Category Archives: Lovecraftian arts

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.

The Hungarian Lovecraft Society

04 Tuesday Sep 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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The Hungarian Lovecraft Society looks very efficiently organised and active, and their member Kiti Solymosi is currently well into translating Lord of a Visible World among other projects. Also underway in translation is one of Joshi’s shorter versions of his Lovecraft biography.

The Society has an English page on their website and a Facebook page. Their website is also publishing substantial translations of the Letters as long footnoted blog posts, focussing on clearly demarcated topics such as Sonia’s arrival in Providence, etc.

They have just announced that, from this week, they will be taking over the news functions formerly offered by the fine Hungarian Lovecraft blogmag The Black Aether. This means that “The Black Aether will be transformed into a [full] literary magazine” offering a venue for Hungarian weird writers. That’s the direction it seemed to me that it had long been headed in, looking back over its content.

I’m guessing that there may be space at the back of this new magazine for the occasional essay and reviews? So, if you can write in Hungarian or can pay to get an old classic essay translated, this may be a new outlet for some scholarship.

The Gawain-poet and the supernatural – call for papers

04 Tuesday Sep 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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After my recent book discovering the identity and landscape of the Gawain-poet (aka The Pearl-poet), I’m interested in Sir Gawain as a classic English supernatural text. It seems that others are too…

The International Pearl-Poet Society is sponsoring six sessions at the 54th International Congress on Medieval Studies (9th–12th May 2019) at Western Michigan University. Session Five is: “Fifty Shades of Green: Hagiography and Demonology in the Pearl-poet Corpus”.

“Between the celestial city and the shady Green Chapel, the miracles of a London bishop and the Leviathan-underworld in the belly of a sea beast, the works of the Pearl-poet [aka the Gawain-poet] explore the full range of the divine and the infernal. The papers in this session will interrogate the poet’s use of hagiographic tropes [trans: the extraordinary aspects expected to be possessed by saints and related supernatural beings] as well as material from folk traditions as he crafts his supernatural narratives.”

Deadline: 15th September 2018. Looks like it’s one of those where you have to be there in person to give the paper, rather than delivering by video-feed.

In a more fannish vein there’s also a call for submissions for The Realm of British Folklore anthology. Deadline is Halloween 2018. Wanted is poetry, fiction and art, all of the non-twee variety and relating to aspects of British folklore.

The meat-waggon to Innsmouth

03 Monday Sep 2018

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Picture postals

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Whatever the academic textbooks and Wikipedia tell you, creative and satiric photomontage began before Dada. It was a grassroots and folksy and anonymous thing, and its postcards went far and wide. Here’s such a doctored postcard sent 1915, and it was probably pasted up sometime in the early 1910s.

It pokes fun at the reputation the decaying Newburyport in New England. Which would later be H.P. Lovecraft’s inspiration for Innsmouth. The card’s fun-poking implies that, in Lovecraft’s time, the town already had a certain reputation which the postcard-maker expected would be recognised throughout the region.

Gravity Crashes

03 Monday Sep 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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One single academic paper on Gravity Falls, since 2014? One. One. And even that fails to mention Lovecraft. Odd, as there are some fairly large clues in Gravity Falls, on that particular influence…

Anyway, the one paper I found is: Lorna Piatti-Farnell, “What’s Hidden in Gravity Falls: Strange Creatures and the Gothic Intertext”.

Checked for others: Google Scholar, Google Search, Google Books, and JURN. One other paper proved to only be a slight abstract for a conference paper, on the changing status of animation in general.

Which means there’s huge potential here, I’d suggest, for independent scholars to publish a thoughtful book that tells academics to wake up and smell the popular culture.

“There’s never quite been a show like Gravity Falls” — Nerdist.com.

“Gravity Falls is the best thing on TV […] consistently, laugh-out-loud funny every week [yet] It’s neither vulgar nor stupid […] I don’t care how old you are, if you’re not watching Gravity Falls you’re missing out. […] the perfect TV show.” — Forbes.

“Saying goodbye to Gravity Falls is like saying goodbye to childhood all over again […] something that’s almost unheard of in entertainment […] uniquely wonderful” — Polygon.

“Gravity Falls is a clever, clever show [that] takes care to layer its delivery, slowly building nuance, offering relatable scenarios and interludes of silliness to balance out its more philosophical elements. You need to watch Gravity Falls […] the narrative arc is positively balletic in its elegance.” — Ars Technica.

Some free book covers

02 Sunday Sep 2018

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Need a free book cover for your bona fide book? Here are three I knocked out some while ago.

Turner’s public domain engraving titled “Lake of Thun”, Photoshopped to remove ‘quaint’ rustic figures, cropped, and a re-colour to make it more icy and less sepia. Might suit a thunderous book of northern weird sea-poetry.

A Photoshopping of the public domain “The Lost Path” (1920) by Charles M. Tuttle. Again, suitable for a book of weird poetry or similar.

‘Raven’, a failed Photoshop doodling with public domain sources. Someone might find it useful for a slim volume of macabre bird poetry… or something like that.

Studi Lovecraftiani – recent issues

28 Tuesday Aug 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works

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What has the worthy Italian language Lovecraft Studies journal, Studi Lovecraftiani, been up to since it was last noticed on this blog?

Studi Lovecraftiani #14 has, among other items…

“the symbolism in the story “Celephais” [and] Lovecraft at the theater”

Studi Lovecraftiani #15 has…

“In this issue we talk about war in the biography and family history of H.P. Lovecraft (with reproductions of unpublished documents) […] also contains an unpublished poem by Lovecraft, and complete reviews of all Lovecraftian books published in Italy in 2015-2016.”

Note sure what the unpublished poem is, but given the ‘war’ theme it’s possibly the same one as I discovered and published in my book Lovecraft in Historical Context: fifth collection in 2014.

A macabre Providence artist

27 Monday Aug 2018

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, New discoveries, Odd scratchings

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John La Farge (1835–1910, lived in Providence, Rhode Island). Bed-ridden early in his career and in need of the cash, La Farge produced fairly loose watercolour designs which were engraved by Henry Marsh (American, 1826–1912) and published as story illustrations in the Riverside Magazine for Young People. He later regained his health and turned to the more respectable, and probably more profitable, trade of stained-glass windows.

Lovecraft knew of him, since he mentions him by name in a letter to Moe, 24th November 1923. Lovecraft had written “The Rats in the Walls” a few months earlier, August–September 1923. An interesting co-incidence, given the picture seen above, I’d suggest. There was apparently also a ‘Bishop Hatto’ story by Sabine Baring-Gould.