17 Monday Oct 2022
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
I wasn’t aware that PDF Index Generator could also create a back-of-the-book index by…
importing a list of terms from a text file, to index a book using just that list of terms.
Useful. There’s a new video tutorial showing how to do this.
This means that one could manually go through a digital book in an armchair, just jotting down specialist terms or phrases while also proofing. No need to note page numbers. The resulting mini-index could then be merged with the larger automated one.
13 Thursday Oct 2022
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
New to me, the scholarly book Theology and H.P. Lovecraft (August 2022), a multi-author book in the ‘Theology, Religion, and Pop Culture’ series from Fortress Academic.
This collection of fourteen essays is the first sustained academic engagement with H.P. Lovecraft from a theological perspective.
The book follows 2021’s survey Theology and Horror, from the same publisher.
10 Monday Oct 2022
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Why do publishers make it so difficult to find out about forthcoming books? For instance, the McFarland website has no way to search by all books + latest, by date. But after some naughty URL-hacking by me, they do now. Though even then you still have to manually open the book blurb fold-away section for each and every page. And then another section to get the publication date. Sigh. Oh, for a unified all-publishers news-feed for all forthcoming non-fiction books in English. Hint: it’s definitely not Amazon, which is rubbish at that and also clogged up with shovelware and ‘blank notepads’ junk.
Anyway, some possible forthcoming or just-out McFarland titles of interest to Tentaclii readers. As always with McFarland, some will be gems, some clunkers…
Ancient Stone Sites of New England and the Debate Over Early European Exploration (2nd Edition)
Reading the Great American Zombie: The Living Dead in Literature
The Dark Side of G.K. Chesterton (“explores the darker fringes of his wild imagination”)
Music and the Paranormal: An Encyclopedic Dictionary
Fantastic Serial Sites of California: Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Locations, 1919–1955 (screen filming locations)
How to Misunderstand Tolkien: The Critics and the Fantasy Master
Beowulf in Comic Books and Graphic Novels
The Writer and the Cross: Interviews with Authors of Christian Historical Fiction
10 Monday Oct 2022
Posted in Astronomy, Scholarly works
It’s sad to hear of the death of Frank Drake, originator of the famous Drake Equation.
Of course Lovecraft never lived to hear his November 1961 equation, or even an intimation of it in early science-fiction. He never put its weightings so precisely, but I do recall that in his letters he sometimes put his mind to thinking along the same logical step-by-step lines, about the chances of other intelligent and enterprising beings elsewhere in the galaxy. I seem to recall a passage in which he estimated the likely time between the emergence of each new sentient species, and from that logically extrapolated according to the astronomy of his day (which was still discovering basic matters about the universe), concluding there was a good chance of other intelligences.
Though re-finding the relevant quotes would take a long time. Roll on the unified mega-index of Lovecraft’s letters, which will hopefully have entries for concepts such as “Extraterrestrials, likelihood of actual existence”. Possibly the forthcoming ‘Lovecraft and astronomy’ book will also have some identification of the relevant letters.
08 Saturday Oct 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
The German Lovecraftians report that…
The new double-issue (9 + 10) of The Lovecrafter magazine was sent out this month by our hard-working cultist Andre. It should have reached our members’ mail-boxes by now.
The theme of the double-issue is “Lovecraft’s Geography” / “Dreamlands”, and TOCs include…
* “Somewhere in the middle of nowhere” examines various locations from Lovecraft’s works in detail.
* Another article goes “the opposite way and describes how role-playing games mix geographical reality and fiction”.
* A further article goes “in search of lost species”.
* An article on “the Cthuloid book portfolio of the Nighttrain publishing house”.
* An interview in which “Rahel and Rene talked extensively with Huan Vu about the current status of the shooting of his Dreamlands project.” (movie?)
* Many RPG game scenarios and game reviews, and more.
They also report a new book…
in [German publisher] Festa’s Weird Fiction series. In November, Dunkle Pforten will be the first of a total of six volumes that will [eventually] contain all the stories by Robert Aickman (1914-1981) in German for the first time.
07 Friday Oct 2022
Posted in Scholarly works
A useful time-saver for researchers. A Contemporary Biography Builder tool, with a focus on America. First insert the not-so-famous person’s birth-death dates. Then advance the death date by 20 years, to make sure most obituaries, posthumous survey articles and memoirs are captured. Then search.
You get pre-built links, constrained to those dates and the name…
06 Thursday Oct 2022
Posted in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
A new Voluminous podcast reads a Lovecraft letter to Frank Belknap Long, 25th February 1924. It’s part of the new Long cache deposited at the John Hay Library, and apparently it’s largely new here…
A couple of excerpts from this letter were published in Selected Letters I, but it is not yet available in the Brown Digital Repository, which means that except for a very small handful of people, you are among the first to experience the complete version since Frank Belknap Long opened the envelope 98 years ago!
The reading is followed by a good interview with the John Hay librarian in charge of the Lovecraft materials. It’s revealed that the collection has un-digitised collections from the Lovecraft Circle, and they welcome endowments specifically targeted at Lovecraft and the Circle (which, I guess, might enable scanning). It seems they can’t dip into the general university funds to pay for such things, and Special Collections relies on endowments and donations.
The S.T. Joshi Fellowship at Brown is revealed to have re-opened to scholars. That was mentioned in the podcast as being “1st October”, but it seems this was a slip of the memory. The S.T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship Web page states 1st November 2022, so there’s still time to apply. A point to keep in mind for applications is that Brown is said (in the interview) to favour applications to work with un-digitised areas of collections. It was thus interesting to hear that they have un-digitised Circle materials, and also one of the world’s largest collections of Silver Age U.S. comics, in that respect. So potentially one might track the early emergence and evolution of Lovecraftian themes in comics.
Another factor revealed in the interview is that, as of NecronomiCon 2022, scanning of the new Long letters has not yet started. So presumably they won’t be arriving online very soon.
05 Wednesday Oct 2022
Posted in Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi brings news of a Campus Miskatonic convention. 5th November 2022, in Verdun, northern France. This year the focus is on discussing the relationship between Lovecraft and R.E. Howard.
28 Wednesday Sep 2022
Posted in Scholarly works
Great news from Another Town on the Hudson…
Last month, I submitted my book manuscript, a biography of H.P. Lovecraft and his New York City period, to my publisher, capping nearly two years of imaginative immersion and intensive writing.
Also…
In October [2022], I’ll be talking about Lovecraft and New York at the King Manor Museum in Jamaica, Queens.
The location is about six miles east of Brooklyn, New York City.
26 Monday Sep 2022
Posted in Scholarly works
News of the Mythopoeic Society’s “Fantasy Goes to Hell – Online Midwinter Seminar”, set for 27th-28th January 2023. Deadline for papers is 15th November 2022. The requirement is for discussions of Hell as found in “modern fantasy work”, which here can include Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. So I guess the organisers can go back as far as the 1940s/50s if needed.
24 Saturday Sep 2022
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
New on Archive.org to borrow, Horrors and unpleasantries : a bibliographical history & collectors’ price guide to Arkham House (1982). Probably superseded now, as a price-guide, but other aspects of it may interest some.
22 Thursday Sep 2022
Posted in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works
An open-access review of Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain. “Modern” here meaning early modernity, from the 1870s through to the 1930s…
On the whole we cannot see the turn to psychical research as a momentary lapse of reason on the part of late Victorian physicists. [And] we should not be embarrassed or surprised by the interest that leading physicists had in the occult.