Lovecraft was right: part 534

29 Friday Aug 2014

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

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

≈ Leave a comment

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

≈ Leave a comment

* 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

≈ Leave a comment

* 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

≈ 1 Comment

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

≈ 1 Comment

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

The Floor of the Oceans

26 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by in Historical context, Maps

≈ Leave a comment

Tharp and Heezen’s mid-1950s “The Floor of the Oceans” map, in hi-res. Just in case Mythos writers needed to research a location for an underwater city or something.

Note especially the curious shape of Greenland. Presumably envisaged that way to show the sub-glacial meltwater lake area, possibly with life, which lies deep beneath the now-thickening ice cap (the thickening is why more ice is falling off some of the edges, since the weight of the inner mass pushes it off).

oceanmap

In Lovecraft’s day the ocean depths were mysterious unmapped places, plumbed primarily by submariners and those laying undersea telegraph cables. The weirder denizens of the deep were better known, having been hauled up by the likes of the Challenger Expedition and also by occasional startled fishermen. And hunted by the likes of the Arcturus Expedition. The bathysphere (metal diving sphere) was essentially still just an interesting one-off novelty in the mid 1930s. The first modern textbook on oceanography was not published until 1942, after Lovecraft’s death. Only after the Second World War — with war-surplus Navy ships and sonar at the disposal of scientists — could sea-bed mapping be undertaken in detail and over wide areas.

Boston subway, 1915

25 Monday Aug 2014

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

1280px-Tremont_and_Boylston_Streets_by_ACGoodwinPicture: Entrances to the Boston subway line, Tremont and Boylston Streets, Boston (1915). Painting by Arthur C. Goodwin.

“Lynch & I were the last to go. His toothache excited my sympathy, but sympathy could not cure it. He left the [tram] car at the Boylston Street subway station, & thereafter I was alone.” — Lovecraft on attending the Hub Club Conference on 5th September 1920, Boston, at which he met Morton for the first time.

“Then we split up into narrow columns, each of which seemed drawn in a different direction. One disappeared in a narrow alley to the left, leaving only the echo of a shocking moan. Another filed down a weed-choked subway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad.” — H.P. Lovecraft, “Nyarlathotep” (1920).

“God, how that man could paint! There was a study called ‘Subway Accident,’ in which a flock of the vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boston Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform.” — H.P. Lovecraft, “Pickman’s Model” (1926).

Added to Open Lovecraft

23 Saturday Aug 2014

Posted by in Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

* David Javet (2010), “The Pen that Never Stops Writing: the Lovecraft Mythology or the expansion of a literary phenomenon” (Masters dissertation)

* Jelena Maravic (2014), “Atavism on the tongue of cognition”. (The influence of Darwin on Lovecraft)

* David Goudsward (2014), “A Visit to Haverhill”, The Fossil, #360, July 2014. (Originally in Wave-Lengths #58, and later incorporated in Goudsward’s book H.P. Lovecraft in the Merrimack Valley)

* Sonja Jauernig (2011), “H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” in zwei deutschen Ubersetzungen”. (Masters dissertation for the University of Vienna. In German with English abstract. Discusses two German translations of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Call of Cthulhu”)

* Alberto Agosto (2012), “The topic of dream in the work of H.P. Lovecraft”. (In Italian, appears to be a Masters dissertation for the University of Torino)