Category Archives: Scholarly works

“he projects his own mind through space…”

25 Tuesday Aug 2020

Posted by in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

S. T. Joshi’s revivified blog has a new post. Among other things, he reveals that he appeared by video feed at one of the recent big Mexican events for Lovecraft’s 130th birthday. I blogged about these some days ago now, re: my first round up of the Birthday doings. Joshi also notes the Russian Darker magazine has new translations of Lovecraft’s “Vermont – a first impression” and of Joshi’s own “Autobiography in Lovecraft”.

More 130th Birthday items

25 Tuesday Aug 2020

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

Spanish, Italian and other languages are now starting to appear in the search-engine indexes covering the last five days. Here’s what I’ve picked up by search so far, to add to my previous coverage of Lovecraft’s 130th Birthday…

* New in Italian, and published on Lovecraft’s birthday, the book Chi ha paura di H.P. Lovecraft (Who’s Afraid of Lovecraft?, Oakmond, 290 pages)…

An articulate monograph full of ideas, De Sio’s work is framed by two experts in this area — Gianfranco de Turris and Sebastiano Fusco — who, in the extensive preface masterfully meld all the points covered by the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

Oakmond Publishing have a page for the book and it’s shipping now.

* Pietro Sabatelli usefully rounds up about 20+ Italian blog links offering posts for Lovecraft’s 130th Birthday. Scroll down to the foot of his post, and look under this banner…

* The day was chosen to launch the ‘Biblioteca Lovecraftiana Fundamental’ the term being used for a new door-stopper book. Contos Reunidos do Mestre do Horror Cósmico (Tales Gathered, by the Master of Cosmic Horror, Ex Machina, 540 pages). The publisher is in Brazil, so I assume Portuguese for this weighty…

anthology containing all 61 short stories written by Lovecraft and published in various magazines between 1917 and 1935.

Lovecraft Annual 2020

23 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

Now listed on Hippocampus as shipping, the scholarly journal Lovecraft Annual No. 14, 2020.

Looking down the contents list, the follow items especially appeal…

* Steven J. Mariconda’s “Atmosphere and the Qualitative Analysis of ‘The Colour out of Space'”, which must be the major essay which was known about but which did not appear in his recent book collection.

* Dylan Henderson’s “Missing the Punchline: The Subversive Nature of H. P. Lovecraft’s Occult Detective”, which must be on Malone in “Red Hook”.

* Ken Faig, Jr.’s “John Osborne Austin’s Seven Club Tales: Did They Inspire Lovecraft?”.

* Andrew Gipe-Lazarou’s “The ‘Extreme Fantasy’ of Delirious New York” sounds interesting, presumably a survey of Lovecraft’s responses to ‘faery’ New York before it curdled into being his ‘feary’ New York.

I see that Lovecraft Annual No. 13, 2019, can also be had at a discount.

News from Association Miskatonic

23 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

≈ 1 Comment

France’s Association Miskatonic writes…

Hi! Since we had to cancel our 2020 [Lovecraft] convention due to the pandemic, we’ll be hosting online lectures this Autumn/Fall, in the last week of October. These will include…

* When Japan meets HPL.
* Junji Ito and HPL.
* How did the Call of Cthulhu RPG arrive in France, and what impact did it have?

Next year, hopefully in October 2021, we should be able to organise a ‘physical’ event here in Verdun, France, with lectures by Lovecraft scholars, screenings and exhibits.

H.P. Lovecraft’s 130th Birthday: the round-up

21 Friday Aug 2020

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

≈ 1 Comment

There will probably be more to come, but this is my round-up so far for 2020:

* The key website hplovecraft.com has… “completely overhauled and re-organized the “Lovecraft’s Letters” page” as a 130th birthday present. This being the page for the Lovecraft letters as published in book form.

* Portland’s H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival is celebrating Lovecraft’s 130th Birthday on the nearest weekend, via a “streaming event available to stream from anywhere in the U.S.”, and featuring “short films both new and classic from the festival’s 25 year history” and billed as “HPLFF Presents 130 Years of H.P. Lovecraft”. There is also a t-shirt for the event and the Festival’s co-director and “fellow Portland horror writers” ran an online Lovecraftian horror panel.

* The ‘Segundo Festival Literario H.P. Lovecraft’, aka ‘Literario 2do Festival H.P. Lovecraft’, appears to be taking place in Mexico from 20th-22nd August 2020, bringing together Lovecraftian artists, writers and film-makers in Mexico. Last year it was a physical event with stalls, talks and screenings at La Moderna. But this year it was perhaps only virtual. Online already is “Remanentes del pesimismo Schopenhaueriano en al obra de H.P. Lovecraft”, a 45 minute video lecture in Spanish on Schopenhauerian pessimism in Lovecraft. Doubtless more videos from the event will appear online soon.

* Elsewhere in Mexico there was a university event to launch the fourth edition of the La ciudad de las montañas de la locura (At The Mountains of Madness) and the blurb had it that… “there will be talks, short film screenings and will talk about art, science and cinema, all related to the writer.” The Casa Universitaria del Libro de la UANL also has livecasts via Facebook from August 17th to 22nd. “Among the themes will be addressed the relationship between Lovecraft and the First World War, his vision as a popularizer of science, the relationship between cinema and literature, and his poetry.”

* Also in Mexico, the 19th Macabre Film Festival at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico runs… “from August 25th to 30th, and will commemorate a hundred years of German Expressionism, and 130 years since the birth of H.P. Lovecraft”. The PDF Programme.

* Nothing from the Italian or other European Lovecraftians, that I can see. But possibly the search-engines have not yet got around to indexing the latest from across Europe. I get that impression from searches.

* I released my Annotated “Hypnos” at Tentaclii. This is the first substantial annotated edition, as Klinger omitted it from his two volumes, and the notes to be found from S.T. Joshi are fairly short.

* The latest Sept/Oct Halloween issue of Digital Production magazine, the substantial German trade magazine for high-end movie and TV digital FX and similar, was released on Lovecraft’s birthday with a ‘Cthulhu creation’ feature (article not yet online).

* There’s a “Cthulhu Mythos Sale” over on DriveThuRPG, which appears to be one of the largest of the RGP book sites. Tenkar’s Tavern has waded in and selected five of the best, and promises more picks soon.

* RPG gamers also chose the day to unleash Apocthulhu… “successfully launched the PDF edition of the APOCTHULHU Core Rulebook. It’s a 330 page behemoth packed with rules, world building resources, pre-defined settings…”.

* Comics artist Frank Brunner & Friends posted a nice arty ‘birthday-card’ on Facebook…

* A slightly less impressive Cthulhu Minecraft Skin was released. But fun, if you need a Cthulhu in there.

* Makowh released his full reading of “The Rats in the Walls”, accompanied by his own artwork which can be seen in crisper form at ArtStation.

* Harry Piper put together special 130th Birthday musings on “The Cosmic Pessimism of H.P. Lovecraft”.

* And lastly and rather more cheerily, the Journal of Geek Studies chose the day to celebrate Pokécrustacea: the crustacean-inspired Pokémon.

For Lovecraft’s birthday: Annotated “Hypnos”

20 Thursday Aug 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Scholarly works

≈ 2 Comments

Here’s my annotated “Hypnos”, for H.P. Lovecraft’s 130th birthday.

Download: annotated_hypnos_v1_2020.pdf

This is a version 1.0, and may well be polished up a bit and added to in a future version.

I’ll be hoping to gather together links to other people’s birthday offerings in due course, once the search-engines catch up with indexing today.

H. P. Lovecraft: A Bibliography (1952)

19 Wednesday Aug 2020

Posted by in Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

New in June on Archive.org, H. P. Lovecraft: A Bibliography by Joseph Payne Brennan (Revised Edition, 1952). As a 20 page booklet from 1952 it’s not at all to be compared to the enormous doorstopper we now have, but is still somewhat useful as a snapshot of ‘the state of Lovecraft’ at 1952, some 15 years after his death. Also because it has some timelines that are still useful for quick consultation…

* Lovecraft in anthologies during his lifetime and beyond, in date order from 1927 – 1952.

* Lovecraft in Weird Tales, a simple title list in date order of appearance.

Added to Open Lovecraft

16 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by in Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

* S.M. Elizalde, “Horror Vacui: temporalidades para alem do tempo”, Capa, Vol, 18, No. 2, 2020. (In Portuguese. ‘Horror Vacui: Temporalities Beyond Time’. Discusses work on Lovecraft by the Argentine philosopher Fabian Luduena Romandini, re: modernity and the image of time, and also touches on Kant, Nick Land and accelerationism, and Marco Antonio Valentim who appears to be another Argentine philosopher).

* D.N. Gago, “A sombra de Lovecraft sobre Providence”, Gavea-Brown: A Bilingual Journal of Portuguese-American Letters and Studies, Vol. 41, 2019. (In Portuguese. Appears to be a short evocation of Lovecraft’s place in his home city).

* J.R. Leo, “There are more thinhgs. El horror Lovecraftniano en la obra de Jorge Luis Borges”, Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana, Vol. 48, 2019. (In Spanish. Appears to be a survey of Borges’s debt to and symbiosis with Lovecraft’s work).

It’s a Lulu

13 Thursday Aug 2020

Posted by in Housekeeping, New books, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

Thanks to Andrew for trying to order some of my Lovecraft books in paperback, and thereby discovering that some of the Lulu.com links were dead. The context here is that print-on-demand service Lulu.com recently had an utterly disastrous site makeover, causing chaos and much loss at the back-end of the service. Many authors, including myself, are still locked out of the service after several months. Book pages and author pages are slowly getting back to normal, and on checking I found that remaining “404” URLs were for…

* Walking with Cthulhu: H.P. Lovecraft as psychogeographer, New York City 1924-26.

* Ice Cores: essays on Lovecraft’s novella ‘At the Mountains of Madness’.

* And my very first Historical Context book, just a collection of the early blog posts really, and not comparable to the later footnoted books… Lovecraft in Historical Context: Essays.

So those three links are now fixed, both on old posts and over on the Tentaclii sidebar.

Other book pages at Lulu appear to be back to normal, and books are now printing/shipping fine.

“… words came up from that uncanny vault”

12 Wednesday Aug 2020

Posted by in Scholarly works

≈ 1 Comment

S.T. Joshi’s blog is back online again, and the latest update has lots of books news, including a preliminary chapter-list for his forthcoming The Recognition of H.P. Lovecraft.

Also, he notes that the hardback of the new Lovecraft-Smith letters, Dawnward Spire, is slightly different from the paperback…

“the hardcover edition is just about exhausted [i.e. sold out]. This paperback edition includes one or two scraps of correspondence (a postcard or two) that came to light after the hardcover edition appeared.”

Ghostly Haunts #28

12 Wednesday Aug 2020

Posted by in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

Dark Worlds Quarterly peers into the old 1970s Carlton Comics, and particularly their Lovecraftian work in the horror monthies… Part One and Part Two.

There’s a link on the first post to the Digital Comic Museum, of claimed “public domain” comics, where they have over 1,000 Charlton scans currently listed. Though sadly missing is Ghostly Haunts #28, December 1972, which Dark Worlds Quarterly spots as effectively featuring Lovecraft as both a cover-star and the lead character in “No Way Out”

With art by Joe Staton.

Ghostly Haunts was Charlton’s answer to the 1970s titles House of Mystery and Tower of Shadows and it ran from 1971-78. #28 also had Steve Ditko interior story, but even so it seems fairly easy to find cheap on eBay in a slightly worn condition. However a little searching online reveals… there’s “No Way Out”. Another item for a potential ‘Lovecraft as Character’ encyclopedia.

Talking of comics, an undergraduate-oriented introductory Comics Studies: A Guidebook book is set for publication in mid-August 2020, from Rutgers University Press.