The Once and Future Antiquity

“The Once and Future Antiquity: Classical Traditions in Science Fiction and Fantasy” conference, Seattle, 27th-29th March 2015.

“What roles has classical antiquity played in visions of the future, the fantastic, the speculative, the might-have-been?”

Given Lovecraft’s abundant uses of classical antiquity in his fiction and poetry, I’d be surprised if the organisers can’t squeeze in at least one Lovecraft paper.

The Old refrain…

Ah yes, the kids of today: no energy, no hope, no talent, and they dress funny too… 🙂

   “… our languid youth to gloom resort,
and listless children must be taught their sport:
whose arts the stamp of waning pow’r confess,
and hide their weakness in eccentric dress;”

H.P. Lovecraft, from “Old Christmas”, written at the end of 1917.

Potboilers from the Pit of the Amazons!

The Amazon recommendation system is still dumb, despite supposely being trained in my tastes for years now. I wish for Lovecraft scholarship therefore I will like… Dennis Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out. Er, no.

I think the general problem arises from lumpen categorisation systems, which are auto-sorted according to publisher supplied metadata and then parsed by artist/writer. It serves publishers well to make their tagging of a product as broad as possible. But a recommendation system needs to be able to make fine distinctions of taste, and do so even within artists. Such as knowing that Ziggy-era Bowie is not the same as Tin Machine-era Bowie. Or that Midge Ure’s Ultravox is mass-market pap compared to John Foxx’s Ultravox.

Atlantis and the pulps

A clearly-delivered 30-minute video lecture on the influence of the myth of Atlantis on R.E. Howard, by pulp history scholar Jeff Shanks. Including discussion of the Atlantis fringe authors, who Lovecraft eventually got around to reading circa the mid to late 1920s.

Lovecraft had of course written an early Atlantis story in “The Temple” (1920), in which the Prussian narrator suggests the sunken city was the forerunner of Ancient Greece.

He commented to Clark Ashton Smith in June 1926 about his reading of The Story of Atlantis (1896)…

[he writes that he is undertaking new reading] of vast interest as background or source material — which has belatedly introduced me to a cycle of myth as developed by modern occultists and sophical charlatans … I only wish I could get hold of more of the stuff. What I have read is The Story of Atlantis [1896]… by W. Scott Elliott.

He then attempted the germ of an Atlantis-meets-Roman Britain story in his fragment “The Descendant” (c.1927)…

Gabinius had, the rumour ran, come upon a cliffside cavern where strange folk met together and made the Elder Sign in the dark; strange folk whom the Britons knew not save in fear, and who were the last to survive from a great land in the west that had sunk, leaving only the islands with the raths and circles and shrines of which Stonehenge was the greatest.

But this would have rather improbably placed Atlantis somewhere just off his beloved ancestral Cornwall and Devon. One suspects that even Lovecraft balked at the task of turning the homely Isles of Scilly into the evil-haunted remnant mountain-tops of a sunken Atlantis.

Dreams of Cthulhu, a H.P. Lovecraft Circus Spectacular

Dreams of Cthulhu, a H.P. Lovecraft Circus Spectacular, Seattle, USA…

dreams

“Shortly after a series of earthquakes, Ann Wilcox starts having unprecedented dreams of great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. As the weeks continue, these dreams intensify causing her to wonder if these dreams are real or if she is going insane. With aerial, modern dance, and burlesque performances by Kelly Ward, Jennifer Lottes, Morgue Anne Morrighan, Anton Lukyanov, Carla Petrulli, and Warren Woo. Tickets only $10.”

September 17th at 9:00pm: https://www.facebook.com/events/1493031914269527/

September 19th at 7:30pm: https://www.facebook.com/events/1467226573558249

September 20th at 9:00pm: https://www.facebook.com/events/821277337917025

September 21st at 5:00pm: https://www.facebook.com/events/639084652866322