22 Sunday Mar 2015
Posted in Odd scratchings
So, why do fungi glow? Amazingly, apparently this has been… “a controversial question for more than two millennia”. Turns out they glow to entice horrible eight-legged buzzing night-crawlers out of the gloomy windless forest, to feast upon their dripping flesh. Lovecraft probably knew that already, of course, as with so many other things — perhaps via some passing bit of conversation with a deep woodsman like Dwyer 😉
18 Wednesday Mar 2015
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
David Crawford’s “Lovecraft’s Monsters”, a one-man theatre show of Lovecraft’s life and work, at The Maker Theater / 12 Peers Theater, Pittsburgh. Sounds rather good, with a strong focus on the biography, until the reviewer notes that… “The show’s second half is given over largely to a live retelling of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”. The show runs until 21st March 2015. Pittsburgh Stage also has a review, “Lovecraft’s Monsters Haunt The Maker Theater”.
In 2014 there was a staging of the play in Edinburgh, UK, where it was reviewed by Counter Culture and Broadway Baby.
16 Monday Mar 2015
Posted in Odd scratchings
Machen’s Far Off Things, free in a Kindle .mobi…
* Far Off Things (1922) — First volume of the autobiography. On Archive.org.
* Things Near and Far (1923) — Second volume of the autobiography.
* The London Adventure (1924) — Third and final volume of the autobiography.
14 Saturday Mar 2015
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Unknown artist, found on a Tumblr-like site where they don’t credit or title. Google Images’s reverse look-up only finds a scan of a Chaosium rule book, in which the picture was used for the opening double-page spread, but no artist name was given. Looks like a Photoshop-ing of an old public-domain oil painting, with new elements laid on top…
11 Wednesday Mar 2015
Posted in Odd scratchings
One more thing to blame on Derleth… the iPad / ereader / tablet design. 🙂 Here’s the cover he chose for the first edition of science fiction writer A.E. Van Vogt’s Slan (1946)…
11 Wednesday Mar 2015
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Just realised I haven’t mentioned the 20th Annual H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Los Angeles 1st-3rd May 2015. Submission are still open, deadline 1st April 2015. Then later in the year the Festival rolls into Portland Oregon on 2nd-4th October 2015, with Charles Stross as Guest of Honor. Sadly no awesome posters yet, so here are a few from previous years…
02 Monday Mar 2015
Posted in NecronomiCon 2015, Scholarly works
The scholarly and academic bit of NecronomiCon 2015 is now calling for papers. The theme is the mythos, its sources and influence…
The Armitage Symposium aims to foster exploration of Lovecraft’s elaborate cosmic mythology, and how this mythology was influenced by, and has come to influence, numerous other authors and artists”
01 Sunday Mar 2015
Posted in Scholarly works
* Samuel Coavoux (2015), “”Life itself”: l’engagement d’Howard Philips Lovecraft dans le journalisme amateur”, COnTEXTES, February 2015. (In French. Examination of the way in which the egalitarian amateur journalism movement gave Lovecraft a platform to re-establish his lost social position as a gentleman leader, albeit at the margins of society, and also contributed to his later ethos of open collaboration for the creation of the Mythos)
25 Wednesday Feb 2015
Posted in Historical context
Picture: Brown University campus in 1908. Lovecraft then circa age 18.
23 Monday Feb 2015
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
If you can read Italian, the Italian ‘Project Aphorism’ aims to compile a complete list of aphorisms found in Lovecraft’s Italian translations. Here’s an approximate translation of the blurb…
CONTENT — New research to promote sharing ideas on the thought of HPL as a man, writer and thinker, further increasing the circularity of experience / contacts between magazine, experts and readers. The course aims to collect in an agile book the APHORISMS contained in the correspondence, in fiction, non-fiction of Lovecraft.
HOW TO ENTER — Are you a fan of HPL? Want to be a STAR of literary research? Now you can. How? Any fan can “adopt” a text of Lovecraft, [and] move in search of aphorisms through the reading of texts. You should reference your found quotations to the text of an Italian edition. And add more precise data: title of the story, the book / anthology from which the quotation is taken, publisher, year of publication, the translator. We will consider only complete reports on a Lovecraft work.
19 Thursday Feb 2015
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
Scotland now has a Masters degree course in Comics Studies, the first in the UK.
19 Thursday Feb 2015
Posted in New books
S.T. Joshi reports in his blog that publisher Scarecrow Press / Rowman & Littlefield has cancelled its Studies in Supernatural Literature series. The short series had produced very nicely designed case bound hardbacks and also Kindle ebooks, both at high prices. Which aimed them at the academic library market rather than fan-scholars. Perhaps a better marketing strategy would have been nice £50 hardbacks for libraries and tenured academics, plus a much cheaper Kindle ebook version for the fans at £6.99.
* Lovecraft and Influence: His Predecessors and Successors (my review)
* Lord Dunsany, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury: Spectral Journeys
* Disorders of Magnitude: A Survey of Dark Fantasy
* Journeys into Darkness: Critical Essays on Gothic Horror
* Lord Dunsany: A Comprehensive Bibliography
* Ramsey Campbell: Critical Essays on the Modern Master of Horror
Joshi reports that they’ll pop in one more before the series dies, and it’s of interest to Lovecraftians… “an anthology of essays on Weird Tales [magazine] edited by Jeffrey Shanks”. Which sounds worth having in a Lovecraft library.
Joshi also reports that “David E. Schultz’s long-awaited annotated edition of Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth” is expected in time for NecronomiCon 2015, with 200 pages of annotations.