Crafting Cthulhu

31 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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Echo Station muses on what he wants in a Cthulhu idol…

To sum up, my ideal Cthulhu idol would have the following characteristics:

* stylized
* looms outward, or otherwise aggressively posed
* big grabby unfinished-looking wings, possibly posed asymmetrically
* spider-like eyes, but probably not too regular in numbers or symmetry
* extremities not clearly arms or flippers or whatever, but some horrible combination, and skinny rather than [body-builder] buff
* inhuman (probably covered by all of the above)
* intelligent
* menacing

Nuclear Lovecraft

30 Saturday Aug 2014

Posted by in Astronomy, Historical context

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The young Lovecraft goes nuclear…

Radio-activity interested me enough to cause me to obtain a spinthariscope — containing, of course, a minute quantity of radioactive matter.” (Letter to Galpin, 29th August 1918, recalling his boyhood)

s12s

It may have been tiny but it was visible evidence of a discovery that lifted a great weight of despair, from the minds those who had grown up during the Victorian era. I refer to the once prevalent scientific idea of the ‘inevitable’ heat-death of the sun (by some calculations, as soon as in 3,000 years or so). The following quote from 1906 shows that Lovecraft had used the discovery of radium (radioactivity) to shrug off this erroneous model of how the sun worked…

“To this, it must be said that the great body’s [the sun’s] size precludes its cooling at any time within millions of years, and the discovery of an element called “Radium” in its constitution lengthens the epoch to billions, so it may be safely believed that for many generations the sun will continue to exist as a great donor of light and heat.” (The sixteen year old Lovecraft, writing in 1906)

One can see the older ideas about the death of the sun — albeit not in as short a scale as 3,000 years — most clearly in Wells’s famous The Time Machine (1895) in its various forms. On the influence of this theory on Wells and his generation, see Gillian Beer’s “‘The Death of the Sun’: Victorian Solar Physics and Solar Myth'”, in the book Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter.

Something vaguely similar pops up in a 1933 Lovecraft dream-story sent in a letter to Dwyer…

“that thing on the table — the thing that looks like a match-box” … “The small object on the table fascinated me intensely. I seemed to know what to do with it, for I drew a pocket electric light — or what looked like one — out of my pocket and nervously tested its flashes. The light was not white but violet, and seemed less like true light than like some radioactive bombardment. […] Finally I summoned up courage and propped the small object up on the table against a book — then turned the rays of the peculiar violet light upon it. The light seemed now to be more like a rain of hail or small violet particles than like a continuous beam. As the particles struck the glassy surface at the center of the strange device, they seemed to produce a crackling noise like the sputtering of a vacuum tube through which sparks are passed. The dark glassy surface displayed a pinkish glow, and a vague white shape seemed to be taking form at its center. Then I noticed that I was not alone in the room — and put the ray-projector back in my pocket.” (from Lovecraft’s “The Evil Clergyman”, Fall 1933)

NecronomiCon 2013: Providence Art Club lecture

29 Friday Aug 2014

Posted by in NecronomiCon 2013, Podcasts etc.

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Not linked here until now, NecronomiCon 2013: Providence Art Club lecture and discussion with Henry L. P. Beckwith…

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVv67JwvxI8?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

Still looking for MP3 or video recordings of the following core panels…

HPL: A LIFE

LOVECRAFT’S LITERARY INFLUENCES

HPL ALL-STARS [scholars]

LOVECRAFT’S ESSAYS & LETTERS

LOVECRAFT’S NEW ENGLAND: HISTORY AND SOCIETY

Lovecraft was right: part 534

29 Friday Aug 2014

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Visualise the 4th dimension, with this handy attic-sized LED-light hypercube, with programmed dimension-revealing patterns…

4d

We shall see these things, and other things which no breathing creature has yet seen. We shall overleap time, space, and dimensions, and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of creation.” [said Tillinghast] … We entered the laboratory in the attic, and I observed that detestable electrical machine, glowing with a sickly, sinister violet luminosity.” (H.P. Lovecraft, “From Beyond”)

Definitely one for the Art Room at NecronomiCon 2015.

Hive.co.uk

27 Wednesday Aug 2014

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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I’ve just been looking at Hive.co.uk in the UK. Hive has many of the books that Amazon offers, sometimes cheaper(!), and with free shipping to your local independent bookshop for in-person collection. They have all the print-on-demand Hippocampus Press titles, and can accept PayPal. Sadly they don’t offer a ‘public gifting’ Wish List, though, or indeed any Wish List facility at all. But should you be fed up with useless couriers or Parcelfarce, they might be worth a look — provided you still have an independent bookshop nearby from which to collect your eldritch treasures.

Added to Open Lovecraft

27 Wednesday Aug 2014

Posted by in Historical context, Scholarly works

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* Stefan Helmreich and Sophia Roosth (2010), “Life Forms: a keyword entry”, Representations 112, Fall 2010. (Detailed discussion of the history of the changing conception of the term ‘lifeforms’, including a discussion of scientific sources which strongly influenced Lovecraft)

* John J. Miller (2014), “Master of Modern Horror”, Claremont Review, Vol. XIV, Number 2, Spring 2014. (Long review essay of three volumes of Lovecraft’s fiction)

Added to Open Lovecraft

26 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by in Scholarly works

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* Kenneth W. Faig, Jr. and David Haden (2014), The Providence Amateur Press Club, 1914-1916, Moshassuck Press and Burslem Books. (Second edition, revised and with new illustrations)

* Benjamin Noys (2007), “The Lovecraft Event” (Compares… “the rupture Lovecraft inflicts on the Gothic and weird fiction with the rupture Lacan inflicts on psychoanalysis and the stabilisation of his own earlier teaching”, in terms of the ability to form a fiction congruent with history and then to align it with the realities and trajectories of the new modernity of the 1920s)

* Mark Fisher (2007), Lovecraft and the Weird: Part I and Part II (Reflections on the Lovecraft: Weird Realism event at Goldsmiths University, London, 2007)

The Providence Amateur Press Club, 1914-1916 – new second edition

26 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works

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I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve recently been collaborating with Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., a leading and veteran Lovecraft researcher, on the second edition of his The Providence Amateur Press Club, 1914-1916. Ken has very kindly encouraged me to take a co-credit on the title page, although I should point out that the overwhelming bulk of the scholarly work was his. The PDF of this new second edition is now being hosted here, and is available for free in PDF.

Download The Providence Amateur Press Club, 1914-1916 (PDF link, 2Mb). Revised second edition, with new illustrations.

Disorders of Magnitude: A Survey of Dark Fantasy

26 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by in New books

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Shipping now, Jason V. Brock’s new collection of essays, Disorders of Magnitude: A Survey of Dark Fantasy. Sadly it comes from a $80-a-book publisher which aims at sales to university libraries and tenured professors rather than the fans, but Amazon ships it slightly cheaper than the list-price and some used paper copies are now filtering onto Amazon at somewhat lower prices. There’s also a Kindle ebook edition, but it’s a ridiculous $76.65.

brock

I’ve highlighted the items of likely interest to Lovecraftians…

Contents:

Section One: The Darkest Age

The Smoldering Past: The Creation of the Modern from Frankenstein and Dracula to the Great War and Beyond
“Cosmic Introspection”: Lovecraft’s Attainment of Personal Value by Way of Infinite Insignificance
Forrest J Ackerman: Fan Zero
Gathering Darkness: In Appreciation of the Artists of Weird Tales
Frank M. Robinson: First Fandom and Beyond

Section Two: Things Become

The Burden of Now: Welles’s “Panic Broadcast,” World War II, and Creeping Anomie
Ray Bradbury: The Boy Who Never Grew Up
Cinematic Dream Logic: How Movies Permanently Altered the Fabric of Reality
Individual Sexual Liberation Becomes Social Emancipation: Playboy Changes the World
Harlan Ellison: L’Enfant Terrible (Sort Of)

Section Three: The Rise of the Speculative Mind

Rod Serling: Articulating the American Nightmare
A Howling at Owl Creek Bridge: Observations on Two Important Twilight Zone Episodes
George Clayton Johnson: A Touch of Strange
L’Age d’Or to Gotterdammerung: How Bradbury, Serling, Beaumont, and “The Group” Shaped a Pop Future
Roger Corman: Socially Conscious Auteur
Finding Sanctuary: Running from the Zone to Logan
The Long Nuclear Shadow: Atomic Horror, Godzilla, and the Cold War
The Horror of It All! EC [comics] and the Beginnings of Modern Media HOOHAH!
Madly Yours, Al Feldstein
An End, a Middle, a Beginning: Richard Matheson and His Impact

Section Four: Slashers, Blockbusters, and Bestsellers

Riding the Dark Wave: The Role of Dystopian Science Fiction in Popular Culture
Celluloid Asylum: O’Bannon, Romero, Carpenter, and the Liberals Lose (and Find) Their Collective Minds
Terrible Beauty: Slasher Film Connections to Conservatism, Pornography, and Misogyny
King of the Dead: Filmmaker George A. Romero on Politics, Film, and the Future
Dan O’Bannon: Not Gone, Not Forgotten
H.R. Giger: A Darkness Faster Than Light
The Emperor’s New Book [on the decline of horror publishing]
The Doctor Is In: F. Paul Wilson
Sounds Horrific: Art Rock, Soundtracks, and the Zeitgeist

Section Five: A Century of Speculation

Carnivora: The Dark Art of Automobiles
David J. Skal: Monster Kid Ambassador of Horror
Seasons in Hell
Kris Kuksi: Dark Horizons in the Realm of the Senses
Bluewater Comics’s Darren G. Davis: On the Run in the Digital Age of Comics
The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival: Cosmic Chaos on the Silver Screen
S.T. Joshi: Champion of the Weird Tale
Marc Scott Zicree: As Timeless as Infinity

Section Six: From (and Into) the Beyond

Fangoria’s Chris Alexander: Cinephilia, Music, and All the Rest of It
Bruce Campbell: From The Evil Dead to Burn Notice and Beyond
The Inner World of William F. Nolan
The Mammoth Book of Body Horror
Two of a Kind: Lee-Anne Raymond and Demetrios Vakras
“Cthulhu, a Vampire, and a Zombie Walk into a Bar…”: Why These Themes, Why Now, and What’s the Matter with Hollyweird?
John Shirley: The Tao of Identity
Ray Harryhausen: A Note on the Passage of Giants
Kneeling at the Dandelion Shrine: An Appreciation
William F. Nolan and Ray Bradbury: Reflections
Introduction: The Pope of Speculative Fiction
Future Shock? (De)Parting Thoughts

Appendices
Index
About the Author