15 Monday Oct 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Lovecraftian physical model-maker and stop-motion animator The Lone Animator has a new book of his monsters available… My Stop-Motion Monster Puppet Menagerie (2018).
[ Video removed – no longer works ]
15 Monday Oct 2018
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
* 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.
14 Sunday Oct 2018
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
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).
14 Sunday Oct 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
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.
13 Saturday Oct 2018
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
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.
13 Saturday Oct 2018
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
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”.
13 Saturday Oct 2018
Posted in Scholarly works
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”.
12 Friday Oct 2018
Posted in Historical context, Picture postals
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].
12 Friday Oct 2018
Posted in Historical context, Odd scratchings
The DMR blog has a new post, “The Sword and Sorcery Legacy of Donald A. Wollheim: Part One”, which seems likely to be followed by more. [Update: Part Two] It points to Wollheim’s editorship of The Avon Fantasy Reader, and thus his role in keeping sword & sorcery and weird fantasy available on the news-stands in a post-war era (1948-52) which increasingly seemed to have lost its taste for such things. Or perhaps Wollheim had cannily spotted that there was still a market demand for such tales, but that the market was no longer being served by other editors and magazines. Weird Tales was still around, just about, but was being run into the ground and would cease in 1954.
If you want to see what the title was like, Archive.org has what seems to be a complete collection of scans of Wollheim’s digest The Avon Fantasy Reader. A sampling of the issues there shows that the Reader wasn’t just sword & sorcery, and Wollheim widened his readership by covering a range of material. He often also slipped in some H.P. Lovecraft reprints, including both “Silver Key” stories and two ghost-written stories (“Yig” and “Eons”).
12 Friday Oct 2018
Posted in Odd scratchings
Stockholm H. P. Lovecraft Festival, Sweden, set for November 2018.
“The programme is a work in progress but at this juncture includes the short subject “Hypnos” (Juho Aittainen, 2016) and the feature They Remain (Philipp Gelatt, 2018). We will also have the honour of welcoming director Ludvig Gur and actor Kola Krauze who will tell us about their Lovecraft adaptation “The Outsider”, filmer in the Stockholm area this summer. After we wrap up the film screenings and discussions at Serieteket (around 7pm) those interested can reconvene at the pub Queen’s Head, Drottninggatan 108, for something to eat and drink. We also have a Lovecraft quiz ready to be unleashed, if enough people are interested. If you feel like testing your mettle please drop a line to lovecraftfestival@gmail.com and register for the quiz!”
12 Friday Oct 2018
Posted in New books
Just arrived on the Amazon Kindle, Famous Someday, a collection of biographical R. E. Howard articles originally published in The Cimmerian. The articles arose from trying to track down people in Cross Plains who might have known Howard, back in the day. And finding them, it seems. The book has illustrations in colour, and some extras.
11 Thursday Oct 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The Disgusting Food Museum opens 29th October 2018, in the capital of Sweden. Includes tastings. The Museum is temporary until January 2019, but appears to be something more than a student stunt or a front for animal-rights politiking…
