17 Wednesday Apr 2019
Posted in Historical context, New books, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
The journal Wormwood : Writings about fantasy, supernatural and decadent literature (#32, April 2019) is a special issue on “Literary Enigmas” in the field, including several from the Lovecraft circle period.
12 Friday Apr 2019
Posted in 3D, Scholarly works, Unnamable
A new version of the 3D heavens Stellarium software is now available, including a “paleolithic sky culture and landscape”, two new ancient Babylonian ones, and medieval and modern Chinese sky zodiacs. It’s the leading free / open source software for such things, that’s also easy for clueless newbs like myself to use.
You can also zoom back in time with Stellarium, making it rather useful for historians trying to date and geographically locate a text that has astronomical / sunrise-sunset time statements in it. My latest use of it in that way was for my Sir Gawain book. It doesn’t yet include comet positions.
12 Friday Apr 2019
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia, Ohio State University Press, 2013. Now out of embargo, and in public open access as an OCR-d PDF. Amazon wants $47 for the paper edition, but it’s free here. The Introduction and Afterword might be useful for offering some pointers and frameworks for those writing on the historical context of Lovecraft’s upbringing, in terms of New England’s fears of disease and immigration and how these fears might have mirrored those of Great Britain.
12 Friday Apr 2019
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Derleth expert and champion John D. Haefele reviews Joshi’s new expanded and updated book Eighty Years of Arkham House: A History and Bibliography (March 2019).
10 Wednesday Apr 2019
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
A handy tip for wrangling an old book in Microsoft Word, to port it over into an Amazon ebook for the Kindle with re-flowable text. After many years when it was impossible-to-difficult to get clean HTML from Word, there’s now a relatively easy solution for MS Word -> clean HTML, including linked footnotes. But it has one stumbling block… it un-indents your quotation paragraphs. The link above takes you to the fix.
10 Wednesday Apr 2019
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
“The literature of madness : a critical study of the madhouse in Gothic fiction”, a 2018 thesis, with the PDF under embargo until 2021 but with a long public abstract. Seems to be a sweeping survey of madhouses in fiction, which takes in five Lovecraft tales. Usefully lists all the titles covered, including the Lovecraft ones.
07 Sunday Apr 2019
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
New on Archive.org, Arthur Machen: a bibliography (1923) in open PDF etc.
04 Thursday Apr 2019
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Published in January 2019, Studi Lovecraftiani 16, the Italian journal of Lovecraft scholarship. Now available via Lulu.com.
Since I no longer use Flash (which is still used by Lulu for previews), and the Studi Lovecraftiani blog is not updated with #16, the only source for the contents appears to be a review in Italian at Ver Sacrum. From this I can sift a contents list, via a hazy auto-translation…
* Leni Remedios on the phenomenological horror of H.P. Lovecraft (possible connection with Husserl’s phenomenology).
* Andrea Scarabelli on the alien cults of H.P. Lovecraft (possible links with esoteric notions).
* Angelo Cerchi on the myths of Cthulhu and the end of time (the apocalyptic in H.P. Lovecraft).
* Renzo Giorgetti on the futurist architect Virgilio Marchi (and “his possible connections with certain Lovecraftian suggestions”).
* Claudio Foti on Aristeas and Lovecraft (“the enigmatic figure of Aristea of Proconnese” and his Arimaspeia).
* Robert M. Price on Lovecraft’s concept of blasphemy.
* Translated letters from Lovecraft to Robert H. Barlow.
03 Wednesday Apr 2019
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
Tolkien in Vermont, USA. On Tolkien and Horror. 5th-6th April 2019. Who knew?
A keynote titled “The horror of the unnarrated: Implications for Tolkien’s reader”, then sessions on…
Nature, Madness, and Humor
The Perils of Faerie
UVM Undergraduate Voices
Horror of Words
Horrors of Modernity
On the Borders of Horror
Hopefully there will be podcast audio online at some point.
03 Wednesday Apr 2019
Posted in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works
Crypt of Cthulhu #112 is now available (Candlemas 2019).
Contents:
Disturbing and Disquieting Editorial Shards by Robert M. Price.
The Door Through the Fire by Gary Myers.
On Dunsany’s “Probable Adventures of the Three Literary Men” by Donald R. Burleson.
Necronomicon in Sweden by Rickard Berghom.
The Other Writer From Cross Plains by Ken Faig, Jr. [On another published writer of Cross Plains].
Quatermass and the Abyss: Lovecraftian Elements in Television’s Premier Event by Marc Cerasini.
Theology and Philosophy in “The Dunwich Horror” by William Fulwiler.
Derleth’s Notes Toward a Biography by John D. Haefele.
Cryptic Interview: W. Paul Ganley by Darrell Schweitzer.
R’lyeh Reviews.
Mail Call of Cthulhu.
William Fulwiler’s “A Heritage of Hubris: Sources for ‘The Doom that Came to Sarnath'” is mentioned in the Editorial but not in the Contents. Was it replaced at the last minute by “Theology and Philosophy in “The Dunwich Horror””?
03 Wednesday Apr 2019
Posted in New books, REH, Scholarly works
Here’s a new book that may be of interest to R.E. Howard scholars, who might want to see how well this author’s framework fits with Howard’s stories and the wider western pulp tradition. Cowboy Courage: Westerns and the Portrayal of Bravery examines the three types of bravery and courage to be found in the U.S. screen westerns made from 1946 to about 1964.
Judging by the free-sample introduction, the book is written by someone old enough to remember the original reception of the big screen westerns. He’s a psychologist but he doesn’t seem in thrall to the frameworks of the Jung/Freud psychoanalysis era, or mired in the tar-pits of modern leftist politics.
Preface
Introduction
1. The Quality of Courage
2. Redemption
3. Love, Friendship and Bonds to the Community
4. Justice
5. Temperance
6. Growing Up and Growing Old
7. Being Authentic
8. The Revisionist Western
9. Lonesome Dove
Conclusion
Filmography
Bibliography
Index
02 Tuesday Apr 2019
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
A new Spanish language journal has a special issue now out. Herejia y Belleza #6 includes essays such as “Spaces and voids in HP Lovecraft” (Lovecraft’s use of real spaces and places); “Lovecraft and pisciform beings” (a survey of fishy beings before Lovecraft); “When the eye of God was Egyptian: Lovecraft and the philomasonic aesthetic” (masonic activities of Lovecraft’s maternal family, and possible later thematic influence on the fiction); and “The sound of horror” (cinema sound, re: Lovecraft adaptation). All in Spanish, though, and the above is my translation.
