Author Archives: asdjfdlkf

The “lightning-scarred” Lovecraft

18 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Historical context

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I don’t bother with the likes of Twitter, but I occasionally use Social Searcher to take a fleeting keyword-based glance across the cesspool. Very rarely does anything newsworthy turn up among the parroting and blather. But today I noticed that a Twitter-diot is complaining about Lovecraft making up items such as “lightning-scarred” in “The Lurking Fear”. Yet a simple search of Google Books, Google Scholar and Hathi swiftly reveals many such uses…

* The U.S. Congress…

These lightning-scarred trees are readily found in any large body of timber. During the dry season of 1910 there were many electrical storms, and innumerable small fires were found immediately afterwards.” (1910)

* The U.S Bureau of Mines…

Lightning, however, sometimes strikes an airship without destroying it. The Friedrichshafen Museum has lightning-scarred parts of airships that have withstood thunderstorms successfully (1933)

* It appears to have been ‘house standard’ usage in American Forestry journal, and elsewhere in forestry publications and articles. One can find it, for instance in the pre-war publications of the ranger stations at Yosemite and the Grand Canyon.

Thus, while one can find it getting past the picky copy-editors of The New England Magazine in 1909 (“the lightning-scarred beech tree by the mill in the hollow”) and The Saturday Evening Post in 1919 (“He had seen living trees struck and had examined the lightning-scarred tops of fallen dead ones”), and it does occurs in the poetry of Aubrey De Vere and the 1910 translation of The Aeneid of Virgil (“[his] body lightning-scarred, Lies prisoned under all, so runs the tale”), Lovecraft does not seem to have been reflecting very much of a literary usage. For instance, there’s nothing in the obvious suspects such as Poe or Melville’s “The Lightning-Rod Man”.

It seems more probable that Lovecraft had noticed the then-current forestry usage, and I assume that was because he had perused a few journals for research before he wrote “The Lurking Fear” and made a working list of the correct terminology. He would also have been looking for books on mountain lightning and thunder-storms. See my annotated “Lurking Fear” for details on the extent of Lovecraft’s accurate knowledge of the Catskill Mountains.

Ulthar Post for Christmas

17 Monday Dec 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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My Patreon patrons will find there are now two new blog posts from me with a printable-size ‘Ulthar Post’ stamp. I realised that one can treat Patreon like a private patrons-only blog, so now that I know how to do it there will be more such posts.

It might look good on Christmas parcels, as well as hand-delivered Christmas cards.

The edge-deckling is in the cutout .PNG, but you might find it’s a bit tricky to add that by hand. Especially if you print it on paper at less than about four inches. Serrated shears of the sort used for fabrics are going to be too large, but careful use of a sharp X-Acto (USA) or Stanley (UK) knife to form deckling might do it. As it’s a PNG with a transparent edge it might also be used as a template for a very thin bit of 3D-printing — you might get an amusing beer-mat or fridge-magnet out of it.

Putting a simple drop-shadow on it before you print, and then printing on paper the same white colour as the envelope should also reveal the deckling.

You could of course get some real but large stamps of low value, and carefully stick the Lovecraft square over the top.

Call for papers: Brumal’s ideology issue

15 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by in Scholarly works

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The Spanish journal Brumal has a new call for papers on ‘the fantastic and ideologies’. Deadline 15th June 2019.

The call makes for a very difficult read in English. So I had a quick go at making it comprehensible, as well as far less verbose…

[Original]

Academics often assume that genre content is an industrial product, made to be a fleeting entertainment for juvenile minds. Another common assumption is that artists who use imagination in the form of ‘the fantastic’ are mere escapists, and that these artists and their audiences are to be condemned for seriously betraying their expected ideological commitments. While several outstanding works try to identify ideologies in the fantastic, we do not yet have a toolset which allows a meaningful dialogue between researchers. This is unfortunate, given i) the current immense popularity and range of ‘the fantastic’ and ii) the great power that media is alleged to have to infuse ideologies into young minds. Thus we call for papers on themes such as:

* The ideological critique of fantastic motifs.

* Conceptualization of values by means of fantastic metaphors.

* Comparison of ideological elements in fantastic fiction that belong to different literary systems.

* Outward expressions of particular ideologies in fantastic works: nationalism, liberalism, feminism, anarchism, socialism, etc.

* Authorship of fantastic texts and ideological construction.

Cephalopods of the Multiverse

15 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by in Censorship, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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As the new Aquaman movie apparently romps to worldwide success, the oceanic tentacular becomes even more alluring. What better time for a comprehensive survey of the tentacular aspects of the popular game Magic the Gathering. It’s newly published in the Journal of Geek Studies as “Cephalopods of the Multiverse” by Mark A. Carnall, curator at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

On Aquaman, I’ve not seen it yet but it apparently throws DC’s usual preachy ‘grimness and angst’ overboard, in favour of a well-made fun adventure with epic CG sets and lively CG sea-monsters with Lovecraftian tendencies. And let’s face it, that’s really all we want from most superhero movies. It’s been lightly censored for gore, in UK cinemas, so as to get a 12A rating.

Where No Fear Was: A Book About Fear

14 Friday Dec 2018

Posted by in Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc.

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New on Librixov in free chaptered audiobook, A. C. Benson’s Where No Fear Was: A Book About Fear (1914).

Benson was the Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. A writer of short stories, including what are said to be ghost stories in the English tradition and the Edwardian style. An occasional translator of the macabre into English. A poet and a writer of at a least one popular song lyric. He published his diaries in 1926.

Partial contents listing.

His 1914 book on fear was admired by the likes of Wilfred Owen, who read it while recovering in a bleak northern war hospital in 1917. One assumes that Lovecraft perused the book at some point, out of professional interest. Although it’s not listed in the edition of Lovecraft’s Library that I have access to. He would almost certainly have a read at least one review of it, in the likes of The Spectator.

Lovecraft was aware in passing of Benson’s essays, since he noted them in the United Amateur in July 1917 while profiling another amateur…

“Apart from fiction, Miss Barnhart is fond of books on travel and of light essays such as those of Mark Twain, Stevenson, and Arthur Benson.”

If he had read these same essays is another matter. But he did read his equally prolific brother, E.F. Benson, who also wrote rather more impressive ghost and horror stories among much else. Lovecraft read and admired these stories, noting Benson’s work in his “Weird Story Plots” work-book. He also mentioned Benson in his survey “Supernatural Horror in Literature”.