13 Thursday Dec 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works
It appears that scholars and publishers are doing serious work on republishing and writing about Colin Wilson, the British fringe philosopher and novelist (The Space Vampires etc) who played a part in the reception of H.P. Lovecraft. See Colin Wilson World News for full details. Regrettably the site has no RSS feed that I can find.
13 Thursday Dec 2018
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
Explore “Cats in Western literature” with a short course at the British Library in London. Starting 10th January 2018 and running on Thursday evenings. Limited places, booking now. It’s just around the corner from three of London’s main train stations, St. Pancras, King’s Cross, and Euston.
Picture: La Casa by Javier Alcalde of Spain, at DeviantArt.
12 Wednesday Dec 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
MN90 does tiny blipticles on Minnesota history, spoken audio micro-articles in 90 seconds as downloadable MP3 files, with music and FX. One of their latest is “Pen Pals with H.P. Lovecraft”…
In 1926, Donald Wandrei was a 19-year-old university student when he decided to write a fan letter to H.P. Lovecraft. Britt Aamodt has an account of Wandrei’s summer hitchhike trip to visit the horror writer and how that friendship led Wandrei, years later, to found Arkham House to publish and preserve Lovecraft’s fiction.”
I like the idea, but they probably need to get MN90’s uploaded to YouTube as videos with static pictures. Then people can easily make and share their own playlist compilations of the episodes. 90 seconds seems too short, judging by this Wandrei release. I’d say 3 minutes would be a better format.
Incidentally I’m pleased to see the Hevelin Fanzine Collection appears to have switched from tiling their fanzine page-images, switching over to big static single page scans. Tiling is no protection for big public domain images, as there’s a fairly easy capture/re-assembly workflow. But my guess would be that the apparent changes at Hevelin’s transcription portal are to accommodate transcribers who want to download and OCR. OCR can increasingly be machine-learning trained to work with awkward things such as hand-lettered comic books and also, one assumes, the stencil-punched and ink-leaked words on old Gestetner duplicated fanzine pages. But the change also has the effect of making it easier to extract, clean and fix fannish artwork… such as this from Virgil Partch in The Acolyte for Winter 1945, depicting Donald Wandrei in uniform…
Picture: Virgil Partch sketch of Donald Wandrei in The Acolyte for Winter 1945. Newly extracted and cleaned.
10 Monday Dec 2018
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
A new Kindle ebook of 239 pages, just published, surveys Italian Sword & Sorcery: La via Italiana all’heroic fantasy. It’s in Italian, and appears to be from independent scholars. Here’s the blurb translated and tweaked…
Francesco La Manno, aided by Annarita Guarnieri, aims to outline the boundaries of sword and sorcery. The lead essay makes an analysis of the core constituent elements of sword and sorcery. It does this firstly by an examination of the main characters of heroic fantasy as crafted by the Master of Cross Plains (Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn and James Allison); then through a survey of the cycles of Clark Ashton Smith (Hyperborea, Poseidonis, Averoigne and Zothique) and Thongor of Lemuria by Lin Carter; then a look at some recent commercialisations of the genre. Finally, there is a survey of ‘the new heroic Mediterranean fantasy’ and its [bishops = authors and curators?]. The volume also contains essays by Adriano Monti Buzzetti, Gianfranco de Turris, Mario Polia and Paolo Paron.
10 Monday Dec 2018
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, New books, REH, Scholarly works
Added to Open Lovecraft…
* Philip Emery, “Revivifying the Ur-text: a reconstruction of sword-&-sorcery as a literary form”, PhD thesis at Loughborough University, UK, 2018. (The author is a North Staffordshire writer, of several horror novels. Here he asks if, given this literary genre’s relative neglect in recent decades, it is possible to identify the genre’s core characteristics and then use these “to create a work that realizes the form’s potential to exist as literature”. Explores the structural development of the Ur-genre as it emerged in the stories of R.E. Howard (influenced by Lovecraft in terms of the horror elements), then surveys de Camp’s later contributions and distortions, and generally seeks to identify the “pristine elements” at the core of the genre’s once-flourishing form which are still available to creative writers).
09 Sunday Dec 2018
Posted in Historical context, REH, Scholarly works
Bobby Derie has a new and comprehensive survey of “Robert E. Howard in the Biographies of H. P. Lovecraft”. The first half usefully steps us through how Howard gradually crept into the Lovecraft biographies, as decades of scholarship put the peices together. In the second half Derie surveys what uses various recent writers on Howard and Lovecraft appear to have made of the best biographies, and Derie finds most recent efforts wanting in some way. He usefully includes the two recent biographical Lovecraft graphic novels in this assessment, though gives the nod to one and finds only some slight dramatic licence in the other.
I’ve taken the liberty of using his final paragraphs as a source for a handy guide list:
* Don’t take De Camp at face value. Though pioneering, and with direct access to those who (hazily) remembered the 1930s, he didn’t have all the facts. Remember also that he was embedded in a particular cultural and publishing milieu, and that you need to know enough about that to spot where and how it’s influencing the text.
* Find out what the best recent Howard biographies are, read them and use them.
* Make sure you’re using the accurate Howard texts for the fiction.
* Read the volumes of Howard letters and Howard-Lovecraft letters.
* Don’t go in for heavy over-reliance on I Am Providence. A very great source, yes. But not if: i) you’re just rehashing it so as to crank out another tick-box article for your academic C.V.; and ii) you are assuming it’s exhaustive and that it’s ‘all that it is possible to say’; and iii) you’re assuming that certain key events (such as the rejection of “Cool Air”) haven’t been recoloured by new facts found since publication.
07 Friday Dec 2018
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
“Edward Gorey: master of the macabre” The Spectator Australia reviews the new book Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey. The reviewer echoes the complaint of one of the Amazon reviewers when he says that “There’s a great deal of repetition in this book”, but finds it assiduously thorough.
Perhaps that opens an opportunity for someone to make a heavily abridged graphic novel, or a heavily illustrated abridged version, at some point?
05 Wednesday Dec 2018
Posted in Scholarly works
* T. W. Melvaer, “Imagining the Unimaginable: Lovecraft in Popular Culture”, Masters dissertation for the Norway Technical and Natural Sciences University, 2018. (Surveys the use of Lovecraft and Cthulhu in recent popular culture: Rick and Morty; South Park; Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham; and the videogame Darkest Dungeon).
* J. R. C. Pacheco, “Apropiaciones Lovecraftianas de temas teosoficos”, Melancolia, Vol. 3, 2018. (In Spanish. A student of the Center for the Study of Western Esotericism discusses theosophical references in Lovecraft, especially… “Blavatskian anthropogenesis and the myth of the Book of Dzyan”).
04 Tuesday Dec 2018
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
The new book Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States is one of those elite $115 essay collections seemingly aimed at collecting dust in University and (in this case) ecclesiastical libraries.
I’ve only just noticed it, and see that it appeared in the summer of 2018. It’s only of interest here for the one chapter: “Lovecraft’s Things: Sinister Souvenirs from Other Worlds” by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. Curiously an essay of the same title, and by the same author, also appeared in the similar (though now rather less costly) book collection The Age of Lovecraft (2016), so the 2018 essay seems to be a reprint — though I suppose it could also be revised and/or expanded version.
For those wondering what’s in that essay, since the new book has no previews as yet… after introductory and theoretical ‘thing theory’ sections, the final third of Weinstock’s Age of Lovecraft essay surveyed Lovecraft’s re-use of the stock Gothic props of the Castle (“Rats”), the Portrait (“Pickman”), and the Forbidden Book (guess), especially in terms of their uncanny quasi-personification in Lovecraft’s texts. It is suggested that such a form of personification might raise in Lovecraft’s readers a dimly resonant recall of a superstitious world, a world in which liminal objects and object-places (such as castles) had once been psychologically ‘enchanted’ with both dread and wonder. Such personification of earthly ‘things’ might also be understood as foreshadowing Lovecraft’s later deployment of monstrous cosmic forces in his fiction, outer entities that indifferently understand humans only as ‘things’. (The essay somewhat feeds into academic theory’s current notions of trans-species psychology, a future eco-animism, and a post-human planet).
03 Monday Dec 2018
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
A newly-republished essay on “The Political Thought of Edgar Allan Poe” which has until now been locked up in an obscure paper journal published in the 1990s. It seems like a useful addition for those reading Joshi’s Decline of the West, the key book on Lovecraft’s politics and philosophy, and who might be left wanting an overview of what Lovecraft could have taken from his idol Poe — beyond the obvious inheritance of the fictional style/settings and the aesthetic repertoire.
Poe’s room at the University of Virginia. A Creative Commons Attribution image which is set to be removed in the Flickr-purge in January 2019.
29 Thursday Nov 2018
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
Added to my Open Lovecraft page…
* R. F. de Medeiros, “Borges leitor de Lovecraft”, Nau Literaria, Vol 4. No 1, 2008. (In Spanish. “This article analyzes J. Borges’ short story ‘There are more things’, seeking to unveil the way in which the writer assumes the authorial identity of H. P. Lovecraft, realizing what he calls a ‘posthumous tale’ by the American writer”).
There appear to be no MP3 audiobook readings of this short story online, only someone reading the story’s Wikipedia entry (such fun…). There’s one commercial physical CD from Penguin from 2010, of all his fictions. But oddly Borges appears to have nothing in English translation on Audible. Apparently the Penguin recording is tinny and the reading rather fast, so one might want to rip from CD to files and then use AIMP to pitch-shift, equalise the sound and slow down the speaker.
Also added to Open Lovecraft:
* B. Siegel, “In Defense of Dagon: Intertextuality in “The Shape of Water””, 2018. (Detects influences from Lovecraft and the Bible in del Toro’s movie The Shape of Water).
* A. Barroso, “Fear and (non) fiction: Agrarian anxiety in “The Colour Out of Space””, 2018. (Masters dissertation for East Michigan University, 2018).
28 Wednesday Nov 2018
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
A new blog post from S. T. Joshi. He’s planning to travel to Paris in May 2019, for the formal launch of Je Suis Providence, and he notes…
One of the people I hope to meet in Paris is Martine Chifflot, a professor at Universite Lyon who has just issued a charming little book, Howard, Mon Amour (Aigle Botte Editions, 2018). This slim (88 pp.) is a series of 23 scenes [from Lovecraft’s domestic life]
Ah, ‘Paris in ze springtime’…. nice. Hopefully with the scent of apple-blossom and coffee drifting down the boulevards, rather than (as currently seem more likely, from the news) the scent of petrol-bombs.
The book, at 88 pages and originally a play of “23 spooky and musical scenes”, sounds like it might make for the basis of an interesting graphic novel in English translation? The market for ‘Lovecraft’s life as graphic novel’ might seem to be becoming a little crowded, but the three we have so far seem only to have scratched the surface with broad surveys. There are ‘worlds within worlds’ in Lovecraft’s life that could be focussed down on in 120 pages.
Joshi also notes he has a screenplay in progress, which will focus down on Sonia and Lovecraft…
“The appearance of this book is very serendipitous, as it partly echoes the themes in my own screenplay of the film The Lovecrafts on which Ryan Grulich and I are currently working.”