08 Saturday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works
Robert McParland’s new book on Myth and Magic in Heavy Metal Music, a side-project from his recent book on the history of the uses of science fiction in 1970s rock music.
08 Saturday Sep 2018
Posted in Odd scratchings
Up for auction at Heritage Auctions, A Lovecraft family Bible, (apparently) owned by Lovecraft’s mother early in her marriage. This popped up in the news circa 2014, and there was some scepticism. It’s now up for auction with five days to go. Claimed to have been a wedding gift to Lovecraft’s mother, and with an apparent marriage certificate and a couple of other items in it.
07 Friday Sep 2018
Posted in Picture postals
Benefit St., Providence, with what appears to be a roving ice-cream pedlar and his cart.
Appears to be a view north along Benefit Street, from the point where Angell Street comes down the hill (from the right of the picture) and ends, and then drops down the hill as Thomas Street (the downward opening of which is seen on the left of the picture). See part of the name “Angell St.” written above the lamp-glass…
There’s a glass plate of the scene, at what appears to be an earlier point in time (1890s?)…
07 Friday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Black Gate magazine has just posted “The Beauty in Horror and Sadness: An Interview with Darrell Schweitzer”, scholar of the fantastic and also a practitioner with poems, stories and novels.
It’s part of their “interview series which engages contemporary authors & artists on the theme of ‘Art & Beauty in Weird/Fantasy Fiction'”.
07 Friday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
I see that the new graphic novel of H.P. Lovecraft’s life is available now for the Kindle, titled He Who Wrote in the Darkness. The book is by Alex Nikolavitch and Gervasio-Aon-Lee, and is due in hardback 2nd October 2018 from Pegasus Books. $26 / £19 for 112 pages.
However, Amazon UK has a Kindle edition which is available right now. Nice to see a book get its Kindle edition first, although sadly the price is hardly lower than the hardback. I’ve asked the publisher if it’s possible to send my Kindle HD 10″ a digital review-copy.
“He Who Wrote in the Darkness” opens with a partial but factual recounting of Lovecraft’s New York City period. The reader also sees scenes from his earlier life and the stories, deftly woven into the pages at the points in time when Lovecraft dreams them up or remembers them. The art is simple but clear, and the faces are expressive in the samples. The toony style reminds me a little of the Dreamlands / Kadath comics adaptations which were nicely done in the 1990s by Jason Thompson and published in full in 2012. It looks very promising.
Incidentally, what is the short name for a comic book bio-pic? For movies it’s obviously bio-pic, for graphic novels… not sure. ‘Biography’ seems too grand for many rather slight and under-researched graphic novels, though some (such as the recent chunky Alan Turing one, The Imitation Game) do deserve the term. ‘Bio-comic’ is too clunky and also dismissive sounding. ‘Graphic novel biography’ is both clunky and too ponderous. ‘Life story’ is not going to cover all biographies, which may only cover part of the life. Comixology hasn’t cracked it, putting The Imitation Game under ‘biography’ and ‘historical’. Combining biography and comic as ‘biomic’ sounds like the name of a Saturday Morning Animation’s kid-robot. So I guess we’re stuck with ‘biography’.
06 Thursday Sep 2018
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
The Wormwoodiana blog has just posted a new long interview with James Machin, about his new book Weird Fiction in Britain 1880-1939. It’s the same book I had a quick look at yesterday. I must say that Machin makes the book sound much more interesting than the promo blurb and dry chapter-abstracts from the publisher…
The one thing I really lit on is the foundational and persistent influence of literary Decadence … Brian Stableford remarked somewhere that the Decadence of the 1890s never really died, it just moved to the U.S. with Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, etc. This observation really struck me, and in a way the entire book is more or less built on Stableford’s insight here.
… genre snobbery is of course still very much with us: I’m amazed at the contamination anxiety, and the pains some prominent contemporary writers will take to insist that their science fiction or fantasy novels aren’t science fiction or fantasy novels. They endlessly tie themselves up in knots, desperate to avoid the stigma of genre.
Yes, a recent Lovecraft Geek podcast had a question about why Asimov apparently disdained Lovecraft. Robert Price didn’t suggest what I think was the underlying reason — I suspect it was mostly a fear of genre contamination. Asimov had seen horror invading science-fiction in the cheap 1950s drive-in movies, and he and his fellows such as Arthur C. Clarke didn’t want the same thing to happen in the literary ideas-led world of science fiction as well. Thus, Lovecraft had to be kept out of the pantheon.
06 Thursday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
“The Human Fear of Total Knowledge”, an excellent long article in The Atlantic for June 2016, which surveys the idea of “infinite libraries” in science fiction and fantasy.
Be warned that the article casually slips in a huge spoiler for two of the most outstanding episodes of the classic David Tennant years in Doctor Who, “Silence in the Library” / “Forest of the Dead”. These run a story back-to-back across the two episodes, and are well worth watching as your first-ever Doctor Who episodes.
06 Thursday Sep 2018
Posted in Censorship, Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts
The Whole Wide World is set for release as a Blu-ray disc on 18th September.
“When a feisty teacher falls for an eccentric pulp writer [Robert. E. Howard], the two begin a tumultuous affair and find they have nothing in common but their passion.”
Currently only listing on Amazon USA, but the page there notes that “This item ships to the United Kingdom”.
For those expecting a depressive gloomy angst-fest about small-town small-mindedness, frontier violence and family illness, ending in tragic suicide… it’s a brighter movie than you might expect.
I read that the 106-minute DVD edition had vital scenes cut. In one Howard discusses his views on racial memory, and in another part Lovecraft is talked about. I hadn’t known about those scenes. It seems that many had seen these scenes in the big-screen version that screened at Sundance and in its cinema run, felt they were integral to the movie, and had expected to see them on the DVD. One hopes that it wasn’t the DVD distributor who demanded they be cut, to forestall a leftist twitterstorm about race. Back in 2012 Bobbie Derie’s blog commented that…
There are certain aspects of the film that make little sense without them [the deleted scenes]
The deleted scenes had been uploaded to YouTube in 2012, and were apparently available until 2015, but have now vanished from the Web. Nor does there appear to be a full script available online.
So we might hope that the Blu-ray has the five or six minutes of deleted scenes on it, which were not on the DVD.
However, I can nowhere find details of Blu-ray having any extras at all. None are mentioned by Multicom in its survey of its summer 2018 releases. It looks to me like it’s just a bare-bones Blu-ray, with the 106-minute cut-down movie shown in a higher resolution than it was on the DVD.
06 Thursday Sep 2018
Posted in Unnamable
Announcing PulpFest 2019. Thursday 15th – Sunday 18th August 2019, just north of Pittsburgh, USA. No theme, but there’s a mention of “Children of the Pulps and Other Stories” which I’m guessing might suggest a planned focus on spin-offs, revivals and the later afterlives of pulp characters?
06 Thursday Sep 2018
Posted in New books
David Brussat’s Lost Providence, August 2017. A deep and well-researched book on the tragic destruction of “buildings of architectural merit” in Providence, and their replacement with various types of hideous concrete carbuncle. H. P. Lovecraft pops up in the story here and there, as an early pioneer of preservation in the city.
06 Thursday Sep 2018
Posted in Podcasts etc., REH
Newly online free Mythmoot V recordings of talks. Mostly these talks are of interest to Tolkien scholars, but there’s also an excellent hour with the great SF/fantasy scholar Tom Shippey, titled “The Hero and the Zeitgeist”. This ranges widely across the nature of heroes and the state of the culture, and is outstanding in both delivery and content.
The playlist omits a good focussed 90-minute round-table discussion of Tom’s new book on Vikings, titled Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings (Reaktion, 2018), with the author. It also has clear and listen-able audio. Those interested in the background of the long R.E. Howard – Lovecraft discussion on Nordics and barbarians may find this one especially interesting.
As I mentioned here a few posts ago, for auto-downloading of YouTube playlists as .MP3 audio files on a desktop PC, I highly recommend MakeHuman’s Free YouTube to MP3 Converter. Just make sure you fiddle with its Settings after install to: i) turn on ‘Expand Playlist Automatically’ and; ii) tighten up the privacy by turning off ‘send anonymous usage statistics’.
06 Thursday Sep 2018
Posted in Housekeeping, Scholarly works
My Open Lovecraft listing has updated, with a basic 2016-2018 survey of ‘open access’ scholarly and academic work which is free and public. About 25 new links added, as yet with minimal commentary and fill-out.
The rest of the links on the page haven’t yet been link-checked, so they probably have some link-rot. Around 15% link-rot is usual on academic papers on the open Web, after a couple of years.