13 Wednesday May 2020
Posted in Scholarly works
Call for papers…
‘Ill met by moonlight’: Gothic Encounters with Enchantment and the Fairy Realm in Literature and Culture, in the UK and set for 8th-10th April, 2021 (assuming no third-wave of the virus and lockdown).
10 Sunday May 2020
Posted in Scholarly works
* L. Arriagada, “Realismo estructural ontico en H.P. Lovecraft, Laboratorio, No. 21, 2019. (In Spanish. “Ontic Structural Realism in H.P. Lovecraft”).
* The Fantastic Universe of H.P. Lovecraft, a special issue of Brumal, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2019:
– “Rhetorics and Cosmicism in H.P. Lovecraft.”
– “Multiplied Horror: An isotopy in three stories by Lovecraft.”
– “H.P. Lovecraft on Screen: A challenge for filmmakers.”
– “Hidden Rituals, Secret Powers And Everlasting Horrors: The presence of the Lovecraftian imaginary in recent Spanish extreme metal.”
– “The Forms of The Unspeakable: some representations of Lovecraftian horror in the adaptations of Alberto Breccia.”
– “The Influence Of H.P. Lovecraft in the work of Junji Ito”.
07 Thursday May 2020
Posted in Scholarly works
Barton Levi St-Armand’s “H. P. Lovecraft : New England Decadent” (1975) is now online for free at Persee, as part of their digitisation of the literary journal Caliban. No. 12, 1975 was a special issue on American science-fiction, and its long article on Lovecraft as a “New England Decadent” was an important item of early Lovecraft scholarship.
“New England Decadent” had been issued as an ebook fundraiser for the WaterFire Providence festival, in connection with NecronomiCon 2013…
WaterFire Providence is re-publishing, H.P. Lovecraft: New England Decadent by Professor Emeritus Barton Levi St. Armand. First published in 1979, the book, which examines the history of Lovecraft scholarship and his roots in the decadent movement of 19th Century Britain and Europe, has been corrected and re-released for NecronomiCon Providence 2013.
… but this edition later vanished from Amazon sometime in late summer 2018. Presumably the permission for an ebook only lasted five years.
02 Saturday May 2020
Posted in Kipling, New books, Scholarly works
S. T. Joshi’s blog has updated. He’s rescued sixteen of the best weird stories by the first William Waldorf Astor (1848-1919), the post-1892 owner of The Pall Mall Gazette in London. These are now published in a new 358-page volume titled The Ghosts of Austerlitz and Others. It has a Kindle edition nicely priced at a mere $4, and has a Joshi-penned biography of Astor.
The Pall Mall Gazette is a familiar name to anyone who has looked into the early life of H.G. Wells. Under Astor’s new ownership, and the conservative editorship of his new editor Henry Crust, the Gazette provided a congenial home for paid essays and humour pieces by the impoverished H.G. Wells at an absolutely crucial time in his pre-fame career. If Wells had not had a bare living from the post-1892 Gazette under William Waldorf Astor, we might not have had The Time Machine in 1894-95 — and the history of science-fiction could have looked very different.
I seem to recall the Gazette also published Kipling, and that there was an anthology a year ago of various strange stories gleaned from the Gazette. Presumably Astor’s liking for the weird made it a congenial home for the likes of Wells, Kipling and others. More on such matters will no doubt be found in Joshi’s biographical essay.
The Wikipedia portrait of Astor at the end of his life is not at all flattering. So here is my repaired, enlarged and colourised picture of him in his prime. Here he might be aged around age 42-ish — about the time when he purchased the Gazette.
Joshi’s new blog post also has new news on the ongoing series of annotated Lovecraft letters…
Later this year we should be publishing Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner and Others (including letters to Arthur Harris, James Larkin Pearson, Winifred V. Jackson, Arthur Leeds, and Paul J. Campbell).
29 Wednesday Apr 2020
Posted in Historical context, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
I’m pleased to find The Lovecraft Geek Podcast – New Series #4 (February 2020). I missed this, earlier in the spring, but here’s the link. It’s an excellent set of questions for Robert M. Price, this time around, and he rises to the challenge.
At the end of the The Lovecraft Geek podcast Price reveals he has a new book of short stories available, Horrors and Heresies, in which horror meets various aspects of religion. Price is, of course, an expert on the Bible as well as on Lovecraft and sword-and-sorcery, so a joining of the three should be especially succulent. If you want to know more of the anthology, the podcast The Free Thought Prophet #195 recently brought him onto the show to discuss the new collection.
I can also add a couple of small pointers to the questions and answers in this latest Lovecraft Geek.
i) On the ‘Poe’ question, there’s what appears to be a strong new book The Lovecraftian Poe which would be useful for the enquirer.
ii) On the ‘Nodens’ question, I can add that Nodens was once a god in ancient Britain, and this fact had been known among antiquarians after excavations at Lydney in the 1770s and became briefly known again when an additional find was written up for publication in the 1880s. This material and the name must surely have been known to Machen. Machen’s fictional use greatly impressed Lovecraft, who wrote in a letter…
I’ll never forget that pillar raised by Flavius Senilis to Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss
Machen having the inscription read: “To the great god Nodens (the god of the Great Deep or Abyss) Flavius Senilis has erected this pillar on account of the marriage which he saw beneath the shade.”
Lovecraft had first discovered and read Machen’s work in the summer of 1923, and Nodens then appeared in Lovecraft’s “The Strange High House in the Mist” (1926) and Dream-Quest (1926-27). It seems quite plausible to assume, as Joshi and others have, that Lovecraft had been unfamiliar with Nodens prior to 1923. My quick search of Google Books for the 19th century and for 1900-1924 confirms this strong likelihood. You couldn’t look him up in an encyclopedia, it seems.
Nodens appears to have been only a brief dalliance by Lovecraft, as there seems to be nothing lurking in the poetry. But his lack of any pursuit of the god into Dunsanian realms was perhaps timely. Since there was a flurry of publicity by 1929 around the Nodens name, which would have constrained any continued use of the name in fantastic fiction. The name and site at Lydney became closely associated with the discovery of a lost golden ring, known as ‘The Vyne Ring’, and a curse. The discovers put a call through to one Professor Tolkien, who kindly wrote a learned philological essay on the name Nodens in the light of the new finds. His essay is to be found in good form in the back of the Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire (1932) and reprinted in Tolkien Studies #4 (2007).
Fourth-century inscription dedicated to Nodens, at Lydney, with sea-dragons. Note the Sauron-like staring ‘eye’.
Tolkien’s linguistic pursuit of the name led him to find a cognate across the Irish Sea in Nuada Argat-lam, he of the lost hand. There is thus a possible origin here for Tolkien’s idea of Sauron and the ring of power. Since Sauron lost a severed finger and with it his ring, and thus most of his power was lost. This key idea is not so far, at least in its basics, from a quick imaginative combination of the lost and cursed golden ‘Vyne Ring’ + the lost hand of Nuada.
29 Wednesday Apr 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Rob Hansen’s new and free ebook HOMEFRONT: Fandom in the UK, 1939-1945 may interest those exploring the years immediately after the death of Lovecraft. 163,000 words of primary and memoir material from and about British fandom during the Second World War…
There was a scheme afoot to materialize Lovecraft [among the spiritualist mediums of wartime London]
Well, there’s a cue for a new Mythos and Lovecraft-as-character story. Just add some rival Blackshirt occultists, and a guest appearance by Churchill accompanied by his (apparently) wartime industrial-production consultant S. Fowler Wright.
28 Tuesday Apr 2020
Posted in Scholarly works
This call-for-papers may tickle the fancy of lovers of deep and dusty research, and those who enter a library with a pocket digicam and a piratical grin. The Joy of Information: A Library Trends Special Issue…
This special issue of Library Trends features writings that explore the relationship between information and joy [in an issue that] brings together bright and uplifting views of information to contrast with critical or problem-oriented perspectives that color our literature in grayscale.
They appear not to want to see proposals, but rather full-papers submitted by 1st August 2020.
25 Saturday Apr 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Close Reading with Computers: Textual Scholarship, Computational Formalism, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (April 2020). This substantial new single-author book applies textual computing to the science-fiction-philosophy novel Cloud Atlas, and is also free and under full Creative Commons.
This book is the first full-length monograph to bring a range of computational methods to bear in a sustained fashion, on a single novel, at the micro-level. While most contemporary digital studies are interested in distant-reading paradigms for large-scale literary history – using their digital methods as a telescope – following calls by Alan Liu and Tanya E. Clement, Close Reading with Computers instead asks what happens when such techniques function as a microscope.
As such it is possibly of interest as an exemplar for a set of computational techniques and approaches that could be used on a Lovecraft work. With the dense and historical (and public domain) Dexter Ward springing to mind.
23 Thursday Apr 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
New from Emily Alder of Edinburgh Napier University, Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siecle. The focus is on British authors and their relations with science as then understood. Alder appears to be challenging the assumption that such works were all in some way ‘supernatural’ or were an elaboration of ‘the gothic’.
In this book, I conceive weird fiction as a literature of borderland science. In its fin-de-siecle forms, the weird tale arises because scientific discourses had murky edges, because the limits of knowledge and the extent of what was or wasn’t possible in the world were unclear, because the boundaries of valid scientific enquiry itself were not stable. Weird fictions flourish in gaps in knowledge or beyond its edges. … Some tales exploit the gaps and possibilities in materialist science opened up by late nineteenth-century biology and evolutionary theories; some extrapolate from theories of physics, from classic thermodynamics and the new physics of unseen, subatomic worlds. All pick up on the strangeness of science, of what is already weird. … Weird fiction and science belong to the same, widespread cultural conversation taking place at this time about new knowledge… [its authors react] to changing ways of understanding generated by scientific exploration, considering how their implications might be experienced by individuals in the present, projected into the future, and reconciled with competing worldviews.
It looks like an interesting approach. Here are the contents…
CONTENTS:
* Weird Tales and Scientific Borderlands at the Fin de Siecle.
* Weird Selves, Weird Worlds: Psychology, Ontology, and States of Mind in Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Machen.
* Weird Knowledge: Experiments, Senses, and Epistemology in Stevenson, Machen, and Edith Nesbit.
* Weirdfinders: Reality, Mastery, and the Occult in E. and H. Heron, Algernon Blackwood, and William Hope Hodgson. [On the ‘occult detectives’ sub-genre].
* Borderlands of Time, Place, and Matter.
* Meat and Mould: The Weird Creatures of William Hope Hodgson and H. G. Wells.
* Weird Energies: Physics, Futures, and the Secrets of the Universe in Hodgson and Blackwood.
21 Tuesday Apr 2020
Posted in Scholarly works
Added to the Open Lovecraft page on this blog:
* A. Fattori, “Narrazioni aliene: Da Innsmouth a Twin Peaks: tendenze transmediali e tentazioni postumane in Howard Phillips Lovecraft”, Mediascapes journal, No. 14, 2020. (In Italian. “Alien narrations: From Innsmouth to Twin Peaks: Transmedia Trends and Posthumous Temptations in Howard Phillips Lovecraft”. Appears to focus on Lovecraft’s role as the begetter of the first fannish transmedia universe).
* F. Collignon, “The Insectile Informe: H. P. Lovecraft and the deliquescence of form”, Extrapolation, Vol. 60, No. 3, 2019. (Considers the buzzing insectile sounds in “The Whisperer in the Darkness”, and how they later take the form of an “enfleshed [human] voice”. Infers possible philosophical-political meanings from apparent “formlessness” taking on a human form).
* T. Honegger, Re-enchanting a dis-enchanted world: Tolkien (1892-1973) and Lovecraft (1890-1937), Quaderni di Arda: Rivista di studi Tolkienani e mondi fantastici, Vol. 1, No. 1., December 2019. (In dual English and Italian, scroll halfway down the page to find the English version. Both are new.)
Also, forthcoming from Thomas Honegger (in paid paper only) is…
“Language, Historical Depth, and the Fantastic in the Work of H.P. Lovecraft”, in: Fantastic Languages: The Language of the Fantastic. (Fastitocalon: Studies in Fantasticism Ancient to Modern 9), forthcoming in 2020.
20 Monday Apr 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
There’s a second edition of Bookery’s Guide to Pulps & Related Magazines, new in 2020 from Ivy Press. It’s a comprehensive price guide in the Overstreet tradition, but could also be a handy lookup for years and titles for historians. The 400-page 2005 edition is on Archive.org, if you want to see the sort of thing you’ll be getting for your $30 for the new edition.
For those who buy a copy, I’d suggest you might get an interesting blog post by tabulating a few prices, comparing 2005 → 2020 and looking for trends both up and down.
18 Saturday Apr 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
A new book, due later in 2020…
My new book: Aliens, Robots & Virtual Reality Idols in the Science Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov and William Gibson is due to be published on October 30th of this year”
The core idea seems to be that some of us enjoy imagining extreme aliens/robots, encountered under extreme conditions. Such ideas then both threaten and reinforce the reader’s ideas about ‘what it is to be human’. One can certainly see how such repeated literary lessons might have been useful for a certain kind of young nerd in the 1930s-80s.
