Geek Anthropologist: call for writers

14 Monday Jul 2014

Posted by in Scholarly works

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Geek Anthropologist is looking for contributors for texts ranging from “comprehensive pieces to book reviews”…

The Geek Anthropologist is a blog where geek culture and all things geek are analysed through the perspective of socio-cultural anthropology. We write about the intersections between social science, cultural analysis and practice of anthropology with geek culture, whether they be embodied, literary, cinematic or cybernetic. In short, we’re interested in any culturally informed analysis of geek culture or things that geeks love.

“They brought their own food from the stars…”

13 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings

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London artist Johanna Schmeer, of The Royal College of Art, has made a short film called Bioplastic Fantastic. It depicts a future world in which bioplastic food generators are common, and Lovecraftian gloop and strange mists are what’s on the menu…

“…the Great Race’s mechanised culture had long since done away with domestic beasts, while food was wholly vegetable or synthetic.” — H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow Out of Time”.

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“The Moon Pool” (original 1918 version)

13 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts

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“The Moon Pool” (1918) by A. Merritt, in its original 17,000 word novelette version. The H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia states that Lovecraft…

considered the novelette “The Moon Pool” (Argosy [Argosy All-Story], 22nd June 1918) one of the ten best weird tales in literature; he disliked the later novel version

Basic .mobi (Kindle) and .epub conversions are here.

Sadly there appears to be no free audio-book reading, although Librivox has one for the later novel. The novel is apparently a rather poorly-structured combination of the original story with a six-part sequel, all of which was then abridged for book form. Merritt seems to have had the Elizabethan / folk tale approach to the ‘sanctity’ of his texts, freely hacking them about and adding to them in order to fit each subsequent appearance. Science-fiction: The Gernsback Years points out that few early SF fans ever got to read the original 1918 Argosy All-Story version, reading either the novel (1919) in book form or the Amazing Stories magazine reprint of the novel in May-July 1927. Science-fiction: The Gernsback Years claims the original story was not reprinted from 1918 through 1970, but I have found a record of what appears to be a reprint of it in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Sept-Oct 1939.

The_Moon_Pool3Illustration: Virgil Finlay.

“He had gone farther than anyone else in interpreting the obscure and primal books…”

12 Saturday Jul 2014

Posted by in New books

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New edition of S.T. Joshi’s The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos, set for 2015…

Upon my return [from the Dunsany castle in Ireland], I hope to undertake extensive work on my revised edition of The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos (Mythos Books, 2008), which will be retitled The Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Cthulhu Mythos. This new edition should appear next year from Hippocampus Press. It will be difficult to incorporate discussions of all the new Mythos writing that has appeared over the last decade or so, so I will restrict myself to some of the more noteworthy items; I will also revise earlier parts of the text where needed. The book could well be substantially larger than the original edition.

Unknown Friends of H. P. Lovecraft: No.3, David Horn Whitter

11 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by in Historical context, Scholarly works

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I’m again very pleased that the legendary Lovecraft researcher Randy Everts has chosen Tentaclii to help publish another essay on Lovecraft’s unknown or little known friendships. With his permission I have slightly tweaked the text, formatted it with my usual book style, and added my footnotes. My thanks to Randy for this great opportunity.

Download: Randy Everts, “Unknown Friends of H. P. Lovecraft: No.3, David Horn Whitter”. (PDF, formatted for 6″ x 9″ booklet printing).

The Arkham Gazette: call for articles

10 Thursday Jul 2014

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The Arkham Gazette is calling for article writers…

* A write-up of [the Lovecraft fragment] “Of Evill Sorceries Done in New-England of Daemons in no Human Shape” [found in Collected Essays V]

* Alchemy in New England [a vast subject, very active in terms of recent scholarship].

* A [linguistic and folkloric] discussion of what colonial witches might call various Mythos beings.

* New England folklore about witches.

Unknown Friends of H. P. Lovecraft: No.2, Woodburn Prescott Harris

10 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by in Historical context, Scholarly works

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I’m very pleased that the legendary Lovecraft researcher Randy Everts has chosen Tentaclii to help publish another document on Lovecraft’s unknown or little known friendships. This publishes, for the first time, a letter about Lovecraft from Woodburn Harris.

With his permission I have slightly tweaked the text, formatted it with my usual book style, and added my footnotes plus an extra picture. My thanks to Randy for this great opportunity.

Download: Randy Everts, “Unknown Friends of H. P. Lovecraft: No.2, Woodburn Prescott Harris”. (PDF, formatted for 6″ x 9″ booklet printing)

Added to Open Lovecraft

09 Wednesday Jul 2014

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* Francesco Levato (2014), “Semi-peripheral : spaces of deviation, abjection, madness”, New Academia, Vol.3 No.1, January 2014. (A ‘performative writing’ text, blending fragments of critical theory with bits from “The Call of Cthulhu”)

* Anthony Conrad Chieffalo (2011), “Poe, Lovecraft, and the uncanny: the horror of the self” (Masters dissertation for Central Connecticut State University. Uses Freud to suggest that Poe and Lovecraft draw on… “internal confrontations between the protagonists and the formerly concealed aspects of themselves” to make their stories into powerful horror).

“He prepared a special record for the benefit of certain learned men”

09 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by in New books

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An entertaining essay-by-essay fisking of New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft (2013), an expensive book aimed at academic libraries and the shelves of tenured academics.

By the time Simmons [the editor] mentions Donald Tyson’s The Dream World of H.P. Lovecraft as “an interesting biographical reading of Lovecraft’s writing” alarm bells were going off in my head.

“half of them [the essay writers] really haven’t even done the proper research”