25 Thursday Oct 2018
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
On the facial identification elements needed to identify Lovecraft in old photos. Useful as a guide for artists. The long article also looks at the shape-detail of Lovecraft’s eyes.
23 Tuesday Oct 2018
Posted in Doyle, Kipling, New books, Scholarly works
Wormwood #31 has been published by Tartarus at £10.
Likely to be of most interest to readers of this blog is “The Dark and Decadent Dreams of Doctor Doyle” by Paul M. Chapman, on Conan Doyle’s non-Holmes tales in which… “His work often echoed Poe’s ‘love for the grotesque and the terrible’”.
Looking back over other issues of the last few years, I also see that #26 had a similar survey essay for Kipling, “The Strange and the Supernatural in the Short Stories of Rudyard Kipling” by Colin Insole.
22 Monday Oct 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works
The original has been found for John W. Campbell’s famous story “Who Goes There?”, a 1938 Lovecraft-alike tale about a team of scientists in Antarctica and their horrifying encounter with a shape-shifting alien entity. Campbell’s unpublished draft for that, known as “Frozen Hell”, had 45 pages of unused material. The original is now set to be published in 2019 by Wildside.
Science Fantasy Review for Spring 1950 lists “Frozen Hell” as part of a forthcoming Campbell collection, but it seems that book never made it to print. The work was recently discovered by Alec Nevala-Lee, just sitting un-regarded in an archive box, while he was doing research for his new book on the history of the famous Astounding magazine.
21 Sunday Oct 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Maps, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
Here’s an elegant map, which might make a useful folded bookmark or paste-in for Lovecraft scholars. Especially those reading through the ever-increasing number of shelf-strainers that contain Lovecraft’s Letters and Essays, and who are trying to follow the old gent as he zig-zags through the coastal summerlands and backwaters of New England to alight on the doorsteps of fellow amateurs, correspondents and antiquarian museums. The map is from the 1922 edition of The geography of New England.
300dpi, in a 3Mb .jpg file. It’s not a fold-out, so there’s not much I could do about the gutter when aligning the two pages in Photoshop.
Also useful, for following Lovecraft’s more local walks into the city-centre, is a 1907 street-map of central Providence. Hand-drawn by a local, it was intended for use as part of a city-wide ‘open day’. As such it shows the hopping off points for the tram lines that Lovecraft would have used to get out and about, and it usefully highlights and has a fine-grained local awareness of which stores and buildings are worthy of notice. Again, there was not much I could do about the map’s gutter, as it wasn’t a fold-out map.
19 Friday Oct 2018
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
Inspired by the excellence of Sam Moskowitz’s boots-on-the-ground 1964 biographical article on Virgil Finlay, mentioned here in an earlier post, I went looking to see if he had collected more such articles on artists into a book. It seems not, but Archive.org has the 1974 reprint of his earlier Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom (1954).
Also noted, the last issue of Spicy Armadillo Stories #7 (August 1992), themed “How the Pulps Worked”. Includes “Teaching Pulp Magazine Writing” by Sam Moskowitz. Seems to be totally unavailable today, but a $3 Kindle edition might get some interest re: the growing interest in the pulps among business historians.
There’s a more recent collection on how the pulps worked, albeit only from the point of view of the writers and probably mostly talking about story mechanics. The Penny-a-Word Brigade (2017) is from the makers of The Blood ‘n’ Thunder Guide to Pulp Fiction (2018, revised edition).
16 Tuesday Oct 2018
Posted in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
No mention of Lovecraft, but readers of this blog will likely be interested in a new and excellent 90 minute interview with Tom Shippey, leading Tolkien scholar. Shippey is on top form. As well as various acutely perceptive Tolkien observations, other topics include the establishment attitudes to the study of genre literature, then the real historical Vikings and their recent TV adaptations, and heroism. It’s a dual presenter podcast, but the jokey ‘lots-a-laffs’ approach that such shows commonly exhibit is suppressed for such a heavyweight guest and only creeps back in toward the very end of the show.
15 Monday Oct 2018
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
* A. Sheedy, “Perverted by language: weird fiction and the semiotic anomalies of a genre”, 2016 PhD thesis for the University of Tasmania, Australia. (Focusses on short stories that deploy “nameless things and thingless names”, inc. by Lovecraft. Chapters three and four usefully discuss this in relation to the library as a characteristic place of weird fiction).
Comics panel from Obscure Cities: The Walls of Samaris I.
14 Sunday Oct 2018
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
H. P. Lovecraft – Leben und Werk 2 is now listed on Amazon UK for publication 1st November 2018. It’s the second volume in the German translation of S.T. Joshi’s full and excellent Lovecraft biography I Am Providence. Volume One in German translation was H. P. Lovecraft – Leben und Werk, Band 1: 1890–1924 and appeared in October 2017, having been first announced in late 2012.
The German Amazon store also has volume 2 listed as pre-ordering, but has a later shipping date of 30th November 2018.
Is the interior of the mirror meant to be solid black? Or is that due to the poor screen I’m currently having to use (my hi-colour monitor died, after a decade of use).
13 Saturday Oct 2018
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
I’m pleased to see that Strawberry Hill, birthplace of the Gothic Revival in the personage of Horace Walpole, has been restored. Walpole initiated the Gothic novel, with his The Castle of Otranto (1764). The 2005-2015 restoration of the house is finished, and the curators are now able to also restore much of Walpole’s original collection to their original places around the house…
“A complex exhibition involving more than 49 lenders, including a significant number of private collectors, its principal aim is to display Walpole’s pieces in their original settings”.
This major exhibition, “Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill: Masterpieces from Horace Walpole’s Collection”, is at Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham, England. It opens on 20th October and runs through to 24th February 2019. The location of the house is about ten miles west of the centre of London, in a district of London that is safe for tourists to visit.
This exhibition could be your only chance to fully savour some of the original physical context for the birth of the neo-Gothic and the Gothic novel.
13 Saturday Oct 2018
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
New in October 2017, and seemingly not yet noticed outside France, the book Lovecraft au prisme de l’image: litterature, cinema et arts graphiques [Lovecraft in the prism of the image: literature, cinema and the graphic arts] (Green Face, 2017). Green Face is a well-regarded and genuine small press, and their book has sixteen essays on Lovecraft’s visual afterlives among makers of pictures, movies, comics and more.
Translation of some of the essay titles:
PICTURES:
“New notes – distance: 1995-2012 – on the poetics of excess at Lovecraft and its graphic solutions”.
“The textual and pictorial fables in At the Mountains of Madness: a genealogical approach to the Lovecraft novella”.
“”The strange and disturbing paintings by Nicholas Roerich”: the pictorial referent and his functions in At the Mountains of Madness“.
“Lovecraft, painter of the unthinkable”.
“The image and Lovecraft”.
CINEMA:
“H.P. Lovecraft as outsider cinema – what changes?”
“The Truth About The Charles Dexter Ward Case: Fright and Excess in The Haunted Palace (Roger Corman, 1963) and The Resurrected (Dan O’Bannon, 1991)”.
“Lovecraft on screen: adaptations, tributes, rewrites”.
“Presences of the unspeakable: found footage and poetics Lovecraftienne“.
COMICS:
“Neonomicon: monstrosity and adaptation after Howard Phillips Lovecraft”. [Alan Moore]
“Lovecraft in the colors of nightmare: a study of Alberto Breccia”.
TRANSMEDIA:
“Adaptation and Transmediality: Kadath, the Unknown City“.
“Howard Phillips Lovecraft: God of Modern Popular Culture”.
“Brett Rutherford’s Night Gaunts: Between Illustration and (Re) Creation”.
“The Necronomicons of H.R. Giger”.
13 Saturday Oct 2018
Posted in Scholarly works
Published 2016, a full listing and “Guide to the Alfred Galpin papers 1920-1983, at Brown University Library”.
“The Alfred Galpin papers primarily contain autographed and typed correspondence to and from fans and Lovecraft biographers inquiring about his reminiscences and correspondence with Lovecraft and more broadly their own personal day to day struggles with travel, finances, and writing. The collection also includes an Italian program for the fortieth anniversary (1977) of Lovecraft’s passing, a German pamphlet, photographs, photocopies of Lovecraft publications in amateur journalism which include The Rainbow and The United Amateur, newspaper clippings in English, French and Italian, and a full Italian newspaper in which the obituary of Galpin appears”.
09 Tuesday Oct 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
DIY History now has the Hevelin Fanzine Collection open for crowd-sourced transcription. Doing the tables-of-contents and artist names for each issue would probably be the best initial route into this. I’d suggest that’s a do-able goal that could be crowdfunded for and then outsourced to paid Web-workers (on Fiverr, Mechanical Turk, etc), rather than taking up the time of someone better suited to more advanced tasks.
