20 Thursday Feb 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
Some of Lovecraft’s best poetry, now ably translated into Spanish. The leading Spanish newspaper El Pais has a review of the new volume.
Lovecraft is a prophet of human insignificance in the cosmos, yet Garcia Roman finally decides that one of the tonal keys to Lovecraft’s poetry is that… “The poems show an author of maturity. One who is less pessimistic … If Lovecraft opened any doors to hope, he did so in his verses.”
19 Wednesday Feb 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
“Ad Alta Voce”: Howard Phillips Lovecraft, a recording from Rai Radio 3 in Italy. A 31 minutes recording from last June, of what appears to be “The Festival” professionally produced in mellifluous Italian and with music. It takes some wrangling of the page to start the recording, rather than the station’s live-stream. Kudos to the station for keeping it online so long and making it public to the world, rather than removing it after a month or only making it available to certain territories — as is so often the case with the BBC and others.
18 Tuesday Feb 2020
Posted in Podcasts etc.
The podcast Voluminous: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft has completed a stinging four-thwack spanking of Frank Belknap Long.
18 Tuesday Feb 2020
Posted in New books, Odd scratchings
Kklak!: The Doctor Who Art of Chris Achilleos is due in spring 2020, with large reproductions of paperback cover-art showing classic Doctor Who incarnations. Several of these feature the more Lovecraftian style of monsters, such as the Sea Devils…
18 Tuesday Feb 2020
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Odd scratchings
Old Book Illustrations, a large site sourced from Archive.org, Library of Congress etc, with public downloads at a reasonable medium size. The site seems to be curated, or at least has found a way to filter out all the “country house” engravings and similar mundane topographic items.
By Arthur Rackham.
17 Monday Feb 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings
Facsimile Dustjackets LLC has jackets for Lovecraft’s Selected Letters volumes I-III, albeit at a hefty price.
16 Sunday Feb 2020
Posted in Historical context, Odd scratchings
Two printings of a Weird Tales favourite tale of the 1920s, Frank Owen’s “The Wind that Tramps the World”. Thanks to Archive.org uploaders for the Weird Tales scans.
April 1925 first appearance.
June 1929 reprint appearance.
(Now defunct PDFs, seek the pages on Archive.org).
Note the broad similarity to Lovecraft’s “Erich Zann” (1921, National Amateur 1922), which saw a reprint in the May 1925 Weird Tales, a month after Owen’s “The Wind”. Only those readers who had seen the 1922 publication of “Zann” would have been aware that Lovecraft was not following up on Owen with his own “copy-cat” story.
15 Saturday Feb 2020
Posted in New books
Rather too late to benefit from the movie, Penguin is set to publish an £8.99 paperback of The Colour Out of Space under their Penguin Classics imprint. Amazon lists it as on pre-order for early July 2020.
The contents will be “The Colour Out of Space”, “The Whisperer in Darkness” and “The Shadow Out of Time”, and one assumes they’ll use the S.T. Joshi texts and annotations from the existing Penguin Classics editions. Penguin has popped two quotes from leftist newspapers on the Amazon page, presumably in the vain hope of quieting a Twitter-tantrum about Lovecraft being published again under the ‘Penguin Classics’ label, aka ‘Modern Classics’.
As is usual with Amazon, the page currently has links that sidetrack the potential buyer onto utter crapware with the same title. The big publishers such as Penguin would do us all a favour of they were to haul Amazon in front of Trading Standards officers in the UK, and put a stop to this underhand practice. But I guess there’s nothing to stop a merry band of readers doing the same, and the political climate now feels right for such a move.
15 Saturday Feb 2020
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
Deutsche Lovecraft Gesellschaft, the German Lovecraft forum, brings news of Lovecrafter Nr.6, December 2019. The main article, in German, is “From Sauk City to Arkham – 80 years of Arkham House”.
15 Saturday Feb 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
I’d overlooked a book in summer 2019, Shapeshifters: A History. A short, but seemingly sound, historical survey of this cultural phenomenon. There appear to be no journal reviews of it, but then these days journal editors are increasingly refusing to review titles not published by a university or prestige press.
But looking for such a review led me to discover a new journal I wasn’t aware of, Gramarye: The Journal of the Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction from the University of Chichester in the south of England.
It has produced 16 issues so far, balancing articles with a healthy crop of reviews.
The latest Gramarye is issue 16 and has “In Search of Jenny Greenteeth” by Simon Young and “‘A Fairy, or Else an Insect’: Traditions at Fairy Wells” by Jeremy Harte, both topics on which I mused a couple of years ago (“On Jenny Green-teeth”, “‘Lady Wells’ in the High Peak”, “Mothlach”, and “On The Butts, Baggins, and Butterflies”). The same issue also has the review of Shapeshifters: A History.
As such I’m inclined to get No.16, but… it’s not on Amazon in either ebook or paper. It’s available from the university, but instead of a simple PayPal connection the eager buyer goes to one of those annoying clunky “sign-up before you can buy” shopping-carts. Which it appears only takes credit-cards. Then, a departmental assistant manually emails you the purchased PDFs. It’s not ideal.
It’s a pity that departmental journals are not also assigned an ‘impact rating’, in the same manner as a dept’s scholarly article-output. Such a official rating (which affects their taxpayer income) might chivvy up the publicity and distribution for such journals, and see a few summer interns or apprentices assigned to tasks such as getting them all on Amazon as ebooks. But of course the ideal in terms of ‘impact’ would be a big crowd-funder which would ‘buy out’ all the back-issues and make them open access, and then for a small legacy or bequest to ensure the journal continues to be open access.
Anyway, nothing very ‘Lovecraft’ except tangentially in some of the reviews. But other items of interest to me in other issues of Gramarye:
#14. ‘From Ogre to Woodlouse: A Journey through Names’, Jeremy Harte. [Presumably on the noted Gawain word ‘woodwose’].
#13. ‘Tolkien’s style’, Colin Manlove.
#6. ‘The American Fantasy Tradition’, Tom Shippey.
Shippey has always been a bit sniffy about Howard’s Conan, so it would be interesting to see his take on that aspect of fantasy and its place in the American tradition.
A two-year subscription to the PDF version of Gramarye is £20, about $26. The paper edition is not much more. It appears you can’t back-date a subscription and have it start from, say, #13.
14 Friday Feb 2020
Posted in Scholarly works
Marzaat is currently undertaking an issue-by-issue description and review of Sargasso: The Journal of William Hope Hodgson Studies, and has reached #2…
14 Friday Feb 2020
Posted in Historical context, Picture postals
I can’t imagine that Lovecraft-the-Roman never once sought out this fine bronze statue of ‘Cesare Augusto’ on the Brown University campus.
The statue stood in front of Rhode Island Hall, an exact replica of an ancient statue of Caesar Augustus in Rome. It was installed at Brown in 1906, a gift from M. B. I. Goddard, and by the 1920s and 30s the statue’s surface and pedestal would likely have become somewhat softened in tone by natural weathering.
Standing before it, many aspects of the man would have flashed in Lovecraft’s mind. Not the least of which would be that here was monument to a fellow writer…
… it would pay to study other languages … Even Latin literature can be known pretty well through good English renderings of Caesar, Cicero, [etc, though] not all of them [to be read] complete, of course, but in balanced rations as recommended.
Encyclopedia Brunoniana reveals that after 1915 the Hall housed the Philosophy Department on the first floor and the Geology Department on the ground floor and in the basement. One then wonders if a visit to Providence by the geologist Morton might once have enabled Lovecraft to go inside the building with him, and be given a tour of the Geology dept.? Thus also admiring the statue on the way in and out. The statue stood there until 1952.
Predictably, toxic leftists are now demanding it be removed from the campus.