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 Probably superseded now, as a price-guide, but other aspects of it may interest some.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.
21 Wednesday Sep 2022
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
A new issue of the Italian language Lovecraft journal Studi Lovecraftiani No. 21 (Autumn 2022) is now available. Contents in Italian include…
* A long and detailed article titled “Collecting Lovecraft”, a guide for connoisseurs and collectors looking for the rarest and most sought-after editions, as well as those more difficult to find.
* An articulate essay on the role played by music in HPL’s works.
* An essay on the pseudobiblia of Sutter Cane. [Cane being the fictional novelist in John Carpenter’s movie In The Mouth of Madness.]
* An in-depth study of Jean Robin’s book, H.P. Lovecraft et le secret des adorateurs du Serpent (2017). [Robin appears to be a stylish writer who is well known in French occult circles, in the tradition of Rene Guenon. Title translates as ‘H.P. Lovecraft and the Secret of the Serpent Worshipers’, which appears to claim to be non-fiction.]
* The second and last part of an essay on the “abstraction of corporeality” in the fiction of HPL.
* Unpublished works by the master, newly in Italian. Notes on “Medusa’s Coil” with Zelia Bishop, and the poem [known in Italian as] “A Pan”.
* A detailed review of Joshi’s HPL biography I Am Providence, recently available in Italian.
* News of the latest releases at the international level.
* Two new Lovecraftian stories by contemporary writers.
Cover art by Pietro Rotelli.
21 Wednesday Sep 2022
Posted in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
Thanks to Gregory for letting me know about a new podcast. For Henrik Moller’s 150th podcast last week, he interviewed (in English) living members of the ‘Providence pals’…
The first wave of serious Lovecraft scholars started out in the 1970s. [In the U.S.] They called themselves ‘The Providence pals’. This is the story of how they helped Lovecraft to become recognised as a serious literary author [at a crucial time].
18 Sunday Sep 2022
Posted in de Camp, Historical context, Scholarly works
Brian Kunde has a useful look at the science writing of the Lovecraft biographer L. Sprague de Camp, as part of a review of his The Heroic Age of American Invention. Others include…
The Story of Science in America.
The Great Monkey Trial (the trial that Lovecraft sometimes refers to).
Darwin and His Great Discovery.
Great Cities of the Ancient World.
The Evolution of Naval Weapons (for the U.S. government, as a course textbook).
The Ape-Man Within.
He was working alongside Sagan and Asimov, in the popular science / debunking superstition field.
Earlier, in Astounding (July 1938), his non-fiction “Language for Time Travelers” surveyed the difficulties a time traveller would encounter with pronunciation, semantics and vowel shifts. Put together with his “non-fiction radio scripts for Voice of America”, if extant, could there be a public domain audiobook there for someone to tackle?
16 Friday Sep 2022
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Now listing, the revised and expanded Eyes of the God: Selected Writings of R. H. Barlow. It’s gone from a slim 209 pages to a shelf-trembling 596 pages.
Also, the third issue of S.T. Joshi’s megajournal Penumbra is now listing on Hippocampus with table-of-contents. Among others…
“A Baconian Reading of the Weird Tale from Shelley to Lovecraft”.
““I Dream a Golden Dream”: A Brief Dunsany Correspondence — and Friendship”.
“Under the Sign of the Hourglass: Elderly Protagonists in Horror Fiction”.
“Searching for God in the Dark Seas of William Hope Hodgson’s Poetry”.
The blurb also mentions an essay on “H P. Lovecraft’s influence on George R.R. Martin”, though I don’t see it in the TOCs.
Plus my bit of initial archaeological probing on Mary Howitt, to establish the weird outlines of her vast output and save someone a few weeks of work in the future. It won’t be me, as it needs abundant time and travel expenses to visit multiple archives for weeks at a time. If you can get a chunky grant for that, feel free.
16 Friday Sep 2022
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
I’m pleased to say that my “big Tolkien book” is finished. The 200,000-word book Tree & Star: Tolkien and the quest for Earendel is now available to buy on Gumroad as a .PDF ebook.
Sample: tolk-earendel-sample.pdf
For those unfamiliar with Gumroad, you input the price in the sidebar (more, if you want), and click “I want this”.
15 Thursday Sep 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
Lovecraft’s letters geo-located. Sadly it’s “one-record, one map point”, rather than the some vast seething tentacular web of points and connections. Still, the database wranglers appear to have done the basic work, parsing the structured records / list published by the Providence-based archives. Thus it may be possible to get just the Lovecraft data out, and then have software make it into a visual map. The correspondence.ie Web site does have visualisations, but I couldn’t spot one on the list for Lovecraft.
A simpler and more creative task would be an artistic wall-chart map showing all his known correspondents, with a uniformly hand-drawn portrait of each (if their appearance is known). The size of the portrait would indicate the size / duration / importance of the correspondence. With small arrows to indicate any notable non-Lovecraft correspondence with other members of the Circle. With insets on the map to cover New York City, California, the British Isles and the British Empire, etc. In fact, such a big wall-map might be a nice incentive to boost sales of the forthcoming mega-index covering all of Lovecraft’s letters.
15 Thursday Sep 2022
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
Changes at The Fossils, as Lovecraft researcher and scholar David Goudsward becomes a trustee with this long-running group dedicated to the history of amateur journalism. Details in the latest free edition of The Fossil #392 publication (July 2022).
Note that tax-deductible donations and bequests are welcome to the fund that supports the annual care and “maintenance of the largest collection of amateur journals and related materials”, this being held at University of Wisconsin–Madison. See the back cover of the issue for details.
No Lovecraft article this issue, but if you’re interested in the conjunction of Lovecraft / his circle and amateur journalism, I’m sure the Fossils would be interested to hear from you.
12 Monday Sep 2022
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. Among other news…
I can report the arrival of the new issue of the Lovecraft Annual, an issue of unusual interest and substance, containing no fewer than three separate articles about Lovecraft’s relations with C.M. Eddy, Jr., among many other subjects.
Great. Well, one of those is mine, so it’ll be interesting to read the other two.
Also noted is…
a Russian translation of I Am Providence, published by a Moscow firm called Eksmo […] a 794-page hardcover
He can’t find the Web page, and nor can I. However, this appears to be a picture of Vol. 1, as trailed back in May 2022. Seems to be following the two volume format of the English edition.
Joshi becomes “C.T. Axown”!
12 Monday Sep 2022
Posted in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works
Possibly of interest to those looking into the historical context for Lovecraft’s “Nyarlathotep” (1920), a new McFarland book Radio Psychics: Mind Reading and Fortune Telling in American Broadcasting, 1920–1940. Apparently not well written, according to one review. But it seems snappy enough in the Google Books excerpts I can obtain, and looks well researched.
April 1919 was when “the restrictions were lifted” on U.S. commercial radio, and it then seems to have been something of a free-for-all? The book also notes early phonograph records in the hypnosis line…
Fitzgibbons had been the first to think of making a “hypnotic record” one could play on one’s phonograph, in order to induce hypnosis (“‘Hypnotic Record’ Brings Out One’s Latent Genius”, Talking Machine World 15.6 (15th June 1919)
