09 Tuesday Dec 2014
Posted in Scholarly works
‘Secrets’ is the theme of the 23rd Annual Conference of the English and American Literature Association, being held in Taiwan in October 2015…
Truth, Uncovering, and Concealment
Secrecy and Conspiracy
Esotericism
Secret Codes
Taboos
Disguise and Secret Identity
09 Tuesday Dec 2014
Posted in Odd scratchings
Amazon’s warehouse bots rush to complete your Xmas books order…
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMpsMt7ETi8?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
07 Sunday Dec 2014
Posted in New books
S.T. Joshi’s collected essays book Lovecraft and a World in Transition is now available as a $28 paperback.
05 Friday Dec 2014
Posted in Odd scratchings
I’ve only just stumbled on the news that last month George R.R. Martin (Game of Thrones) made a visit to the grave of H.P. Lovecraft…
05 Friday Dec 2014
Posted in Podcasts etc.
The Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast talks listeners through The Science of Uncanny Music.
Virgil Finlay illustration used for “Tcheriapin” by Sax Rohmer in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, July 1951.
03 Wednesday Dec 2014
Posted in Scholarly works
Mythical Cosmos: now and then, a conference in Poland on 21st-22nd March 2015.
Is there some genuinely mythical potential in popular culture and the modern media arts? The conference will explore this question, and discuss how a mythical worldview might change as it travels into and beyond popular culture. The conference will interest those who investigate traditional cultures, ancient mythologies, modern day mythologies and popular culture.
Specifically inviting papers on Lovecraft. Deadline for abstracts: 30th December 2014.
01 Monday Dec 2014
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
In the new Journal of Sonic Studies, an essay on “The Imagined Sounds of Outer Space” by James Wierzbicki.
30 Sunday Nov 2014
Posted in New books
The earliest Arabic tales of the weird, Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange, published in English for the first time.
…it lay unread and gathering dust, a ragged manuscript that no one even knew existed, until 1933 when Hellmut Ritter, a German Orientalist, stumbled across it and translated it into his mother tongue. An Arabic edition was belatedly printed in 1956.”
The stories…
dealt with all things that challenged human understanding, including magic, the realms of the jinn, marvels of the sea, strange fauna and flora, great monuments of the past, automatons, hidden treasures, grotesqueries and uncanny coincidences. … The sheer mad inventiveness of “The Story of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle”, with its jumbling of Muslim, Christian and pagan beliefs and rituals would take some beating. Here we have a mechanical vulture, visionary dreams, conversation with a pagan god, magical transformations, thrones of wrath and of mercy, an enchanted gazelle, a herder of giant ostriches, lustful jinn, speaking idols, a queen of the crows, a weeping lion, a fortress guarded by talismans, a crocodile with pearls in its ears, the sacrifice of virgins to the Nile and much else.”
The hardcover seems to have sold out, but a Kindle edition is available.
Still from Reiniger’s Achmed.
30 Sunday Nov 2014
Posted in Scholarly works
* Erik Davis (2014), “H.P. Lovecraft” (from the book The Occult World, Routledge 2014. A concise overview of Lovecraft’s portrayal of the occult in his fiction, and the later claims made by some modern occultists about H.P. Lovecraft)
25 Tuesday Nov 2014
Posted in Scholarly works
The latest issue of One+One Filmmakers Journal includes a short interview on Lovecraft…
Dominic Fox interviews Graham Harman and they find subversive, philosophical and materialist dimensions in the works of H.P. Lovecraft.”
18 Tuesday Nov 2014
Posted in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts
Perhaps I’m just over-sensitised to H.P. Lovecraft’s ideas, but it seems to me that the excellent new sci-fi blockbuster film Interstellar has some interesting elements drawn from Lovecraft’s fiction. I was expecting epic civilisation-building space opera on the Foundation scale, yet the film is anything but that. It’s much more down-to-earth, more of a deft melding of Sagan’s Contact and Clarke’s 2001 series. Click on to read spoilers… Continue reading
18 Tuesday Nov 2014
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
A full scan of On Strange Altars: a book of enthusiasms (1924) by Paul Jordan-Smith, containing his essay “Black Magic—An Impression of Arthur Machen”. A hat-tip to the Son of Yog-Sothoth, who writes that…
The second part of the essay is, perhaps to me, the most unexpected: the author had in 1920 travelled to England and visited Arthur Machen and his wife, where Machen briefly spoke of his acquaintance with Oscar Wilde. It seems to me that I must have read something of this in one of the essays or biographies of Machen, but I’ll leave tracking that down to some other day.”
This may interest some, as it’s a view of Machen by an American who discovered him a few years before Lovecraft did. Lovecraft first discovered Machen’s work in the summer of 1923 (S.T. Joshi, I Am Providence, p.454).
Paul Jordan-Smith’s Cables of Cobweb book, listed facing the title page, sounds like a supernatural novel but apparently isn’t…
A young Virginian, revolting against his parents conservatism, experiments with radicalism but with maturity becomes conservative”
Likewise his novel Nomad, which seems to have been a sort of light-hearted philosophical quest story, with the hero and his companions moving through and exemplifying various philosophies. It sounds like Pilgrim’s Progress meets Gulliver’s Travels?