New on Archive.org

28 Wednesday Apr 2021

Posted by in Historical context

≈ Leave a comment

A few snippets from items newly arrived on Archive.org…

1. Lovecraft, as understood by a book reviewer for a journal for high school English teachers, January 1946. He reviews the then-new HPL by Derleth, and Supernatural Literature. This is not to be found in the collection of early Lovecraft criticism, A Weird Writer In Our Midst. The reviewer makes the interesting observation that it was only with a long radio dramatization of “The Dunwich Horror” that Lovecraft really “arrived” in the national consciousness.

Henry I. Christ was, incidentally, a real person and not Derleth using an especially grandiose pen-name.

2. Also new is Venus on the half-shell and others, collecting various pseudonymous and pen-name tales by Philip Jose Farmer. The introduction briefly itemizes a few of his planned stories in this vein that were never written or completed by Farmer. His interminable Riverworld series managed to put me off him for life, after a few books… but I wouldn’t have minded reading his take on “The Feaster from The Stars”. “Unfinished” suggests it exists somewhere as a draft and/or notes.

“I have frequently reread those phantasmagoria of exotic colour”

27 Tuesday Apr 2021

Posted by in Historical context, New books

≈ Leave a comment

I’ve found a new source for the colour in “The Colour out of Space”, on which more in my forthcoming review of Lovecraft Annual 2020. In the meanwhile, those fascinated with the histories of colour may be interested in the latest shelf-trembler from Bloomsbury. The mammoth A Cultural History of Color runs to six handsome volumes, and costs £395. Which I think is roughly about $500.

A pity, perhaps, that there wasn’t also a pre-history volume surveying and summarising what we now know about colour in the deep past. Although, admittedly, the emphasis might have been largely on the various shades of ochre and umber.

“Favourite dinners … Hungarian goulash”

27 Tuesday Apr 2021

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books

≈ Leave a comment

H.P. Lovecraft, suddenly popular in Hungary with a string of new pocket-book editions with fine translations.

Here’s a loose summary-translation of the review-article, trying to get some sense out of Google’s goulash of a translation…

… rumour has it that these two H.P. Lovecraft collections are among the most successful in Helikon’s impressively designed pocketbook series. Their success perhaps offers an insight into the current nervous state of the Hungarian people … [One little-remarked] characteristic is that Lovecraft’s work is that it is hardly inseparable from the works of those he felt to be his fellow warriors. One could muse at length on the intricate spread of effects and repercussions among his circle, and at times I feel that this literary program was emphatically, though never declared as such, movement-like. [When one considers his stances and his almost gnostic understanding of the world/cosmos] the tricky question is whether Lovecraft should be considered “reactionary” or just “progressive” from the point of view of the history-of-ideas. [Of course, many mis-read him, but his cult is guarded by] aesthetic priests who are the Jesuits of pop culture: their reputation may be fearsome, but whoever gets to know their views more thoroughly inevitably comes to understand them. For instance the Hungarian Lovecraft Society [is doing fine work nationally … but even they may not fully penetrate the] remarkable “local history” aspect to his reflexively “cosmic” works — perhaps then it is permissible for this zealous but distant deacon, interested in deliberate misreadings, to commit a dark hermeneutics. On Lovecraft’s gravestone not “I Am Providence”, but “I am the Providence.

The Dark Man at Christmas

26 Monday Apr 2021

Posted by in New books, REH, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

Well, well… an issue of The Dark Man, journal of Robert E. Howard Studies, snuck-out the door at Christmas 2020 (Vol. 11, No. 2). It’s news to me, and perhaps to you. Looking at the TOCs it seems like it’s worth my getting a copy this time around, as all items sound at least interesting. Though at present it’s not yet in ebook.

The Dark Man, Volume 11, Number 2, 102 pages.

Articles:

* “Harsh Sentences: H.P. Lovecraft vs. Ernest Hemingway” by Bobby Derie.
* “A Publication History of The Dark Man” by Luke E. Dodd.
* “Illustrated Auguries: Images Out of Time” by Phil Emery.
* “Deviations from Realism in High and Low Literature” by Jason Ray Carney.
* “Cosmic Horror: Lost in Translation” by Jacob Lindner.
* “A Brief Analysis of the Aesthetic of Weird Tales” by Mara Tharp.

Reviews:

* Book: The Howard Companion, by Richard Toogood. Reviewed by Gary Romeo.
* Book: Fantastic Paintings of Frazetta, by J. David Spurlock. Reviewed by Dierk Gunther.

“In that cabin a printing-press was set up; & there we prepared…”

25 Sunday Apr 2021

Posted by in Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

S. T. Joshi’s Blog has updated, and heralds a host of forthcoming books: a new third volume of Robert H. Waugh essays on Lovecraft; Ken Faig Jr.’s Lovecraftian People; a book of essays by Matt Cardin “on weird fiction and philosophy”; Joshi’s own The Recognition of H.P. Lovecraft; and Lovecraft’s Letters to E. Hoffmann Price and Richard F. Searight. For the latter Joshi adds that this will be the “first complete publication of the letters to Price”.

Rhode Island History, 1942-2011

25 Sunday Apr 2021

Posted by in Historical context, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

Now arriving on Archive.org from microfilm, the last of a run of the local history journal Rhode Island History 1942-2011 with indexes. They were previously only online to 2008, and only at the Historical Society website — for which the old Web link now yields only the bare warning “Forbidden”.

Lovecraft appears to be unmentionable in the journal after 1954, but one early and fair assessment is found in Randall Stewart’s survey article on “Rhode Island Literature” (January 1954)…

The journal has occasional pictures, but these have not been treated kindly by the microfilming process.

Dreams and Fancies

25 Sunday Apr 2021

Posted by in Odd scratchings

≈ 3 Comments

The now very collectable book Dreams and Fancies (Arkham House, 1962) opens with the title section, consisting of Derleth’s pick of…

Fifty-nine pages of Lovecraft’s letters describing his dreams.

I was interested to learn about this. Since I have the H.P. Lovecraft Dream Book from 1994, but on flicking through it I see it only ran to 35 pages of actual dreams.

Whence came the additional pages? Was Derleth perhaps including dream-fragments such as “The Book”, which would make this Dreams and Fancies section longer? But that can’t be the case with “The Evil Clergyman”, at least, since an eBay picture shows that fragment appearing later in the book.

“… the gaunt showman was seldom to be deceived by such tactics”

25 Sunday Apr 2021

Posted by in Historical context, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

There’s a new issue of The Fossil freely available online.

David Goudsward tugs on a jungle creeper and swings manfully over the early Tarzan movies filmed at Silver Springs, Florida. He finds them to be mere phantasms of the river-mists, and that Lovecraft was actually wrong in his letters. None of the Tarzan films made during Lovecraft’s life were filmed along the river, though Goudsward posits that some ‘splicing in’ of old newsreel clips of underwater swimming in the pools. This would have allowed the Silver Springs promoters to make the claim and technically be correct. The article gives a taster of his new book Adventurous Liberation: H.P. Lovecraft in Florida, now said elsewhere in The Fossil to be set for a release late in 2021.

There is also an article and several reviews of recent academic work on the changing age profiles of amateur journalism, in the years before Lovecraft’s birth.

The Author and Journalist, 1916-69

24 Saturday Apr 2021

Posted by in Historical context, Odd scratchings

≈ Leave a comment

Newly on Archive.org, the U.S trade magazine for writers The Author and Journalist. It appears to be a complete 1916-69 run.

November 1961, a science-fiction special.

August 1948 had Lovecraft’s tips for constructing a tale, via Rimel…

The canny sub-editor has paired the then-unusual name with an article on choosing a distinctive pen-name, and a verse about love.

June 1959 also has Derleth on “The Biographer’s Goal”…

… in virtually nothing of his work save his letters did H.P. Lovecraft emerge, except by indirection, as a reclusive introvert, who lived far more in the past than in the present … it required some psychiatric knowledge to be able to put together even so short a biography as H.P.L. … The Facts — the known facts — occupied only 12 pages of the biography …

The run, as it stands on Archive.org, also includes The Student Writer.

‘Hang them durn new-fangled plots…’

23 Friday Apr 2021

Posted by in Historical context

≈ Leave a comment

Lovecraft circle member Everett McNeil, giving good advice in The Student Writer for March 1923.

One can almost hear an echo of his voice at a meeting of the Kalems…

Don’t be deceived by the editorial howl for original plots. Editors don’t want original plots, and authors could not supply them if they did. The last of the strictly original plots was used centuries ago. Even Shakespeare did not create an original plot. An editor would shy violently at sight of an honest-to-goodness original plot. It would be something he had never seen before, something that no magazine, at least in his generation, had tried out.

To which we might imagine Lovecraft pushing back with a comment on new modern ways of telling the story, at least, and musing “Hmmm… The Call of Cthulhu…”.

McNeil may also give us a hint of why he was paid such low rates for a book…

The [book royalty] payments may be scattered over all the years of the copyright, fifty-six in all.

Though that still does not explain why an elderly (elderly, by the expectancy of the 1920s) professional writer would settle for terms that would outlast him by some forty years.