30 Thursday Aug 2018
Posted in Historical context
Plans and an isometric view of Butler Hospital for the Insane, Providence, as it was in 1914. Unavailable in high-res on Hathi, as the auto-scanners didn’t unfold and scan the fold-outs. But someone on eBay did, and I rectified their wonky pictures with Photoshop. Possibly of use to RPG and videogame designers who care about the historical authenticity of their game environments.
29 Wednesday Aug 2018
Posted in New books
Pre-ordering now for delivery in November 2018, the book New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature: The Critical Influence of H.P. Lovecraft…
“This collection of essays examines the legacy of H.P. Lovecraft’s most important critical work, Supernatural Horror in Literature. Each chapter illuminates a crucial aspect of Lovecraft’s criticism, from its aesthetic, philosophical and literary sources, to its psychobiological underpinnings, to its pervasive influence on the conception and course of horror and weird literature through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.”
It’s from academic mega-publishers Springer / Palgrave Macmillan. S. T. Joshi wrote an Introduction for the editor’s earlier book, The Lovecraftian Poe, which may be a somewhat encouraging sign.
29 Wednesday Aug 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Gage Prentiss’s H.P. Lovecraft statue is progressing well. A post on his Facebook page has a new photo of the current state of the casting…
“Here is a taste of the newly cast bronze life size statue of H. P. Lovecraft! There is still welding, chasing, sandblasting and patina to do, but he is finally standing in bronze.”
28 Tuesday Aug 2018
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
The start of the university year looms once more, and for some that means the start of the sprint toward the final dissertation hand-in in January 2019. Want to amaze your tutor with your ‘mad scientist’-level search skills? Here are a few ‘power-up items’ that I recently noted over at my JURN blog, and which don’t require you to sign up to some online Cloud service.
* WorldBrain for Chrome. Locally copies the text of all the Web pages you visit, and makes the resulting cache searchable by keyword. Bookmarks and blogs are fine as a basic ‘outboard brain’, but if you need global domination this seems useful.
* Open Semantic Desktop Search. Genuinely free desktop search for Windows, enabling Google-like search across and inside your bulging folder of saved research texts and PDFs. It can also auto-OCR inside PDFs that don’t have OCR text, a new feature added in a December 2017 update. Worth trying as an open source alternative to the increasingly nagging and intrusive Copernic Desktop Search.
* My own JURN search-engine. Speedy keyword-search across all public ‘open access’ arts and humanities journals, plus the full-text from selected university repositories. Groups tests show it regularly outperforms all other such services, even Google Scholar, for finding free public articles.
28 Tuesday Aug 2018
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
New from McFarland this summer, H.P. Lovecraft: Selected Works, Critical Perspectives and Interviews on His Influence. The cover, and the fact that it reprints (again) various Lovecraft stories, makes it look like yet another shovelware reprint of the stories.
But a closer inspection, via Google Books, shows that it’s not shovelware. There’s an academic section, sitting at the back of the story reprints. Plus some interviews…
I can get a few pages of the essay “The Victorian Era’s Influence on H.P. Lovecraft” via Google Books, and it looks quite encouraging. It appears to be a sound undergraduate primer on late Victorian aesthetic and philosophical movements as they were taken up in America and impacted on Lovecraft in Providence.
As such Selected Works, Critical Perspectives and Interviews looks like the sort of book one would assign to a class of bright and sensible undergraduates in an out-of-the-way American university, students preparing to spend four weeks on Lovecraft as part of a larger 12-week course module on the history of the weird in America. It seems to fit that market, although the high price (£18 on Kindle, $40 paper) is obviously geared to university libraries rather than individual students.
Even the Kindle edition is too expensive for me, though, when all I’d want to read is “The Victorian Era’s Influence on H.P. Lovecraft” and perhaps T.E.D. Klein’s “Providence after Dark” — I’m guessing the latter is perhaps a historically-accurate topographic description of Lovecraft’s long night walks among the antiquated ways and burying-grounds, evoking what HPL would have seen and felt there?
28 Tuesday Aug 2018
Posted in Scholarly works
“Tentacles, Tethers, and Sea Tendrils” will be a strand on the hot academic topic of ‘sea horror’, at the 2019 Popular Culture Association National Conference in Washington, D.C., USA. Deadline for paper abstracts: 1st September 2018.
28 Tuesday Aug 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works
What has the worthy Italian language Lovecraft Studies journal, Studi Lovecraftiani, been up to since it was last noticed on this blog?
Studi Lovecraftiani #14 has, among other items…
“the symbolism in the story “Celephais” [and] Lovecraft at the theater”
“In this issue we talk about war in the biography and family history of H.P. Lovecraft (with reproductions of unpublished documents) […] also contains an unpublished poem by Lovecraft, and complete reviews of all Lovecraftian books published in Italy in 2015-2016.”
Note sure what the unpublished poem is, but given the ‘war’ theme it’s possibly the same one as I discovered and published in my book Lovecraft in Historical Context: fifth collection in 2014.
27 Monday Aug 2018
John La Farge (1835–1910, lived in Providence, Rhode Island). Bed-ridden early in his career and in need of the cash, La Farge produced fairly loose watercolour designs which were engraved by Henry Marsh (American, 1826–1912) and published as story illustrations in the Riverside Magazine for Young People. He later regained his health and turned to the more respectable, and probably more profitable, trade of stained-glass windows.
Lovecraft knew of him, since he mentions him by name in a letter to Moe, 24th November 1923. Lovecraft had written “The Rats in the Walls” a few months earlier, August–September 1923. An interesting co-incidence, given the picture seen above, I’d suggest. There was apparently also a ‘Bishop Hatto’ story by Sabine Baring-Gould.
27 Monday Aug 2018
Posted in Podcasts etc.
I’ve link-checked, repaired and added to my 2014 R. E. Howard audio-books list, in which I listed free recordings of Howard’s Conan stories in order of the story-world chronology.
27 Monday Aug 2018
Posted in Scholarly works
Lovecraft Studies journal, issues 9-21, now on Archive.org for free.
For search-engine indexing purposes I have a plain-text listing of the essay titles from these issues over at my JURN blog, along with a short listing of the essays included in Archive.org’s sundry copies of old Crypt of Cthulhu magazines. A useful time-saver if you just want to quickly run your eyes down the titles list, and thus save time laboriously opening and flipping through each scan. You’ll also find per issue links there.
27 Monday Aug 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The London Lovecraft Festival, a festival for stage plays in February 2019. The Submissions Form is now open.
27 Monday Aug 2018
Posted in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works
A new book on Weird Tales, The Thing’s Incredible: The Secret Origins of Weird Tales, albeit with what is possibly one of the worst covers ever put on a serious book. One glance at that and half the potential audience is gone.
Yet it debuted at PulpFest 2018, where they know their stuff, and it’s had some favourable blog comments. It even had a mention in a Washington Post multi-book review of recent fantastika. The book offers a revisionist business history of the ‘early days’ of the famous magazine, 1923-24, and these years are scrutinised in detail…
“Who were Henneberger and Lansinger, the founders of the magazine, and what strange forces joined them? How did first editor Edwin Baird become the wild man of the pulps? What lay buried in haunted second editor Farnsworth Wright’s past that he never dared speak of? What was the uncontrollable “reorganization” that sucked legendary horror author H.P. Lovecraft into a vortex he barely understood? Why did world-famous magician Harry Houdini suddenly appear on the covers of the obscure magazine, and just as suddenly disappear? Finally, how did an all-out war behind the scenes at the magazine lead to the long peace of the Wright years?”