie that keeps soldiering on, but now very old and with very poor relevance ranking. Common Crawl still has no third-party keyword search interface, except for an incredibly old crawl. Yippy is a filtered Bing, and while excellent (if rather slow) for techie forum searches like researching a regex formula, it doesn’t seem to be much use for anything else I want.

I don’t know of any engine that dogpiles together the full main Google, with Bing and Yandex, and also has good relevance ranking and de-duplication. According to the above chart (2019) it doesn’t exist. But if anyone knows of one, or a browser addon or dashboard that does the same without captchas, I’d welcome hearing about it.

At the Mountains of Manga

03 Monday Jun 2019

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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The 298-page Vol. 1 of the English translation of At The Mountains of Madness graphic novel, by cult manga artist Gou Tanabe, has a release date of 25th June 2019 from Dark Horse.

The 365-page Vol. 2. of Mountains of Madness now also has a release date, of 29th October 2019. At which point the work will apparently be complete in English translation. Even if there’s some padding from the publisher, it looks to be more than 600 pages in total.

This is what his style looks like…

PhD thesis: Prophets of Decline

03 Monday Jun 2019

Posted by in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works

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I’ve found an open access PhD thesis titled Prophets of Decline (2003), which has two chapters relevant to understanding the historical context for Lovecraft’s reception of Spengler in the America of the later 1920s…

Once returned to Providence…

Lovecraft began in the late 1920s to develop his notions of the decline of the West — notions that his reading of Oswald Spengler’s great work on the subject only helped to clarify and develop. (S.T. Joshi, I Am Providence).

From a Lovecraft letter of 1926…

Recently I saw a review of Spengler’s ‘Decline of the West’ — which will make splendid discussion-matter with Mortonius [James Morton]. Did you see it — in the New York Post?

This must be the front-page review by the anti-communist John Cournos, “Is Our Civilization Doomed? No Chance Of Survival — Says Spengler” The New York Post Literary Review supplement, 29th May 1926. (Now un-findable online, and it seems there’s no microfilm of this title at libraries before 1934?).

The Prophets of Decline thesis thus offers what are effectively two ‘free bonus’ appendices, in a digestible thirty pages, for readers of S.T. Joshi’s book on Lovecraft’s intellectual life The Decline of the West (now a very affordable and cleanly formatted ebook on Amazon). The chapters are quite dense and have some typos, but are admirably concise and focused. They outline Spengler’s initial reception in America, and then the changed perceptions there of Spengler in the 1930s — as the civil war within socialism raged and both communism and fascism twisted the ways he was portrayed and understood. Part of the problem on the right was that Spengler did not endorse Hitler. He had also supported those purged in 1934, and because of this was subject to a campaign of vilification by the Nazi Party.

As for the rest of the thesis it tells the larger story of the reception by journalists and intellectuals of the alarmist doom-mongers of 1896-1961, and as such provides useful background for better understanding the doom-mongers of the 1970s and 80s.

More on La Farge

02 Sunday Jun 2019

Posted by in Historical context

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In the latest University Bookman, Stephen Schmalhofer takes a trip “From New York to Chartres with La Farge” and examines this macabre Providence artist’s later stained-glass work and his influence on other creatives of his time.

Adams came to understand that gothic architecture was not gloomy. “The necessity for light was the motive of the gothic architects,” he writes of Chartres. “They needed light and always more light, until they sacrificed safety and common-sense in trying to get it.” Cortissoz observes that La Farge’s art contained “little knots of form, meant to hold color in solution; cunningly wrought webs in which to imprison light” and his windows were “curtains of jewels hung between us and the light, pieces of some new kind of luminous poetry.”

I’d previously noted the early print illustration work of this Providence artist, in my post on “A macabre Providence artist”. There I observed that Lovecraft’s discovery of him had coincided with the writing of “The Rats in the Walls”.

Research on Weird Tales at Brown

02 Sunday Jun 2019

Posted by in Scholarly works

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Congratulations of Dylan Henderson of Arkansas, who has been awarded the R.D. Mullen Fellowship. According to the local press, he will…

“conduct archival research this July [2019] at the John Hay Library on the Brown University campus. The $1,000 fellowship is sponsored by the journal Science Fiction Studies. Henderson’s current research project explores how, in the 1920s, the distinct genres now known as fantasy, horror, and science fiction gradually coalesced and then separated from one another. He seeks to investigate the role of the early pulp magazines in this process, specifically Weird Tales, the first pulp magazine to specialize in speculative fiction. During its early years, when the genres it published were still comparatively fluid, the Weird Tales magazine contained works that defied categorization, including short stories by H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard. […] Henderson hopes to reveal how certain plot structures became associated, in the minds of both readers and writers, with more clearly distinct genres of science fiction, horror, and fantasy.”