09 Sunday Dec 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
“… a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting — under suitable precautions — of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront.” — from “The Shadow over Innsmouth”.
08 Saturday Dec 2018
Posted in Odd scratchings
New on Archive.org this week, a clean scan of The Phantagraph for July 1936 (Vol. 4 No. 4), with the Lovecraft Fungi poem “Nostalgia” (c. 1930?) on the cover. Also a short but useful signposting article on ‘weird music’, as it stood in the mid 1930s.
After the first substantial issue, July-August 1935 (“Volume 4, No. 1” because it was deemed a continuation of the Bulletin of the Terrestrial Fantascience Guild) the Hevelin collection also has some complete online scans of Donald Wollheim’s Phantagraph from the 1930s. Though with the archive’s ‘plastic hold-down’ scanner-strip visible across the scans…
* November-December 1935. (Letter from Lovecraft praising an article by C. W. Lonsdell on writing good science fiction; Lovecraft poem “The Dweller”; tongue-in-cheek article-squib “How I Get My Inspiration”, on how to ‘write Lovecraftian’ for Weird Tales).
* June 1937. (Lovecraft poem “Halloween in a Suburb”)
* July 1937. (Lovecraft poem “The Well”, and Lovecraft’s c. 1920-21 prose poem “Ex Oblivione”)
* August 1937.
Archive.org has one 1940s issue, and the Hevelin collection has a number of 1940s issues.
The FictionMags Index has a complete index and tables of contents. The above links are to the only online full scans that I can find from the 1930s.
In 1967 a slim hardcover collected the very best of the publication as Operation: Phantasy. The Best from The Phantagraph (Table-of-Contents).
I’ll add links to this page as and when I find future complete scans of the 1930s issues.
07 Friday Dec 2018
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
“Edward Gorey: master of the macabre” The Spectator Australia reviews the new book Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey. The reviewer echoes the complaint of one of the Amazon reviewers when he says that “There’s a great deal of repetition in this book”, but finds it assiduously thorough.
Perhaps that opens an opportunity for someone to make a heavily abridged graphic novel, or a heavily illustrated abridged version, at some point?
07 Friday Dec 2018
Following the relative success of my recent “Maps for Lovecraft’s letters” blog post, I’ve gone back over my older posts and made/added a new category tag, “Maps”. Clicking this link will now get you all the relevant posts.
07 Friday Dec 2018
Posted in Odd scratchings, REH
The dates for the Robert E. Howard Days 2019 have been announced: 7th and 8th June 2019 in Cross Plains, Texas. All the regular events, plus the promise of… “a few surprises for you”.
Ben Freiberg has a fine and seemingly comprehensive online collection of recordings of talks and panels from the ‘Howard Days’ held in previous years, with good audio.
07 Friday Dec 2018
Posted in New discoveries, Picture postals
Did Lovecraft ever receive ‘picture postals’ from R. E. Howard, dropping through the mailbox in Providence? Perhaps. Although Cross Plains, Texas, does not seem to have been the sort of place one would make a postcard of — unless perhaps one could do something artistic with sagebrush and cattle and a sunset. But if they did once make such things as postcards, then it seems that a view of the town bank and main row of stores might have been the standard ‘town view’…
Rogers photo, 1920s, newly repaired and colourised.
I had a dig around on Archive.org and found the town’s water-tower, as seen behind the stores in the above picture, in full-length and in detail. One can see figures standing on the top railing and sitting on the bottom struts, for scale…
06 Thursday Dec 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
Tecnicus Street Studios has recently been hand-sculpting Lovecraft and a tentacular Azathoth, and has well-lit speeding-up timelapse videos of the process.
05 Wednesday Dec 2018
Posted in Scholarly works
* T. W. Melvaer, “Imagining the Unimaginable: Lovecraft in Popular Culture”, Masters dissertation for the Norway Technical and Natural Sciences University, 2018. (Surveys the use of Lovecraft and Cthulhu in recent popular culture: Rick and Morty; South Park; Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham; and the videogame Darkest Dungeon).
* J. R. C. Pacheco, “Apropiaciones Lovecraftianas de temas teosoficos”, Melancolia, Vol. 3, 2018. (In Spanish. A student of the Center for the Study of Western Esotericism discusses theosophical references in Lovecraft, especially… “Blavatskian anthropogenesis and the myth of the Book of Dzyan”).
04 Tuesday Dec 2018
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
The new book Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States is one of those elite $115 essay collections seemingly aimed at collecting dust in University and (in this case) ecclesiastical libraries.
I’ve only just noticed it, and see that it appeared in the summer of 2018. It’s only of interest here for the one chapter: “Lovecraft’s Things: Sinister Souvenirs from Other Worlds” by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. Curiously an essay of the same title, and by the same author, also appeared in the similar (though now rather less costly) book collection The Age of Lovecraft (2016), so the 2018 essay seems to be a reprint — though I suppose it could also be revised and/or expanded version.
For those wondering what’s in that essay, since the new book has no previews as yet… after introductory and theoretical ‘thing theory’ sections, the final third of Weinstock’s Age of Lovecraft essay surveyed Lovecraft’s re-use of the stock Gothic props of the Castle (“Rats”), the Portrait (“Pickman”), and the Forbidden Book (guess), especially in terms of their uncanny quasi-personification in Lovecraft’s texts. It is suggested that such a form of personification might raise in Lovecraft’s readers a dimly resonant recall of a superstitious world, a world in which liminal objects and object-places (such as castles) had once been psychologically ‘enchanted’ with both dread and wonder. Such personification of earthly ‘things’ might also be understood as foreshadowing Lovecraft’s later deployment of monstrous cosmic forces in his fiction, outer entities that indifferently understand humans only as ‘things’. (The essay somewhat feeds into academic theory’s current notions of trans-species psychology, a future eco-animism, and a post-human planet).
03 Monday Dec 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings
New on Archive.org, the Amateur Correspondent for May-June 1937 (Vol. 2, No. 1), with H.P. Lovecraft on the cover in the now well-known Virgil Finlay cover art. Inside this issue of “the magazine for the amateur fantasy writer” is a lively short tribute to Lovecraft from E. Hoffmann Price. Lovecraft had died a few months earlier in March 1937, so this issue was a tribute issue. But not wholly so when one looks inside — the reader senses that the news of the death was then still slowly percolating through fandom.
Archive.org also has the Amateur Correspondent for November-December 1937 (Vol. 2, No. 3) with Clark Ashton Smith giving lengthy advice to writers on “Atmosphere in Weird Fiction”.
03 Monday Dec 2018
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
A newly-republished essay on “The Political Thought of Edgar Allan Poe” which has until now been locked up in an obscure paper journal published in the 1990s. It seems like a useful addition for those reading Joshi’s Decline of the West, the key book on Lovecraft’s politics and philosophy, and who might be left wanting an overview of what Lovecraft could have taken from his idol Poe — beyond the obvious inheritance of the fictional style/settings and the aesthetic repertoire.
Poe’s room at the University of Virginia. A Creative Commons Attribution image which is set to be removed in the Flickr-purge in January 2019.
02 Sunday Dec 2018
Posted in Unnamable
Oh dear. In the latest Scientific American the lead editorial article seriously suggests that we ditch the un-spellable and un-pronounceable “anthropocene” blahword… and replace it with something even more un-pronounceable…
the Chthulucene … an age in which we teach ourselves to live in full and rich harmony
Not to be confused with the Cthulhucene, in which Plush Cthulhu will gather around the campfires with happy rainbow-tailed LOLcats, to intersection-ally knit muesli together and sing ‘Kumbaya my Lord…’ while cuddling their therapy-shoggoths.
Judging by the piece, the editors of Scientific American are being serious and obviously have no clue at all about Cthulhu, and why he might make their dippy “Chthulucene” proposal just a little bit untenable for a mass audience.