31 Thursday Oct 2019
Posted in Historical context
It was 100 years ago that H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ first emerged onto the printed page, in the form of the seminal “Dagon”. This tale was published in the November 1919 issue of Paul Cook’s humble amateur publication The Vagrant.
30 Wednesday Oct 2019
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts
Slightly late, this week. Kittee Tuesday — a weekly blog post, celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s interest in our fascinating felines.
30 Wednesday Oct 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
29 Tuesday Oct 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings, REH
A few months back I spotted public domain scan on Archive.org, and realised that it could be re-purposed as a free book cover. I Photoshopped the text away, cleaned just a little, and made some small tweaks. I’ve just found it again, and this was the result…
Specifically, it made me imagine a book featuring a mystery-adventure with H.P. Lovecraft (left), Robert E. Howard (centre) and Frank Belknap Long (right) as the protagonists. Feel free to use this bit of inadvertent Lovecraftian art (1926 from Barcelona, Spain, originally) for the cover of such a lengthy tale, with the addition of suitable typography of the era.
I initially imagined such a tale set in New York City, but looking at it now… the desert-night colouration and faint hint of a pyramid-like mound in the background could suggest Lovecraft and Long making a long-distance visit to R.E. Howard in Texas, en route to a cruise across the Gulf of Mexico and a tour of the ruined temples of central America. Such an ambitious trip could be deemed to have been ‘financed by Long, who had come into a small family legacy’ etc.
28 Monday Oct 2019
Posted in Odd scratchings
S. T. Joshi’s Blog has updated. In terms of non-fiction interest he notes that a number of journal runs have been added to the Books for Sale from the W. H. Pugmire library…
Lovecraft Studies, Lovecraft Annual, Weird Fiction Review, Studies in Weird Fiction, Nyctalops
Interestingly I also see newly-added there…
An Index to the Selected Letters, Second Edition, $100
$100! I’m glad now I got mine a year years ago for much less. That was in anticipation of eventually having a set of Selected Letters in paper.
27 Sunday Oct 2019
Posted in Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc.
Librivox has just released a new unabridged recording by John Van Stan of The House on the Borderland. Also on Archive.org as a mirror.
Cover of the UK Panther paperback. Blurb has plot-spoilers.
26 Saturday Oct 2019
Bobby Derie reviews the new pulps-for-academics book Weird Tales of Modernity: The Ephemerality of the Ordinary in the Stories of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft.
25 Friday Oct 2019
Posted in Picture postals
Continuing the dockside theme of recent ‘Picture Postals’… the Fulton Street Fish Market, and a view of some of the towers of New York City as they appeared in 1930.
“Some years ago Long and I attempted to explore the Fulton Fish Market section of New York — which is full of quaint scenes and buildings. I don’t know where I left the lunch I had eaten an hour previously — for I was too dizzy to read the street signs! In the end I managed to stagger out of the stench without actually losing consciousness …” — Lovecraft in a letter of 1933, Selected Letters IV.
This brief mention suggests this daytime after-lunch visit perhaps followed a perusal of the large used magazines bookstore on that section of Fulton Street. Evidently Lovecraft had strayed too close to one of the main market-places, probably as it was being sluiced out at the end of the day’s trading, and his well-known reaction to the smell of fish took hold of him.
“New” Fulton Fish market, 1910.
Yet, according to Vrest Orton’s memoir of Lovecraft in New York, the same area was also a fairly frequent night-walk haunt, as he and Lovecraft went in search of 18th century remains (see his memoir in Lovecraft Remembered). How to explain the apparently incongruity? My guess would be that the fish-smell was less so in the dead of night, when the boats were away and fishing, and the disinfected slabs of the fishmongers awaited the dawn and the landing of the catch? There is also the weather to consider. Lovecraft could have explored with Orton in New York in the winter, whereas an early 1930s visit with Long might have been in high summer.
24 Thursday Oct 2019
Posted in New books
A tentative date, on the Bowker forward book-ordering database, for the paperback of Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. These appeared in a 500 limited-edition hardcover in 2017. Volume 1 in paperback lists as… “Aug 2020”.
24 Thursday Oct 2019
Posted in Scholarly works
Now that the “back to uni” rush is over, a reminder of the The S. T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship in H. P. Lovecraft, 2020/21 edition.
The Fellowship provides “a monthly stipend of $2,500” to one lucky Lovecraftian “for up to two months of research” on H.P. Lovecraft and his circle, at the John Hay Library in Providence.
Application deadline: 13th March 2020.
23 Wednesday Oct 2019
Posted in Podcasts etc.
I’m pleased to see that Robert M. Price’s The Lovecraft Geek Podcast – Series 2, #1 has returned. It had vanished, at least for me.
And now it’s also just now been joined by #2 of the new series.
You can download an .MP3 file from ListenNotes by clicking the cryptic “…” over on the right-hand sidebar, and then right-clicking the “Download” link…
My thanks to ‘Governmentdrone’ for the heads-up on appearance of this new podcast.
23 Wednesday Oct 2019
Posted in Scholarly works
A quick round-up of some calls, new journals, conferences, of possible interest…
* A new open access journal, Gothic Nature: New Directions in EcoHorror. The chunky first issue is already online, seemingly coming out of the Gothic Studies / Ecocriticism postgrad crowd in academia. They are obviously happy to range into popular culture. Note also that they will also review suitable works.
* Journal of the British Fantasy Society, call for papers for a future (late 2020 or 2021) special issue “about works of fantasy translated into English”.
* MDPI’s Humanities journal is planning a Special Issue on the “relationship between modernism and science fiction”.
* Journal of Dracula Studies, is planning a Special Issue on witches.
* Gothic Studies is planning a Special Issue on ‘Tales of Terror: Gothic and the Short Form’ (Nov 2021). They appear to want papers on how the very short form, brevity, elision, the left-unsaid, tight story-mechanics, etc, contribute to the effectiveness of terror-tales.
* Announced is a new wide-ranging Religion and Comics series from Claremont Press. Not open access, but “paperbacks with a price point between $20-$30” rather than the usual $80 academic tome.
* The Outer Dark Symposium, 27th – 28th March 2020, Atlanta, USA. The focus is on “contemporary Weird fiction writers”, and it appears to be something of a social convention for writers as well as a symposium.
* Conference on Contemporary Folk Horror in Film and Media, Leeds Beckett University in the UK, 30th – 31st July 2020. Probably with a British slant, I’m guessing. Think Wicker Man and Penda’s Fen.
