20 Tuesday Jan 2015
Posted in New books
S.T. Joshi blogs today that he is…
contemplating the issuance of e-books of some of my older titles … H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (1990), A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft (1996)”
And since they’re going to have to be retyped, he muses that he might also revise them at the same time.
19 Monday Jan 2015
Posted in Podcasts etc.
Fascinating Nouns podcast recently had two interviews of interest: a new S.T. Joshi interview is which Joshi mostly gives the usual ‘Lovecraft 101’, and an H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society interview.
19 Monday Jan 2015
Posted in Odd scratchings
Yuggoth discovered, maybe…
The uncharacteristic orbital behaviour of 13 objects beyond Neptune has been pored over by scientists, who have now published their calculations in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters. “This excess of objects with unexpected orbital parameters makes us believe that some invisible forces are altering the distribution of the orbital elements of the ETNO [extreme trans-Neptunian objects] and we consider that the most probable explanation is that other unknown planets exist beyond Neptune and Pluto,” said de la Fuente Marcos.
17 Saturday Jan 2015
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
io9 has a new ‘not safe for work’ article in “The Long Tentacle of H.P. Lovecraft in Manga”, a breathless scamper through Lovecraft’s reception and use in Japanese manga comics. Though supposedly about manga the article is unable to resist slithering in a mention of a genre of interactive, erm… “romance system tentacle battle” games and the existence of “porn anime” animated movies with titles such as Mystery of the Necronomicon. Generally the reader gets the impression that Lovecraft in Japan looks like this…
Yes, apparently Nyarko W is one of the top Lovecraft inspired series. Which, in terms of sheer chutzpah in using Lovecraft’s name and characters, rather overshadows the West’s recent wave of feeble ‘Kickstarter cash-ins’.
Though the article does have a more interesting mention of…
Innsmouth wo ô Kage [Insmus wo Oou Kage, 1992], Chiaki Konaka’s 1990s TV adaptation of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” transplanted to the foggy byways of rural Japan”
Sounds good, but looking at it on the YouTube link (above) it just seems very ‘TV movie flat’, cheesy, and distinctly lacking in mist and shadow. Maybe I skipped past too much.
Not that much to get excited about, then in terms of the possibility of a Japanese equivalent of a Berni Wrightson or a Mike Ploog penning Lovecraft adaptations in comics. But should readers want a little more authoritative detail on Lovecraft in Japanese manga, maybe in order to dig up a comic worth licensing for an English translation, the io9 article helpfully notes…
In an article in the Japanese Mythos horror anthology Night Voices, Night Journeys
(published in English in 2005 by Kurodahan Press), Yoshihiro Yonezawa and Satoshi Hoshino provide an exhaustive 50-page history of manga which really refer to Lovecraft.”
17 Saturday Jan 2015
Posted in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works
Can’t afford the 4,000 page The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary? Historical writers can instead use the Historical Thesaurus of English from Glasgow University, which is huge, online for free and has a search facility.
15 Thursday Jan 2015
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
A 2013 open access item in The Comics Grid: journal of comics scholarship, “‘Should we not also speak of Art as Magic?’: A Review of Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition”, includes an account of a chapter in the book on Moore and Lovecraft…
Concluding with an obvious yet essential illustration of the relationship between Moore, Lovecraft and the Gothic, Green’s ‘A darker magic: heterocosms and bricolage in Moore’s recent reworkings of Lovecraft’ investigates the recent Neonomicon. It results in an examination of Moore’s accentuation of Gothic tropes — fear of the past and excessive knowledge — through psychogeography. The Neonomicon (2010–2011), Lovecraft’s texts, and the Gothic tradition are seen as possibly dangerous ‘heterocosms’, as intertextual bricolage that make ‘other worlds’: but ‘the fact that a particular world can be imagined, does not necessarily mean that it should be brought into being’”
13 Tuesday Jan 2015
Posted in Scholarly works
* Sebastian Normandin (2015), “Review of Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, by Graham Harman”, Speculations (forthcoming, 2015).
* Dominic Fox (2014), “Interview with Graham Harman on H.P. Lovecraft”, One+One : filmmakers’ journal, Vol. 2, Issue 13, October 2014.
* Ricardo Pereira da Silva (2014), “Performing Call of Cthulhu: role-playing games and performativity”. (Paper given at Messengers from the Stars conference, Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon 19th-21st November 2014)
13 Tuesday Jan 2015
Posted in Podcasts etc.
I recently undertook my quarterly fly-by of BBC Radio 3’s talk based programmes, available online as “listen again…”. Sunday Feature : The Supernatural North and Landmark : 2001: A Space Odyssey are two 45 minute programmes that might appeal to readers of this blog.
12 Monday Jan 2015
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
There’s something rather Lovecraftian about this beautifully filmed short movie of a forest. Not least the bioluminescence, little-seen these days but remarked on by Lovecraft a number of times in his fiction (“dancing death-fires”, “tales of dancing lights in the dark of the moon”, “swarm of corpse-fed fireflies”, “the faint glow of the vegetation”, etc). We don’t tend to see it these days because of light-pollution, electric torches and reflective jackets, and possibly because our eyes are not those of a rural old-timer who’d spent thirty years learning how to navigate a farm in the pitch dark so as to save the cost of lamp oil.
In this case it’s digitally-projected, but gives us a taste of what it might be like if we could see the bioluminescence happening in the web of forest ecology. Details at Bioluminescent Forest (requires Flash).
12 Monday Jan 2015
Posted in Odd scratchings
In relation to 2014’s ‘summer of rage’ over the Lovecraft statuette, this last week saw the publication of two detail analyses of the tactics used. They lay out the leftist ‘attack playbook’ for this sort of emotion-driven attack, over at Spiked magazine and at Slate Star Codex…
It’s in activists’ interests to destroy their own causes by focusing on the most controversial cases and principles, the ones that muddy the waters and make people oppose them out of spite. And it’s in the media’s interest to help them and egg them on.
Too often the “cases” turn out to be simply fabricated, or the inconvenient hard facts quickly become heavily obfuscated, I might add. Overall these tactics are a morbid symptom of the activist left’s weakness and decay, their inability to make and defend rational evidence-based arguments, or to cohere their raggle-taggle bands around more challenging targets. The best defence against such tactics seems to be not to take offense at leftists’ ‘offense’.
12 Monday Jan 2015
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
The Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination has grants to…
support undergraduate student projects on imagination. Specifically, projects that will lead to a deeper understanding of imagination as a neuro-cognitive and socio-cultural phenomenon, as well as projects that apply imagination in novel and impactful ways are encouraged. Creative works (art, music, dance, theater, literature, etc…), technology development, or scientific study, in which the role of human imagination is foregrounded are appropriate for the funding. Projects that involve cross disciplinary collaborations are particularly encouraged, and all funded projects are expected to be featured in Clarke Center events and facilities per the timeline below. We anticipate awarding three grants this year.”
Opens 25th January 2015. Fleeing night-dream memories and their potential for having subtle impacts on everyday waking decision behaviors, that would be my choice of a topic. Which would also tie into Lovecraft’s interest in dreams somewhat.
11 Sunday Jan 2015
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Doc Con XVII will be a Doc Savage fan convention in Glendale, Arizona. Apparently set for 17th-19th October 2015.
No news since last summer, it appears, about Sony’s mooted Doc Savage movie. And, given the Sony hack, there may not be for some time. The job might be done better by a lavish 1930s costumed TV mini series, showing 6 x two-parters of the very best 181 original Doc books (1933-1949). And ideally with no modernising tweaks. A quick scoot around the Web suggests The Man of Bronze and The Polar Treasure are two likely candidates… but it seems there’s no handy list to be had with a title like: “The Six Very Best Doc Savage Novels, for those who really don’t want to slog through all 181 titles”.
Though a handy slog-free taster of Doc can be had from the quarterly Doc Savage magazine (1975-1977), oversize b&w ‘mature’ comics with extra-long stories. I remember being very fond of these, pieced together as a collection of used copies picked up from comic shops. They are collected in a huge hardback reprint Doc Savage Archives Volume 1: The Curtis Magazine Era
Oh, and about that time when H.P. Lovecraft let Dent use his settings and monsters? Doc Savage: Madness from the Sea, perhaps…
