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“In this issue we talk about war in the biography and family history of H.P. Lovecraft (with reproductions of unpublished documents) […] also contains an unpublished poem by Lovecraft, and complete reviews of all Lovecraftian books published in Italy in 2015-2016.”
Note sure what the unpublished poem is, but given the ‘war’ theme it’s possibly the same one as I discovered and published in my book Lovecraft in Historical Context: fifth collection in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?”
27 Monday Aug 2018
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
In the latest issue of The Fossil (#376, July 2018, free online)… “Dave Goudsward describes his transformation from high school social outcast to a published author of 13 books.” Including H. P. Lovecraft in the Merrimack Valley (review).
The article notes…
“My next book will be H. P. Lovecraft in Florida (Bold Venture Press, 2019)”, with a side-project for… “a cenotaph for Robert Barlow near his mother’s grave in Cassia, Florida.”
At the end of 2015, Goudsward also published his more general Horror Guide to Florida: A Literary Travel Guide.
Also of note in recent years in The Fossil is Goudsward’s article “Cassie Symmes: Inadvertent Lovecraftian – How H. P. Lovecraft touched the life of a New York socialite”. To be found in The Fossil, April 2017.
27 Monday Aug 2018
Posted in Historical context, Odd scratchings
An Annotated Bibliography of Fiction Set in Boston (working draft).
John French Sloan, Encounter on a Boston subway staircase.
26 Sunday Aug 2018
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings
Scans of full copies of vintage Weird Tales are continuing to be archived on Archive.org. Regrettably my WordPress blog refuses to post a link that goes to these uploads sorted by texts-only / upload date. Because it gets freaked out by [] square brackets in the URL, and presumably thinks it’s under attack from script-kiddies. Here’s how to manually filter out the irrelevant ‘relevance’ fluff and sort at Archive.org…
Once that’s done you’ll see there have been ten new uploads in August 2018, and all from the ‘prime Lovecraft’ period.
Fairly dismal cover paintings during this period, by the looks of it, and one can see how the magazine might have struggled to attract new readers on the crowded news-stands.
The latest upload, Feb 1926, printed “The Cats of Ulthar”. This was the first public appearance, it having previously been published only in the amateur journal Tryout in 1920.
26 Sunday Aug 2018
Posted in New books
Due in early 2019, Faunus : The Decorative Imagination of Arthur Machen. It appears to be a “best of” book anthology drawn from essays in… “Faunus, the biannual journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen”.
Also a Call for Papers for a Machen book, Critical Essays on Arthur Machen. Deadline: 1st September 2018.
26 Sunday Aug 2018
Posted in New books, Odd scratchings
A range of texts drop out of copyright each year. At the start of 2019, for the UK it will be the turn of books whose authors died in 1948. One such will presumably be W. Paul Cook. Cook was an amateur journalist, printer and bookman, and a good friend of H.P. Lovecraft. He was later the author of the important long memoir In Memoriam: Howard Phillips Lovecraft. This text can be found in full in the handsome volume Lovecraft Remembered…
Although it appears that Lovecraft Remembered is now yet another Lovecraft volume being listed at very expensive ‘only for the rich book collector’ prices.
Given that the text appears to be coming out of copyright in the UK and Europe, an abridged version of In Memoriam might make for an interesting graphic novel adaptation project for someone.
Last year (start of 2018) the public domain also welcomed: Alfred North Whitehead (a British philosopher whose 1920s works influenced Lovecraft); M. P. Shiel (Lovecraft thought his “The House of Sounds”… “the most haunting thing I have read in a decade” when he read Shiel circa 1923); and of course Arthur Machen.