27 Friday Nov 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings
McFarland has a Black Friday sale with coupon BLACKFRIDAY30 — and their huge list has a great many to choose from. Though it’s not all great, and in there are some gems such as H. P. Lovecraft’s Dark Arcadia, but also some that are not so good such as the Dune Companion. I spotted a book there that’s new to me, Arkham House Books: A Collector’s Guide (2004). This has a pleasing Cornell-like glimpse of Lovecraft on the cover.
25 Wednesday Nov 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
The 10th issue of Fantasy Art and Studies will be “dedicated to music” and is calling for creative work. While the journal is French, for this issue they appear to be also open to work in English. Deadline 5th January 2021.
22 Sunday Nov 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
Scottish Lovecraftian Comedy. What’s that then, and is it more fun than a hairy highland haggis on the loose? Find out by listening to a new long interview with the maker of such…
Matthew McLean is the writer, producer and one of the stars of A Scottish Podcast. While the name may not suggest it, A Scottish Podcast is steeped in Lovecraftian horror. It’s also pretty damn funny.
15 Sunday Nov 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
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12 Thursday Nov 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings
I’d always been vaguely put off the Call of Cthulhu RPG’s “Dreamlands” supplement by its naff current cover. Partly because the cover recalls for me the boredom engendered in a boy by C.S. Lewis’s show-stopping The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (I think it was that one, in Narnia series), rather than the creepy wonders of encountering Lovecraft’s Dreamlands. And then there’s that awful garish typography and equally off-putting subtitle: Roleplaying Beyond the Wall of Sleep. When did “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” enter the Dreamlands canon? Nothing about the cover invites confidence in the likely contents.
But who knew there was this older cover, which makes the thing look very much more appealing and is a nice bit of Lovecraftian art in its own right…
Anyway, if you want to check out the CoC Dreamlands as it currently stands (with Gazetteer, creature guide and map, as well as RPG adventures), there’s no need to pay silly collector prices for it. The 2011 printing is currently available in print for $10 at the Chaosium site, although shipping is extra.
Here’s a peek at the contents for the two books and map found in the original box…
04 Wednesday Nov 2020
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts
“Author with Dreams”, a circa 1936-46 painting of Donald Wandrei (and his personal dream-world) by Clement B. Haupers.
31 Saturday Oct 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
For Halloween, Stanley Chaplin’s “Cornish Litany” series of monster postcards. Apparently there are 12 designs in total, in b&w and colourised variants. The Litany is said to be traceable back to the 15th century, and to be chanted by superstitious Cornishmen and women to ward off the night-spirits.
0.
1.
Missing
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9. B&W.
9. Colour
10.
Missing.
11.
12.
29 Thursday Oct 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
Providence’s Brown University has a fully-funded PhD opportunity in Music and Multimedia Composition, which may be of interest to those making Lovecraftian music or sonic environments…
Students have access to the department’s Multimedia and Electronic Music Experiments (MEME) studios, and the university’s Granoff Center for the Creative Arts. These specialized research facilities house recording studios, electronics shops, project studios, exhibition and performance spaces. … faculty specialties in technoculture, sound studies, copyright, improvisation and timbre.
22 Thursday Oct 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Newly up for sale, an original art board for Marvel’s Journey into Mystery, specifically the Gene Colan teen-friendly Lovecraft adaptation of “The Haunter of the Dark”.
Also a nice page of ‘Kirby Cosmicism’ from Thor, where in the pencilled margin notes you can see the synopsis and thus ‘the Marvel Method’ at work. For speed, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby would verbally spitball a plot outline, and Lee would jot it down into a basic synopsis. Jack would go away and pencil the pages to the synopsis, then Lee would come back in and ‘write to the art’ — often directly onto the boards.
Both boards are at nostalgicinvestments which has a website that’s just too annoying to link to, with weird rapid auto-refresh of pages that can’t be cured even by disabling Javascript and CSS.
21 Wednesday Oct 2020
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts
Following my recent stroll down the old College Street, I found another drawing of the archway near the foot of College Street, this time by Providence artist Whitman Bailey and from 1914. Not in my Whitman Bailey ebook collection, which is available at the previous link.
17 Saturday Oct 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
A Portuguese translated Tales collection from Lovecraft, to be published from Martin Claret, 28th October 2020. It’s one of three such volumes but their page for these is broken, which doesn’t inspire confidence. Still, a very pleasing and clever cover for the first such book.
The bicycle is there because the young Lovecraft was a keen cyclist to about 1908, then it most likely became sporadic, and he marks 1913 as the terminal date for his giving up cycling altogether. For adults to cycle in Providence was not the “done thing” at that time.
15 Thursday Oct 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works
A new book, seemingly coming from an occultist perspective, Dark Magic: H.P. Lovecraft, Starry Wisdom and the Contagion of Fear…
explores the contagious qualities of Lovecraft’s tales, with their embedded sense of dread and their dismantling of human reason, and how they have propagated in the near century after his death … the infectious qualities of Lovecraft’s ideas are seen to parallel virology, mass infection, and the fraying state of the human psyche during times of pandemic.
Which blurb leads me to coin the new word “cultifectious”:— the quality had by a certain type of culture that is highly infectious and communicable, but not mere mass-market pop-fluff or some passing propaganda of-the-moment. It carries within it a complex nexus of elements that organically connect things usually divided — low and high culture, the deep past and the cosmic future, or ancient and modern science. Its infectiousness thus comes partly from being connected to ‘the genuine’ at both ends of one of those divisions, and by bringing these lightly into play with each other. Because it has something genuine woven through it, it may be difficult to make into a mass audience commodity unless brutally shorn of many of its intrinsic qualities. Instead it persists and spreads among initiates as a potent ‘cultic’ form of culture. It does not usually, however, gather about it the more oppressive hierarchical apparatus of ‘a cult’ in the religious sense. It naturally fascinates, rather than ponderously recruits.