Category Archives: Odd scratchings

Howard’s story openings – the systematic survey

30 Wednesday Jan 2019

Posted by in New books, Odd scratchings, REH

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The new Marvel comics Conan reboot opens with a defenceless Conan adrift at sea, before he goes “stumbling” into Stygia. Sounds like a rather mundane way to start, Marvel. I don’t read Conan for an approach which goes…

Hither wandered Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, depressed, no sword, bedraggled and stumbling, to hobble over the weary dust of Stygia with his blistered feet.

The new Marvel approach is to be enlivened by “romance and comedy”, apparently. Oh dear… it doesn’t sound good. But I’m probably not their intended audience, these days.

What would R.E. Howard have done, to make the big ‘splash’ opening just a touch more gripping and forceful? Mark Kirby posted a fine guide to that, a week ago…

Robert E. Howard did not leave us much in the way of personal writing advice. The few direct comments we have by him on the topic are gleaned from his letters, or revealed by Novalyne Price Ellis in her biography … There are eight primary elements most often used by Robert E. Howard in opening narratives.

A Brief REH-Inspired Guide to Writing Great Story Openings (Part One)

A Brief REH Inspired Guide to Writing Great Story Openings (Part Two)

He also usefully points to the currently-active main forum for Howard discussion.

Selling at PulpFest 2019

26 Saturday Jan 2019

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Selling at PulpFest 2019, the official blog post telling potential sellers and dealers exactly what they get and when. This year there seems potential for selling items from beyond the pulps themselves…

We’ll be exploring the profound effect of the pulps on popular culture across the globe at this year’s PulpFest. The fiction and art of the pulps reverberated through a wide variety of mediums — comic books, movies, paperbacks and genre fiction, television, men’s adventure magazines, radio drama, and even video, anime, and role-playing games. Please join us at PulpFest 2019 for “Children of the Pulps and Other Stories.”

Paperwork

22 Tuesday Jan 2019

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This may be useful for Lovecraft scholars. Paperwork is free open-source desktop software that helps a scholar get to grips with and search inside their PDF folders. It copies and OCRs your PDFs and other documents, puts the new OCR versions in its new C:\Users\YOURNAME\papers\ folder, and then searches across them quickly.

It has an interface that is slick but is difficult to like, yet doesn’t demand you join a social network or hook your data into the cloud.

It could also be used simply as a batch OCR tool and folder-watcher. To create OCR’d PDFs to be searched by other more powerful desktop search tools — such as dtSearch Desktop.

There appears to be no support for German “black letter” OCR in Paperwork, so it may not handle your folder full of scans of the Necronomicon and similar.

The Arabian Nights

21 Monday Jan 2019

Posted by in Historical context, Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc.

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The Librivox readers are working through Richard Burton’s The Book of A Thousand Nights and a Night, aka ‘The Arabian Nights’, as audiobook readings and have just released volume 9. Which makes it almost complete, with just Vol. 10 to go. Presumably once Vol. 10 is done the team will then go on to do the six volume Supplemental Nights and other related material from Burton. There are sixteen volumes in total.

The free Librivox audio is per-story, but the raw title usually gives one no indication of the contents. For instance, “Forty-second Night”. One needs to look up the story title at The Thousand Nights and a Night at wollamshram.ca. There, for instance, one can see that the story for Night 908 would be “The Spider and the Wind”, and the other titles at wollamshram.ca are similarly descriptive.

The Arabian Nights was of course a formative influence on the boy Lovecraft. However the Burton edition was unlikely to have been the edition Lovecraft knew, though it is possible that the first nine volumes of the edition were available to his elders in Providence, and that he may have peeked into ‘forbidden’ copies of Burton later in the bookshops and libraries of New York City. S.T. Joshi comments on the matter in I Am Providence…

The copy found in his library [Andrew Lang 1898 … could not have been read] at the age of five. … Sir Richard Burton’s landmark translation in sixteen volumes in 1885–86. Lovecraft certainly did not read this translation, either, as it is entirely unexpurgated and reveals, as few previous translations did, just how bawdy the Arabian Nights actually are. … My guess is that Lovecraft read one of the following three translations:

The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments: Six Stories. Edited by Samuel Eliot; translated by Jonathan Scott. Authorized for use in the Boston Public Schools. Boston: Lee & Shepard; New York: C. T. Dillington, 1880.

The Thousand and One Nights; or, The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. Chicago & New York: Bedford, Clarke & Co., 1885.

The Arabian Nights. Edited by Everett H. Hale; [translated by Edward William Lane]. Boston: Ginn & Co., 1888.

I also spotted The thousand and one nights, or, The Arabian nights entertainments: translated and arranged for family readings, with explanatory notes on Hathi, in its 2nd edition, 1847. “Illustrated with six hundred woodcuts by Harvey and illuminated titles by Owen Jones.” That sounds like the sort of thing that might have been in a Providence drawing room circa 1895, and accessible to young children. One wonders if this might have been the book of the same title that Joshi refers to as being “Bedford, Clarke & Co., 1885”, with Bedford being a later reprinting?

Kirk in a cartoon

10 Thursday Jan 2019

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Scenes from Lovecraft’s New York City in the 1930s by Wortman — a news-stand, a cheap cafe, and a burgled studio. Wortman was a syndicated single-panel cartoonist with whose work Lovecraft was familiar by the early 1930s.

The Walforf being an exclusive upmarket hotel.

In one such Wortman cartoon, Lovecraft wrote in early 1933…

… our old friend George Willard Kirk & his Chelsea Book Shop are very plainly delineated. G K is shewn leaning against the wall in a very characteristick posture, & even his face is distinctly suggested despite certain departures from line-for-line realism.

A 280-page book on Wortman appeared in 2010, Denys Wortman’s New York: Portrait of the City in the 30s and 40s, during the writing of which the author found 5,000 drawings that were in a hazardous state of preservation. There was also an exhibition, “Denys Wortman Rediscovered: Drawings for the World-Telegram and Sun, 1930-1953″.

I can’t immediately find out where the Wortman archives are held now, though The Center for Cartoon Studies will know. Somewhere in among the 5,000 drawings, from circa 1930 – early 1933 is likely to be the good pencil portrait of Kalem member Kirk as mentioned by Lovecraft in his letter. Possibly someone with access to a U.S. newspapers archive for that period might pick up a good scan of the syndicated printed version. The title was the New York World from 1930 to 1931, then became the New York World-Telegram thereafter, but ‘syndicated’ means that other newspapers also reprinted the same cartoons.

Weird Tales May-June-July 1924

08 Tuesday Jan 2019

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Newly uploaded to Archive.org, a nice clear scan of the notorious ‘banned in Indiana’ May-June-July 1924 bumper issue of Weird Tales magazine. Lovecraft gets the cover, albeit without a name credit, as “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” is here presented as being written by Houdini.

In the same issue, the sublime “Hypnos” by H. P. Lovecraft, although with a mundane illustration. Also one of his ‘shockers’ — the notorious necrophiliac story “The Loved Dead” by Eddy and Lovecraft (“Lovecraft clearly had a greater hand in this story than the other ones [and it] reads as if Lovecraft wrote the whole thing” — S.T. Joshi, A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in His Time, page 173. This opinion was slightly revised for Joshi’s later I Am Providence to: “There was, as with its two predecessors, in all likelihood a draft written by Eddy for this tale; but the published version (Weird Tales, May–June–July 1924) certainly reads as if Lovecraft had written the entire thing.”). The issue also has a Henry S. Whitehead story “Tea Leaves”.

It’s interesting to see the way that editor Baird diffused micro-articles throughout the issue. These being short potted histories, accounts of grim historical crimes, and ‘strange news items’, all lightly rewritten in a house style. These were used to pad out the pages at the end of stories, and thus add value for the reader at little cost to the publisher. One can see how this sort of ‘assemblage of the bizarre’ could have fed into the idea of the assemblage of disparate cuttings found in “The Call of Cthulhu”. Although doubtless many writers and others in Lovecraft’s circle kept similar paste-in scrapbooks of strange newspaper cuttings and weird fragments. Thus, no elite modernist literary influence required for “Cthulhu” — as for those elements of the story Lovecraft would be have been responding to a mix of home-made grassroots bricolage and a commercial re-purposing of public information of the sort found in the early Weird Tales.

Visit R.I.

08 Tuesday Jan 2019

Posted by in Historical context, Maps, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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Visit Rhode Island has a new page, “Sci-Fi + RI = H.P. Lovecraft” promoting Lovecraft tourism for 2019. Although it repeats the questionable local claim about the… “Providence Athenaeum, where Lovecraft frequented”. The Athenaeum claim appears to be slowly becoming one of those dubious ‘Claims That Will Not Die’ which are often to be found in a city’s marketing to unknowing tourists. He included it on the whirlwind tour of Providence he gave friends, due to the Poe connection, and late in his life he had to consult some scarce books there which gave the history of Nantucket, but so far as I know that was the extent to which he “frequented” it. I know of nothing to suggest he used it as a regular library. Why would he, when the Providence Public Library was free, huge, and one of the best in the USA?

Perhaps the wider tourism industry needs a recognisable brand-mark/stamp for tourism materials: “All Claims Vetted For Authenticity by an Independent Panel of Local Historians”? Although that would be the whole of Stratford-upon-Avon kaput, as only Mary Arden’s House (located a few miles outside Stratford) has any real claim to a provable connection to Shakespeare.

If you’re travelling to Providence and New England in 2019, perhaps for research or for NecronomiCon 2019, here are a couple of handy and authoritative guide-books you might find useful. Which it’s possible you might not be able to pick up locally, not even in the Arts & Sciences Council shop to be seen in the above Visit Rhode Island article.

* Henry Beckwith’s Lovecraft’s Providence & Adjacent Parts (second edition, revised and enlarged). Paper only, about $50 used. Unless someone has a garage full of paper copies still to shift, this could probably use a $6 ebook edition in time for NecronomiCon 2019. Anyone care to contact the copyright holder about doing that?

* Off the Ancient Track: A Lovecraftian Guide to New-England & Adjacent New-York (2013, revised and enlarged). Paper only, but a very reasonable $10 from Necronomicon Press.

You may also want my free map of Lovecraft’s Providence.