13 Thursday Sep 2018
Posted in Films & trailers
A trailer for the forthcoming documentary film “Clark Ashton Smith: The Emperor of Dreams”, which according to Derrick Hussey is set for public release “this fall by Hippocampus Press”, presumably as a DVD.
[vimeo 281911751 w=580 h=326]
12 Wednesday Sep 2018
Posted in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
“The fantastic geology of Verne, Poe and H.P. Lovecraft” (August 2018) is a new 70-minute video of a talk in Spanish by Dr. Blanca Martinez Garcia. Garcia is a geologist and researcher at the Aranzadi Society of Sciences.
11 Tuesday Sep 2018
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
A new blog post from S. T. Joshi, which reveals a major new book…
David E. Schultz and I are close to completing work on a comprehensive volume of memoirs of Lovecraft, under the title Ave atque Vale: Reminiscences of H. P. Lovecraft. This will be a new publication by Necronomicon Press.”
It promises to be more comprehensive than 1998’s Lovecraft Remembered, and will be annotated…
“and we have annotated the individual items to correct errors and provide other useful information”.
Joshi also plans to self-publish a book of essays titled The Development of the Weird Tale, with some new essays. Of the titles, “Samuel Loveman: Shelley in Brooklyn” (previously in a booklet on weird poetry) sounds rather interesting to Lovecraft scholars, as does the end multi-essay section “Lovecraft and Some Lost Classics of the Supernatural”.
11 Tuesday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The Rhode Island School of Design (RSID) Museum Collection catalogue is now online. A blank search shows they currently have 12,903 item records online which also have images on them. No results for “Lovecraft”, and almost no local photography or scenes. Not a single “cat” either, which is surprising in so large a collection. Some “Roman” and “Egyptian” items, which we can probably assume Lovecraft once saw, but nothing that seems of interest in relation to his work.
But I did stumble on their record for Gregory Amenoff‘s wonderful “The Starry Floor” (1994).
They only have the one picture by him, but looking at images of his other work from the 1990s and 2000s, I’d say he’s definitely worth a look if you collect Lovecraftian art.
11 Tuesday Sep 2018
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works
I’m pleased to see that Jason Eckhardt’s graphic novel of Lovecraft’s life was published last summer (2017), with what is said to be a well-researched script by Sam Gafford. Some Notes on a Nonentity: The Life of H. P. Lovecraft eventually weighed in at 118 pages of art. It covers the entirety of Lovecraft’s life, using the clever framework of a stage-play directed by HPL himself.
Amazingly, according to the writer…
“Much to my surprise, the project has been passed on by every publisher and agent I’ve contacted. I’m truly gobsmacked at this as I thought it would be an easy sell especially considering the quality of Jason’s artwork.”
The book is still only in hardcover, at present, and at an eye-watering price of £40 here in the UK via Amazon. The UK-based publisher PS Publishing currently has it listed at a more reasonable £25 plus shipping. It looks great and I’d imagine it would do rather well selling as a $6 Kindle ebook for 10″ digital tablets, once the print-run is eventually sold out at PS.
It doesn’t appear that PS has sent out review-copies yet, as there are no real reviews online at present, other than few comments from buyers at Amazon and a brief promo-blurb at Publishers’ Weekly.
11 Tuesday Sep 2018
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft (2010) is newly available in Italian translation, as Contro la religione. Gli scritti atei di H.P. Lovecraft, edited by S.T. Joshi. A stylishly Italian cover, and an introduction by no less than the late Christopher Hitchens.
11 Tuesday Sep 2018
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
The forthcoming academic collection New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature (Nov 2018), on Lovecraft’s famous essay Supernatural Horror, now has free chapter abstracts and page previews of chapters.
“Lovecraft’s Debt to Dandyism” may be an interesting chapter to some, in terms of the life — though I’ve now seen it and the author is clearly rather too dependent on Joshi’s I am Providence while failing to really connect a general discussion of the history of dandyism with Lovecraft himself. Key bits of evidence are not mentioned, such as Lovecraft’s Clinton St. Sunday-morning ‘dandy walks’ with his circle, in which he sported an ancestral cane.
The book also has two surveys of how Supernatural Horror was received by later critics.
11 Tuesday Sep 2018
Posted in Censorship, Odd scratchings
Apparently comic conventions across America are having to change their name, following a bizarre and absurd legal ruling that “Comic Con” is a trademark and infringement can carry a $4m liability. Techdirt has the details.
Presumably similar legal fears, unfounded or not, will now cause all other ‘Cons’ to have to change the ‘Con’ bit of their names. Since the same legal arm-twisting could be tried on conventions other than those for comics. Necronomicon Providence should be safe though, as the -con there is part of another name, arising from fiction that’s in the public domain. Perhaps that’s the trick for conventions — find a new public-domain name that naturally ends in ‘con’ and is associated with your topic.
11 Tuesday Sep 2018
This may be of interest to Lovecraft artists who use 3D. A new all-terrain height-map of Antarctica has just been released, with a mapping resolution that’s high enough to spot one of Lovecraft’s Star-Headed Old Ones and possibly even to count the number of points on his star (2m resolution in rocky parts). There’s a Google-Maps-like Web Viewer of this summer 2015-16 snapshot of the mighty continent’s terrain.
Presumably the data sets will soon be loaded to the main 3D terrain download service TerrainParty, which is free and public, from where you’ll be able to get it with relative ease to creative 3D landscape software such as Vue, Terragen, World Creator Pro etc. And you can then create any true-life vista of Antarctica you want, without risk of frost-bite or shoggoth attack.
10 Monday Sep 2018
Posted in Scholarly works
Journal of Geek Studies. Not peer-reviewed, but with editorial oversight and an approval process. Studies by geeks, not of geeks.
10 Monday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
Final Guys Podcast has just posted a new interview (MP3 link) with the well-known Lovecraft audiobook reader Wayne June.
Here’s a sample of his gravelly voicework, on Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls”…
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0eDis-w-90?rel=0&start=22&w=560&h=315]
10 Monday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
A few nights ago a new orchestral work by Guillaume Connesson premiered in Germany, “The Cities of Lovecraft” (aka “Les Cités de Lovecraft”, aka “Les Trois Cités de Lovecraft”). The National German Radio service (NDR) now has a complete audio recording of the 25 minute performance online and this is accessible from outside Germany.
Update: Seems to have been taken down. The Lovecraft work opened the recording I linked to, but a few days later NDR broke the link totally and sent the traffic to their homepage. I guess their online “listen again” service only lasts for a week? But there’s an Archive.org community audio backup available here.
Here’s my approximate translation of the key descriptive section in the venue’s German programme notes brochure, with some descriptive additions of my own which reflect my hearing of the work:
Celephais: In the opening movement, Randolph Carter goes to meet his old friend Kuranes in the shining port city of Celephais. Brass fanfares describe the bronze gate through which he enters the dream-city, before a melody of violins evokes the weaving and bustling dream-life of the city’s streets. In the section “The Temple of Turquoise” colourful trumpets express Carter’s encountering of pagan celebrations, followed by a quiet chorale titled the “Rose and Crystal Palace of the Seventy Delicacies” as he enters ascends to more refined parts of the city. The “Seven Processions of the Orchid Crowned Priests” are then encountered, and given a great crescendo to end the first movement.
Kadath: In contrast to the radiant first movement, the scene then shifts to “Kadath”, the gloomy outpost of ancient gods located in an icy region of Antarctica named “The Plateau of Leng”. Lamenting violas emerge from the noise of the wind machine, then twelve-tone passages disseminate culminating chords (so-called “clusters”). Nyarlathotep, the eerie envoy of the ancient gods, approaches a throne room… He is given voice in a solo viola that sings and ripples in half and a quarter tones above kettle-drums and mad titterings.
The Golden Dream-City: Without a pause, a third short movement follows: Mr. Lovecraft begins to drift up from his nightmare slumber and the scene of his dream begins to change into his familiar dream-vision of a distant mighty city in the golden sunset. This is briefly evoked in the form of an intoxicating short dance, but some orgiastic overtones emerge in it at the very end.