The big one

21 Saturday Sep 2013

Posted by in Scholarly works

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The ‘final frontier’ for Lovecraft studies? Not only having all the Joshi-Shultz complete archive of Lovecraft’s letters placed online, in an electronic searchable scholarly edition — but also having that opened up for a 30-year programme of annotation and hyperlinking by scholars.

Marshmads

21 Saturday Sep 2013

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings

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Amazingly, there are still Lovecraft monsters that haven’t been worked up into game monsters by the table-top gamers. I can add another one, from the previously unpublished Wilbraham letter (ms. to Lillian D. Clark, 1st July 1928) that I was able to access for my latest book of essays…

“…lean brown marsh-things (invisible to mortal eyes) who wave & brandish them [constellations of fire-flies] in the gloaming when the unseen nether world awakes.”

Interesting also, that here we may have the genesis of the invisible monster which he was to place centre-stage in “The Dunwich Horror”. He wrote the story immediately after the Wilbraham visit.

Landscapes in the works of H.P. Lovecraft

21 Saturday Sep 2013

Posted by in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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New podcast lecture from Durham University, in the north of England, UK. “Such Terrifying Vistas of Reality’: lunatic landscapes in the works of H.P. Lovecraft”…

“David Varley takes a tour through the uncanny landscapes of H.P. Lovecraft. This lecture was recorded as part of the Late Summer Lecture Series given by Ph.D students to bring new research to a public audience.”

Sadly it’s posted on some crappy Flash player system called MixCloud, rather than as a simple mp3 — and MixCloud doesn’t seem to want to work on my system

Update: Thanks to Read Durham for an alternative MP3 link: http://bit.ly/1f67k4D The long ‘Lovecraft for beginners’ preamble ends 23:28, when the landscape bit starts.

The Variorum Lovecraft

21 Saturday Sep 2013

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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My 2013 Lovecraft Annual has yet to arrive, but Wilum Pugmire has perused a copy and winkled out a nugget ‘o news, on a new S.T. Joshi volume…

“The Variorum Lovecraft, to be publish’d by Hippocampus Press in four volumes. […] could begin publication as early as next year, I hope to present all the relevant textual variants for all the stories that Lovecraft wrote over his short literary career. […] may include the printing of passages from handwritten or typed manuscripts (chiefly the former) that were excised as Lovecraft was writing the story or as he performed a subsequent revision of it.”

Sounds like the ideal candidate for an interactive electronic edition?

Biology and Evolution of the Old Ones

20 Friday Sep 2013

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, NecronomiCon 2013, Scholarly works

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Fred S. Lubnow has kindly placed online Part I of the talk, “Human Interpretations on the Biology and Evolution of the Old Ones”, that he gave at NecronomiCon 2013. Once all the parts are posted, then I’ll be adding this to the Open Lovecraft page.

Fred writes…

“The talk is on the biology and evolution of the Old Ones, and I have elaborated on it a bit. A number of people have asked for a copy of the talk, and I thought it would be best to put it onto the blog.”

lubnow2013-necronomicon

Further Open Lovecraft

20 Friday Sep 2013

Posted by in Scholarly works

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Added to the Open Lovecraft page…

* Andreas Schardt (2011), “The Gothic Pastoral: terrible idylls in late nineteenth and twentieth-century literature”. (Ph.D for the Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Heidelberg, Germany. In English. Examines “The Colour out of Space” and “The Dunwich Horror” on pp.163-177).

* Mark Blacklock (2013), Final Bibliography for his 2013 Ph.D thesis “The Fairyland of Geometry: a cultural history of higher space, 1869-1909”. (Relevant to the young Lovecraft’s understanding of fourth-dimensional space and similar scientific matters).

tesseractAbove: Inside front fold-out plate of The Fourth Dimension (1904).

The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

19 Thursday Sep 2013

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903), by George Gissing. Apparently one of H.P. Lovecraft’s favorite books, and one on which he based his personal philosophy of life. Sonia stated that she received a copy of it early in their courtship, with instructions to read it to better understand him.

gissing

Curiously the book isn’t listed in Lovecraft’s Library. My guess on that would be that S.T. Joshi had to weigh Sonia’s solo revelation about the book, against Lovecraft’s apparent utter silence on Gissing in all his other walks of life and voluminous correspondence. And the similar silence of his bibliophile friends on the book. But if you’d like to take a look, the book is available here: Dutton U.S. first edition online digital facsimile and as .mobi for Kindle.

Parade of Ancients and Horribles

19 Thursday Sep 2013

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Hot on the heels of the Junior Burials at Brown I’ve found another Rhode Island tradition of weird parading. Lovecraft and George Kirk took a ten-mile trolley ride from Providence to Chepachet on 4th July 1926 to see the first of the modern ‘Parade of Ancients and Horribles’. This parade was the U.S. Sesquicentennial (150th) anniversary revival of an annual satirical Parade of Ancients and Horribles, an event which had first been recorded in New England in 1851. The visit was mentioned in Kirk’s diary…

This essay has been replaced by the essay in my new book of revised, expanded, and footnoted versions of my recent Tentaclii essays, Lovecraft in Historical Context: fifth collection.

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