10 Monday Aug 2020
Posted in Scholarly works
The Pulpster #29 will be a plumpster…
almost twice as large as last year’s edition. Weighing in at 84 pages, plus covers
Shipping early September 2020 in paper, with lead articles on Ray Bradbury and Black Mask. Note that the above link reports some “slightly bumped” back-issues are available now for $10 each.
03 Monday Aug 2020
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works
H. P. Lovecraft: Letters to Family and Family Friends is now listed on the Hippocampus Press website. Nice and chunky at 1,110 pages, mostly because of the immense amount of letters to his aunts Lillian Clark and Annie Gamwell. These letters are here given “complete and unabridged” and also in a meticulously annotated and indexed form. There are also “previously unpublished letters written by Lovecraft’s grandfather, Whipple V. Phillips, to his grandson in the 1890s”.
Quite reasonably priced, at $60 for both in paperback. There’s an “Add to cart” button on the page, so I assume they’re shipping now. No sign of them yet on either Amazon USA or UK or eBay, but no doubt they’ll appear there in due course.
The books have a pleasing cover design by Daniel V. Sauer, around evocative art by David C. Verba.
03 Monday Aug 2020
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
Thanks to Ken Faig Jr. for telling me that there’s a new July 2020 edition of The Fossil, journal of the Historians of Amateur Journalism. This is freely available online.
There are two items of Lovecraftian material in the issue. David Goudsward offers “A Postscript to Myrta Little” in which he explains some of the context for Lovecraft’s apparent love poem “To Phillis”. This article might have perhaps been a touch longer, and also briefly considered Lovecraft’s sonnet to Whitehead’s young friend & guest Allan Grayson.
The main article is the biographical “A Memory of Andrew Francis Lockhart”…
“an early acquaintance of H.P. Lovecraft who is mainly known in literary circles for having written the first article about the famous horror writer.”
Lockhart was an ardently anti-liquor man and was admired by Lovecraft for his tussles with local rum-runners, and well as for his poetic and amateur endeavours. Lockhart was the subject of Lovecraft’s poem “To Mr. Lockhart, on His Poetry”, aka “To A.F. Lockhard”, and is enshrined in the travel account “Little Journeys to the Homes of Prominent Amateurs: II. Andrew Francis Lockhart”. The latter is available as a reading on Librivox.
02 Sunday Aug 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Super news from S.T. Joshi’s Blog…
I have plunged into the treatise that I have been promising for years to write: The Recognition of H. P. Lovecraft: His Rise from Obscurity to World Renown. In this month alone I have written about 50,000 words — and I’m only up to the year 1980!
Great, we need a good scholarly study digging in to his 1938-1974 ‘afterlife’ in fannish circles, and how he was understood and (often fruitfully) mis-understood in those decades. Ideally that would also survey the early use of ‘Lovecraft as character’, and briefly survey the more notable early Lovecraftian artists and book-cover designers and their approaches. But that’s because I’m rather more interested in the history of recognition by the fans, fan-creatives and small-presses than by the sniffy establishment. It would be ‘icing on the cake’ to also get a brisk account of the later 1975-2015 period, in terms of the more easily-surveyed life-research and scholarly criticism, his wide diffusion outside the English-speaking world, and the slow and often reluctant uptake of Lovecraft by university academics and mainstream publishers.
Joshi also reports a fine new set of Lovecraftian fiction, and some essays and letters, due soon-ish in French from “French publisher Mnemos”.
31 Friday Jul 2020
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
Here in the UK, our National Maritime Museum has taken the lockdown wraps off the major show “Monsters of the Deep” and opened it to the public. The show surveys the fact and fiction of sea-monsters, and includes hundreds of pickled mini-monster specimens shipped over from the U.S. National Oceanography Collection. It runs until January 2022, though note that this is not the London branch of the Museum — you will have to trek down to Falmouth, in relatively remote Cornwall, to see the show. It appears to be paired for its duration with “Viktor Wynd’s UnNatural History Museum” in which Viktor uses taxidermy to devise curious and never-seen creatures.
26 Sunday Jul 2020
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
Bobby Derie considers “Cosmic Horror” (1945) by Dorothy Tilden Spoerl, an early item of Lovecraft criticism.
25 Saturday Jul 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith is now on Amazon UK in paperback with a July shipping date. 800 pages in two volumes, 1922-1931 and 1932-1937. Amazon UK has them for £30 each.
There at first seems to be no sign of them on Amazon USA, where general Web search will only land you on the page for the hardback, and with only a $150 used copy available there. Curiously, nothing then shows on Amazon USA when you search for “Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill”, even though the hardback has a known page-listing. Further tests showed that only the search “Dawnward Spire Lonely Hill” — without the comma and in inverted commas as a phrase — meets with success. This reveals the very elusive U.S. Amazon listing pages for the paperbacks: 1922-1931 and 1932-1937.
A simple search for Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill (comma, no quote marks) failed completely. On closer inspection this was due to the dumb AI at Amazon trying to second-guess the title. There can no such word as Dawnward, its pea-sized brain surmises. Therefore you must be searching for Downward. Durh. So much for rapid machine-learning.
Yes Amazon, you need “need help”. Help to fix stupid second-guessing by your search tools, a crude technique that should surely have no place in a billion-dollar high-tech search-based business in 2020 — not least because it fails at least 70% of the time. Google Search has also taken to annoyingly auto-removing your “quote marks”, if it thinks there won’t be enough search results for the phrase. Which reverts the search to synonymys etc. Actually, I’d rather like to know that there are no results for that exact phrase, and not be bamboozled into seeing a page of irrelevant ‘maybe, perhaps, sounds like…’ results, which are inevitably far astray from what I’m seeking.
23 Thursday Jul 2020
Posted in Scholarly works
I’m pleased to find the new-ish Brazilian journal Zanzala: Revista Brasileira de Estudos de Ficcao Cientifica (trans. ‘Zanzala: Brazilian journal for the study of science-fiction’). Now with four issues available. They appear to be quite interested in monsters, for instance they have an article on tropical vampires in the 1950s and 60s and a couple of others in the same line.
The call for articles for the next issue has a deadline of 31st August 2020, and the theme will be: ‘The Contagious Imaginary: fantasy, horror and science fiction in the era of COVID-19’. Articles appear to be in Portuguese, though among the four issues I did spot one article in English.
Also of interest to some, in monster journals, will be the new theory-led academic Journal of Gods and Monsters from Texas.
Another recent item of note from South America is a 40 minute talk on “Lovecraft en Chile”.
23 Thursday Jul 2020
Posted in Scholarly works
Indicible Entretien #9 has an interview with Lovecraft’s biographer S.T. Joshi, along with a native French translation.
22 Wednesday Jul 2020
Posted in Housekeeping, Scholarly works
On the Open Lovecraft page, I’ve removed about thirty links to PDFs on Academia.edu. PDFs there can no longer be downloaded by the public, only by the service’s members or via a search at Google Scholar. The lock-down of the PDFs appears to have happened in the last couple of weeks. My thanks to Dave Higgins for letting me know about this. If scholars want PDFs to be truly open in future, I suggest using a proper public repository instead of closed services such as Academia.edu.
22 Wednesday Jul 2020
Posted in Scholarly works
* K. Dimitrios, “Evolution or Degeneration? Darwin’s Influence on R.L. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth”” (Masters dissertation for the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, February 2020).
* K. Kwong, “On Xenophanes’ theology and Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos”, Kerberos, Summer 2020. (Can be had via search on Google Scholar as the complete issue in PDF, where it is also known to Scholar by the title “An Alternative Site for Troy on Imbros Gokceada”, which is the title of the first article in the issue).
* D. Balodis, “Iedomu valodas: H.F. Lavkrafta gramatas ‘Kthulhu aicinajums’ un tas Latviska tulkojuma analize” (‘Fictional languages: an analysis of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” in its Latvian translation’. A dissertation for the University of Latvia, 2020).
15 Wednesday Jul 2020
Posted in New books, REH, Scholarly works
I see that Amazon now lists a June 2020 edition of The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies. At the journal’s website there’s also a new call for papers with a deadline of 16th August 2020.
Thanks to GreyIrish who has provided the TOCs for the latest issue of The Dark Man…
* Editorial by Jason Ray Carney and Nicole Emmelhainz-Carney.
* Willard M. Oliver, “Robert E. Howard and Jack London’s Martin Eden: analyzing the influence of Martin Eden on Howard and his semi-autobiography”.
* Todd Vick, “The Kid, Two-Gun, and history”.
* Karen Kahoutek, “More Than Meets the Eye: the women protagonists of the Conan stories”.
* Ralph Norris, “The Coming of Kull”.
* Luke F. Dodd, “The Sword and Sorcery Themes of The Sword’s Age of Winters, Gods of the Earth, and Warp Riders. (Album reviews).
* The Dark Man interview with The Cromcast [podcast]. (Interview).
There’s also now a table of contents for last summer’s issue. I learn it had an essay on Lovecraft, “Heredity and Madness in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls””.
Also of note is a forthcoming book by a 2020 Dark Man contributor, Todd Vick, titled Renegades and Rogues: The Life and Legacy of Robert E. Howard. It’s set to appear from the University of Texas Press. It sounds to me like a ‘Howard 101’ book aimed at academics who need a quick primer…
You may not know the name Robert E. Howard, but you probably know his work. His most famous creation, Conan the Barbarian, is an icon of popular culture.
Set for publication in November 2020 or January 2021, the dating varies.