Checked and repaired Open Lovecraft

13 Thursday Aug 2015

Posted by in Housekeeping, Scholarly works

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Checked and repaired all links on the Open Lovecraft page. The following items have been carried away by night gaunts…

An Awe-ful Integrity: The Science-Fiction Horror of H.P. Lovecraft.

Perceptual and relational deictic shift and the development of ‘atmosphere’ in H.P. Lovecraft’s short story The Colour Out of Space.

The Genetics of Horror: Sex and Racism in H.P. Lovecraft’s Fiction.

Kosmicki horor, gotsko telo i tekst: H.P. Lovecraft “Senka nad Insmutom”.

The Cosmic Angle of Regarding: mathematics and the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft.

Le temps du reve Lovecraftien, ou l’elaboration d’un temps du mythe.

H.P. Lovecraft: a transient speck in wide infinity. (Lovecraft as a poet).

Os Mitos de H.P. Lovecraft e a cultura juvenil.

Antares issues 08 and 00.

Robert E. Howard and Weird Tales

13 Thursday Aug 2015

Posted by in Historical context, REH

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Bobby Derie’s new essay “An Irreparable Loss: Robert E. Howard and Weird Tales, 1936″ scrutinises R.E. Howard’s publication history in regard to Weird Tales in 1935-36, interestingly delving into the financial intricacies and arrangements of the magazine.

“…it is likely that [William] Sprenger [the Weird Tales business manager] made the ultimate decision as to whom [among the writers] would be paid and how much; certainly he signed some of the checks.”

One hopes we may learn more of the Weird Tales finances and management in the forthcoming and final book of the Scarecrow Press / Rowman & Littlefield Studies in Supernatural Literature series, which according to S.T. Joshi is set to be…

“an anthology of essays on Weird Tales [magazine] edited by Jeffrey Shanks”.

I daresay that the focus of the essays will be on the writers and their fans, Brundage and other artists, and the demographics and geography of the readership. But a couple of thorough essays by business historians would also be very welcome.

WeirdTalesDecember1936
Picture: Cover of Weird Tales December 1936, published shortly after Howard’s death.

Comments open

12 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by in Housekeeping

≈ 1 Comment

Apparently Tentaclii’s “Allow people to post comments” checkbox was unchecked in my WordPress. Strange, and I’m not sure how it switched itself off (probably a WordPress update) but it’s fixed now. Comments are open for 14 days on new posts.

Modification and mind style in Robert E. Howard

11 Tuesday Aug 2015

Posted by in REH, Scholarly works

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Not added to Open Lovecraft, but noted here because it may interest some readers: Suominen Seppo, “As silently as the ghosts of murdered men”: modification and mind style in Robert E. Howard’s fantasy. Masters disseration for the University of Eastern Finland, May 2015. Close linguistic study of the shift in Howard’s style from the early to later work, with a focus on sensory descriptors.

Seabury Quinn: A Weird Tales View of Gender and Sexuality

10 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by in Historical context, Scholarly works

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Interesting new scholarly thesis by Stephanie Brimson, “Seabury Quinn: a Weird Tales view of gender and sexuality”. Sadly the full-text is not available. This an example of a regrettable recent development among open access repositories, which publicise the thesis as if it were open access but in reality add an embargo of around 12 to 18 months. Anyway, Brimson suggests that…

… a unique male characterization was born in Seabury Quinn’s protagonist Jules de Grandin. Unlike other interwar characters, Quinn’s Jules de Grandin rejected the figure of American bodybuilder in favor of one that emphasized male effeminacy. The sexuality of these effeminate male characters was often unclear, and it is difficult to discern whether this was a serious attempt by Quinn to circulate literature with homosexual elements in the public sphere or just an attempt to lure readers with mentions of social taboos.”

As the “star” author of Weird Tales in Lovecraft’s time, could Quinn’s choice of a lead character — that apparently “emphasized male effeminacy” — have primed the Weird Tales audience for similar characters? Specifically, to more readily accept Lovecraft’s own presentation of his unmanly lead characters?

Or is Brimson just reading too much into the character? Difficult to say, since there’s no full-text for the thesis and I’ve not read the Jules de Grandin stories. Certainly the book Uranian worlds: a guide to alternative sexuality in science fiction, fantasy, and horror (1990) seems to have failed to have noticed this aspect of Jules de Grandin, although it did spot some overt lesbian themes in a late 1947 Jules de Grandin story.

jules_de_grandin_by_cowboy_lucasCowboy-Lucas‘s fan-intepretation of Jules de Grandin.

Getting Lovecraft’s Letters online

09 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by in NecronomiCon 2015, Scholarly works

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Eight hours to go, on a set of used Selected Letters on eBay, and the seller is offering an affordable shipping rate to the UK. Currently unaffordable for me, sadly, but one day I’ll get a full set of the Selected Letters hardbacks on my Lovecraft shelf.

Although, by then, there may be a good searchable public digital edition of Lovecraft’s letters. On that score I’d suggest that NecronomiCon 2015 seems a suitable venue for some serious pre-production discussion, and initial wallet-tugging for some seed funding. The digital Collected Letters don’t necessarily need to be released as a readily pirate-able DVD or USB stick. The Letters might appear as a website that only serves up Google Books-like page-views, in response to search queries, and only allows copy-paste of one paragraph at a time. An annual subscription fee could give access to such a site ($20 a year for individuals, $300 for libraries and institutions?), or it might be made free and the costs defrayed by ads or sponsors — in fact, a Kickstarter would probably fund it with $500,000 in a few hours if the campaign were to be fronted by Joshi, the HPLHS, leading scholars etc, and the amount was to be match-funded by an institution or foundation. Such an online format would, of course, have the great advantage of allowing a group of approved annotators to easily start work on annotating the letters in a coherent and moderated manner. Plus it would not eat into sales of existing print books of the letters, and might actually stimulate such sales.

The Spirit of Revision: Lovecraft’s letters to Zealia Brown Reed Bishop

09 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by in Historical context, New books, New discoveries, Scholarly works

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Forthcoming in mid/late August, a new H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society book The Spirit of Revision: Lovecraft’s letters to Zealia Brown Reed Bishop. Nice to see that it’s both illustrated and rather affordable. The letters are new and previously unpublished…

“In 2014 a collection of [36, 1927 to 1936] letters from H.P. Lovecraft to Zealia Brown Reed Bishop was discovered in an old trunk in a basement.”

These new discoveries have been woven into the “eighteen previously known letters”, and the whole has been annotated.

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[ Hat-tip: Ken Faig ]