Author Archives: asdjfdlkf

Giraffes on Horseback Salad

07 Thursday Mar 2019

Posted by in New books

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Dali worked with Harpo Marx. That is quite enough to enlarge one’s mind with endless surrealist possibilities. But there’s more. They became friends and devised a screenplay for a movie in which man of mundane reality falls in love with a dream-woman from the realm of comical absurdity. A notebook and treatment was presented to the MGM movie studio, but the studio declined the project. These materials have now been tracked down, and much research undertaken. The resulting ‘graphic novel re-creation’ of the planned movie will be published, sans the Marx Bros. distinctive physical comedy and syncopated wisecrackery, on 19th March 2019 as Giraffes on Horseback Salad.

So far as I know Lovecraft never saw the Marx Bros. movies, though from 1930 to 1935 he could have seen all the classics newly-released at one of the Providence movie-houses: Animal Crackers; Monkey Business; Horse Feathers, Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera, and A Day at the Races.

What would a Dali / Lovecraft collaboration have sired? We can only dream…

Chasing after Monster Talk

06 Wednesday Mar 2019

Posted by in Historical context, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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I’ve been catching up with the Monster Talk podcast from the worthy Skeptic Magazine. Recent episodes of interest to readers of this blog will be…

* MonsterTalk: The Call of Tut-Thulhu. “This episode spends a lot of time talking about the unusual connection between H. P. Lovecraft and the discovery of King Tut’s Tomb.”

* MonsterTalk: Teaching with Monsters. “Dr. Thor Hansen has been teaching a course at Western Washington University that uses monsters to teach science”.

* MonsterTalk: Spouting off about Gargoyles. “Mathew Duman, author of An Education in the Grotesque: The Gargoyles of Yale University.”

It’s one I hadn’t yet plugged into my recently-discovered OneCast podcasting app on my Amazon Fire tablet. OneCast is genuinely free and ad-free and is very nicely designed, if you were looking for such an app. It has everything you could want, except for an imaginary ‘YouTube subscriptions to MP3, then treated as podcasts’, which would get me regular shows like ‘Ask Lovecraft’ as podcasts. OneCast also has a feed set that discovered everything I wanted, once I learned that it doesn’t like phrases only keywords. For instance, to find ‘The Lovecraft Geek’ don’t search for the full name, just search for ‘Lovecraft’ and then hunt and peck among the ‘Lovecraft’ results.

Elder Props freebies

05 Tuesday Mar 2019

Posted by in Fonts, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Odd scratchings

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New on Archive.org… Elder Props (1981), an 84 page compendium of printable pages, presumably for use as photocopies made as RPG game prompts and elements. The artist has a nice clean toony ink style, which I like a lot.

If you wanted these in colour, look at Krita’s 4.0’s new ability to auto-paint line-art.

I see that the same book can also be downloaded from the site of the artist for free, though there’s it’s confusing labelled Evil Dead, which makes one think of tiresome video-nasty zombies movies of the 1980s rather than the Neconomicon.

The artist is still working, and has a similar product for the awesome Gravity Falls series. Also free Fonts…

Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

05 Tuesday Mar 2019

Posted by in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works

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A major new history book from Erik Davis (author of the superb TechGnosis) is always welcome, especially one edited and designed by MIT Press. His new High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies is pre-ordering now, to ship in July 2019. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s a ‘Lovecraft chapter’ or two.

On the record

04 Monday Mar 2019

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.

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Most folks would be content to bung their new Lovecraft story reading on YouTube, along with the 30 others that now appear there each day. But H. P. Lovecraft’s “Dagon”, “The Cats of Ulthar” & “The Music of Erich Zann” does things more elegantly. A vinyl LP record, superb 12″ sleeve art, and a… “new original score by cinematic instrumentalists Anima Morte”.

Worth a peek just for the quality artwork by Karmazid.

The Cracks of Doom: Untold Tales in Middle-earth – now in ebook

03 Sunday Mar 2019

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My new short book The Cracks of Doom: Untold Tales in Middle-earth is now available on Amazon as an ebook. In 22,000 words it carefully identifies 135 points or ‘cracks’ in The Lord of the Rings and related material, ‘cracks’ in which one might write new fan-fiction stories…

The 22,000-word book is a side-project from my forthcoming scholarly book on Tolkien, and as a bonus this new ebook version adds ten more ‘cracks’ not in the print edition.

de Camp on the reception of his Lovecraft biography

03 Sunday Mar 2019

Posted by in de Camp, Historical context, Odd scratchings

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From the Science Fiction Review in 1975, de Camp on what he left out of the Lovecraft biography…

This will already have been encountered by those interested in Lovecraft’s young manhood and his attempts to enlighten the local Irish youth. But I wasn’t aware of the information given on the initial sales volume for the biography, and this may interest those looking at the early history of the Lovecraft revival in the 1970s.

The Shadow Out of Time

02 Saturday Mar 2019

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Here’s a glimpse of the style of the manga-style comics adaptation of The Shadow Out of Time adaptation, recently completed by Gou Tanabe in Japan. This book is apparently getting manga fans excited, and he’s said to have a cult following. Personally it’s not an art style I greatly appreciate, but it’s good to get a full-length adaptation of this major story.

Added to Open Lovecraft

02 Saturday Mar 2019

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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Newly added to the Open Lovecraft page on this blog…

* K. Dodd, “Narrative Archaeology: Excavating Object Encounter in Lovecraftian Video Games”, Studies in Gothic Fiction, forthcoming 2019.

* V. Sirangelo, “Sulla natura lunare di Shub-Niggurath: dalla mythopoeia di Howard Phillips Lovecraft a The Moon-Lens di Ramsey Campbell”, Caietele Echinox, Volume 35, 2018. (Short article in French on Shub-Niggurath in Lovecraft and Ramsey Campbell. Part of a special issue on the Neo-Gothic).

Caietele Echinox‘s large archive of themed special issues also looks interesting, though articles need to be bunged through Google Translate unless you can work with English abstracts.

Friday ‘picture postals’ from Lovecraft: The Biltmore

01 Friday Mar 2019

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I imagine that people are making their hotel bookings about now for NecronomiCon. So here are two evocative postcards showing the main hotel which will host the NecronomiCon 2019 Lovecraft convention. One could almost imagine that the fellow in the drawing might be the Old Gent himself, perhaps taking a close look at the pigeons to check for signs of Yuggothian tendencies.

The hotel opened in 1922. While it may seem unlikely that Lovecraft or his friends ever lounged in the lobby here, one can imagine Frank Belknap Long’s affluent family staying there overnight. Though I know of no evidence that they did. A Spanish text I have suggests that when Barlow was travelling with his family they stayed in this level of hotel. But again, I know of no evidence they ever came with Barlow to Providence.

Possibly Lovecraft was more familiar with the park adjacent. It looks like the sort of place where one might have a pleasant wait away from the crowds, if a train was heavily delayed. Or could have served as a place to sit out with friends, while they recovered from their train journey enough to walk up the hill.

The hotel is briefly mentioned by Lovecraft in “Dexter Ward”, when Lovecraft evokes in fiction his own homecoming to Providence from New York…

“his head swam curiously as the vehicle rolled down to the terminal behind the Biltmore … It was twilight, and Charles Dexter Ward had come home.”