25 Tuesday Nov 2014
Posted in Scholarly works
The latest issue of One+One Filmmakers Journal includes a short interview on Lovecraft…
Dominic Fox interviews Graham Harman and they find subversive, philosophical and materialist dimensions in the works of H.P. Lovecraft.”
18 Tuesday Nov 2014
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
A full scan of On Strange Altars: a book of enthusiasms (1924) by Paul Jordan-Smith, containing his essay “Black Magic—An Impression of Arthur Machen”. A hat-tip to the Son of Yog-Sothoth, who writes that…
The second part of the essay is, perhaps to me, the most unexpected: the author had in 1920 travelled to England and visited Arthur Machen and his wife, where Machen briefly spoke of his acquaintance with Oscar Wilde. It seems to me that I must have read something of this in one of the essays or biographies of Machen, but I’ll leave tracking that down to some other day.”
This may interest some, as it’s a view of Machen by an American who discovered him a few years before Lovecraft did. Lovecraft first discovered Machen’s work in the summer of 1923 (S.T. Joshi, I Am Providence, p.454).
Paul Jordan-Smith’s Cables of Cobweb book, listed facing the title page, sounds like a supernatural novel but apparently isn’t…
A young Virginian, revolting against his parents conservatism, experiments with radicalism but with maturity becomes conservative”
Likewise his novel Nomad, which seems to have been a sort of light-hearted philosophical quest story, with the hero and his companions moving through and exemplifying various philosophies. It sounds like Pilgrim’s Progress meets Gulliver’s Travels?
17 Monday Nov 2014
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
A descriptive note on a scholarly French book L’Art Etrange de Clark Ashton Smith (2013).
12 Wednesday Nov 2014
Posted in Scholarly works
Call for papers:
“Wonderlands: reading, writing, telling fairy tales and fantasy”: a one day symposium in Chichester, England. 23rd May 2015.
We are seeking papers which explore all aspects of reading, writing, and telling fairy tales and fantasy. In particular, we invite discussion of wonder lands in fantastical literature, classic and modern fairy tales, and contemporary oral storytelling.
Possible topics of focus include, but are not limited to:
Other worlds, otherworldliness, Wonderland, and wonder lands
Relationships between reading, writing, and/or telling fantasy
Contemporary scholarship in children’s and adult’s fantasy literature
Storytelling as a vehicle for the fantastic
Practice and performance of fairy tales
Fantastical non-fiction
Relationships between real and imagined wonder lands
Meta-textual conversations with classic fantasy literature
Imagining the fantastical world through illustrations and picture books
We also welcome paper submissions or panel presentations which include a creative or performative element.
Deadline: 31st January 2015. Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words (or panel proposals of 1,000 words) and a short personal bio to the organisers, Joanna Coleman, Joanne Blake Cave, and Rose Williamson at wonderlands.symposium@gmail.com Registration dates will be announced on the Sussex Centre website in the near future.
08 Saturday Nov 2014
Posted in Scholarly works
* Geza Arthur George Reilly (2014), “”Escape from the prison-house of the known”: reading weird fiction in its historical contexts” (PhD thesis, University of Manitoba. Proposes that useful new scholarly perspectives can be gained by the analysis of… “weird fictions via their specific historical locations [and] placement within specific historical milieus [in regard to the work of] Lovecraft, Smith, Howard, Bloch, and Ligotti”. The first chapter examines traces of the First World War in Lovecraft’s stories)
* Ludwig Karlsson (2014), “The Statement that is Randolph Carter: growth in a nihilistic universe” (Masters dissertation, Stockholm University. The recurring character of Randolph Carter seen as a prism of Nietzschean virtues)
* Iago Mosquera Gonzalez, and Xavier Moron Dapena (2014), “El Necronomicon visto desde el Aleph: pseudointertextualidad en Lovecraft y Borges” (In Spanish. “The Necronomicon seen from the Aleph: pseudo-intertextuality in Lovecraft and Borges”, in Sobrenatural, Fantastico y Metareal: La Perspectiva de America Latina, pp.39-46)
* Andre Roberto Tonussi Arnaut (2013), “Onde fica a Rue D’auseil? A primazia do horror sobre a aporia, de Levinas a Lovecraft” (Seems to be a Masters dissertation for the Department of Philosophy at the University of Brazil. In Portuguese. An attempt to understand Levinas and Lovecraft via the use of elements of contemporary European philosophy)
04 Tuesday Nov 2014
Posted in Scholarly works
The latest issue of The Fossil is available now, and page 6 has a short article on the Ken Faig collection of amateur journals, now safely in a university archive…
KEN FAIG DONATED HIS amateur journalism collection to the Special Collections Department of the University of Iowa in Iowa City.” [includes the run of] “Nyctalops, George Record’s The Dark Brotherhood Journal, Robert M. Price’s Crypt of Cthulhu, many journals published by Marc Michaud’s Necronomicon Press, and a complete set of the mailings of the Esoteric Order of Dagon…”
It also appears that the Library of Congress is seeking, in paper format… “a run of THE FOSSIL from 1965 on” (see p.11).
04 Tuesday Nov 2014
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
A weighty new book from the University Of Chicago Press looks interesting, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing
compelling, surprising, and persuasive defense of Strauss”[‘s claim that…] “virtually all philosophers up until the early 19th century wrote their books ‘esoterically’ — that is, using a rhetoric of concealment, with a surface teaching meant for general readers and a hidden teaching for those who were intelligent, clever, and tenacious enough to uncover it.” [The author] “supplies a mountain of evidence in support of Strauss’ claims — quotes from just about every major philosopher (and many other writers) from ancient Greece to 19th-century Germany testifying to the reality of esotericism.” — Damon Linker, The Week.
a landmark work in both intellectual history and political theory” — Wall Street Journal.
29 Wednesday Oct 2014
Posted in Scholarly works
Applications are now open for the new S.T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship, for research on H.P. Lovecraft and his circle. The lucky recipient gets to spend six weeks at Brown University, with $2,500 to cover travel and expenses. Application deadline: 31st January 2015. The email address below was from the initial announcement, and I’m assuming it’s still the one for contact.
29 Wednesday Oct 2014
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
An open call:
Art Laboratory Berlin is initiating an open call for art works, texts and cooperative works with artists, scholars and scientists on non-human subjectivities.
Recent philosophical works by Graham Harman [known for his work on Lovecraft] [and others] have questioned the solely human role of subjectivity that has formed the core of ‘humanism’ over the past five centuries. [and suggested there may be] a new multiplicity of viewpoints of non-human intelligence, agency and subjectivity, that make up our planet (and beyond).
Possible topics could include:
* Perspectives under threat – non-human viewpoints during the great species die off. [which is a dubious claim]
* Bacterial viewpoints – how microbes communicate, interact and experience the world.
* Non-human perspectives – intelligence and agency in animals, plants, bacteria.
* Re-definition of intelligence, agency and sentience in ways that are not anthropomorphic.
* What do some of these perspectives make of Homo Sapiens? e.g.- 90% of the cells in our body do not have human DNA – we are a host, a topography, for billions of bacteria and fungi.
* How about agency (and even intelligence) beyond life – virii or crystals for instance.
* Are complex data systems, algorithms, artificial intelligence beginning to have points of view, and forms of agency that are beyond human comprehension?
Art Laboratory Berlin is seeking submissions and proposals predominantly for exhibitions, performances and workshops, but is also interested in cooperation with scholars and scientists for the production of a series of lectures, texts and a symposium.
The deadline for entries is 15th December, 2014. Chosen proposals will form part of our 2016-17 programme, Please submit your proposal by email to: nonhumanisms@artlaboratory-berlin.org and please title the subject-line: POST RQST.
The application should include a proposal (not longer than 5 pages), a C.V. and work portfolio (not longer than 10 pages). We ask that you keep the size of attachments altogether under 5Mb. For video or other large files we encourage the use of Web links.
26 Sunday Oct 2014
Posted in Scholarly works
Fantastika Conference announced for Lancaster (a town on the coast of northern England, under the Lake District) in summer 2015. With a theme of locations, spaces and settings…
23 Thursday Oct 2014
Posted in Maps, Scholarly works
Call for Papers: Maps and Mapping in Children’s Literature…
Literature for children and young adults is a rich source of material for the study of literary maps, one that has been largely overlooked, despite the growth in academic interest in this area of study.
Not so relevant to Lovecraft, but this call might be interesting to those researching similar genre authors, especially those in the sword-and-sorcery genre where the addition of fan-made maps have enhanced the fiction’s appeal to later generations of young teens.
There is the surveyor mapping in “The Colour Out of Space”, and one passing moment when Lovecraft follows a rough local map… “I was steering my course by the map the grocery boy had prepared” in “The Shadow over Innsmouth”. This latter probably reflects his own practice during his numerous antiquarian visits to strange towns. There are also carved wall maps in At The Mountains of Madness which are found, copied and followed. But Lovecraft’s fiction is probably more interesting for the implied idea that certain spaces could not be found, or had not yet been placed, on maps.
23 Thursday Oct 2014
Posted in Scholarly works
I’ve only just found out about this one: Gothic Spaces / Gothic Places at The Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, England, on 25th October 2014. The academic symposium has an interesting opening paper about… “John Carter, the zealous defender of the Gothic architectural style in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British culture” and publisher of the 18th century The Gentleman’s Magazine. Another Carter to offer up as a possible inspiration for Lovecraft’s Carter, perhaps?