20 Monday Jan 2020
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts
“Are Cats Part-Octopus?” Now, there’s an idea for story. While the notion has had slight and rather cursory attention in toon graphics and seen the occasional hand-crafted plushie bunged on Etsy, there seems plenty of potential for a more explanatory Lovecraftian fiction on connections between the two creatures.
19 Sunday Jan 2020
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
Bret Kramer of Sentinel Hill Press has noticed that a few of a series of “Yankee Yarns” New England folklore radio-broadcasts are now on Archive.org. They’re from Boston’s Alton H. Blackington, who broadcast 1933-53 and who would drive thousands of miles and interview many people to get his tales and get them straight. He also made such trips pay by being a newspaper photographer and running a New England stock-photo company. After finishing with radio he continued as a popular stage lecturer and published the best of the Tales in print as several volumes under the titles Yankee Yarns and More Yankee Yarns…
A mine of ideas for the region’s fiction writers, as well as a repository of folk-life, I’d suggest. Perhaps even more importantly, a large chunk of his photography collection survived…
“[the core of] the collection is the dozens of images of typically eccentric New England characters and human interest stories. Most of the images were taken by Blackington on 4×5″ dry plate negatives, however many of the later images are made on flexible acetate stock and the collection includes several images by other (unidentified) photographers distributed by the Blackington News Service. … His photographic vision extended to include hermits and eccentrics, skilled craftspeople, and the living relics of old traditions, including lighthouse keepers, whalers, and the last living town crier. … Blackington [had a] narrative eye and appreciation for the eccentricities of New Englanders and the vestiges of its long past”
… which raises the possibility of using some of it to help produce a new “Lovecraft’s places and faces” book, by pairing images related to or evoking Lovecraft’s travels with his letters and public-domain maps. Or perhaps a Ken Burns-style documentary made along the same lines, “panning and scanning” across such pictures.
18 Saturday Jan 2020
Posted in Doyle, Lovecraftian arts
A new 39 minute reading of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Horror Of The Heights” (1913). The blurb is via Wikipedia and has plot spoilers, the opening being… “The story is told through a blood-stained notebook, dubbed the ‘Joyce-Armstrong Fragment’.” Other aspects are quite Lovecraftian, although the writing isn’t.
If the reader is not to your taste, HorrorBabble has it on YouTube in a good steady British English reading, and there are other readings on Librivox here (40 mins), here (42 mins) and here (36 mins).
Archive.org has the original appearance in The Strand magazine 1913, complete with superb colour plates. I won’t show these here as they’re visual spoilers.
H.P. Lovecraft read a good deal of Conan Doyle, as a lad in his ‘detective phase’. Joshi states that… “he read every Holmes story published up to that time (circa 1903)” and that these formed a key template for his early boyish fiction writing. Lovecraft wrote that… “I used to write detective stories very often, the works of A. Conan Doyle being my model so far as plot was concerned.”
He later recalled he had dipped a toe back into new Holmes stories in 1908, but found these… “an odd (& rather mediocre) pair or series of tales” and thereafter gave up on Holmes. If he also sampled the best of the non-Holmes horror, ghost and weird stories of Conan Doyle appears to be uncertain.
A story by Doyle titled “The Horror Of The Heights” would certainly have attracted Lovecraft’s attention. Yet he would probably have not seen it in The Strand, but rather in Doyle’s non-Holmes 1918 book collection Danger! and other stories. This would surely have arrived in the Providence Public Library in multiple copies and then been noticed by Lovecraft once the initial rush of borrowing of it had subsided — perhaps circa 1919. But more likely the nature of this particular story might have been called to his attention by someone in his circle, at some point in the mid 1920s, before he fully formulated shoggoths. While it appears we have no evidence of such a reading that I know of, we do know that in 1924 Lovecraft was discovering overlooked items such as Wells’s collection Thirty Strange Stories (1897, read January 1924), and Wells’s classic The Time Machine (1895, read November 1924). He was also doing much ‘catch up’ reading for his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, with the aid of the New York libraries, the many used bookstores, and the private libraries of friends. Could he also have been sampling the best “strange stories” of Doyle, Kipling and others at this time?
16 Thursday Jan 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A look at the cover that Greenwood gave The H.P. Lovecraft Companion in 1977, a first ‘high pass’ over Lovecraft’s work, written by a Sherlock Holmes fan and newspaper book-critic. The book is usually presented for sale without the dust-jacket, and when it is a nice copy it’s usually for sale at silly prices.
The first section surveys Lovecraft’s style and opinions of other authors. Then follows a section with brief summaries of nearly 60 stories. There’s an A-Z of key places, characters and monsters found in the fiction. Then a survey of the pantheonic monsters. The final part briefly outlines Lovecraft’s pantheon and surveys what he was known to have read re: the occult and witchcraft.
It’s long since been superseded and the book is probably most interesting today for the choice of the cover picture which taps into “Witch House”, rather than into “Cthulhu” and tentacles as would be the case today. Thus the subject matter and 17th century woodcut style would have framed Lovecraft’s ‘first glance’ academic library reception within the mid-70s interest in the New England witch trials. The smiling wizard and the frowning witch also implicitly make an appeal to the then-emerging gender studies crowd in academia, which again links to “Witch House”.
15 Wednesday Jan 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
14 Tuesday Jan 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
New on Archive.org, Writing For The Quality Market (1935) is a short but detailed book that lays out what the ‘quality’ or ‘slick’ magazine market was like in Lovecraft’s last years, complete with a great many tables that ‘scientifically’ assess the types of purchased stories and their characteristics. Obviously, short of making a return to his “Sweet Ermengarde” days, he wasn’t going to fit in.
14 Tuesday Jan 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
How to make a cute 3D-rigged Elder Thing, in the Spore Creature Creator module.
With a bit of wrangling it’s possible to get these to Collada .DAE format, and then into Maya or 3DS Max and from there to other software. Blender perhaps, if you want free software, although their 2010 Open Collada support is apparently basic and has been abandoned since circa 2012.
11 Saturday Jan 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Board Games UK has an in-depth and very informed review of the new board-game Cthulhu: Death May Die. Even if you don’t care to play such Derlethian things, it appears to be quite a minor work of art in itself, with fine card-art and hand-painted miniature pieces.
09 Thursday Jan 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
From the music press, news that…
Dark ambient label Cryo Chamber are releasing a two-hour dark soundscape album recorded by over 20 ambient artists to pay tribute to H.P. Lovecraft. […] The label is keen to stress [the album] is not a compilation, rather a collaboration — and a huge undertaking.
Casey Douglass has a review.
02 Thursday Jan 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
I’m late in getting to the very trippy hippy-tastic poster for the release of the movie of Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space. The poster slipped out and got lost in the razzle-dazzle of the run-up to Christmas. The movie’s cinema release is on 24th January in the USA, so you should have about a month or so to catch it. Then the 4k Blu-ray and DVD is due a month later on 24th February 2020.
02 Thursday Jan 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
“Wrightson Collector: A collection of ALL things Bernie Wrightson”. A dedicated website with a large gallery, including fanzines and small magazines with photos of interior pages with art.
28 Saturday Dec 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
* Y. Torhovets and M. Andronova, “Features of functional epithets in the stories of H.P. Lovecraft” (title translated), Studia Philologica, Vol. 1, December 2019. (Philological study in Ukranian. Examines and categorises Lovecraft’s use of “epithets used to appeal to sensory feelings” in the reader. Finds that his visual epithets predominate, compared to auditory and olfactory epithets).
* J. Bazile, “Ludoformer Lovecraft: Sunless Sea comme mise en monde du mythe de Cthulhu”, Science de jue, No. 9, 2018. (In French with English abstract. Examines the videogame Sunless Sea, seeing in its level design and “narrative architecture” an attempt to recreate “semantic continuity” with Lovecraft’s own approaches to narrative).
