Librivox’s new full-cast readings

26 Tuesday May 2020

Posted by in Podcasts etc.

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I’m glad to see that Librivox is branching out into full-cast unabridged readings. Their second volume of such has just been released. Since most stage actors and live musicians are likely to be unemployed for a while now, I’d expect to see the appearance of many more full-cast unabridged readings, ideally with music and FX. They seem the obvious route to converting talent to income, and can be done while working together online via home studios. The exemplar here is Phil Dragash’s The Lord of the Rings.

These, however, are free…

Vol. 1 offers Sherlock Holmes. Vol. 2 also offers another Sherlock Holmes, “The Purloined Letter” by Edgar Allan Poe, and “The Stolen Bacillus” by H. G. Wells. Some are rather rough, and lack sound balancing and a producer’s touch.

The Fireside Sphinx

26 Tuesday May 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Kittee Tuesday, Scholarly works

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In 1932 Lovecraft wrote to his friend Moe, recalling once again the lost-lost days of 1900 when he had been ten years old. One of the items recalled in his stream-of-consciousness flow was… “the new cat book by Agnes Rapplier”.

Rapplier was a conservative Catholic essayist and reviewer, who also wrote popular books. The “new cat book” must be her The Fireside Sphinx: A Cultural History of Cats which appeared in 1901. Thus Lovecraft mis-placed it a little amid the tumble of memories, as a book of 1900.

It is just the sort of erudite yet breezy book that would have delighted a precocious lad who doted on cats, with chapters on Egypt, Dark Ages hysteria, and cats in his beloved British Isles. It is full of little stories and brisk histories. The book is simply footnoted as The Fireside Sphinx (without its subtitle indicating its non-fiction nature) in the Moe letters, and does not appear in my edition of Joshi’s Lovecraft’s Library. But, as a formative childhood book, it should probably be listed in a future edition of the Library.

Being out-of-copyright it could also make the basis of various new media productions, trimmed down a bit, from dramatized audiobook to graphic novel. Although note that archaeology is starting to dramatically change the story of ancient domestic cats in Europe — that bit would need to be added/updated.

When did Lovecraft have it and read it? A quick search suggests The Fireside Sphinx was probably issued October 1901 with an eye to the Christmas market. Thus it was perhaps a family gift, possibly to his mother or more likely to the young Lovecraft himself at Christmas 1901 when he was aged 11. By my calculations Lovecraft would then have been a doting cat-owner for several years and the kitten Trigger-ban, that had been presented to him as a “tiny black handful” at about age seven, would have fully grown into an adult pet cat by Christmas 1901.

Lovecraft’s Opera

25 Monday May 2020

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Lovecraft’s L’Opera Completa, due in Italian translation in May 2020. Sadly not an actual opera, with a Lovecraft a-like wailing among the screeching shoggoths and a mad orchestra pummelling the audience at full blast. It’s the Complete Works and appears to be from a reputable publisher.

Added to Open Lovecraft

24 Sunday May 2020

Posted by in Scholarly works

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* J. Wierzbicki, “Silent Listening, The Aesthetics of Literary Sounds”, Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, Vol. 1, Number 1, 2020. (Discussion of sounds in Poe and Lovecraft).

* P. Jarvinen, “The Social Outsider: Generating Horror Through External and Internal Alienation in “The Outsider” and “The Music of Erich Zann” by H.P. Lovecraft”. (April 2020 undergraduate dissertation for Tampere University, Finland).

* A. de Sena, “Frankenstein de Mary Shelley e “O Intruso” de H.P. Lovecraft: Simetrias”, in Figuracao de Personagens Monstruosas, DialogArts, University of Rio de Janeiro, 2020. (Sees parallels between Shelley’s Frankenstein and “The Outsider”. In Brazilian Portuguese. Book chapter, book title roughly translates as ‘The Figurations of Monstrous Characters’).

* J. Franca, “Fundamentos esteticos da literatura de horror: a influencia de Edmund Burke em H. P. Lovecraft”, Caderno Seminal Digital, Vol. 16, No. 14, June-December 2010. (In Brazilian Portuguese. Edmund Burke’s influence on Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror. Graduate Journal of the University of Rio de Janeiro.)

“Across the void and through the space-hung screens.”

23 Saturday May 2020

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings

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Have a VR headset handy? Let’s Virtually “Wander” in Lovecraft’s Providence and Beyond…

“Please send a message to me on Facebook at WillHartCthulhuWho1 or contact me here on my blog, if you’d like to meet in Virtual Reality in “Wander,” to see some of the many Lovecraftian sites that can be visited this way, or in “vTime XR,” for a virtual four-person Lovecraftian meeting.”

‘The World Below’ in Selected Letters

22 Friday May 2020

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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Lovecraft’s Selected Letters volume five, page 415, apparently has a reference to S. Fowler Wright’s The World Below being given as a Christmas gift to Lovecraft by Ernest A. Edkins. I don’t have access to volume five, never having found it at a cheap price. Can any reader kindly look up and supply the quote please? I’m interested to learn if there is any additional comment there on The World Below.

On Conan encyclopaedias and gazetteers

21 Thursday May 2020

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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A free A-Z Encyclopedia Hyboria (2019) by ‘bittertreememory’. His book is relatively mighty-thewed at 24,000 words, if you also paste the well-hidden Preface into a Word .DOC file. The Preface reveals that Encyclopedia Hyboria only covers the Howard works. Dipping in randomly, it seems to me like excellent and precise work.

I’d assume ‘bittertreememory’ is American, given his American spelling of encyclopaedia. Someone should try to contact him and get permission for an expanded book, adding…

* an additional introduction by a big name such as Roy Thomas;
* an introduction that surveys similar reference works if they exist, and/or any in-world reference files Howard developed for his own use;
* a short in-world story chronology of Howard’s Conan tales;
* story titles added to each entry, where relevant – see ‘at a glance’ where each item or character was used;
* abundant use of small illustrations in a suitably loose Kaluta/Frazetta sort of pen-and-ink style;
* add maps and then add runes that colour-code the entries by region;
* add a short scholarly survey of the most notable and faithful new items added by later writers of Conan tales;
* then design and print it up as a book.

Another option for such a book would be Dale E. Rippke’s online A Gazetteer Hyboria which is a 1,000-item A-Z that includes the pastiche books and the better comics of the 1970s and 80s. Though, by including the larger post-Howard Conan works, this would cause all sorts of copyright tangles for a new expanded book version.

The author states that about a third of A Gazetteer Hyboria, presumably the purist Howard-only items, had long ago appeared in print in the Borgo Press guide titled A Gazeteer of the Hyborian World of Conan (1977). Some sources have this as Starmont House, not Borgo. Possibly there was a hardback from Starmont, and a paperback from Borgo?

A Gazetteer Hyboria seems to have vanished from all but Archive.org, presumably for fear of copyright trolls, but Dale E. Rippke also has a live Solomon Kane Gazetteer v.2.0 (2015) online for free.

For additional non-people/places items, the 128-page gamer book GURPS Conan has a section titled… “A gazetteer featuring the people, customs, laws, religion, and mysteries of 34 lands in the world of Conan.”

Also noted recently, and also useful for fan-writers as well as gamers, the new Conan the Adventurer (Modiphius, 2020). This is a 120-page illustrated PDF sourcebook, described as…

the definitive guide to the lands south of the Styx River, including serpent-haunted Stygia, Kush, Darfar, Keshan, Punt, Zembabwei, and that vast region known to the folk of the Dreaming West as ‘the Black Kingdoms’.

Apparently the new book was… “developed with leading Conan scholars”, so is presumably largely ‘Howardian’ — rather than bolting on later developments in movies, videogames, cash-in novels, comics etc.

Modiphius previously published Conan: Nameless Cults, a sumptuous book and…

guide to the cosmology, gods, cults, and otherworldly entities of Conan’s world and time.