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The Monolith Monsters

15 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts

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Sunday afternoon classic sci-fi movie, The Monolith Monsters (1957), free on archive.org as it’s now public domain. Though the picture quality there is a little rough. You can find it elsewhere in higher quality, if you go looking.

Rocks from a meteor which grow when in contact with water threaten a sleepy Southwestern desert community

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Gawsh, dawrn it, that sounds very familiar! They even added a few touches from The Dunwich Horror. One wonders if August Derleth managed to wrangle a slice of royalties on this one?

…a brisk and efficient piece of entertainment, that has been put together with a degree of care which belies its modest budget.” (IMDB)

Added to Open Lovecraft

15 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by in Scholarly works

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* Stefano Lazzarin (2014), “Il volto velato: Iperbole e reticenza in Howard Phillips Lovecraft, e nel racconto fantastico e d’orrore otto-novecentesco”, Between journal, Vol 4, No.7, 2014. (In Italian. “Lovecraft … as part of a certain line of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fantastic genre and horror literature [which] plays with — and reflects on — the rhetorical devices of hyperbole and reticence. In the texts examined by the author, what cannot be represented is chased throughout the story and is finally revealed, but only to leave room for an irresolvable ambiguity … The last horror, unnameable and unthinkable, is nothing more than an empty signifier.” In Italian.)

Dream-Quest videogame

14 Saturday Jun 2014

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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What a wild videogame “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” would make. The plot summary just says “game” all the way…

Dream three times.
Find and negotiate the seventy steps.
Get past the priests.
Get through the Enchanted Wood.
Encounter the Zoogs.
Travel to Ulthar
Talk to Atal
Travel to Dylath-Leen.
Negotiate the Black Galleys.
Battle the Moon Beasts
etc

So far as I can discover, there’s not even a table-top RPG text adventure for the story, or even an interactive fiction. Which is kind of amazing.

“A sort of mad-eyed monstrosity behind the leader…”

13 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by in Historical context, Scholarly works

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The Organization of American Historians is holding their 2016 conference in Providence. The conference theme is “Leadership in America”, so on that basis I guess there might be room to shoehorn Lovecraft in there? Which would be fitting, as the conference will be in Providence.

Perhaps a paper titled something like… ‘Corresponding Leaderships: H. P. Lovecraft as leader of the amateur journalism movement’. Looking not at the tedious minutiae of the posts he occupied and the twist and turns of his leaderships-by-correspondence, but at Lovecraft as an example of the sort of people who gained skills from leading an autonomous literary open movement that was — perhaps for the first time in world history — outside of religion or party/single-issue politics, free of pre-publication censorship, and which consciously tried to overcome boundaries (gender, income, education, and geography) between members.

“I was lectured upon as a typical example…”

13 Friday Jun 2014

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72nd World SF Convention, London in August 2014. The keynote academic speaker is Isabella van Elferen (author of the book Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny), on “In Space, No One Can Hear David Bowie: A Brief History of Unheard Music”…

Few authors have described the terrifying silence of space more grippingly than H. P. Lovecraft, whose stories narrate the “black seas of infinity” surrounding human life. But the vacuum of space, Lovecraft asserts, listens. Through the “audient void” of his universe voiceless sounds resonate. Detestable, gigantic, absurd … What could this arch-alien possibly sound like?

MLA 2015: “Weird Fiction, Weird Methods” roundtable

13 Friday Jun 2014

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MLA 2015 Vancouver, session roundtable on “Weird Fiction, Weird Methods”. Does weird fiction have a single coherent approach and origin? Does it need to be read and studied differently than other fiction? Can it find a place in academia, or is it just too… weird?

* Kate Marshall (elements of American naturalist literature may have been co-opted by the early weird)

* S. T. Joshi (recapping Lovecraft’s theories of the weird)

* Ali Sperling (the early literary weird should be understood as part of the history of modernist literature)

* Matthew Taylor (what the new Speculative Realist philosophy has taken from the old weird, especially re: autonomous self-generating systems that have unhuman frames of reference)

* Eileen Joy (can academics develop a weird methodology for weird literature, by borrowing ideas from the philosophers of OOO Speculative Realism?)

Rediscovering the Deep Sahara

12 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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New 90 minute podcast from the Long Now Foundation. Stefan Kroepelin on “Civilization’s Mysterious Desert Cradle: Rediscovering the Deep Sahara” (.mp3 link. Starts at 4:10).

Kroepelin has survived every kind of desert hardship to discover the climate and cultural history of northern Africa. He found that the “Green Sahara” arrived with monsoon rains 10,500 years ago, and people quickly moved into the new fertile savannah. There they prospered as cattle pastoralists — their elaborate rock paintings show herds of rhinoceros and scenes of prehistoric life — until 7,300 years ago, when gradually increasing desiccation drove them to the Nile river, which they had previously considered too dangerous for occupation. To manage the Nile, the former pastoralists helped to invent a Pharaonic state 5,100 years ago. Its 3,000-year continuity has never been surpassed. Kroepelin, a climate scientist at the University of Cologne, is a dazzling speaker with hair-raising stories.

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Unknown Friends of H. P. Lovecraft: No.1, Chester Alwyn Mowry

11 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by in Historical context, New discoveries, Scholarly works

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I’m very pleased that the legendary Lovecraft researcher Randy Everts has chosen Tentaclii to help publish an important new essay on Lovecraft in Providence. His essay reveals, for the first time, one of Lovecraft’s previously unknown local friends — Chester Alywn Mowry (1898-1945).

With his permission I have slightly tweaked the essay, formatted it with my usual book style, and added my footnotes plus a few extra pictures. My thanks to Randy for this great opportunity.

   “Yeh—keep it up [meaning, the use of new American slang and twang], & you’ll have even Mowry rolling his rrr … ’s in mid-western style yet!” (Letter from Lovecraft to James F. Morton of January 1928).

Download: Randy Everts, “Unknown Friends of H. P. Lovecraft: No.1, Chester Alwyn Mowry”. (PDF, formatted for 6″ x 9″ print, 8,000 words inc. footnotes).

The Supremacy of Life

11 Wednesday Jun 2014

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Thanks to Randy Everts for telling me that an early Lovecraft revision is now scanned and online, “The Supremacy of Life” (1917)…

In one of the letters to [David V.] Bush dated 20th January 1918 HPL mentions the book he edited (re-wrote) for the Rev. W.S. Harrison of Starkville, Miss., a “long Miltonic epic in blank verse”

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ex1

I wonder if the revision / ghost writing for this work may have prompted Lovecraft to muse upon the possibility of his lost “Life and Death” story (c. 1920). We know of one such instance: apparently working on a Bush revision had, in part, been a prompt for the dream that led to “Nyarlathotep”.