18 Saturday Sep 2021
Posted in Scholarly works
Iris, a long-running French journal… “to promote and to disseminate research in the field of myths, images, symbols and cultural history.” Tested articles were all open access, had English abstracts, and were under Creative Commons Attribution NC.
17 Friday Sep 2021
Posted in New discoveries, Picture postals
“On Cykranosh” (July 1934). Not actually a postcard from Lovecraft this week, but rather an example of the sort of sci-fi postcard-print that Robert Barlow might have sent to his friend in the mid 1930s.
Barlow built this up over a real-world ’empty’ photo (possibly of Florida tree-tops, presumably by Barlow). In the Mythos ‘Cykranosh’ = the planet Saturn, which Mythos encyclopedias inform is the home-planet origin of Smith’s Tsathoggua. Encyclopedia items for “Cykranosh” have failed to also notice Lovecraft’s space-leaping Cats of Saturn, but it must also be their home. In Dream-Quest these alien cats are deemed “large and peculiar”, and have an affinity with the cosmic darkness on the Dark Side of the Moon. But the creature here is more of eel-like, a flying alien ‘eel-gannet’, and thus probably not meant to be one of the Cats of Saturn.
The scan of the card is from the small Barlow collection at Brown University. Looking through this again I find an update to my recent ravine post. Lovecraft’s own sketch map of Providence confirms my research. Two paths around the edges of York Pond, to a narrow ravine then running far back from the shoreline, and into a long oval which appears to indicate a narrow flooded area that was likely the “frog-haunted ponds” he later recalled. My feeling is the arrow may be, following mapping conventions, an indication of a steep incline. Rather than the western starting point of the ravine as he knew it. Note the importance he assigns to it here.
16 Thursday Sep 2021
Posted in Historical context
New on Librivox, a one-hour public domain appreciation of Poe and short account of his life and death.
16 Thursday Sep 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
New to me, and perhaps to you. Timothy S. Miller’s fine and comprehensive “Timeline of Botanical Fictions”. Also covers fungal spores. Does not stray into modern high fantasy (e.g. Tolkien’s Ents) or flower-fairies and suchlike.
What we need now is a best-of-the-best collection, I’d suggest, which weeds out all the so-so jungle tales of giant fly-traps and poison pods, and the creakier pulp greenhouses-of-horror.
15 Wednesday Sep 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Deep Cuts takes a look at Enki Bilal’s first collection of mostly Lovecraft-inspired short comic strip stories, published in the magazine Pilote between 1971 and 1974.
Below I take an additional look at the various covers. First published as one volume in French as a five-story BD by Minoustchine in 1975…
Deep Cuts unearths a partial 1982 English U.S. translation by Flying Buffalo, publisher of the early RPG gaming magazine Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Not a great translation, it seems, and they were likely working from the 1975 Minoustchine edition as they have the same five stories and the same cover but with English lettering.
Then the volume appeared in a popular 1982 French BD by Futuropolis as Le Bol Maudit (“The Cursed Bowl”), with eight stories.
There was also a later reprint of the latter in 1987, with a garishly jazzed-up colour cover.
14 Tuesday Sep 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Manga master Gou Tanabe has revealed his next adaptation of Lovecraft into graphic novel form. The first episode of his “The Dunwich Horror” adaptation will run in Japanese in Kadokawa’s Monthly Comic Beam on 12th October 2021. This new Lovecraft adaptation, one of a growing number by Tanabe, will eventually enjoy an English translation in single-volume graphic novel form. It usually takes him about nine months to produce such a serial, so we might expect the English translation by Halloween 2022 at best. Or 2023 if there are publisher delays. Although these days there are Manga Translators for your browser, which work on automatic.
Lovecraft’s tale, which has a fairly good claim to be the most famous horror tale of the 20th century, needs no introduction here. “Cthulhu” has more name-recognition today, true. But only because the monster-name is in the title, and thus the clueless will nod when it’s mentioned, rather than because it’s widely read and enjoyed by many.
14 Tuesday Sep 2021
Posted in Odd scratchings
A website for the many exhibitions and events to celebrate the seminal writer and historian Sir Walter Scott at 250. It seems the publicity did not extend far enough outside Scotland to reach me, and I find that many are now past. Yet the roster still includes choice items such as “Haunted Scott”, an online talk and event on 29th October 2021. There is also a London exhibition opening this Autumn/Fall.
S.T. Joshi’s I Am Providence observed Scott’s influence on Lovecraft at a formative time…
One long weird poem […] is “Psychopompos: A Tale in Rhyme”. This 312-line poem was begun in the fall of 1917 but not completed until May or June of 1918. Unlike the bulk of Lovecraft’s weird verse written up to this time, the apparent influence on this poem […] is not Poe but the ballads of Sir Walter Scott.
At the other end of the nation, and also with a faint Lovecraft connection via his Devonshire/Cornish roots, an online lecture on 12th January 2022 on “The Cornish Gothic: Haunted Cornwall in Victorian Literature”.
14 Tuesday Sep 2021
Posted in Scholarly works
Taiwan’s Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture (appears to be free online) invites contributions to a special issue on Asian Gothic, scheduled to appear in December 2022. They seek “essays of 6,000-10,000 words to broaden our understanding of the Gothic in Asia”. Deadline for abstracts: 15th October 2021.
Suggested themes that may especially interest Lovecraftians:
* Gothic and Asian popular culture (manga, comics, anime, games, fashion, subcultures etc).
* Asian adaptations of western Gothic texts.
* Asian Gothic as part of a “globalgothic”.
* Genealogy of Gothic in an Asian context.
13 Monday Sep 2021
Posted in Housekeeping
A new category for posts at Tentaclii, ‘Night in Providence’. I’ve gone back and given suitable posts a quick retrospective tagging. 17 posts are thus tagged with the category, at present. More will be added as I re-encounter them.
13 Monday Sep 2021
Posted in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts
“The Streaming Edition of the 26th Annual H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival will take place 8th-10th October 2021″.
This is one of two such festivals that happen annually in the USA.
12 Sunday Sep 2021
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
New on Archive.org, Chacal #1 (Winter 1976), including the four page footnoted article “Hannes Bok: Artist and Man”.
12 Sunday Sep 2021
Posted in New books
Deep Cuts peruses the relatively new edition of Old World Footprints (1928) by Cassie Symmes, Belknap Long’s aunt. She had been very impressed by Cook’s printing and binding for her nephew’s slim volume of poetry. So much so that she commissioned Cook to publish 300 copies of her own account of a tour of Europe. I see the book can now be had as a budget Kindle ebook, Old World Footprints [Print Replica], in the new edited and annotated edition.
The attraction for (very dedicated) Lovecraftians is that Lovecraft was ghosting for Long on the Introduction…
actually ghostwritten by H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft proofread the book for Cook, and may have edited it as well.