03 Tuesday Jun 2014
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
Gurus of Sci-Fi: the Hugo Gernsback and Forrest J. Ackerman Papers…
Ackerman is known less as a writer and more as a literary agent for writers like Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury. […] Ackerman’s papers came to Syracuse University in the late 1960s. By 1973 they totaled 100 linear feet and included fanzines, correspondence, manuscript drafts, and ephemera — all of it to this day unprocessed.” (My emphasis)
03 Tuesday Jun 2014
Posted in New books
Amazon has a new listing for the forthcoming (July 2014) book The Curious Case of H. P. Lovecraft, touted as a “comprehensive new biography” in 192 pages. The author’s past books apparently include “The Dark History of the Occult”; “The Crimes of Jack the Ripper”, “Nazis and the Occult”.
03 Tuesday Jun 2014
Posted in Odd scratchings
Siberian fisherman hauls up a ferocious god statuette made at the beginning of recorded time…
The figurine has almond shaped eyes, a large mouth with full lips, and a ferocious face expression “[…] the experts told me that this object was carved at the very beginning of the Bronze Age. […] Marina Banschikova, director of Tisul History Museum said: “Quite likely, it shows a pagan god.
02 Monday Jun 2014
Posted in Historical context
Handy March 2014 list of Rhode Island Online Historical Newspapers, with free sites.
Above: Providence Tribune, 4th Jan 1920.
01 Sunday Jun 2014
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Design Observer looks at the new vogue among the trenderati for vintage typewriters.
Although perhaps more interesting, in terms of fine art, is their potential for prototyping of the future Giant Beetle Race…
01 Sunday Jun 2014
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Video preview for the major new exhibition “Tentacles: The Astounding Lives of Octopuses, Squid and Cuttlefishes”, on now in California.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRgWo9M8y0Y?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
And a “Making of…” that examines the automata and animatronics…
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-szwHKPo6g?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
31 Saturday May 2014
Posted in Lovecraftian places
Even more Lovecraftian places that really exist…
Abandoned organ room, Eastern Europe.
Ani, medieval ghost town in Armenia.
Library at Chateau de Groussay, France.
Abandoned Soviet power plant, with ‘eye’ dome.
Abandoned prison, Ross Island, India.
Hotel Salto del Tequendama, Columbia.
Wreck of the S.S. America (1940), Canary Islands.
Abandoned tunnel under New York.
Abandoned mine, Arctic circle.
Mirny mine, Siberia.
Ol Doinyo Lengai, Rift Valley, Africa.
Abandoned power station, Belgium.
30 Friday May 2014
Posted in Scholarly works
2014 Conference of The Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association (NEPCA). To be held at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island, on Friday 24th October and Saturday 25th October 2014.
“Given the conference location in Rhode Island, we would also be very much interested in organizing at least one session on H.P. Lovecraft…”
30 Friday May 2014
Posted in Scholarly works
* Anthony Christopher Camara (2013), Dark Matter : British Weird Fiction and the Substance of Horror, 1880-1927. (PhD thesis for UCLA. Examines Lovecraft’s predecessors in British fiction — Vernon Lee, Machen, Blackwood, Hodgson — and asks how they departed from the Gothic romance and the Victorian ghost story. Seems to lack a proper conclusion, but has a short coda survey article on later developments in British weird fiction)
* Arthur Jorge Dias de Morais Coelho (2013), “Os Mitos de H.P. Lovecraft e a cultura juvenil”, Anais : Semana de Historia, Vol. XIX, 2013. (In Spanish. “Of youth culture and the mythology of H.P. Lovecraft”. Asks how the mythos came to be such a key part of youth culture).
* Frederic Sayer (2004), “Horreur des villes maudites dans l’oeuvre de H.P. Lovecraft”, Belphegor : Litterature Populaire et Culture Mediatique, 3.2, 2004. (In French. Explores… “the combination of attraction and repulsion that these elements [architecture, degenerates, ancient cults] produce for the hero, who is a true double of the reader”)
* Sean Braune (2013), “How to Analyze Texts that Were Burned, Lost, Fragmented, or Never Written”, Symploke, Vol. 21, No. 1-2, 2013.
30 Friday May 2014
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
Now on pre-order, Dark Adventure Radio Theatre’s “The Dreams in the Witch House”, done as a 74 minute audio adaptation.
29 Thursday May 2014
Posted in Odd scratchings
Alternative careers of H.P. Lovecraft:
* Paid research assistant to Harry Houdini: journalistic debunker of Spiritualism and other nonsense.
* Editor of Weird Tales magazine.
* New York advertising man, specialising in copywriting.
* Architectural historian, conservator and building restoration consultant.
* Astronomy assistant at Brown University.
* Paid researcher and writer for hire, for ‘our town’s history’ books.
* Travel writer, of practical guidebooks leavened with personal anecdote and curious local folklore.
* Part-time book cataloguer for Kirk’s expanding bookshop chain.
* Head press publicist for Sonia’s successful chain of New York hat shops.
* Archaeologist in the American southwest.
* Writer of a radio comedy-horror show.
* Purveyor of small boxed mineral and rock crystal samples, via the back pages ads of Popular Science (he owned a quarry).
* Inventor of a means of typing a story without actually typing.
* Populariser of the Patent Lovecraft Reducing Diet program.
* Dangerous Sea Life specialist of the U.S. Navy Archives at Boston Navy Yard.
28 Wednesday May 2014
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
