Category Archives: Censorship

The Whole Wide World on Blu-ray

06 Thursday Sep 2018

Posted by in Censorship, Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts

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The Whole Wide World is set for release as a Blu-ray disc on 18th September.

“When a feisty teacher falls for an eccentric pulp writer [Robert. E. Howard], the two begin a tumultuous affair and find they have nothing in common but their passion.”

Currently only listing on Amazon USA, but the page there notes that “This item ships to the United Kingdom”.

For those expecting a depressive gloomy angst-fest about small-town small-mindedness, frontier violence and family illness, ending in tragic suicide… it’s a brighter movie than you might expect.

I read that the 106-minute DVD edition had vital scenes cut. In one Howard discusses his views on racial memory, and in another part Lovecraft is talked about. I hadn’t known about those scenes. It seems that many had seen these scenes in the big-screen version that screened at Sundance and in its cinema run, felt they were integral to the movie, and had expected to see them on the DVD. One hopes that it wasn’t the DVD distributor who demanded they be cut, to forestall a leftist twitterstorm about race. Back in 2012 Bobbie Derie’s blog commented that…

There are certain aspects of the film that make little sense without them [the deleted scenes]

The deleted scenes had been uploaded to YouTube in 2012, and were apparently available until 2015, but have now vanished from the Web. Nor does there appear to be a full script available online.

So we might hope that the Blu-ray has the five or six minutes of deleted scenes on it, which were not on the DVD.

However, I can nowhere find details of Blu-ray having any extras at all. None are mentioned by Multicom in its survey of its summer 2018 releases. It looks to me like it’s just a bare-bones Blu-ray, with the 106-minute cut-down movie shown in a higher resolution than it was on the DVD.

On (not) finding Lovecraft in paper

06 Thursday Sep 2018

Posted by in Censorship, Odd scratchings

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Two recent posts on the increasing perils of having to rely on libraries, thrift stores and mainstream bookstores, to find local paper copies of Lovecraft:

1) “Where Have All the Books Gone?”…

Entire oeuvres of authors work have disappeared from the [local library] shelves, including Sheri S. Tepper, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Patricia A. McKillip – to name but a few of my favourites. I knew the main Library at least had a copy of The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories. That is, after all, where it started. If I couldn’t find anything new, I’d just reread that, it’s been a while. [But] The one known Lovecraft book is gone.

Replaced by an ebook option, it seems. Nice if it’s free, is the same bona fide Joshi-edited Penguin Classics edition, and one has an dedicated ereader such as the original Kindle 3. Otherwise not so good. Even if you have one of the new budget Kindle Fire HD 10″ tablets, reading a long book on a glaring screen is not going to be as pleasant as it would be on a proper eInk ereader. But I’m guessing the library’s app probably only works on a tablet. One can see how these sort of tiresome logistics could get increasingly tangled, for the computer-phobic library user.

2) Also, found on an online Chess Forum, posted August 2018…

In my local used bookstore, I was looking for H.P. Lovecraft volumes and couldn’t find any. I asked about this at the front desk, and they said “Oh we keep these behind the counter.” I asked “Is that because you are afraid you will be boycotted and shamed for selling racist books?”

“No,” they lied. “He is so popular that people were stealing his books.”

I bought all they had — three volumes. It is only a matter of time before HPL is purged from school libraries as well as bookstores.

Of course, it seems faintly ridiculous — in the age of $60 digital tablets, eBay with local store pickup, and free Wayne June audiobooks all over YouTube — to go trudging down the town High Street looking for Lovecraft stories. Nevertheless, these two posts do point to the possibility that some sort of quiet and informal purge might be underway. I don’t think that’s actually the case. It seems more probable that it really is just about the global shift to ebooks and about Lovecraft’s popularity among light-fingered teenagers. But the possible evaporation of Lovecraft in locally accessible paper form is something we might usefully be alert to, in our own localities and districts. Can HPL still be found in your local library and bookstore?