There’s a new special issue of the scholarly open-access journal Shima, on sea and water-monsters. I also note that the earlier Vol. 15 No. 2, and Vol. 12 No. 2, were on mermaids.
Shima special issues
30 Sunday Oct 2022
Posted in Scholarly works
Category Archives: Scholarly works
More on Theology and Lovecraft
26 Wednesday Oct 2022
Posted in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
More on theology and Lovecraft, in a new podcast “H.P. Lovecraft, Idolatry, and Theology: An Interview with Dr. Alex Thompson” on YouTube. This relates to a chapter in the book I posted about in mid October.
Two new books
24 Monday Oct 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works
From Portugal, the new ebook Lovecraft e as Tradicoes Esotericas: Influencias do Horror Cosmico no Ocultismo (trans: ‘Lovecraft and the Esoteric Traditions: Influences of Cosmic Horror on Occultism’). In Portuguese.
Here’s my translation of the TOC…
Preface (Dennis P. Quinn Ph.D., Professor and Department Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies at Cal Poly Pomona, California)
1. The Cold and Dark Vast of the Cosmos
2. Lovecraft: Posthumous Member of the Counterculture
3. From Abnegation to Cosmic Pessimism
4. The Dark Essence of the Cthulhu Mythos
5. The Occult Tradition and its Marks in Lovecraft
6. Cults of Cthulhu, its Fans and Devotees
7. The Culture of Fans as a Creative Microcosm
8. The Cult Still Lives…
References
Appendix
“The Festival” (annotated)
135 pages, September 2022.
I can’t get the cover-artist name, but it’s nice work. I also like the retro mid-1980s thrift-shop feel it has.
The other book is still forthcoming. Due soon-ish is The Medial Afterlives of H.P. Lovecraft: Comic, Film, Podcast, TV, Games, with Amazon wobbling between late December 2022 / early 2023. It’s one of those academic… now, I was going to say “£80 tomes”. But the standard list-price for such things seems to have now jumped to £120 (roughly $140).
So… it’s one of those invitation-only academic £120 tomes, of the sort that can trap some good academic work in inaccessible volumes.
Discusses a wide array of medial forms, from film and TV to comics, podcasts, and video and board games.
Again. Yawn…
Part of the Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture series. Despite the price, the academic salaries involved, and leftist hand-wringing about academic labour… they’ve used a raw and very obviously AI-generated image for the cover.
S.T. at Bridgeport Public Library
23 Sunday Oct 2022
Posted in Scholarly works
There’s a raft of ‘Halloween New England’ events this season, and one is “H.P. Lovecraft in New England with S.T. Joshi” at the Bridgeport Public Library. S.T. manifests virtually on 26th October 2022, rather than in person.
Archtober: Lovecraft at King Manor
19 Wednesday Oct 2022
Posted in Scholarly works
Archtober: ‘Lovecraft at King Manor’, a talk event in New York on 28th October 2022.
King Manor, 1946. Newly colourised.
S.T. Joshi has…
he visited Canarsie, Jamaica (where he saw the Rufus King Mansion, a magnificent 1750 gambrel-roofer with two ells that still stands)
Aka “King Mansion”, “King’s Manor”.
PDF Index Generator video
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.
New book: Theology and H.P. Lovecraft
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.
Forthcoming McFarland books
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
Frank Drake (1930-2022)
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.
Lovecrafter #9 and #10
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.
Contemporary Biography Builder
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…
Long and Voluminous
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.