20 Saturday Jul 2024
Posted in Scholarly works
A call for papers for a two-day academic conference ‘Celebrating 215 years of Edgar Allan Poe’. To be held in California. Note also… “This conference will be held online at no charge. The Zoom link will be sent out the week prior.”
“215” apparently refers to the years since his “deathday” anniversary, but the organisers have that wrong. 2024 marks 215 years since his birth in 1809. It’s 175 years since he died.
Deadline for 200 word submissions: 13th September 2024.
16 Tuesday Jul 2024
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Some scholars may be interested in the new book Fantasy Aesthetics: Visualizing Myth and Middle Ages, 1880-2020 (July 2024), which I find can be freely had in open-access, as a .PDF file. It has chapters on, among others, ‘Visualising the Elves throughout the Centuries’; William Morris’s enduring influence on fantasy visuals; the challenges of fantasy maps; medievalism in science-fiction; fantasy novels as shovelware commodity; and… unicorns in contemporary pop culture.
16 Tuesday Jul 2024
Posted in Scholarly works
Can’t wait for the Lovecraft Annual, due in August or thereabouts? Here’s some new 2024 work on Lovecraft to tide you over…
* “Charles Brockden Brown, George Lippard, H.P. Lovecraft, and the Urban Underworld”.
* “The History of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s Brand on the Polish Book Market”.
* “The Non-Euclidean Gothic: Weird Expeditions into Higher Dimensions and Hyper-Matter with H.P. Lovecraft” ($ paywall).
15 Monday Jul 2024
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
New on Archive.org, a collection of the strongly Lovecraft-influenced ‘Hyperborea’ tales by Clark Ashton Smith. This has the same cover as the early 1970s 95-cent U.S. Ballantine paperback, but this new upload is probably to be avoided. Because I immediately randomly spotted a typo at the start of a story: the German “die” for “the”.
Better, then, to look for these Lovecraft-influenced cycle of tales among the free texts kindly placed online by Will Murray and made from good corrected texts. These are freely available as HTML pages. Although one has to already know the list of Hyperborean titles and then hunt for them among what is an A-Z list.
So, to save people some time, here is my quick linked contents-list. The links lead to the HTML-format stories which make up the Murray-edited The Book of Hyperborea (Necronomicon Press, 1996). The listing below is in the same order as the book’s contents…
Introduction to ‘The Book of Hyperborea’, by Will Murray *
The Muse of Hyperborea [Fragment, not linked in the A-Z, but it is online] *
The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan
The House of Haon-Dor (Fragment) *
Lament for Vixeela [Poem, not linked in the A-Z, but it is online] *
The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles
[The Coming of the White Worm (Abridged)] *
Altogether, a relatively short collection by modern triple-decker doorstop standards, at around 70,000 words in total including introduction and postscript.
Audiobook? Yes. The tales above can now be found as a free HorrorBabble audiobook playlist The Hyperborean Cycle on YouTube. Around seven hours. This playlist lacks only the above-starred (*) fragments, poem, and introduction / postscript.
Note that the early 1970s Ballantine book (mentioned at the start of this post) also had…
* Hyperborea (simple map).
* About Hyperborea and Clark Ashton Smith: Behind the North Wind (essay by Lin Carter).
[the core stories, then to finish]
* The Abominations of Yondo (story)
* The Desolation of Soom (fragment)
* The Passing of Aphrodite (fragment)
* The Memnons of the Night (fragment)
Of these additional four however, Carter was unsure if they belonged… “I have the feeling that the short tales which follow are the surviving fragments of yet another such cycle: one which was abandoned, or left undeveloped, for some reason we can only conjecture. I may be wrong in this assumption.”
* Notes on the Commoriom Myth-Cycle (essay by Lin Carter) — I. The Genesis of the Cycle, II. The Sequence of the Hyperborean Stories, III. The Geography of the Cycle.
For further tales by others see A Hyperborean Glossary by Laurence J. Cornford, which is an A-Z and its front page lists the additional sources — tales ‘finished’ later by Lin Carter but apparently based on work or notes by CAS (?), plus various Hyperborea related/set tales by others. Many of these appear to be collected in Robert M. Price’s Book of Eibon along with what looks like an expanded map.
More recently there was also a substantial 2013 anthology, containing the work of some notable modern writers, titled Deepest, Darkest Eden, The New Tales of Hyperborea. I see this now has an affordable Kindle ebook on Amazon.
11 Thursday Jul 2024
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Scholar Jan B. W. Pedersen’s site has a cover and a table-of-contents for his new 170-page book H.P. Lovecraft: Midnight Studies published by Peter Lang. And I see it’s now on Amazon in ebook and paper, and appears to be shipping.
Foreword by S. T. Joshi.
Introduction.
Chapter 1: On Lovecraft’s Lifelong Relationship With Wonder.
Chapter 2: Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Romantic on the Nightside.
Chapter 3: ‘Now Will You Be Good?’: Lovecraft, Teetotalism and Philosophy.
Chapter 4: Lovecraft’s Garden: Heart’s Blood at the Root.
Chapter 5: Weird Fiction: A Catalyst for Wonder.
Chapter 6: H. P. Lovecraft and the Dunsanian Conjuration.
Afterword.
I recall that one or even two of these have been in The Lovecraft Annual.
Also, in the left-leaning Times Literary Supplement this week ($ paywall), a review of the academic book Horror as Racism in H.P. Lovecraft by another author. Rather amusingly, the reviewer implies that the book’s author has not read “The Horror at Red Hook”, which one might think would be the vital ur-text for such a study. He also notes that several of the biographical details are off…
[his explanations] can seem heavy-handed and his belabouring of the author unconvincing. […] why call Thomas F. Malone the “privileged, white, Anglo-Saxon protagonist” of “The Horror at Red Hook”, when he is an Irish-American policeman, described as “the sensitive Celt”? […] Steadman’s Lovecraft, meanwhile, can do nothing right (his mother’s mental state is blamed on the fourteen-year-old Lovecraft’s inability to get a job)…
09 Tuesday Jul 2024
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
The Armitage Symposium at NecronomiCon Providence (August 2024) now has a full programme online. Including, among many others…
* The Phonotactics of Fear: H.P. Lovecraft and ‘Unknowable’ Languages.
* The Shadow Over Lake Erie: A Trip to Cleveland and its Influence on H.P Lovecraft’s Innsmouth.
* Time as a Narrative Tool in “The Silver Key”: A Figural Interpretation of Randolph Carter.
* Rhode Island in 1912 AD: Immigration, Catholicism, and the Nativist Grotesque.
* Madness and Psychosis in Lovecraft’s World.
Note that Hippocampus also has a new page for Lovecraftian Proceedings No. 5, being the Armitage Symposium proceedings for 2022. No table-of-contents, as yet.
03 Wednesday Jul 2024
S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated with a post giving lots of news. Take a look to see everything. The three items that stood out for me were: i) the first part of his massive survey-history of atheism (from prehistory to 1600) is now in proof, and is being hand-indexed; and ii) Ken Faig Jr. has a Lovecraft-as-character novel out, The Selenite Invaders…
This engaging novel features a character (Herbert Hereward) clearly based on Lovecraft, and other elements of this science fiction tale echo events in the life of Lovecraft or his relatives. The novel spans much of the twentieth century, showing Hereward (unlike Lovecraft) repurchasing his birthplace at 454 Angell Street [plot spoilers … ] all while battling [plot spoilers].
I’m pleased to see there’s an affordable Kindle ebook edition of this on Amazon UK. Don’t read the blurb there, unless you want possible plot spoilers.
Also iii) news of the forthcoming booklet H.P. Lovecraft in Paperback Books: The First 50 Years. The page linked suggests the full title is A Complete Listing Of All the English Language Editions Of The Collected Works of H.P. Lovecraft In Paperback Books With Cover Art And Printing History 1944-1994.
02 Tuesday Jul 2024
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
In French, the elegant new blog L’ Antique Sentier peeps into Lovecraft’s collection of The Old Farmer’s Almanac. The blog is subtitled “H.P. Lovecraft, New England, old books, antique photos…” and has some fine photography of books and the man himself.
Incidentally, I read in the Sully letters that at least one 5″ x 7″ negative of Lovecraft was made by Barlow, and in (presumably) the good light of a Florida summer too. I wonder what happened to those negatives?
02 Tuesday Jul 2024
Posted in Scholarly works
New on Archive.org, a good scan of the 1965 hardback of Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master Of Adventure, and with a downloadable PDF.
There is a useful reading guide at the end… “A Princess of Mars [is highly recommended and forms] a single long story that also fills The Gods of Mars (probably the best single volume in the series) and The Warlord of Mars”.
Sounds like the place to start, if you’re not so interested in the Tarzan character. The question then is, where are the best audiobooks? I see all three as Tantor audiobooks (aka Trantor, before copyright trolls forced a name change), read by the excellent Scott Brick circa 2012. Looks good.
30 Sunday Jun 2024
Posted in Scholarly works
A new book, The Mirror of Desire Unbidden: Retrieving the Imago Dei in Tolkien and Late Medieval English Literature (2024) is in open access. Note that Part One attempts to offer a general history of phantasia from antiquity to 1300, in some 150 pages.
30 Sunday Jun 2024
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
New to me, a 376-page 2022 Italian bio-book on Lovecraft that’s not a translation of Joshi.
It’s not a complete life, which would require 3,500 not 350 pages, but instead focusses on the childhood and the death…
With this volume, edited by Pietro Guarriello, we have tried to look more deeply into these two aspects, the most hidden, of Lovecraft’s life: his childhood and his death, essential phases to understand how he developed his philosophical though and then his mature thought. We therefore find collected here a series of biographical materials, some of which are truly rarities, documenting those still rather elusive years of HPL’s life. Between testimonies of those who knew him as a young man and critical writings by major specialists, aspects of Lovecraft as a man are reconstructed which will not fail to illuminate and surprise, but also to move. These testimonies range through the memories and tributes of his friends in Weird Tales, or the reconstruction of his last harrowing days in hospital which also saw him draw up an infamous Death Diary, translated here for the first time in Italy. All documents have been meticulously annotated by the editor, and are important to understanding who Howard Phillips Lovecraft was and why he wrote what he wrote. As Gianfranco de Turris underlines in his Preface, “this is not a picky snooping, but a sincere interest in details, even minor and minimal, of a life which deserves to be investigated to fully understand this personality who endlessly fascinates us.”” (Auto-translation, tweaked for sense in English).
Well-illustrated, according to the blurb.
24 Monday Jun 2024
Posted in Scholarly works
The Knight Letter, free on Archive.org and running to 2022 thanks to the latest uploads. It’s the long-running Newsletter of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America.
