Now on Amazon from Centipede, The Eldritch Dark: Collected Prose Poems and Artwork of Clark Ashton Smith
Collected Prose Poems and Artwork of Clark Ashton Smith
13 Thursday Nov 2014
Wonderlands
12 Wednesday Nov 2014
Posted in Scholarly works
Call for papers:
“Wonderlands: reading, writing, telling fairy tales and fantasy”: a one day symposium in Chichester, England. 23rd May 2015.
We are seeking papers which explore all aspects of reading, writing, and telling fairy tales and fantasy. In particular, we invite discussion of wonder lands in fantastical literature, classic and modern fairy tales, and contemporary oral storytelling.
Possible topics of focus include, but are not limited to:
Other worlds, otherworldliness, Wonderland, and wonder lands
Relationships between reading, writing, and/or telling fantasy
Contemporary scholarship in children’s and adult’s fantasy literature
Storytelling as a vehicle for the fantastic
Practice and performance of fairy tales
Fantastical non-fiction
Relationships between real and imagined wonder lands
Meta-textual conversations with classic fantasy literature
Imagining the fantastical world through illustrations and picture books
We also welcome paper submissions or panel presentations which include a creative or performative element.
Deadline: 31st January 2015. Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words (or panel proposals of 1,000 words) and a short personal bio to the organisers, Joanna Coleman, Joanne Blake Cave, and Rose Williamson at wonderlands.symposium@gmail.com Registration dates will be announced on the Sussex Centre website in the near future.
Feline Classics
11 Tuesday Nov 2014
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Feline Classics (Eureka Productions, Aug 2014, 144 pages), a new anthology. It melds new art and comics with public domain stories and poems. When you flip it over, it reverses into being Canine Classics on dogs — which is not so Lovecraftian. In the kittee section Lovecraft is represented by his poem “The Cats”, alongside an illustration for it. There’s also an essay on cats by Robert E. Howard, “The Beast from the Abyss”, on the rough lives of the semi-wild cats of a Texan oil town.
• Ancient Sorceries – by Algernon Blackwood
adapted by Alex Burrows and Randy DuBurke
• The Beast from the Abyss – an essay by Robert E. Howard
illustrated by Peter Kuper
• Dog, Cat and Baby – by Joe R. Lansdale
illustrated by Lance Tooks
• A Little Fable – by Franz Kafka
illustrated by Vincent Stall
• Tobermory – by Saki
adapted by Trina Robbins and Lisa K. Weber
• The Owl and the Pussy-Cat – a poem by Edward Lear
illustrated by Mary Fleener
• The Cat and the King – by Ambrose Bierce
illustrated by Johnny Ryan
• Fog – a poem by Carl Sandburg
illustrated by Skot Olsen
• The Cats – a poem by H.P. Lovecraft
illustrated by Allen Koszowski
• The King o’ the Cats – by Joseph Jacobs
illustrated by Pat N. Lewis
• What I learn from Cats – a poem by John Lehman
illustrated by Milton Knight
“Pushing through the ice…”
09 Sunday Nov 2014
Posted in Historical context
The theme of Lovecraft’s New York story “Cool Air” was strong prompted by his own fear of cold and need for heat, and by his friend Leeds’s precursor story. But I wonder if the following historical snippet might be relevant to the slight stress that Lovecraft places on the increasing demands of Dr. Munoz for more cold and ever more ice…
At the peak of the trade in the 1870s, cargoes of New England ice worth hundreds of thousands of dollars went south annually from Charleston to Calcutta … ice was cut in winter [for export around the world] on every pond and river in the region” (from Reflections in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England, University Press of New England, 2000)
So could there be a slight touch of historical satire in “Cool Air”, only to be picked up on by those aware of the role of the ice trade in New England history? I hasten to add that I’m not the first to make a suggestion along these lines, as S.T. Joshi has pointed to the possibility of a few deftly humorous touches in the story…
“There is, to be sure, a perhaps deliberate undercurrent of the comic in the whole story, especially when Munoz, now holed up in a bathtub full of ice, cries through his bathroom door, “More—more!” (A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft)
Added to Open Lovecraft
08 Saturday Nov 2014
Posted in Scholarly works
* Geza Arthur George Reilly (2014), “”Escape from the prison-house of the known”: reading weird fiction in its historical contexts” (PhD thesis, University of Manitoba. Proposes that useful new scholarly perspectives can be gained by the analysis of… “weird fictions via their specific historical locations [and] placement within specific historical milieus [in regard to the work of] Lovecraft, Smith, Howard, Bloch, and Ligotti”. The first chapter examines traces of the First World War in Lovecraft’s stories)
* Ludwig Karlsson (2014), “The Statement that is Randolph Carter: growth in a nihilistic universe” (Masters dissertation, Stockholm University. The recurring character of Randolph Carter seen as a prism of Nietzschean virtues)
* Iago Mosquera Gonzalez, and Xavier Moron Dapena (2014), “El Necronomicon visto desde el Aleph: pseudointertextualidad en Lovecraft y Borges” (In Spanish. “The Necronomicon seen from the Aleph: pseudo-intertextuality in Lovecraft and Borges”, in Sobrenatural, Fantastico y Metareal: La Perspectiva de America Latina, pp.39-46)
* Andre Roberto Tonussi Arnaut (2013), “Onde fica a Rue D’auseil? A primazia do horror sobre a aporia, de Levinas a Lovecraft” (Seems to be a Masters dissertation for the Department of Philosophy at the University of Brazil. In Portuguese. An attempt to understand Levinas and Lovecraft via the use of elements of contemporary European philosophy)
Swords of the North
06 Thursday Nov 2014
The cover seems more Jungle/Prehistoric than Celtic/Viking, but the new 540-page Swords of the North looks like a comprehensive collection of R.E. Howard’s Celtic and Viking fiction.
“that worm-riddled book”
06 Thursday Nov 2014
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A fine ‘eaten away’ Necronomicon that also serves as a frame for a portrait of Lovecraft. I’m not sure who did this — it popped up on Facebook with no credit, and Google’s reverse image search picks up no other instance of it online.
Update: thanks to Mandalore for the name of the artist, Joel Harlow.
The Call of Tsathoggua
05 Wednesday Nov 2014
Posted in Historical context
A Lovecraft envelope, postmark 9th June 1934, with a note to Clark Ashton Smith on the back…
Ar-Ech-Bei [Barlow] wishes you would fcall [phone? call / tell?] him as much as possible about H2UICQU01QMN2HAH [Hziulquoigmnzhah], the paternal uncle of Tsathoggua – cf. “Door to Saturn”.
My guess would be that this might relate to tweaking Smith’s “Door to Saturn” (pub. Jan 1932) before a reprint, so as to align it with the emerging Tsathoggua aspect of the mythos…
I have done what I could toward elucidating the genealogy of Tsathoggua, and am sending Ar-Ech-Bei [Barlow] the result of my delvings into the Parchments of Pnom, the chief Hyperborean authority on such matters. Pnom [R.E. Howard?] has much more to say about Tsathoggua than about Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth and Azathoth; but no doubt you have access to other records, mainly concerning these entities; and I’d be glad of more specific information about them. As I am pointing out to Ar-Ech-Bei, Pnom’s account of Ts. can be reconciled with the legendry told to Zamarcona in ‘The Mound.’ The myth, through aeons, was varied in the usual mythopoeic fashion by the cavern-dwellers, who came at last to believe that merely the images of Tsathoggua, and not the god himself, had emerged in former cycles from the inner gulf. Ts., travelling fourth-dimensionally from Saturn, first entered the Earth through the lightless abyss of N’kai; and, not unnaturally, the Yothians regarded N’kai as his place of origin. Undoubtedly the god now resides in N’kai, to which he returned when the ice overwhelmed Hyperborea.” (thanks to Will Murray for the 1934 Lovecraft to Smith letter extract)
An interesting insight into the care Lovecraft took, in co-ordinating the merging of the emerging mythos.
New Fossil
04 Tuesday Nov 2014
Posted in Scholarly works
The latest issue of The Fossil is available now, and page 6 has a short article on the Ken Faig collection of amateur journals, now safely in a university archive…
KEN FAIG DONATED HIS amateur journalism collection to the Special Collections Department of the University of Iowa in Iowa City.” [includes the run of] “Nyctalops, George Record’s The Dark Brotherhood Journal, Robert M. Price’s Crypt of Cthulhu, many journals published by Marc Michaud’s Necronomicon Press, and a complete set of the mailings of the Esoteric Order of Dagon…”
It also appears that the Library of Congress is seeking, in paper format… “a run of THE FOSSIL from 1965 on” (see p.11).
The Lost History of Esoteric Writing
04 Tuesday Nov 2014
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
A weighty new book from the University Of Chicago Press looks interesting, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing
compelling, surprising, and persuasive defense of Strauss”[‘s claim that…] “virtually all philosophers up until the early 19th century wrote their books ‘esoterically’ — that is, using a rhetoric of concealment, with a surface teaching meant for general readers and a hidden teaching for those who were intelligent, clever, and tenacious enough to uncover it.” [The author] “supplies a mountain of evidence in support of Strauss’ claims — quotes from just about every major philosopher (and many other writers) from ancient Greece to 19th-century Germany testifying to the reality of esotericism.” — Damon Linker, The Week.
a landmark work in both intellectual history and political theory” — Wall Street Journal.
Orphan Works – UK opens applications
01 Saturday Nov 2014
Posted in Odd scratchings
The UK has opened its Orphan Works licencing scheme. How to apply, if you want to reprint a long out-of-print and forgotten bit of weird fiction in the UK. As far as I know it’s not a ‘first one to apply, blocks all others’, or else the big publishers would simply gobble up all the low hanging fruit.
Speaking of Lovecraft…
30 Thursday Oct 2014
Posted in Podcasts etc.
Fascinating Nouns has a new podcast interview with S. T. Joshi on Lovecraft. The interviewer is a newcomer to Lovecraft, so I expect Joshi spends a lot of time covering the Lovecraft 101 basics.
Joshi’s latest blog post reports that according to John Trimble “an elderly science fiction fan”, the SF ur-fan Forrest Ackerman once owned a tape of Lovecraft reading one of his stories…
He [Trimble] said things we all know — Lovecraft’s voice was high pitched, he pronounced Cthulhu oddly, and added that HP was a lousy reader (as a dramatist).
I would note that Ackerman was a correspondent from 1931 and that the Ackerman archive is as yet unprocessed. Is a Kickstarter needed, to pay for someone to process it, and perhaps find the tape?