Mythical Cosmos: now and then

03 Wednesday Dec 2014

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Mythical Cosmos: now and then, a conference in Poland on 21st-22nd March 2015.

Is there some genuinely mythical potential in popular culture and the modern media arts? The conference will explore this question, and discuss how a mythical worldview might change as it travels into and beyond popular culture. The conference will interest those who investigate traditional cultures, ancient mythologies, modern day mythologies and popular culture.

Specifically inviting papers on Lovecraft. Deadline for abstracts: 30th December 2014.

Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange

30 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by in New books

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The earliest Arabic tales of the weird, Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange, published in English for the first time.

…it lay unread and gathering dust, a ragged manuscript that no one even knew existed, until 1933 when Hellmut Ritter, a German Orientalist, stumbled across it and translated it into his mother tongue. An Arabic edition was belatedly printed in 1956.”

The stories…

dealt with all things that challenged human understanding, including magic, the realms of the jinn, marvels of the sea, strange fauna and flora, great monuments of the past, automatons, hidden treasures, grotesqueries and uncanny coincidences. … The sheer mad inventiveness of “The Story of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle”, with its jumbling of Muslim, Christian and pagan beliefs and rituals would take some beating. Here we have a mechanical vulture, visionary dreams, conversation with a pagan god, magical transformations, thrones of wrath and of mercy, an enchanted gazelle, a herder of giant ostriches, lustful jinn, speaking idols, a queen of the crows, a weeping lion, a fortress guarded by talismans, a crocodile with pearls in its ears, the sacrifice of virgins to the Nile and much else.”

The hardcover seems to have sold out, but a Kindle edition is available.

Reiniger-achmed30-bigStill from Reiniger’s Achmed.

Lovecraft and Interstellar

18 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts

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Perhaps I’m just over-sensitised to H.P. Lovecraft’s ideas, but it seems to me that the excellent new sci-fi blockbuster film Interstellar has some interesting elements drawn from Lovecraft’s fiction. I was expecting epic civilisation-building space opera on the Foundation scale, yet the film is anything but that. It’s much more down-to-earth, more of a deft melding of Sagan’s Contact and Clarke’s 2001 series. Click on to read spoilers… Continue reading →

An Impression of Arthur Machen

18 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Historical context, Scholarly works

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A full scan of On Strange Altars: a book of enthusiasms (1924) by Paul Jordan-Smith, containing his essay “Black Magic—An Impression of Arthur Machen”. A hat-tip to the Son of Yog-Sothoth, who writes that…

The second part of the essay is, perhaps to me, the most unexpected: the author had in 1920 travelled to England and visited Arthur Machen and his wife, where Machen briefly spoke of his acquaintance with Oscar Wilde. It seems to me that I must have read something of this in one of the essays or biographies of Machen, but I’ll leave tracking that down to some other day.”

This may interest some, as it’s a view of Machen by an American who discovered him a few years before Lovecraft did. Lovecraft first discovered Machen’s work in the summer of 1923 (S.T. Joshi, I Am Providence, p.454).

Paul Jordan-Smith’s Cables of Cobweb book, listed facing the title page, sounds like a supernatural novel but apparently isn’t…

A young Virginian, revolting against his parents conservatism, experiments with radicalism but with maturity becomes conservative”

Likewise his novel Nomad, which seems to have been a sort of light-hearted philosophical quest story, with the hero and his companions moving through and exemplifying various philosophies. It sounds like Pilgrim’s Progress meets Gulliver’s Travels?