Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography

28 Monday Jan 2019

Posted by in Historical context, New books, REH, Scholarly works

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One book I seem to have unintentionally overlooked, in my blog’s rolling survey of such in Sept/Oct of last year, is Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography (Oct 2018). The new book is intended as a reliable and well-written introductory biography for those new to Howard and his work, and who are not historians. It weighs in at 250 pages as a trade paperback or budget Kindle ebook. There’s a foreword by Rusty Burke, who praises the author and notes that the text was peer reviewed by Howard scholars. Howard’s fiction is stepped through in chronological sequence, with judicious plot summaries. Lovecraft and the backroom editorial matters at Weird Tales are covered adequately. The ‘deep background’ on Howard’s family history and early childhood is briefly surveyed in only a few pages, as this material can now be found elsewhere in good form.

More details on Ave atque Vale

28 Monday Jan 2019

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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S. T. Joshi has a new blog post, which usefully pins down the differences between the forthcoming-soon book Ave atque Vale: Reminiscences of H. P. Lovecraft and 1998’s Lovecraft Remembered…

“we have included most of the material in that [1998] volume (some items were omitted for copyright issues; others for editorial reasons) and included several newly discovered memoirs not included in Peter’s volume.”

Right, so it sounds like the Lovecraft scholar would still need both. The new book will be a $30 trade paperback, Joshi states, as well as a hardback.

Should one be considering sampling some of Dunsany’s vast output, on whom Joshi is also the expert, he usefully notes…

“Darrell Schweitzer’s “How Much of Dunsany Is Worth Reading?” (first published in Studies in Weird Fiction, Fall 1991)”

This has been reprinted in the new The Green Book: Writings on Irish Gothic, Supernatural and Fantastic Literature (#11, 2018). It can also be found in Schweitzer’s essay collection Windows of the Imagination: Essays on Fantastic Literature.

Selling at PulpFest 2019

26 Saturday Jan 2019

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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Selling at PulpFest 2019, the official blog post telling potential sellers and dealers exactly what they get and when. This year there seems potential for selling items from beyond the pulps themselves…

We’ll be exploring the profound effect of the pulps on popular culture across the globe at this year’s PulpFest. The fiction and art of the pulps reverberated through a wide variety of mediums — comic books, movies, paperbacks and genre fiction, television, men’s adventure magazines, radio drama, and even video, anime, and role-playing games. Please join us at PulpFest 2019 for “Children of the Pulps and Other Stories.”

Friday “picture postals” from Lovecraft: the Rhode Island letter-carrier (postman)

25 Friday Jan 2019

Posted by in Historical context, Picture postals

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The typical letter-carrier (in British parlance, ‘the postman’, in American ‘the mail-man’) of the 1900s, delivering the mail to houses.

One almost wonders if, at times, Lovecraft even had his own personal letter-carrier to haul up the hill his daily load of correspondence, subscription magazines and amateur journals, and occasional books. No doubt his aunts also had their share of correspondence and packages.

In full Colour

24 Thursday Jan 2019

Posted by in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts

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It’s official. SpectreVision has announced the leading actor Nicolas Cage will be starring in a big budget movie adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Colour out of Space”. The film’s director will be Richard Stanley. He hasn’t directed a feature film since the early 90s (Dust Devil) after becoming entangled in a studio-doomed Island of Doctor Moreau reboot and falling out of features. But he has done documentaries, such as The Secret Glory (Nazi Grail hunting) and The White Darkness (Haitian voodoo) and The Otherworld (modern-day paranormal investigators in Cathar France). Principal photography on Colour is said to be starting next month, and the press-release lists a large phalanx of Producers who’ll keep the production on track. I don’t recognise any of the other actor names, apart from Cage, but it’s obviously going to be a quality production.

Of Poe and tentacles

23 Wednesday Jan 2019

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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A thoughtful new short survey of Poe in the comics, “Edgar Allan Poe: Immortality Is But Ubiquity in Time”. Though in its opening paragraphs, in seeming to follow only the elite academic sentiment on ‘reputation’, it overlooks the huge popular grassroots upswell of interest across America. I’m no expert on Poe, but from reading around Lovecraft I get the impression that Poe was hugely popular at the grassroots from roughly 1909 to 1929, after which many tastes changed and interest was dampened by the onset of the Great Depression.

The same comics blog has an amusing “Tentacle Tuesday” feature-post, in which tentacles from long-gone comics are on display. It’s worth plugging into your RSS news reader, though be warned that some pictures are “Not Safe for Work” in terms of nudity and tentacular probing / politically correctness.

Paperwork

22 Tuesday Jan 2019

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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This may be useful for Lovecraft scholars. Paperwork is free open-source desktop software that helps a scholar get to grips with and search inside their PDF folders. It copies and OCRs your PDFs and other documents, puts the new OCR versions in its new C:\Users\YOURNAME\papers\ folder, and then searches across them quickly.

It has an interface that is slick but is difficult to like, yet doesn’t demand you join a social network or hook your data into the cloud.

It could also be used simply as a batch OCR tool and folder-watcher. To create OCR’d PDFs to be searched by other more powerful desktop search tools — such as dtSearch Desktop.

There appears to be no support for German “black letter” OCR in Paperwork, so it may not handle your folder full of scans of the Necronomicon and similar.