New Neal Stephenson interview

23 Friday Aug 2019

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Conversations with Tyler: Neal Stephenson, July 2017, a 54-minute podcast interview which ranges widely and isn’t just marketing ra-ra and plot-summary for the new book…

I find that, of all of the science fiction writers that I read when I was a kid, [Heinlein’s] stuff has stayed with me more than others. He had this knack for capturing little moments, little human interactions, and images that produced really vivid memories in my head that are still with me.

Direct MP3 downloads at Listen Notes are hidden behind the … icon, thus…

New book: Dr. Moebius and Mister Gir

23 Friday Aug 2019

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books

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248 pages of interviews with Moebius, Dr. Moebius and Mister Gir. Translated into English. Sadly, though, we’re going to have to wait until next springtime to get it.

I can imagine a 600-page Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath adaptation by Moebius, but it was never to be.

Starlog magazine: Issue 112 had an interview with him, buried in a Star Trek issue. But it appears to be the only one on Archive.org.

Spellbound

23 Friday Aug 2019

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On Archive.org, a complete set of Spellbound, the 1976-1977 weekly comic for British girls who enjoyed supernatural stories. Mostly witches, ancient amulets, black cats, some time-travel. As was usual at that time, about five or six black and white strips in each issue, with about six pages each, some strips being episodic from week-to-week.

Lots of quite nice line-art and, on many strips, the art is in page-layouts that are quite dynamic (if often rather crowded). These days, the sort of crowded page seen below would be spread across three pages of a monthly American-style comic.

Even if you don’t care to read them, each page has panels that will potentially inspire an artist to think about their own framing, angles, expressions, and suchlike.

Will Murray interview

22 Thursday Aug 2019

Posted by in New books, Odd scratchings

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Superhero-heavy comics blog Smash Pages has a new interview with Will Murray, mostly on Doc Savage. Black Gate has Will Murray on Doc Savage. I hadn’t realised he had published a 455-page Writings in Bronze ebook on Doc Savage in 2012. It seems to be well regarded and Murray had access to the Lester Dent archives. More of a compendium than a book of academic essays it seems…

“there’s more information on the history of Doc Savage than most Doc fans even knew existed. From Murray’s earliest fanzine writings to his latest commentaries on the fascmile reprints of Doc Savage magazine”

It’s good to know there are serious writings about Doc Savage out there, as I still have fond memories of him from the oversize Marvel b&w albums from the 1970s and 80s, and I also read and very much enjoyed a half-dozen or more of the books in the early 1980s.

I see this book was followed by the survey A History of the Doc Savage Adventures (2018) and the newly annotated The Savage Dyaries: The collected Doc Savage writings of Dafydd Neal Dyar, Volume 1 1979-1984 (2018), and there may be more.

Difficult to find more without digging though. Because Amazon spams with unwanted Shadow and Spider stuff in the search results — even when you’re specifically searching for “Doc Savage” in quotes.

Henri Etienne-Martin

21 Wednesday Aug 2019

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A Lovecraftian sculptor of the 1960s and early 1970s, the Frenchman Henri Etienne-Martin.

Etienne-Martin’s entry in Dictionary of Modern Sculpture, 1960. Note the outdoor “Homage to Lovecraft”, and he also seems to have made smaller variations of this stair/throne-like sculpture.

From a 1965 exhibition catalogue in French…

From recent auction sales of his work…

“Art et mythe – La cosmogonie d’Etienne-Martin, point de depart des “Mythologies individuelles”” (open access book chapter in French).

Lovecraft’s Birthday, the 2019 round-up

20 Tuesday Aug 2019

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Lovecraft’s Birthday, the 2019 round-up:

It’s the 129th!

* Released on H.P. Lovecraft’s birthday, from Hippocampus, An Imp of Aether. 279 pages of the late Wilum Pugmire’s writing in an affordable Kindle ebook.

* Lovecraft’s Letters to Wilfred B. Talman is said by Amazon to be shipping today.

* My own extensively annotated “The Cats of Ulthar”, new and free online. I think this ended up around 8,000 words. At 20 pages it should be printable as a five-sheet booklet.

* Revised and expanded 2019 edition of my big map of Lovecraft’s Providence. 5mb, printable. Added: Eddy’s Bookshop; Twin Islands (boyhood adventures); Fox Point (where he met and saw off visitors on the New York boat); St. John’s churchyard (a regular stop on ‘the tour’ for visitors).

* InnFest 2019. 20th-27th August 2019, “celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s 129th birthday. Visitors [to the famous Second Life ‘virtual world’] will enjoy shopping [for Lovecraftian ‘virtual crafts and fashions’] and experience a week of exploration, events and entertainment featuring a fine calendar of music and stage shows at the theatre and other [digital 3D recreations of] locations in Lovecraft Country.” Not sure about the knick-knacks, but the location-builds can be quite something. Especially now that Second Life has VR.

* Dark Adventure Radio Theatre have their new Mad Science old-time radio serial adaptations of Lovecraft ready to go, and when last heard planned to release the collection… “on or about Lovecraft’s birthday, 20th August 2019”.

* In Mexico, the state of Veracruz and the writer Miguel Angel Vartak have “organized an exhibition of Lovecraft books and stories, a reading of Lovecraft’s poetry, live music and several lectures”.

* I also spotted a special ‘H.P Lovecraft Birthday’ Guided Tour of Brooklyn.

Various other stuff that’s just too cynically spammy to mention, to do with offering marginal discounts on Lovecraft-labelled beer and modern RPGs and suchlike. Try harder next year.

And finally, not quite on the birthday, but on the closest weekend… the many-tentacled NecronomiCon Providence 2019 rises from the depths again on 22nd-25th August 2019. I seem to recall that the new Selected Essays and Selected Poems Lovecraft books are due for release to coincide with this?

The R.I. Historical Society had their usual annual H.P. Lovecraft: A Literary Life walk on the 17th August, rather than the 20th. If you missed it then they have a H.P. Lovecraft Literary Walking Tour in October: “October 19, 20, 26 & 27, 2019”.

Lovecraft’s Birthday: “The Cats of Ulthar” annotated

20 Tuesday Aug 2019

Posted by in Historical context, Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts, New discoveries, Scholarly works

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As mentioned here a few weeks ago, here is H.P. Lovecraft’s story “The Cats of Ulthar” (1920) with my full annotations. This is being issued for the first time today, to celebrate Lovecraft’s birthday.

“The Cats of Ulthar” annotated as a 20-page PDF.

The Adobe Caslon Pro and Garamond fonts have been embedded in the PDF, so you should have no problems with font substitution. For those who like print, simply use any imposition-capable printer driver to print this as a 5-sheet fold-ready booklet. Fold up, then slip it between card covers… and ideally have your resident kitty make a paw-print on the card cover in the blood of a Zoog.

“Air” by Myrta Alice Little

19 Monday Aug 2019

Posted by in Historical context

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I’ve discovered a curious ‘country fair’ story, “Air” by Myrta Alice Little. Her story was published a few months after she had two long visits from H.P. Lovecraft in summer 1921, when there was a faint prospect of marriage in the air. “Air” has an interesting if slight resemblance to Lovecraft’s later “Cool Air” (March 1926).

At this late date it’s somewhat difficult for a modern reader to parse the story while reading it, but here’s a plain plot summary which may help make more sense of it the first time around…

A wife visiting a summer State Fair as a competitor requires a room with four windows. She feels she’d die without ’em, due to the lack of cool air in the night. (This was before the era of air conditioning units). The head of the Fair has a Committee to allocate rooms efficiently to visitors, and the head of this committee reluctantly finds the wife and her husband such a rare thing. Especially rare in the hot and crowded summer season. On then finally going to bed the wife demands the husband open all the windows, but he finds them all sealed tightly shut by some mysterious force. In desperation to please his wife he smashes the glass bookcases in the dark of the night. As a result the wife is convinced that cool air must be circulating, and she dozes off blissfully ‘like a contented cat’. Only the next day does she discover that the windows had all remained sealed. The Room Committee chairman had let them have his sealed house which had four windows, his family having departed for the summer and thus tightly shut up the house (presumably nailing the windows, which one could do in those days of sturdy wood frames). The wife is suitably chastened by the experience, and the husband is glad to pay for the damages.