26 Monday Oct 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
A new Italian book, Mitologi, mitografi e mitomani (Mythologists, Mythographers and Mythomaniacs: traces of myth through the centuries). Many medieval chapters, but the book concludes with Alessandro Fambrini’s “Howard Phillips Lovecraft e Friedrich Nietzsche: sogni di dei e di superuomini”…
Lovecraft read Nietzsche and quoted him repeatedly. This article attempts to investigate the influence and consequences of the German philosopher’s thought in Lovecraftian fiction.
25 Sunday Oct 2020
Posted in Podcasts etc.
I’m pleased to find that Phil Dragash’s marvellous full-cast/full-symphonic unabridged version of The Lord of The Rings was uploaded to Archive.org in Summer 2020, in its final 2013-14 version…
* The Fellowship of the Ring. Note that the chapter “A Journey in the Dark” has a small encoding skip, also present on other online versions, which cuts a few minutes relating to the initial search for the doors of Moria and the unpacking and warding of Bill-the-pony. Also, “13. Lothlorian” and “21. The Great River” are 2013 versions, and I prefer the originals which are in the Limetorrents version.
* The Return of the King (and one of the Appendices, “Durins’s Folk”).
To legally download this you have to own the three books, the extended-cut three-DVD movie of The Lord of the Rings, and the official soundtrack album for the cinema version. To hear the full Appendices in audiobook form, you’ll want the official unabridged audiobook reading. This is commercial, and will also give you the small missing section from Phil Dragash’s Fellowship.
There’s a Digital Art Live magazine interview with Phil here, as he’s also a digital artist… as well as possibly the world’s best vocal mimic since Mike Yarwood.
25 Sunday Oct 2020
Posted in Scholarly works
New on Archive.org to borrow, Greenwood’s 1977 book The H.P. Lovecraft Companion, which I described here a while back as a first…
“‘high pass’ over Lovecraft’s work, written by a Sherlock Holmes fan and newspaper book-critic.”
With what must have then been a useful try at a map of the Dreamlands…
24 Saturday Oct 2020
Posted in Scholarly works
S. T. Joshi’s blog notes that his new journal Penumbra: A Journal of Weird Fiction and Criticism has landed on the doorstep. Now available from Hippocampus. Non-fiction items of interest include…
* The Cosmic Scale of Elfland.
* The Idea of the North in the Fiction of Simon Strantzas.
* Finding Sherlock Holmes in Weird Fiction.
* “The Weird Dominions of the Infinite”: Edgar Allan Poe and the Scientific Gothic.
23 Friday Oct 2020
Posted in Night in Providence, Picture postals
This week, more night views of Providence, this time as the young Lovecraft would have known it on night-walks. These two are early 1914 views made by the Providence artist Whitman Bailey (1884-1954). Lovecraft then aged in his early 20s.
Prospect Terrace was, of course, one of Lovecraft’s favourite places in his city. Neither picture is in my Whitman Bailey ebook collection, available here.
23 Friday Oct 2020
Posted in Historical context, REH
DMR considers a plausible alternative ‘cosmic’ influence on Robert E. Howard, Abraham Merritt.
22 Thursday Oct 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Newly up for sale, an original art board for Marvel’s Journey into Mystery, specifically the Gene Colan teen-friendly Lovecraft adaptation of “The Haunter of the Dark”.
Also a nice page of ‘Kirby Cosmicism’ from Thor, where in the pencilled margin notes you can see the synopsis and thus ‘the Marvel Method’ at work. For speed, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby would verbally spitball a plot outline, and Lee would jot it down into a basic synopsis. Jack would go away and pencil the pages to the synopsis, then Lee would come back in and ‘write to the art’ — often directly onto the boards.
Both boards are at nostalgicinvestments which has a website that’s just too annoying to link to, with weird rapid auto-refresh of pages that can’t be cured even by disabling Javascript and CSS.
21 Wednesday Oct 2020
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts
Following my recent stroll down the old College Street, I found another drawing of the archway near the foot of College Street, this time by Providence artist Whitman Bailey and from 1914. Not in my Whitman Bailey ebook collection, which is available at the previous link.
21 Wednesday Oct 2020
Posted in Odd scratchings
Added to my post on The John Brown house, a photograph from 1914…
In 1927 Lovecraft sat inside one of the doorways and, in his untrained manner, sketched a Providence scene of the colonial period as it might have been viewed from there.
21 Wednesday Oct 2020
Posted in Podcasts etc.
As part of a Japanese film festival, “H.P. Lovecraft & Cthulhu Mythos: The Origin of Cosmic Horror”, an online talk in which Japanese Lovecraftians discuss Lovecraft and the mythos.
Online 31st October 2020, in Japanese only (though if it gets to YouTube, they’ll auto-caption it, and then it can be run through Translate to get the gist of it).
20 Tuesday Oct 2020
Posted in Kittee Tuesday
Do rats, mind-controlled by weird invisible brain-parasites, launch themselves to their doom in the jaws of hungry cats? This faintly Lovecraftian claim has been made, sometimes with seeming authority, and then hugely amplified by the media and by the follow-on percolation of the notion into folk-belief. With the implication that kitty, having unaccountably turned up her nose at her Chicken Chunks ConCarne and instead chewed on a smelly rat, might then pass on the brain-controlling parasite to her humans.
Turns out, it’s something of a media myth, according to the new Royal Society paper “When fiction becomes fact: exaggerating host manipulation by parasites”…
… there is no sound evidence that the behavioural changes in infected rodents increase the transmission of T. gondii to felids [i.e. cats …] The evidence surrounding the ‘fatal feline attraction’ is inconsistent and contradictory at best (as it is for all the impacts of T. gondii on human and non-human behaviours).
Which doesn’t mean that this is impossible, just so far un-tested in a firm manner. If such a causal transmission and chain-of-effect were eventually to be found, the paper points out, it may be far more subtle and complex than we think. Of course, everyone who has a cat knows they can do thought-control of humans (“feed me… feeed me… feeeed meee…”), and cause them to head rapidly toward the kitchen. But the lurid ‘rat parasite’ claim is of a different order. It’s no doubt been a very handy excuse for cat-haters, over the last 20 years or so, along the lines of: “Oh no, we don’t let little Timmy anywhere near cats, they could give him a mind-warping brain-parasite…”
This also rather throws cold water on the possibility that H.P. Lovecraft, through his frequent heavy-petting encounters with just about every stray cat in the unsavoury parts of Providence, Boston, and New York City, “must” have had his mind turned toward weirdness by brain-parasites.
19 Monday Oct 2020
Posted in Historical context, Podcasts etc.
The quality Stuff To Blow Your Mind podcast has a new three-parter on the famous Minotaur and its Cretan labyrinth.
Lovecraft would, like most children before the early 1980s, have early become familiar with Greek myth and with the Minotaur story. He found it early in his boyhood, and in vivid form, in Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales for Boys and Girls (1853). Despite the book’s misleadingly rustic title — from which one might expect only cosy mid-Victorian woodland cottages and merrily skipping milk-maids — Hawthorne actually recounts powerful Ancient Greek myth… “the stories of the Minotaur, the Pygmies, the Dragon’s Teeth, Circe’s Palace, the Pomegranate Seeds, and the Golden Fleece” (S.T. Joshi, I Am Providence). Sadly, libraries in the U.S. are now pulling Hawthorne from the shelves. Apparently he offends some perpetually-offended politically-correct sect or other. Laughably, Upton Sinclair, once the golden boy of the left and about whom Lovecraft was sniffy, is being swept away along with Hawthorne.