24 Tuesday May 2022
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
PDF Index Generator 3.2 has been released today, the first update for a year. It’s the best relatively easy and affordable back-of-the-book index creator, and thus useful for scholars who may produce two or three books a year requiring an index. Note the coupon-code…
24 Tuesday May 2022
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Were there actual Theosophists publishing stories in Weird Tales in Lovecraft’s day? Rather than just the occasional Theosophical Press advert and some writers who used a sprinkling of Theosophist notions to ginger up their tales? Tellers of Weird Tales investigates this week.
There’s also a new book on their wider influence, Theosophy across Boundaries: Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Modern Esoteric Movement, from the State University of New York Press (SUNY)…
This book successfully demonstrates that the Theosophical Society and its derivatives crossed all sorts of intellectual and cultural boundaries, and it makes a strong case that these phenomena — long ignored because of their heterodox nature — must be given the attention they deserve.
23 Monday May 2022
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. Of interest is that he has copies of both Lovecraftian People and Places and Lovecraftian Proceedings #4, so they are shipping in paper. He also notes that…
the Spanish edition of I Am Providence is out
It appears that this edition manages to pack the two volumes into a mammoth 830-page table-trembler.
And all for 32 euros, which equates to $33.
The continent appear to do book pricing differently. For instance a few days ago I had a new Polish book arrive, Mitologia Polnocy a Chrzescijanstwo which I had to have for my Tolkien book since it has a chapter on Earendel (not so hot as was touted in a review, as it happens). The book managed to reach the UK, new, for just over £10 ($12.50), including shipping. The low cost was why it was my first new in-paper book for quite a while. It was found to be very handsomely designed and somewhat thick, obviously not print-on-demand. How publisher Avalon can make a zolty of profit on such a price I can’t imagine. I surmised there was perhaps some state-subsidy for worthy books related to national heritage, but the book had no subsidy credits or state logos. Such a nicely-made and rarefied scholarly book in the UK would automatically be around £26 ($33), and I know from my interest in open access that academic humanities publishers whine like hell about (apparently) barely scraping a profit even on £60 monographs featuring unpaid authors. And yet now comes the whole of I Am Providence in Spanish for just $33.
What is the secret? Has some impoverished former Soviet nation in Whereizitagain decided to corner the market in offering cheap book design and printing? Have such presses just found a couple of generous Bitcoin billionaires? Or did the supposed ‘paper shortage’ perversely lead to such an over-supply that the book-paper and printing market is now flooded and thus dirt cheap? Answers written on a night-gaunt’s wing, please, addressed to ‘Tentaclii Towers’.
22 Sunday May 2022
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
Of possible interest to Lovecraftian researchers, Year Book of the American Society of Bookplate Collectors and Designers, 1923-1931. Turning on a U.S. VPN gets me the full-view at Hathi.
11 Wednesday May 2022
Posted in Scholarly works
The April 2022 report of the German Lovecraftians. Among other items they report…
We are in the crunch phase of an academic anthology about the cultural interplay between H.P. Lovecraft and Germany … [with the book] to be officially announced via the usual channels soon.
10 Tuesday May 2022
Posted in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
I’m pleased to see that Lovecraft scholar Robert Price has re-animated his The Lovecraft Geek podcast, now the pandemic is effectively over. To the extent that there are three new episodes available. Before this, the last episode had been 31st March 2020. Then there was a long hiatus.
The new episodes can download to .MP3 from the show’s Podbay listing. Episode 22-001 is a 56-minute regular Lovecraft Geek, and one of the best I’ve heard. This is followed by two with Price’s new readings of Lovecraft’s “Dagon” and “The Temple” respectively.
It thus looks like there’s a good chance of another The Lovecraft Geek or two during 2022, so send in your questions to help encourage the next one.
I also took a look to see if more Lovecraft-related episodes had popped up over on the Christian MythVision YouTube channel, but no… they still only have his short 18 minute-one on “Lovecraft and the Origins of Religion” (June 2020). The rest of his podcasts over there appear to be about Biblical historicity and suchlike, and are thus not likely to be of interest to Lovecraftians. But there’s plenty to dig into in the back-catalogue of The Lovecraft Geek, linked above.
There’s also his The Bible Geek Show, and he mentioned on the new Lovecraft Geek that he recently did a complete Clark Ashton Smith reading there. Though he doesn’t say which episode.
Also mentioned in the new Lovecraft Geek are Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales and two of the best emulators of these are named… Myers for his The House of the Worm / Country of the Worm, but also the “early Kuttner”. And Price should know on that point, since he was the editor for Kuttner’s The Book of Iod: The Eater of Souls and other Tales (1995, Chaosium) collection. A quick perusal of Price’s Introduction in that book reveals the two stories he must be thinking of…
Kuttner penned a pair of pastiches of Lovecraft’s Dunsanian tales. These are “The Jest of Droom Avista” and “The Eater of Souls”.
Both short tales were in Weird Tales in 1937 and can thus now be found online as originally printed…
05 Thursday May 2022
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Newly listed on Hippocampus…
1. H. P. Lovecraft: Miscellaneous Letters.
Various letters to circles and correspondents, fragments of letters to Sonia, and also the letters Lovecraft sent to various local and national publications.
2. H. P. Lovecraft: Letters to Woodburn Harris and Others.
Letters to Woodburn Harris, Walter J. Coates, William Lumley.
Publication due in August 2022, according to the pages, and pre-ordering now. Both newly annotated.
According to Joshi’s recent “what is to come” list for the letters, by September 2022 the Lovecraft letters should then only have the following as ‘forthcoming’…
Letters to Hyman Bradofsky and Others
Letters with Frank Belknap Long (2 Vols.)
+ the single volume mega-index to all the published volumes of letters.
For some reason, from the UK I regularly need to turn on a USA VPN to get to the Hippocampus Press site. Anyone else outside the USA have the same problem?
28 Thursday Apr 2022
Posted in New books, REH, Scholarly works
Tentaclii has gone a bit quiet on Robert E. Howard and Conan et al. It’s not because I’ve lost interested, but because the material isn’t there to note. There seems to have been a lack of suitable items recently, other than the new cash-in comics and foreign translations and suchlike so ably tracked by Messages from Crom.
But now the Robert E. Howard Days (aka Howard Days) in Cross Plains, Texas, are just over six weeks away. It may be that various scholarly and thoughtful publications are being timed to appear for that.
In the meantime I see that Exploring the Worlds of REH Omnibus collects Fred Blosser’s themed ebooks (Howard’s Weird Texas, etc) into a single paperback. Along with eight new articles. I see he also has the survey ebooks Sons of Ringo: The Great Spaghetti Western Heroes and More Sons of Ringo.
One item I thought might be of note was Conan the Barbarian Epic Collection: The Original Marvel Years – Queen of the Black Coast. This was a chunky Marvel 1970s Buscema/Thomas reprint volume released last Christmas. But be warned that the cover and title is misleading. On reading the details you find this is only the run-up to his meeting Belit the ‘Queen of the Black Coast’ (issues #43-59). Conan meets her in #58 and then #59-to-#100 or thereabouts is the rest of the Belit run, as ably collected in Dark Horse’s earlier reprint book Chronicles of Conan, Volumes 8-12. So, be warned that you’re not getting the run that the new ‘Original Marvel Years’ cover seems to promise.
I took a look to see if I had missed anything else in the last year or so, and noted “Der Barbar aus dem Norden: Nordenbilder in Robert E. Howards Conan-Erzahlungen”, in the journal NORDEUROPAforum, 2020. On ‘images of the ancient North as they appear in R.E. Howard’s Conan’. It may interest some readers here, especially because it’s under full Creative Commons Attribution and is thus available to be translated from the German.
Also there’s now a new and mighty-thewed blog-post category here at Tentaclii, REH. I’ve gone back and retrospectively tagged as many posts as I can find.
24 Sunday Apr 2022
Posted in Scholarly works
Added to Open Lovecraft:
2022:
* E.S. Nilsson, Between the Eldritch and the Deep Blue Sea: A Study of Ecosystemic Configurations and the Ocean in Stories by H.P. Lovecraft. (Undergraduate final dissertation for Karlstads University).
* C. Agostini and E. Baggio, “A construcao de narrativas e os estudos de cultura material”, Revista Arqueologia Publica, Vol. 17, 2022. (How Lovecraft entices the reader to think about the formal ‘study of things of the past’).
* L. Mastropierro and M. Mahlberg, “Key words and translated cohesion in Lovecraft’s ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ and one of its Italian translations”, 2022. (“A comparison of Lovecraft’s original and a translation into Italian provides us with a nuanced understanding of the complex nature of cohesive networks [within such texts]”).
2021:
* Special issue of Studies in Gothic Fiction, Volume 7, 2021. (Five texts on adapting Lovecraft for games).
* J. Hunter, “Mysterium Horrendum: Exploring Otto’s Concept of the Numinous in Stoker, Machen, and Lovecraft”, book chapter IN: Theology and Horror: Explorations of the Dark Religious Imagination, 2021. (Appears to be an open access deposit via Academia.edu? Note that their PDFs can only be freely accessed by non-members via a title search on Google Scholar).
* A. Lubon, “Scalanie uniwersum: krytyka translatorska posrod kontekstow recepcji przekladowej poezji H.P. Lovecrafta w Polsce, Przekladaniec, No. 42, 2021. (“Consolidating the Universe: Translation Criticism among Contexts of Translational Reception of H.P. Lovecraft’s Poetry in Poland”. Close study of sematic shifts over time, in Polish translations).
* L.K. da Rocha, “A Tradicao, A Critica E As Representacoes Da Modernidade Em Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Uma Analise Triangular Entre Literatura E Documentos De Intimidade.”, Revista Cadernos de Clio, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2021. (Short article in what appears to be a graduate journal in Portuguese. “Tradition, criticism and representations of modernity in Howard Phillips Lovecraft: a triangular analysis between literature and documents of intimacy”. Lovecraft’s responses to modernity and the ongoing modernizing processes. Lovecraft is an anti-modern agent, an individual who idealised a utopian society via pure values. This is reflected in his fiction.)
* O. Glain, “H.P. Lovecraft’s Zadok Allen: a rebirth of the New England backwoods dialect?”, Etudes de Stylistique Anglaise, Vol. 16, 2021. (In English with French abstract).
Also some interesting items without full-text, noted here only:
“‘Awed listening’: H. P. Lovecraft in classic and contemporary audio horror” (Broad survey, touches on Bloch: “In the radio work of Lovecraft acolyte Robert Bloch as well as shows such as Quiet, Please (1947-49) the ‘Lovecraftesque’ is strongly evident. Indeed, various dimensions to Lovecraft’s fiction make his oeuvre ideally suited to audio adaptation.”).
“Those who predicted the darkness: writing the end in Lovecraft and Houellebecq”. (“Surprisingly, very few critics have discussed Lovecraft’s considerable contribution to Houellebecq’s thinking. […] This first study devoted exclusively to the links between these two authors will examine the thematic and stylistic aspects of their respective eschatological visions.”).
“The Protoplasmic Imagination: Ernst Haeckel and H.P. Lovecraft”. (“For Haeckel, [protoplasm] was the missing piece in the puzzle that Darwin had almost completed, and with it the whole mystery and wonder of life was within explanatory reach. For Lovecraft, on the other hand, it was the very essence of the shapeless, primitive, and fundamentally menacing quality of life that civilization had to keep at bay.”).
23 Saturday Apr 2022
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi’s blog brings news that the paperback edition of His Own Most Fantastic Creation: Stories about H.P. Lovecraft is listing at Hippocampus Press. Joshi was the editor.
Also noted, among others, is that coming soon is… “the vastly expanded edition of R. H. Barlow’s Eyes of the God”.
19 Tuesday Apr 2022
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
I’m pleased to see that Ken Faig Jr.’s new book Lovecraftian People and Places is now listed on Amazon UK and dated there “12th April 2022”. Over at Hippocampus the page for the book usefully notes that… “All essays have been revised for publication in this collection.”
Incidentally I see that Lovecraft Annual No. 15 (2021) is currently half-price at Amazon UK. It’s still waiting for my review here. I read ‘a few essays in’ last autumn and then put it down. My interest in Lovecraft tends to be somewhat seasonal, strongest in May-September. I’ll have to re-start the 2021 Annual reading sometime before the summer of 2022 comes to an end. I’m pleased to say that editor Joshi has accepted an item by me for a future Annual, and another for his Penumbra journal.
14 Thursday Apr 2022
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
The March report from the main German Lovecraftian group states… “320 active members in the association”. Compared to the few dozen who met in the early days. They have an annual meeting coming up on 24th April, and a residential ‘Miskatonic University’ in mid August 2022 in Duderstadt. Their open FHTAGN RPG continued to develop and “work on the English translation is also ongoing”. Their CthulhuWiki Writing Season saw a major revision of their Arthur Machen article in German, among others. They’re also making a Dreamlands film, with location filming due… “at the end of May in the Black Forest and near Nuremberg”.
Meanwhile, over in nearby Hungary, the new Aether #12 podcast from the Hungarian Lovecraftians. They’re reading Horkheimer (good luck) but also the Lovecraft Annual #2 (“Knowledge in the Void: Anomaly, Observation, and the Incomplete Paradigm Shift in H. P. Lovecraft’s Fiction”); and S.T. Joshi’s A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft.