A new Masters dissertation, “The “pastoral of fear” in French-Canadian tales of the 19th century” (May 2024, in French, no English abstract). Freely available online.
French-Canadian fear tales
13 Monday May 2024
Posted Scholarly works
in13 Monday May 2024
Posted Scholarly works
inA new Masters dissertation, “The “pastoral of fear” in French-Canadian tales of the 19th century” (May 2024, in French, no English abstract). Freely available online.
10 Friday May 2024
Posted Maps, Picture postals, Scholarly works
inThis week on ‘Picture Postals’, my hand-tinted version of a nautical map of Providence Harbour and the lower Seekonk in 1896. In the Seekonk (here the ‘Pawtucket River’) we see the ‘Twin Islands’ on which the youthful Lovecraft used to land in his rowing-boat. High-res at 4600px and 300dpi.
Brown University at the top, Starvegoat Island at the bottom. This map seems to have some RPG potential, as at that time a lot of infilling had not yet occurred. Lots of coves and marshes and eel-grass meadows in which Things Might Lurk.
And here’s a more poetic surface view, though also work-a-day since there were still tall-masted ships working the harbour in Lovecraft’s early youth…
08 Wednesday May 2024
Posted Scholarly works
inSignum University’s New England Moot event, set for 19th October 2024. The Lovecraft-friendly theme is “Wicked Wisdom and Forbidden Knowledge”, though the focus will be tilted toward Tolkien.
You are invited to submit your proposal based on “Wicked Wisdom and Forbidden Knowledge”. Our Call for Proposals will close on 19th September.
06 Monday May 2024
Posted New books, Scholarly works
inTwo new items listed at the Hippocampus website.
Lovecraft’s Library: A Catalogue in its expanded 2024 fifth edition. Which will be a treat, if I can get the idiot-bot that semi-organises Amazon to send me the correct newest edition.
I find I only have the second edition from 2002 on my shelves. Which means 148 new additions, for me at least. Due in May 2024.
We also have MORE Lovecraftian People and Places by Ken Faig Jr. Another weighty table-trembling paperback, collecting more articles by the master researcher of Lovecraft’s life and the people around him. Set for June 2024.
02 Thursday May 2024
Posted New books, Scholarly works
inS. T. Joshi’s new blog post brings news of, among other things, When Chaugnar Wakes: The Collected Poetry and Other Works of Frank Belknap Long (2024). Available as a Kindle ebook.
30 Tuesday Apr 2024
Posted Scholarly works
inNew at The Rise of Cthulhu, the long article “E.P. Berglund: Bibliographer of the Old Ones”…
He passed away on June 19th, 2019 and I decided it was high time to write a tribute to him and celebrate his accomplishments in weird fiction. This article will focus on his life, bibliographic, and editorial work.
29 Monday Apr 2024
Posted New books, Scholarly works
in“Ah, Sweet Idiocy!” (1948), being the fan memoirs of Francis T. Laney in a glorious Gestetner-vision PDF scan.
He fatefully encountered the Lovecraft-loving Duane Rimel, and begins by giving an evocative account of their friendship and (on pages 4-5) a detailed short biography and pen picture of “Duane Weldon Rimel”. As many Lovecraftians will recall, Laney didn’t stop there. He went on to be editor of the seminal Lovecraft ‘zine The Acolyte, and here we have the full story in his own words.
The find of the scanned original led me to find the free 2019 PDF and ePub OCR reprint in aid of the TAFF fund. The old inky text here becomes plain Times Roman. The new reprint also includes various expansions, explanations of acronyms, and some scholarly apparatus.
27 Saturday Apr 2024
Posted Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
inIn Italian, an architectural thesis on “Visualizing Innsmouth” in 3D. Freely available in PDF. Well researched and richly illustrated and thus worth perusing even if you can’t read Italian. Of course these days you can also run an unlocked PDF through an auto-translator to get the basic gist of it.
Particular attention was paid to the urban and architectural distribution of the digital model, creating a virtual town that respects the imagined environment as much as possible. The purpose of this reconstruction is to offer the user the possibility of interacting with the space and the buildings.
Also found, in Spanish, “Platonic aesthetics in “Through the Gates of the Silver Key””.
25 Thursday Apr 2024
Posted Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works
inWho knew? The Robert M. Price edited anthology The Exham Cycle actually appeared in 2020, and is still both available and affordable (for now). Sources and sequels to Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls”, by the look of it. I recall hearing about this as once-again ‘forthcoming’, on his podcast, but then the podcast went into abeyance. But the book actually appeared.
24 Wednesday Apr 2024
Posted Scholarly works
inNecronomiCon 2024 Passes and Tickets now on sale.
No programme for the scholarly Armitage Symposium wing as yet, though. At the last NecronomiCon / Armitage Symposium event it looked to be like it would have been possible to devise a full personal schedule that centred around the scholarship at the Symposium / Omni Hotel, rather than the main hotel. I assume it’ll be similar again this time.
Poster by Providence’s own Michael Ezzell.
21 Sunday Apr 2024
Posted Scholarly works
inI’m pleased to say that S.T. Joshi has accepted my long article for the next Lovecraft Annual, and that I’ll be in the 2024 issue. No news of the rest of the 2024 contents as yet.
By the way, if you’re having trouble accessing the Hippocampus Press site, publisher of the Lovecraft Annual, I find the problem is the Web browser’s “DNS-over-HTTPS provider”. The default Cloudflare DNS “knows a’ nurthing” about Hippocampus, while switching it to use Google Public DNS gets you there.
20 Saturday Apr 2024
Posted Scholarly works
inA new issue of Mythlore, with a lead article on “Tolkien Augustinian Theodicy, and ‘Lovecraftian’ Evil”. Freely available online.