New books on Indian genre publications

16 Tuesday Oct 2018

Posted by in New books

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The first such book in English, Saif Eqbal’s Adventure comics and youth cultures in India, offers “a history and ethnography of adventure comic books for young people in India” with a strong focus on home-grown superheroes, detectives and some outright space sci-fi heroes (although I hear that hard space sci-fi is not very popular in India, as the mass markets are culturally attuned to fantasy). Routledge has managed to lumber the book with a very offputting cover, which must have taken them all of five minutes to slap together.

But the Contents suggest a useful brisk overview…

1. Action India
2. The Making of Modern Mythologies
3. The Golden Age of the Indian Superhero
4. Gendering Graphics
5. A Haven of Super Creativity
6. The Fantastic Familiar
7. The State of the Nation
8. A Forensics of Evil
9. Readers’ Worlds
10. In One of my Dreams, I Defeated America
11. Future Presents.
Glossary of Key Indian Adventure Comic Book Characters.
Index

For a historical take that stretches back further, there are essays on Indian genre in the first third of the recent summer 2018 collection Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories. Again, it’s billed as as a first, “the first substantial study of genre fiction in the Indian languages”. Though there was the 2008 article “Indian pulp fiction in English: A preliminary overview from Dutt to Dé” which starts in the 19th century. That article is paywalled but there’s a very long summary here with lots of name-checks.

I’m not sure how well Lovecraft fits into this cultural nexus, and a few minutes of searching for variants on India translations Lovecraft had no results. But Routledge’s Genre Fiction of New India: post-millennial receptions of “weird” narratives (2016) covers the scene in the post-2000 period. Apparently ‘the weird’ is quite commercially successful.

A new Tom Shippey interview

16 Tuesday Oct 2018

Posted by in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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No mention of Lovecraft, but readers of this blog will likely be interested in a new and excellent 90 minute interview with Tom Shippey, leading Tolkien scholar. Shippey is on top form. As well as various acutely perceptive Tolkien observations, other topics include the establishment attitudes to the study of genre literature, then the real historical Vikings and their recent TV adaptations, and heroism. It’s a dual presenter podcast, but the jokey ‘lots-a-laffs’ approach that such shows commonly exhibit is suppressed for such a heavyweight guest and only creeps back in toward the very end of the show.

Lovecraft and ‘heavy metal’

16 Tuesday Oct 2018

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Don Herron today notices that Lovecraft may have been the first to use the term “heavy metal” outside the realm of chemistry. Lovecraft used it to Morton in February 1924, and in the sense of money — heavy coins, jokingly imagining that Weird Tales editor Edwin Baird was paid in physical bags of heavy coin, the ‘heavy metal’. In the early 1920s Lovecraft usually picked up such slang from his boy printer and fellow fairground-carouser “Wisecrack Sandusky” who was an expert at such ‘slick’ talking.

Interestingly, when William S. Burroughs revived “heavy metal” as a counter-culture term in the early 1960s, it was at first also linked with money…

“In the 1962 novel, The Soft Machine, he introduces the character “Uranian Willy, the Heavy Metal Kid”. His next novel in 1964, Nova Express, develops this theme further […] “With their diseases and orgasm drugs and their sexless parasite life forms — Heavy Metal People of Uranus wrapped in cool blue mist of vaporized bank notes — And the Insect People of Minraud with metal music.”

As well as seemingly originating on a planet with an atmosphere of “vaporized bank notes”, “Uranian Willy, the Heavy Metal Kid” is also tangentially connected with cash in terms of his Soft Machine activities. An ex-mobster of the Nova Mob, turned renegade mob-buster, in the novel he devises plans to… “Wise up all the marks everywhere. Show them the rigged wheel”. ‘Marks’ being the American fairground and underworld mob term for a gullible punter who can easily be relived of their cash via a scam. And the “rigged wheel” being the common fairground sideshow wheel, subtly ‘fixed’ so as to cheat the ‘marks’. Burroughs thus seems to have been picking up on a tradition of youthful fairground slang from the pre-war mobster era, of which Lovecraft had probably been aware in the early 1920s. Possibly there was also, in such fairground and arcade environments, the role of the “Heavy Metal Kid” — being the trusted assistant who would cart away the bags of coins from the sideshows, slot machines and pinball tables.

This further suggests that Lovecraft was not only impishly imagining editor Edwin Baird being paid in physical bags of heavy coin, but that he had in mind that the coins were the very ones that had been passed over the counters to pay for Weird Tales.

In the Steamy Amazon

15 Monday Oct 2018

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Since many readers here may be small publishers, and/or book reviewers, it may be useful to get the gist of Amazon’s latest book review policies. Here, so far as I can fathom and without reams of legalese, is the current state of play…

* To post any Customer Review, “you must have spent at least $50 on Amazon.com using a valid credit or debit card in the past 12 months”.

* No Customer Review can be posted for any unverified Amazon purchase, unless it’s a book or comic.

* Publishers sending “free or discounted copies of their books to readers”, for review, should not explicitly state that they require an Amazon review. The same goes for online giveaways to your fans.

* The book reviewer chosen should not be an employee, close friend, family member, or similar. Nor should the reviewer promote other items by such people (e.g. “If you like Smith’s work, also check out Jones!”).

Added to Open Lovecraft

15 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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* A. Sheedy, “Perverted by language: weird fiction and the semiotic anomalies of a genre”, 2016 PhD thesis for the University of Tasmania, Australia. (Focusses on short stories that deploy “nameless things and thingless names”, inc. by Lovecraft. Chapters three and four usefully discuss this in relation to the library as a characteristic place of weird fiction).

Comics panel from Obscure Cities: The Walls of Samaris I.

“I Am Providence” in German – volume 2

14 Sunday Oct 2018

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H. P. Lovecraft – Leben und Werk 2 is now listed on Amazon UK for publication 1st November 2018. It’s the second volume in the German translation of S.T. Joshi’s full and excellent Lovecraft biography I Am Providence. Volume One in German translation was H. P. Lovecraft – Leben und Werk, Band 1: 1890–1924 and appeared in October 2017, having been first announced in late 2012.

The German Amazon store also has volume 2 listed as pre-ordering, but has a later shipping date of 30th November 2018.

Is the interior of the mirror meant to be solid black? Or is that due to the poor screen I’m currently having to use (my hi-colour monitor died, after a decade of use).

Bookplates and Small Printmaking Competition

14 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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Sint-Niklaas 2019 International Bookplates and Small Printmaking Competition. Free entry, serious prizes. All methods welcome, for the making of bookplates, though you do have to actually print-and-send on paper. Judging by previous entries, it’s not a ‘watercolours of twee bowls of violets’ type of art contest, and they’re certainly very open to the macabre and gothic. Looks good. Deadline: 1st November 2018.

The Gothic Revival, revived

13 Saturday Oct 2018

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I’m pleased to see that Strawberry Hill, birthplace of the Gothic Revival in the personage of Horace Walpole, has been restored. Walpole initiated the Gothic novel, with his The Castle of Otranto (1764). The 2005-2015 restoration of the house is finished, and the curators are now able to also restore much of Walpole’s original collection to their original places around the house…

“A complex exhibition involving more than 49 lenders, including a significant number of private collectors, its principal aim is to display Walpole’s pieces in their original settings”.

This major exhibition, “Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill: Masterpieces from Horace Walpole’s Collection”, is at Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham, England. It opens on 20th October and runs through to 24th February 2019. The location of the house is about ten miles west of the centre of London, in a district of London that is safe for tourists to visit.

This exhibition could be your only chance to fully savour some of the original physical context for the birth of the neo-Gothic and the Gothic novel.

Lovecraft in the prism of the image

13 Saturday Oct 2018

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New in October 2017, and seemingly not yet noticed outside France, the book Lovecraft au prisme de l’image: litterature, cinema et arts graphiques [Lovecraft in the prism of the image: literature, cinema and the graphic arts] (Green Face, 2017). Green Face is a well-regarded and genuine small press, and their book has sixteen essays on Lovecraft’s visual afterlives among makers of pictures, movies, comics and more.

Translation of some of the essay titles:

PICTURES:

“New notes – distance: 1995-2012 – on the poetics of excess at Lovecraft and its graphic solutions”.

“The textual and pictorial fables in At the Mountains of Madness: a genealogical approach to the Lovecraft novella”.

“”The strange and disturbing paintings by Nicholas Roerich”: the pictorial referent and his functions in At the Mountains of Madness“.

“Lovecraft, painter of the unthinkable”.

“The image and Lovecraft”.

CINEMA:

“H.P. Lovecraft as outsider cinema – what changes?”

“The Truth About The Charles Dexter Ward Case: Fright and Excess in The Haunted Palace (Roger Corman, 1963) and The Resurrected (Dan O’Bannon, 1991)”.

“Lovecraft on screen: adaptations, tributes, rewrites”.

“Presences of the unspeakable: found footage and poetics Lovecraftienne“.

COMICS:

“Neonomicon: monstrosity and adaptation after Howard Phillips Lovecraft”. [Alan Moore]

“Lovecraft in the colors of nightmare: a study of Alberto Breccia”.

TRANSMEDIA:

“Adaptation and Transmediality: Kadath, the Unknown City“.

“Howard Phillips Lovecraft: God of Modern Popular Culture”.

“Brett Rutherford’s Night Gaunts: Between Illustration and (Re) Creation”.

“The Necronomicons of H.R. Giger”.

Alfred Galpin papers

13 Saturday Oct 2018

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Published 2016, a full listing and “Guide to the Alfred Galpin papers 1920-1983, at Brown University Library”.

“The Alfred Galpin papers primarily contain autographed and typed correspondence to and from fans and Lovecraft biographers inquiring about his reminiscences and correspondence with Lovecraft and more broadly their own personal day to day struggles with travel, finances, and writing. The collection also includes an Italian program for the fortieth anniversary (1977) of Lovecraft’s passing, a German pamphlet, photographs, photocopies of Lovecraft publications in amateur journalism which include The Rainbow and The United Amateur, newspaper clippings in English, French and Italian, and a full Italian newspaper in which the obituary of Galpin appears”.

Friday “picture postals” from Lovecraft: Gorham

12 Friday Oct 2018

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Gorham Silversmiths, Providence. Possible employer of H.P. Lovecraft’s father as a salesman or buyer. Although according to S.T. Joshi’s I Am Providence, the only evidence we have for that is Sonia’s hazy 1948 memories of what Lovecraft told her in the mid 1920s. On the other hand, the draft of “Innsmouth” might seem to show that Lovecraft had a special niche in his heart for men who were buyers for jewellery firms…

“Before I knew it I found myself telling the fellow that I was a jewellery buyer for a Cleveland firm, and preparing myself to shew a merely professional interest in what I should see.” [in the Marsh Refinery showroom].