30 Tuesday May 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
Publications of the annual FantaelX event in Spain. Including four free annual volumes of scholarly work on the fantastic in PDF and in English. The TOC for the latest (2022) gives a flavour of the approach…
Looks like a rather groovy event, combining a conference with a film festival.
29 Monday May 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
The worthy Signum University plans a New England Moot, to be themed as “Perilous Realms & Haunted Spaces”, Set for 21st October 2023 and a little place called Derry, which the map shows translates as “25 miles north of Boston” or about “45 miles north of Providence”.
New England Moot is excited to spirit you away to Perilous Realms & Haunted Spaces. Whether threshold-realms are real or imagined, Faerian or horrifying, deadly or whimsical, mysterious or lucid, they are the playgrounds for imaginative exploration of what is possible. Discovery, danger, failure, and transformation occur in such interstitial spaces.
Whether you are inspired by the Bifrost, the Bermuda Triangle, Wonderland, or an ordinary-looking Wardrobe, we welcome you to question how to define Perilous Realms & Haunted Spaces. How do you know when you’ve entered one? How does the experience of the unknown inform artistic creation? Join us as we traverse the blurry edge of boundaries and venture into the wildlands beyond. You may not be the same when you leave as you were when you arrived…
The Team are currently looking for proposals for “creative presentations, academic papers, or discussion panels”. The Studio Lab physical venue is said to have a 5,376 × 1,344-pixel video-wall. The Moot will also be a hybrid physical/online event.
The deadline for submissions is 7th October, and I’m assuming that’s 2023.
22 Monday May 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
I see that hplovecraft.com has recently…
Created a series of pages showcasing several Lovecraft-Related Documents including his birth, marriage, and death certificates.
And talking of old documents, Brown University Library (i.e. the John Hay Library) is open again to students and visitors, with masks optional…
Spring 2023: Welcome back to your Brown University Library!
This is pinned on their blog, so I assume the Library has been closed until recently due to Covid? Presumably this re-opening means the 2023 S.T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship in H.P. Lovecraft fellow will now be able to lovingly sniff Lovecraft’s letters in person. Currently…
Applications for the next cycle of fellowships will open in Spring 2024.
20 Saturday May 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
My latest Tolkien Gleanings ‘zine is now available. This is the fourth issue, a free 64-page PDF magazine for scholars of the life and works of Tolkien. May also be of interest to collectors, artists, and in this instance to historians of Edwardian Birmingham.
It has articles, artwork, a book review, vintage pictures, and extensive notes on new Tolkien items of interest which I found from April to May 2023. Basically, it does for Tolkien what I also do for Lovecraft, and as such I also make a number of new discoveries. Not least on the name “Anduin”, in this issue.
Designed for easy reading on a larger digital tablet, such as the Kindle Fire 10″.
Available on Gumroad (no sign-up needed, donations welcome) or on Archive.org.
Contributions, especially reviews of less-known non-fiction books, are welcomed for future issues.
17 Wednesday May 2023
Posted in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
Erik Davis on Lovecraft, nice. “A Lecture on Dreaming, Writing, PKD, and Lovecraft” by Erik Davis (author of the excellent Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information). Delivered at the 2010 Philip K. Dick Festival, Colorado. As a 150Mb .ZIP file with .MP3 files. The link is still working.
Somewhat related, Poland’s major PhilosophyCon 6 passed me by and seems to have been substantially about Lovecraft, with S.T. Joshi as guest of honour. 14th-16th May 2021. PDF programme and YouTube, though the latter has no full recordings from 2021.
15 Monday May 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
An unusual and refreshingly fresh Catholic take on Lovecraft, in the new article on “H.P. Lovecraft and a Godless Universe”. Making a point I don’t recall hearing put so bluntly, before now…
Lovecraft undermines the notion that atheism and the rejection of religion would lead to the elevation of mankind. […] It isn’t [human] triumph and unrestrained glory and progress; it is madness and idiocy and filth [… This] is a strange combination, one that is not found often; Lovecraft rejected God, but he had no hopes for a world without Him.
Lovecraft himself made the point eloquently enough in the letters, though at more length. To the effect that the quainter Christian trappings were something he valued for their connection to the rooted life of the past and the ways of his forefathers. And that more broadly religion was useful in maintaining a time-worn social coherence among the general populace — at a time (c. 1919-1936) when forces of both the right and left were elsewhere seeking to establish (often by force) their own ‘new world built on new foundations’.
14 Sunday May 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
Popping up on Archive.org, three Lovecraft related issues of the 1980s RPG magazine Different Worlds. Of most interest to non-gamers is Different Worlds #47 which has the long scholarly article “Lovecraft and The Necronomicon”.
11 Thursday May 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
International Journal of Role-Playing is now up to 12 annual issues. It was located in the Netherlands but has now moved to a new home and URL in Sweden. Published in English.
The latest issue (2022) has “Recomposing Lovecraft: Genre Emulation as Autopoiesis in the First Edition of Call of Cthulhu”. This suggests that the new fusing of sub-genres in the then-new game, built atop Lovecraft’s Mythos, was a response to… “perceived threats to the American way of life during the early Reagan Era”.
Also, new on Archive.org, “The Developing Storyworlds of H.P. Lovecraft”. Found in a 2014 collection from the University of Nebraska. This discusses Lovecraft’s inherent “transmedia adaptability” and the ever-growing range of new fan-work and products based around his Mythos.
The new journal The Incredible Nineteenth Century: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale has published its first issue. Two articles, plus book reviews. Online now, in open-access. The journal has a gushing but useful summary review of a book, re: Lovecraft’s commercial and fannish after-lives. This review would fit well with a reading of the above two articles.
02 Tuesday May 2023
Posted in REH, Scholarly works
The Silver Key has posted a long recap of the 2023 Robert E. Howard Days which have just successfully finished for this year. Also a “Howard Days Wrap Up” at the Rogues in the House podcast.
SpraguedeCampFan ran day-by-day posts, and his final one “Time to Come Home” has links to all the previous posts. There are abundant clear photographs.
Plus Savage journal entry #41 reports on a trip to Howard Days 2023, with photos.
The R.E. Howard Foundation has a post on “The journey of REH’s writing table: a piece of literary history”, on Howard’s lovingly restored writing table. This was a feature of this year’s Howard Days.
Wild Stars also has a set of pictures.
There was coverage in the local Brookhaven Courier, “Museum celebrates author Robert E. Howard”.
The Robert E. Howard Days: 2023 Events Schedule. No YouTube, podcast or audio files as yet, that I can find. I seem to recall that in previous years, the panel recordings surfaced online in due course.
Also in REH, and available along with the new affordable Collected Letters at Howard Days, I see we have a new edition of The Dark Man scholarly journal. ‘New’ since I last noticed it. Issue 13.1, January 2023 includes what appears to be a substantial survey of Conan’s predecessors. The issue is also interesting re: the editors being open to an essay on Tolkien.
I would assume that we’re moving toward the time of year when potential contributors for January 2024 should be thinking about what they might submit in the late summer?
Coming next, PulpFest 2023.
27 Thursday Apr 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
New on Archive.org, with a public PDF download, McFarland’s Science Fiction And Fantasy Artists Of The Twentieth Century: A Biographical Dictionary (2009). This is no longer discoverable on the McFarland catalogue site, and Amazon UK and USA both have it as “out of print, unavailable”. There are no used copies or copies on eBay either. Thus, I think it can justifiably be linked here without harming anyone’s wallet in these difficult times.
It’s a scholarly two-column reference work that was aimed at academic libraries, judging by the original retail price of $135 (probably about $220 in today’s money). There are two introductory survey essays, one to 1975 and another from the 1970s through to the year 2000. The author then crisply details the biographies of nearly 400 selected artists in 500 or so pages, nearly all North American but with some 70 British artists manning the tail-guns. The book doesn’t cover the field of children’s science-fiction, work for the screen, or comics work (Corben is in, Moebius isn’t), and as far as I can tell it has little to say about the art of books native to Russia, Germany or Japan.
The book will also serve as a handy reference guide to collectors of the various artbooks issued by these artists, though there are surely more to be discovered. One hopes that somewhere in the world is a collector with the whole 20th century caboodle of these artbooks in mint condition, and that he’ll leave them all to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum or suchlike.
I wonder if this PDF freebie book has been released on Archive.org in order to drum up interest for a new updated edition circa 2025? One imagines there would be a market for a greatly expanded two-volume $500 set.
26 Wednesday Apr 2023
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Newly listed at the Hippocampus website, the forthcoming books Implications of Infinity: Collected Essays by George Sterling and A Splendid Poison: The Letters of Ambrose Bierce and George Sterling. Both edited by S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, and at a pre-publication discount via the publisher.
This reminds me that it’s about the time of year when thoughts might be turning to the key Lovecraft journal, The Lovecraft Annual. In terms of potential contributors starting to polish their submissions, ready to send off to S.T. Joshi.
In other forthcoming books, I see that The Spirit of Revision: Lovecraft’s Letters to Zealia Brown Reed Bishop is being newly listed in hardcover on Amazon UK. This will be an “enhanced second edition” from Helios House Press, having previously been available from the HPLHS (and, at a much higher price, from Amazon). The new edition is set for release on 31st May 2023.
Note that these letters are apparently also in the new Letters to Woodburn Harris and Others volume from Hippocampus.
25 Tuesday Apr 2023
Posted in New books, REH, Scholarly works
In France, the translator of their new Lovecraft editions is interviewed in interview with La Petit Journal. This is free and in HTML, so can be easily translated. The chat brings news of the next project…
Q: Today, a subscription is launched, until 4th May 2023, for the French translation of the correspondence between Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. How important is this exchange between the two authors, in terms of a better understand Lovecraft’s work?
A: We see the man at work, and in his exchanges with a friend and fellow author. They talk about literature, publishing, history and politics. It is, in a way, the “behind the scenes” of Lovecraft at work.
Q: What will this new French translation of the letters offer, compared to the original?
A: We have some original documents, but above all we intend to enrich this correspondence with our own critical apparatus. Along with several iconic documents: photos of the authors, of their friends, of the places where they lived, reproductions of their letters, covers of the magazines where they published, etc.
The crowdfunder is at a site I’d not known about, fr.ulule.com, as La correspondance de Robert E. Howard et Howard P. Lovecraft. It’s already been nearly 400%+ funded.
