30 Saturday Nov 2019
Posted in Scholarly works
Creatio Fantastica, a Polish scholarly journal in public open-access. Also appears to be completely under Creative Commons Attribution.
A 2016 issue was a Lovecraft special with a Joshi translation as the lead article. A 2017 issue was on Tolkien, with a Thomas Honegger lead article.
Usefully available in .EPUB and .MOBI ebook formats, as well as .PDF files. The Creative Commons status presumably means that translations and digest summaries can be freely made.
29 Friday Nov 2019
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
“One Squid to Rule Them All”, Journal of Geek Studies Vol. 5 No. 1, 2018. A biology-heavy survey of the tentacular ones in Tolkien.
27 Wednesday Nov 2019
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Another scholarly book title that’s new to me, Pulpourri…
a miscellaneous collection of well-written, impeccably researched essays on pulp fiction and how it influenced American popular culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
I’m not sure if it’s going to be in series like a journal or is a one-off.
26 Tuesday Nov 2019
Posted in Scholarly works
* C. de Souza and R. Giroldo, “Um chamado que ecoa? A representacao dos mitos no jogo Call of Cthulhu, Revell, Revista de Estudos Litererios da UEMS, Vol. 2, No. 22, 2019. (In Portuguese. Analysis of the 2018 videogame Call of Cthulhu, based on the Chaosium RPGs).
* C. de Souza and R. Giroldo, “O intruso”, de H. P. Lovecraft: o unheimlich no espelho., Abusoes, No. 10, 2019. (In Portuguese. Reads “The Outsider” figure via the unheimlich, as filtered through later critics. Also explores how Lovecraft’s atmosphere interacts with this effect. Part of a special issue on the idea of the unheimlich).
25 Monday Nov 2019
Posted in Scholarly works
PulpFest’s annual journal The Pulpster calls for your ideas and proposals for well-researched articles. Also artwork. 2020’s event will centre around Ray Bradbury in the pulps, the Black Mask title, and the cover-art of Margaret Brundage.
You can drop editor Bill Lampkin an email at bill@pulpfest.com and the sooner he hears from you, the better. He has to plan space for articles and start collecting artwork and illustrations.
Ad space is also available.
24 Sunday Nov 2019
Posted in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works
The early years of science-fiction fandom in the USA are fairly well documented by now. Or are they? A new 124-page book usefully expands the easily-available source material for the history, and provides a new and questioning preface. Challenging Moskowitz.
“Sam Moskowitz’s The Immortal Storm is regarded by many as the definitive history of US fandom in the 1930s, but several contemporary fans either presented alternative versions of events or took issue with the book’s selectivity (New York-centrism in particular) and partisanship. Rob Hansen has compiled and introduced this collection of relevant fanwriting by Allen Glasser, Charles D. Hornig, Damon Knight, Jack Speer, Harry Warner Jr, Donald A. Wollheim and T. Bruce Yerke.”
Free in various digital formats, but donations are encouraged.
22 Friday Nov 2019
Posted in Scholarly works
Canadian Archaeological Association 53rd Annual Conference, 2020: “Archaeology and Popular Culture”.
This session aims to look at the relationship between archaeology and popular culture.
How has archaeology influenced popular culture (e.g. the influence of archaeologist Margaret Murray’s research on H.P. Lovecraft’s story, “The Call of Cthulhu”)?
How has popular culture influenced archaeology (e.g. the role of Indiana Jones in the origin stories of many archaeologists today)?
How does the appearance of archaeology in various mediums of popular culture influence public perception of our field (e.g. archaeology within video games like The Sims 4: Jungle, Stardew Valley, and the Tomb Raider franchise)?
How can archaeology in popular culture be used to educate the public about our field and the archaeologists within it (e.g. the documentary television show Wild Archaeology)?
And what happens when the archaeology being shared with the public is incorrect, misappropriated, and pseudo-archaeological (e.g. television shows like Ancient Aliens and America Unearthed, books like Chariots of the Gods)?
19 Tuesday Nov 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
Registration will open soon for the Deutsche Cthulhu Convention in Germany. I spotted a deadline of February 2020 for payment, presumably for a summer 2020 event.
Last noted here very briefly in 2014, the event seems to be a large German Cthulhu convention hosted by the German Lovecraft Society in a castle in Lower Saxony. Their tablet-tastic site doesn’t play nicely with Google Translate, so I can’t quite get a sense of how gamer/scholarly the event’s balance is. But they appear to have some sort of core symposium element.
Finding it made me aware of their Lovecrafter magazine. Here’s the pleasing cover of the July 2018 issue, and paper copies are available by mail-order.
Within are…
* A look at a horror and fantasy fanzine of the 1970s (presumably a German one).
* Lovecraft, the first 50 years – a survey of publishing Lovecraft in Germany, with publisher interviews.
* Fear of the Known – on the myths of Lovecraft in the digital world.
* Between protest and delusion – Cthulthu’s role in 1968.
… and some RPG game stuff.
18 Monday Nov 2019
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. On Lovecraft…
Upcoming are the huge volume of Lovecraft’s Letters to Family and Family Friends (the bulk of which consists of his letters to his aunts), a volume of his letters to E. Hoffmann Price and Richard F. Searight, and new editions of the letters to Alfred Galpin and Rheinhart Kleiner, each augmented with letters to several other individuals.
“We have also prepared a new edition of [Samuel] Loveman’s Out of the Immortal Night (2004) — a volume that we thought had included the bulk of his work, but which has now been augmented with a number of additional pieces, along with a long interview of Loveman conducted by a colleague in the 1960s.”
Also what sounds like a useful one-volume collection of Machen’s autobiographical works, now in the public domain…
“I am assembling a volume of Machen’s autobiographical writings (his three formal autobiographies — Far Off Things, Things Near and Far, and The London Adventure, augmented by a few separate essays), as a kind of supplement to my recent edition of Machen’s Collected Fiction.”
One assumes he’s aware of Strange Roads (1924) and will include it.
17 Sunday Nov 2019
Posted in Scholarly works
* P. N. Harrison, Book review of H.P. Lovecraft: Selected Works, Critical Perspectives and Interviews on His Influence, Mythlore, Fall/Winter 2019. (Finds this affordable academic book useful for introductory classroom use).
* R. R. Menegotto with J.C. Arendt, “Genero, Opressao E Horror Cosmico: a Caracterizacao De Lavinia Whateley em O Horror de Dunwich, de H. P. Lovecraft”, Scripta Uniandrade, Vol. 17 No. 1, 2019. (In Spanish. The characterisation of Lavinia Whateley in “The Dunwich Horror”).
* P. Pyrka, “Haunting Poe’s Maze: Investigative Obsessions in the Weird Fictions of Stefan Grabinski and H. P. Lovecraft”, Avant, Vol. VIII, No. 2, 2017. (Suggests that Lovecraft’s writing style arises out of a desire to write ‘like’ Poe, but also his inability to do so).
07 Thursday Nov 2019
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Haffner Press is to publish The Complete Ivy Frost by Lovecraft correspondent and one-time protege Donald Wandrei. A $50 hardcover with 700 pages of mystery-science-detective stories…
Rather than following the usual hard-drinking, trench-coated style of many of his contemporaries, [Wandrei’s] strategy was to mix the logic of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes with the technology of Lester Dent’s Doc Savage.
I’d never heard of Ivy Frost before, but I like the sound of him. These gun-blazing mystery-science stories all appeared in Clues Detective Stories magazine from 1934-37 (not on Archive.org), so one assumes that Lovecraft was aware of them. One wonders how may ‘little nods to Lovecraft’ Wandrei might have snuck into the stories.
Let’s hope for a Kindle ebook version in due course. In the meantime there’s also I.V. Frost: Tales of Mystery & Scientific Investigation which is a 270-page collection of pastiche stories by later writers, available as a budget Kindle ebook as well as a paperback from Moonstone.
In other news on Wandrei, S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated and he notes that the Lovecraft letters book…
Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei and to Emil Petaja is soon to appear from Hippocampus Press.
06 Wednesday Nov 2019
Posted in Scholarly works
An Italian Lovecraft blog has a short new interview with Heather Cole, custodian of the Lovecraft archives at The John Hay Library, Brown University.
Another recent post looks inside 10 Barnes Street, as it is today.
