14 Monday Feb 2022
Posted in Podcasts etc.
New on Librivox is Seabury Quinn’s Weird Crimes, a series of short ‘weird detective’ mystery tales. Here plucked from the pages of Weird Tales in the 1920s, and read by Ben Tucker.
13 Sunday Feb 2022
Posted in Podcasts etc.
The Voluminous podcast has a new episode, of nearly two hours. This time the show features Lovecraft’s letters to fellow amateur journalist Edward Cole in “Everyone’s a Critic”.
06 Sunday Feb 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc.
The Weird Studies podcast’s latest Episode 115 drifts into the observation lounge of Brian Eno’s famous and seminal album Ambient 1: Music for Airports.
This album followed the instrumentals on Another Green World and Before and After Science, and the instrumentals on the Bowie collaboration albums. It then heralded a small but perfectly formed set of such music spread across three solo albums and two made with Cluster.
Much of this then-new type of music could certainly evoke a sense of big weird empty landscapes.
The introductory listening-list of albums would be, in date order:
Another Green World (just the instrumentals)
Before and After Science (just the instrumentals)
Low (with David Bowie, just the instrumentals)
Heroes (with David Bowie, just the instrumentals)
Then the albums:
Ambient 1: Music for Airports
Music for Films
Cluster & Eno (with Cluster)
After the Heat (with Cluster)
Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror
An argument might also be made that Eno’s early lyrics are also profoundly weird, if in a dreamy ‘British surrealist’ way rather than horror-shocker kind of way. But that’s for another post.
03 Thursday Feb 2022
Posted in New books, Podcasts etc.
I’m pleased to see that the Library of America is giving Ray Bradbury the same fine production values they gave Lovecraft a while back. Bradbury gets two volumes, the first being out now as a $40 900-page table-trembler titled Ray Bradbury: Novels & Story Cycles (2021).
It includes “Bradbury’s settled intention” for the final-cut of the famous Martian Chronicles. Google Books can provide no contents list, but according to one interview with the venerable editor this means it includes the show-stopping satirical “Usher II” horror-story, probably best skipped the first time around.
If you want some ‘starter Bradbury’ that’s a little lighter on the wrists, a fine theatrical audiobook version of The Martian Chronicles is the five and a half hour full-cast audio by Colonial Radio Theatre (they use the British spelling for Theatre). Created for direct-to-CD in 2011, rather than lopped-and-chopped to fit a broadcast time-slot. They spent a lot of time making sure the sequence fitted Bradbury’s final intentions. Again, you might do best to skip “Usher II” on the first hearing.
20 Thursday Jan 2022
Posted in Podcasts etc.
New on LibriVox as part of a new Librivox story collection, recordings of Frank Belknap Long’s “The Sea-Thing” (1925) and “The Dog-Eared God” (1926). The SFFaudio podcast also has the discussion episode Reading, Short And Deep #267 – “The Sea Thing” by Frank Belknap Long, from a year ago. At about the same time PseudoPod 742 also had a reading of “The Sea Thing” by Andrew Leman on their podcast. But the new LibriVox recording is Public Domain, which makes it more useful for re-use.
For some reason Librivox decided to put the Lovecraft juvenile story “The Beast in the Cave” first in this overall collection of stories. It seems to be becoming a subtle leftist tactic to push newbies to Lovecraft’s earliest and lacklustre stories, such as “The Alchemist” or “Beast”, as their very first experience of Lovecraft. Presumably with the vague hope that readers will go “ugh, not very good” and avoid Lovecraft stories in future.
16 Sunday Jan 2022
Posted in Historical context, New books, Podcasts etc.
Seemingly new on the HPLHS site, and new to me, The Literature of Lovecraft as an audiobook. Forty-three tales admired by Lovecraft and done as readings, with some having to be excerpts or even plot summaries. Delivered on a USB stick, in a nice book-like case for your shelf. Ordering now.
06 Thursday Jan 2022
Posted in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
New on Librivox are audio readings of George MacDonald’s long essays “The Imagination: Its Functions and Its Culture” and “The Fantastic Imagination”. The essays foreshadowed the later concerns of Tolkien, and can best be found as text in an enlarged book edition of 1895.
16 Thursday Dec 2021
Posted in Podcasts etc.
Horrorbabble has tackled another Lovecraft letter-fragment, “The Evil Clergyman”, in a 12 minute reading.
14 Tuesday Dec 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Podcasts etc.
There’s a new 35-minute podcast interview with the author of the new Catholic Lovecraft / R.E. Howard/ Providence novel Providence Blue: A Fantasy Quest. “Lovecraft, fantasy literature, and Christ: A conversation with novelist David Pinault”. Warning: even the podcast blurb most likely has spoilers for what sounds like rather a good read. Probably best stashed and listened to after reading the novel, though there’s still no ebook available.
11 Saturday Dec 2021
Posted in Historical context, Podcasts etc.
An unusual ‘letter + story’ reading from Horrorbabble, “The Thing in the Moonlight” by H.P. Lovecraft, new on YouTube…
“The Thing in the Moonlight” is a short story based on one of H.P. Lovecraft’s dreams by Chapman Miske, first published in the January 1941 edition of Bizarre magazine. This recording includes both the letter Lovecraft sent to Donald Wandrei detailing the dream, and the short story itself.
The text is very short, and hardly a story. Derleth later ranked and published it as a “fragment”. But Horrorbabble reads it and the letter at 11 minutes.
Who was Chapman Miske? He was co-editor of Scienti-Snaps with Walter E. Marconette, and being duplicated this title would now be termed a fanzine. But obviously one of quality. Scienti-Snaps had earlier done something similar for Lovecraft by publishing one of several versions of the ‘Lovecraft as Roman’ dream, as “The Very Old Folk” in Summer 1940. This was accompanied by the bio-article “H.P. Lovecraft: Strange Weaver” and the poem “The Nightmare Lake”.
Scienti-Snaps was then renamed Bizzare in Summer 1940, and given a more news-stand appearance. But it failed after one issue. Hevelin Fanzines has Bizarre #1 scanned. Here is the Hannes Bok cover and the first page of the Lovecraft appearance.
Regrettably Hevelin Fanzines doesn’t appear to have the Scienti-Snaps issue for Summer 1940, the ‘Lovecraft Special’. However, its “H.P. Lovecraft: Strange Weaver” article is to be found collected in the book A Weird Writer in Our Midst.
09 Thursday Dec 2021
Posted in Historical context, New books, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
There looks set to be a…
hardcover, full-colour second edition of the book The Spirit of Revision: Lovecraft’s Letters to Zealia Reed Bishop
It’s one of the stretch goals for the HPLHS’s Miskatonic Missives crowd-funder. Possibly only available that way, though I guess you might eventually be able to get it via the regular HPLHS Store.
The HPLHS also have a new Voluminous podcast on H.P. Lovecraft, Detective, doggedly solving a dastardly crime at the Haverhill Post Office.
The valuable stolen ‘Dickeybird’ item is a little low-res on their page, so here’s a large one…
Along the way they’ve also found Morton’s article on the virtues of local natural history museums (Oregon Mineralogist, March 1934).
08 Wednesday Dec 2021
Posted in Podcasts etc.
Horrorbabble has a new 50-minute reading of “The Return of the Undead” (Weird Tales, November 1925) by Lovecraft’s friend Arthur Leeds. It proved a strong hit with the Weird Tales readers and Lovecraft called it a “splendid tale of a child vampire” in a fever hospital. As I wrote earlier, it is presumably nearly out of copyright now (1st January 2022) and might make for a timely visual adaptation.
