31 Saturday Aug 2019
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Les editions Mnemos: Luxury Lovecraft.
7 handsome volumes of the stories and poetry, illustrated. Essays by S.T. Joshi, Patrice Louinet and others, the Commonplace Book, selections from the letters. All in French, though.
Apparently “Delivery is scheduled for the first quarter of 2020”, according to editions Mnemos. The project raised £362,516 ($442,142) on the French equivalent of the Kickstarter site.
31 Saturday Aug 2019
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works
Two new books on Breccia are due soon:
Breccia : Conversations avec Juan Sasturain is transcribed previously-unpublished tape interviews in French translation, plus a detailed chronology and newly published art. 460 pages in French. Amazon says October, the publisher says November 2019.
Alberto Breccia, le Maitre Argentin Insoumis. A book by the curator of recent exhibitions in France on Breccia, who is currently preparing a forthcoming… “major retrospective on Breccia, to be held in the Argentine capital Buenos Aires under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture”. 128 pages, in French but it seems to be well illustrated, and is apparently limited to 800 copies. Both the publisher and Amazon say October 2019.
If you want a taster of his Lovecraft comics art, see Revista El Pendulo No. 1 (1979) which has recently arrived on Archive.org due to an Argentine historical journals digitisation project. This issue has a 15-page Breccia comics adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness”. In Spanish, but still worth seeing for the masterly art alone…
The comic is followed by a Lovecraft article by Mosig, again in Spanish. This was graced by a Moebius panel depicting Lovecraft. The article was a Spanish translation of Mosig’s essay “Poet of the Unconscious”, which had first appeared in The Platte Valley Review, Vol. 6, No. 1, April 1978.
The next issue Revista El Pendulo No. 2 (1979) had a short interview with Breccia in Spanish.
Revista El Pendulo seems to have been a brief attempt at publishing an Argentine equivalent of Toutain’s 1984 and its various licensees and imitators, and as such Pendulo’s issues are not ‘safe for work’ today.
The Mosig essay led me to discover that his Mosig at Last (1997) book of collected Lovecraft essays is still available at $7.95 from Necronomicon Press, which means that Lovecraftians and academics can bypass the Cthulhu-sized prices asked for it on Amazon and eBay.
30 Friday Aug 2019
As we slip over into the seasons of mists… a vintage picture of the Van Wickle Gates on a misty night, Providence. My thanks to Brown University for digitising this, and I’ve used Photoshop to subtly rectify some of the damage and fuzzyness of the picture (but you can still see a section of peel-up on right). I can add to their record the name of the photographer: Prof. Walter H. Snell, and that it was made in the early 1930s.
The John Hay Library frontage is seen behind, with main entrance-steps seen on the far right of the picture. This orientation confirms that we’re looking down College Street.
From this vantage point in the shadows a lucky observer in 1933-37 might have glimpsed H.P. Lovecraft about to set off on a long night-walk in his city. A tall gaunt figure would have stepped out from the end of the short lane which came up from his house. After pausing a moment to scout the quiet street and garden-walls for any suitably conversational cats, he would have turned to walk briskly away down the hill — while being framed for an instant in the gate-entrance seen on the far left of this picture. Or, if one was lucky, he would have headed toward the gate and the camera, so as to walk through the grounds of Brown University. I assume that the grounds were not sealed-off at night, in those days.
Map:
Below we see the lane-end (far left, lower corner) in daytime, viewed from the other side of the gates…
Incidentally I now realise that I was mistaken in an earlier ‘postcard’ post here, one made late last year. I had though that a bit of a house glimpsed past the John Hay Library might have been that of Lovecraft. It wasn’t so, and that post has now been deleted. I now realise that any picture which shows the frontage alone can’t show the relevant house(s). Only side views, like those above, are of possible interest and even then will likely only indicate the line of the lane that came up from his house at the back of the Library.
New week on ‘Picture postals’: continuing the theme, with a detailed look at Lovecraft’s unique scientific understanding of the origin of clouds and mists.
30 Friday Aug 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
From the latest Decibel magazine…
Legendary horror film composer Fabio Frizzi talks about helping to bring H.P. Lovecraft’s poetry to life on I Notturni Di Yuggoth.
Decibel also has an exclusive preview-track online. This new Cadabra album starts pre-orders today. Exclusively in heavy vinyl, with “a new liner essay by S. T. Joshi” plus sleeve art and fold-out poster insert.
For those without a vinyl record-player, note also the forthcoming Karamazid Art Portfolio from Cadabra Records. This is the art for the Cadabra albums to date, done as a set of sumptuous prints. 50 copies only, 14 still available as of today.
28 Wednesday Aug 2019
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
On YouTube, leading Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey giving a ten minute talk in August 2019 on the new book Tolkien’s Library. Tolkien scholars now have the equivalent of Joshi’s useful book Lovecraft’s Library, listing exactly what was known to be in the master’s library or ‘known to have been read’. It’s a hefty 466 pages and fully annotated.
Other interestingly bookish talks at the big Birmingham Tolkien event in 2019, now online: Wayne G. Hammond on “Tolkien and his Publishers” and the “Illustrating Tolkien” Panel from leading illustrators of Middle-earth.
28 Wednesday Aug 2019
Posted in Scholarly works
StokerCon 2020 (mid April 2020) is in the UK and has an academic off-shoot, the Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference. The abstract submission deadline is 31st October 2019, and “registration to StokerCon 2019 is required for to be accepted and to present”. No special theme other than “horror studies” in any media, but they expect papers to take an “interdisciplinary approach” and offer a list of academic disciplines to get inter- with. It sounds like it’s more for grad students rather than independent scholars, but I thought I’d mention it here anyway.
28 Wednesday Aug 2019
Posted in Scholarly works
* J. Newell, “The daemonology of unplumbed space: weird fiction, disgust, and the aesthetics of the unthinkable”, PhD thesis for The University of British Columbia, 2017. (The fourth and final section is on Lovecraft, following surveys of the uses of disgust in the fiction of Poe, Machen and Blackwood).
* A. Peedumae, “A corpus-based study of names in Lovecraft’s fiction”, 2019. (Undergraduate dissertation for the University of Tartu, “an analysis of character names with the use of collocations, etymology and semantic prosodies” in Lovecraft).
* M. Sulmicki, Studies In Madness: Reality and Subjectivity in Alan Moore’s Providence, Ambrose Bierce’s “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” and Robert W. Chambers’ “The Repairer of Reputations”, Zeszyty Naukowe Uczelni Vistula / Vistula University Working Papers, Vol.65, No.2, 2019. (In English).
27 Tuesday Aug 2019
Posted in Kittee Tuesday
Celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s interest in our fascinating felines.
Chapter heading from The Book of Cats, 1868.
26 Monday Aug 2019
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
Don Herron has news that Derleth scholar John D. Haefele has…
the first comprehensive checklist of Arkham House ephemera, Modern Era, ever published [in the] September/October 2019 issue of Firsts: The Book Collectors Magazine.
Ah, but this is only the prelude. “Now You’ll Need Two Issues” added Don a few days later. September/October carries the introductory essay, with the actual list in the following issue.
26 Monday Aug 2019
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts
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25 Sunday Aug 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
New to me, a fanzines catalogue ‘Cthulhu & Co.’, by Adam Joffrain. This French site appears to have scanned covers for all Lovecraft ‘zines and journals to about 2015, with most at size where you can see what’s going on. All neatly ordered by title and date, and easily navigated.
25 Sunday Aug 2019
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
The journal The Pulpster #28 is now available, following its debut at a highly successful Pulpfest 2019 (a big jump in attendance, and lots of new younger faces) for which Pulpster is the event’s annual journal. Issue #28 should be available quite soon for non-attendees to order by mail.
A taster of some of the contents:
* Will Murray and Anthony Tollin on… “how the creators of Batman lifted elements from The Shadow“. (There’s a matching article by Murray on Batman prototypes in Alter Ego #152, 2019)
* Will Murray on Johnston McCulley… “whom he calls the grandfather of the superhero”.
* D. Kepler surveys Zorro… “on screens around the world”.
* Scott Tracy Griffin on how… “Tarzan begat generations of jungle men, women, and children in popular culture.”
* Aaron H. Oliver on… “the 1960s western/spy TV series The Wild Wild West“.
* Tony Davis on… “Bertrand Sinclair and his nearly 50-year career in the pulps”.
The 2020 Pulpfest will apparently lead with a focus on Ray Bradbury for his 101st birthday.
Here in the UK I’m also pleased to see that the high-quality Illustrators magazine has a chunky Art of Commando Comics book due at the end of November, covering interior layouts and art as well as the well-known covers from the nation’s favourite war tales comic.
Commando is a somewhat curious format for the UK and is the closest thing we have to the ‘BD album’ format of France and Belgium. Being four x 64-page complete-story comics each month.
