31 Thursday Jan 2019
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
I’m pleased to see Terres Lovecraftiennes, a new Facebook Group dedicated to Lovecraft’s life and times. It’s on-topic, well illustrated and moderated. All readers of Tentaclii will want to join this Group. Facebook auto-translates the Group for me, and it’s readable in English.
30 Wednesday Jan 2019
Posted in Historical context, New books, Odd scratchings, REH, Scholarly works
Those interested in the sweeping intellectual and emotional influence of Spengler on the 1920s and 30s might be interested in a new long review of the out-of-print book The Perennial Apocalypse: How the End of the World Shapes History (1998). Spengler’s ideas and their popular interpretations touched enduring writers such as H.P. Lovecraft and R.E. Howard. In science-fiction, Asimov’s ideas about psychohistory also spring to mind. Thus this new review seems relevant to mention here. The review states that the book looked at…
Spengler alongside a long tradition of historical models that all pointed towards an “end of history.” These summaries of historical narrative modes are the best parts of the book. The project of The Perennial Apocalypse is more ambitious than to provide summaries, though. […] The central argument of The Perennial Apocalypse is that prevailing historical models of how history should go, must inevitably go, play their part in shaping events. But history almost never proceeds in the predicted fashion as a result.
A fascinating idea, re: how intellectual doom-mongering and an associated wrong-headed consensus among the gullible classes and journalists, might act as bumpers on the fast-moving pinball-table of emerging historical events. It’s something I discuss from time to time, over on my 2020 blog, and there are other books on it such as Herman’s The Idea of Decline in Western History.
Yet, while the reviewer finds in the book an interesting and well-written discussion of the structural commonalities of such predictions, he also finds few examples of their strong influence on the flow of history…
Reilly never managed to give many thorough examples of this kind of process at work. The Perennial Apocalypse ends up dwelling far more on the stuff of the great totalizing narratives of history than how they manifest in intellectual spheres and end up steering society.
Too many variables in the mix, perhaps, which in a way is kind of encouraging. Since it might lead to the supposition that no matter how much the cultural elites try to ‘put bumpers on the pinball table of history’ or tilt the table to ‘correct’ it by pounding on it with their fist, they can’t ultimately beat the inbuilt structural elements of the table. Elements which inexorably channel the probabilities of the ball’s direction across an implacable and unreachable table-base. The pinball always ends up in the hole at the bottom of the table.
The book is said to be discursive and goes beyond its main thesis, to detour into…
obscure 19th century millenarian scientific romances, H.P. Lovecraft, theosophy, Christian eschatology, and the evils of the worlds envisioned by Arthur C. Clarke.
It sounds fascinating. The original promotional blurb ran…
In every culture, history is a story, and the end of that story is the end of the world. This work describes the surprising similarities among the various forms that the ‘end of history’ has taken around the world and throughout time. Further, it explores how the image of the end has affected actual historical events, from the rise of millenarian cults to the evolution of the idea of progress.
Regrettably the book now appears to be totally unavailable, unless one pops up on eBay or Abe. There’s not even an Amazon listing for it on either Amazon UK or USA. Although the table of contents is still available along with a free bit of Chapter 2. A good example, I’d suggest, of how certain early self-published POD books are likely to become the real collectable ultra-rarities for the mid 21st century book collector.
30 Wednesday Jan 2019
Posted in Scholarly works
* M. L. Varnieri, “Medos aquaticos: uma poetica do horror liquido em H. P. Lovecraft”, Tessera, Vol. 1 No. 1, 2018. (Water as a symbolic story element in Lovecraft’s evocation of atmosphere. The journal appears to be a new Brazilian title on imaginative literature, with the first issue themed: “An Imaginary Dossier: Forerunners, Founders and Disciples”).
* M. Simicevic, Lovecraftian Horrors: Space and Literature in Silent Hill (2018). (Possibly a Masters dissertation, for the University of Zadar in Hungary. In good English, the author discusses spatiality and the elements of space in selected Silent Hill videogames, and identifies similarities with the texts of H. P. Lovecraft).
28 Monday Jan 2019
Posted in Historical context, New books, REH, Scholarly works
One book I seem to have unintentionally overlooked, in my blog’s rolling survey of such in Sept/Oct of last year, is Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography (Oct 2018). The new book is intended as a reliable and well-written introductory biography for those new to Howard and his work, and who are not historians. It weighs in at 250 pages as a trade paperback or budget Kindle ebook. There’s a foreword by Rusty Burke, who praises the author and notes that the text was peer reviewed by Howard scholars. Howard’s fiction is stepped through in chronological sequence, with judicious plot summaries. Lovecraft and the backroom editorial matters at Weird Tales are covered adequately. The ‘deep background’ on Howard’s family history and early childhood is briefly surveyed in only a few pages, as this material can now be found elsewhere in good form.
28 Monday Jan 2019
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
S. T. Joshi has a new blog post, which usefully pins down the differences between the forthcoming-soon book Ave atque Vale: Reminiscences of H. P. Lovecraft and 1998’s Lovecraft Remembered…
“we have included most of the material in that [1998] volume (some items were omitted for copyright issues; others for editorial reasons) and included several newly discovered memoirs not included in Peter’s volume.”
Right, so it sounds like the Lovecraft scholar would still need both. The new book will be a $30 trade paperback, Joshi states, as well as a hardback.
Should one be considering sampling some of Dunsany’s vast output, on whom Joshi is also the expert, he usefully notes…
“Darrell Schweitzer’s “How Much of Dunsany Is Worth Reading?” (first published in Studies in Weird Fiction, Fall 1991)”
This has been reprinted in the new The Green Book: Writings on Irish Gothic, Supernatural and Fantastic Literature (#11, 2018). It can also be found in Schweitzer’s essay collection Windows of the Imagination: Essays on Fantastic Literature.
17 Thursday Jan 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
New and public from the School of Music at Ohio State, “Musical Affect and Embodiment: Fear, Threat, and Danger in the Music of The Lord of the Rings“…
recent research in music perception, speech prosody, and animal ethology was reviewed to create a list of musical techniques that might communicate fear and threat. […] Musical analyses of the soundtrack accompanying the Nazgul demonstrate abundant use of these and other factors […] in the context of the soundtrack to The Fellowship of the Ring.
Those who are unfamiliar with Tolkien, or who are unable to get past Bombadil or The Council of Elrond in the first part, may not readily associate him with horror. But he has many such elements and does them very effectively. In The Lord of the Rings there are The Black Riders, the Barrow Wight, the flying Nazgul, the tentacular Lurker in the Lake, the Balrog, Moria, the Dead Marshes, the Way of the Dead, Shelob, Sam in the high pass above Mordor, and Mordor itself. There are also horror elements in Merry’s account of the Ent attack on Isengard, the attack on Crickhollow, the battle of Helm’s Deep, and several encounters with wargs. Forests also have their eerie elements.
The essay looks specifically at the early scenes on Weathertop, and includes a handy table of the conclusions of previous research on the matter…
16 Wednesday Jan 2019
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
The new issue of the open access journal Brumal has appeared. Vol 6, No 2 (2018) is ‘Horror and the Fantastic’. English abstracts, then Spanish, Portugese or French texts. On a first pass, the specifically Lovecraft items are:
* “Towards a classification of space in fantastic horror texts”. In which… “we outline three sorts of spatial categories: the natural, the supernatural, and the preternatural spaces, and take incomparable English-speaking authors as a starting point, such as H. P. Lovecraft” before moving on to consider Spanish writers.
* And a review in Portuguese of the book O Fantastico: Procedimentos de Construcao Narrativa em H.P. Lovecraft (2017). [trans: The Fantastic: H.P. Lovecraft’s Procedures of Narrative Construction]
The book can be obtained from Brazil and I see it was also reviewed recently in Revista Abusoes. It appears to be a two-volume Masters dissertation from 1979, which gathered dust for nearly 40 years before being rediscovered, hailed as something special, and published.
14 Monday Jan 2019
Posted in Historical context, REH, Scholarly works
“Conan and the Little People: Robert E. Howard and Lovecraft’s Theory”, another fascinating new ‘correlate all the contents’ essay by Bobby Derie.
14 Monday Jan 2019
Posted in Scholarly works, Unnamable
A new paper “The sounds of plants”. The researchers…
demonstrate, to our knowledge for the first time, that plants emit sounds that can be recorded from a distance. We recorded ~65 dBSPL ultrasonic sounds …
Since certain fungi also attract night-insects, it would be interesting to know if some of those also produce sound.
H.P. Lovecraft on the sounds emitted by the Mi-Go fungus race in the woods of Vermont, in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1931)…
It is more than two years now since I last ran off that blasphemous waxen cylinder [sound recording]; but at this moment, and at all other moments, I can still hear that feeble, fiendish buzzing as it reached me for the first time.
13 Sunday Jan 2019
Posted in New books, REH, Scholarly works
Forthcoming books from McFarland, picked from their new Spring 2019 catalogue:
* Journeys to the Underworld and Heavenly Realm in Ancient and Medieval Literature. (Seems relevant to an understanding of the wider context of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and others) (Already published)
* The Detective and the Artist: Painters, Poets and Writers in Crime Fiction, 1840s-1970s. (First sections likely to be relevant to an understanding of the context of “The Call of Cthulhu” and others) (February)
* The Horror Comic Never Dies: a Grisly History. A short history of 150 pages, seemingly fannish but deeply informed. (February)
11 Friday Jan 2019
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works
I see that Sargasso #2 and Sargasso #3 have appeared since I noted #1 in summer 2013. Sargasso: journal of William Hope Hodgson Studies, is the quality scholarly journal devoted to Hodgson.
A scholarly article in #2 may be of tangential interest to Lovecraft scholars. A full review of #2 usefully summarises…
Scott Conner’s ‘Dust and Atoms: The Influence of William Hope Hodgson on Clark Ashton Smith’. The long-held belief that ‘The Night Land’ [1912] was a major influence on Smith’s Zothique stories is more or less conclusively disproved by the evidence that he hadn’t read any Hodgson books until two years after the first Zothique tale [1932] was published. On the other hand, Scott Conner provides very convincing evidence that ‘The House on the Borderland’ [1908] was definitely a great influence on the writing of Smith’s story, ‘The Treader in the Dust’ [1935].
Lovecraft himself only made… “the discovery, in the summer of 1934, of the forgotten work of William Hope Hodgson.” (I Am Providence, S.T. Joshi) and felt the work was rather conventional in terms of the philosophy it worked in. Lovecraft considered that…
He is trying to illustrate human nature through symbols & turns of idea which possess significance for those taking a traditional or orthodox view of man’s cosmic bearings. There is no true attempt to express the indefinable feelings experienced by man in confronting the unknown. … To get a full-sized kick from this stuff one must take seriously the orthodox view of cosmic organisation — which is rather impossible today.
08 Tuesday Jan 2019
Posted in Historical context, Maps, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
Visit Rhode Island has a new page, “Sci-Fi + RI = H.P. Lovecraft” promoting Lovecraft tourism for 2019. Although it repeats the questionable local claim about the… “Providence Athenaeum, where Lovecraft frequented”. The Athenaeum claim appears to be slowly becoming one of those dubious ‘Claims That Will Not Die’ which are often to be found in a city’s marketing to unknowing tourists. He included it on the whirlwind tour of Providence he gave friends, due to the Poe connection, and late in his life he had to consult some scarce books there which gave the history of Nantucket, but so far as I know that was the extent to which he “frequented” it. I know of nothing to suggest he used it as a regular library. Why would he, when the Providence Public Library was free, huge, and one of the best in the USA?
Perhaps the wider tourism industry needs a recognisable brand-mark/stamp for tourism materials: “All Claims Vetted For Authenticity by an Independent Panel of Local Historians”? Although that would be the whole of Stratford-upon-Avon kaput, as only Mary Arden’s House (located a few miles outside Stratford) has any real claim to a provable connection to Shakespeare.
If you’re travelling to Providence and New England in 2019, perhaps for research or for NecronomiCon 2019, here are a couple of handy and authoritative guide-books you might find useful. Which it’s possible you might not be able to pick up locally, not even in the Arts & Sciences Council shop to be seen in the above Visit Rhode Island article.
* Henry Beckwith’s Lovecraft’s Providence & Adjacent Parts (second edition, revised and enlarged). Paper only, about $50 used. Unless someone has a garage full of paper copies still to shift, this could probably use a $6 ebook edition in time for NecronomiCon 2019. Anyone care to contact the copyright holder about doing that?
* Off the Ancient Track: A Lovecraftian Guide to New-England & Adjacent New-York (2013, revised and enlarged). Paper only, but a very reasonable $10 from Necronomicon Press.
You may also want my free map of Lovecraft’s Providence.