It came from the backwoods…

09 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by in Historical context

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Below is The New York Tribune article of April 1919, on the newly-established (formed 1917) rural police for New York State, which inspired Lovecraft to try The Catskills as a setting for horror stories. I’ve highlighted and overlaid the next-page section of the article on Catskill Mountains degenerates (though strictly speaking they’re actually Schoarie Mountains degenerates, a little north of the main Catskill Mountains). The first effect of this article on Lovecraft was to directly inspire his story “Beyond The Wall of Sleep” (written at some point between April-Sept 1919, published October) then “The Lurking Fear” (November 1922)…

lovecraft_inspiration_1919_catskills-NYT

Audio book readers may find it useful to know that the pronunciation of the Slater/Slahter surname should rhyme it with “doubter”.

Incidentally, the following Google search modifiers will give you a speedy way of searching just The New York Tribune digital copies at the Library of Congress website…

site:http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/ keyword or "key phrase"

Solomon Kane (2009) finally available in USA on DVD

08 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by in Films & trailers, REH

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Cool, I just heard that Solomon Kane is finally out on DVD in the USA. I’ve no idea what delayed this fine 2009 movie, or stopped it getting to the cinemas in the USA. I can only imagine that there was perhaps some spurious legal challenge by a copyright troll, going on behind the scenes?

Thanks to Lovecraft is Missing for the new review of the DVD. I saw the movie way back in 2010 in the UK, and enjoyed it. I thought it was a fine and respectful evocation of R.E. Howard’s Puritan hero, beautifully designed and lit, and well acted with good period accents. The flaws were not very many, but were annoying: two jarring jumps in the plot during the first third, as if the makers hadn’t filmed quite enough material to bridge the gap; many lost opportunities to visually foreshadow the distinctive look of the main bad-guy (for instance via having his minions wear his face as crude tattoos or scrawl it on walls etc); and the ending is a little too “Mines of Moria cave-troll battle” (in a cheesy kind of way, in that it resembles LoTR far too strongly).

SolomonKanePoster

The plan was apparently that Solomon Kane would have been the first of a trilogy. Africa was mooted as being the next stop. But Puritan New England, and a slight blending with the historical back-story of Lovecraft’s Mythos, would have seemed a much better choice. Anyway, due to the bizarre and unexplained four-year hiatus in actually getting this movie to a U.S. audience, it doesn’t seem we’ll get to see the next two movies.

The Shadow knows… it’s a turkey

07 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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John Carter of Mars, and now The Lone Ranger, have both flopped. Actually, they’re not that bad, certainly not bad enough to be put in the same cone-of-shame as Howard the Duck, Dick Tracy, The Shadow, etc. Just a bit bland and instantly forgettable. But together their failure has cost Disney somewhere around $400m in direct losses, not to mention the lost opportunity costs in terms of tying top talent to turkeys. Sony’s Doc Savage is set for 2014, though it seems to be the only old-time pulpster set for release next year. If Doc Savage tanks too, then I guess we won’t be seeing too many big-studio movies of near-forgotten pulp fiction and old-time radio heroes in the next decade or so. Or maybe ever again, as the cultural demographics of nostalgia move inexorably on to 90s toys, 00s videogames (Morrowind: the movie — want!), and superhero comics.

Directory of Current Scholars of H.P. Lovecraft

07 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by in NecronomiCon 2013, Scholarly works

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It would be great if one of the results to come out of NecronomiCon Providence 2013 could be an up-to-date online directory of active researchers. Perhaps titled something like ‘Directory of Current Scholars of H.P. Lovecraft’ (DOCS-HPL). Listing basic email and website details, any university or association affiliations, plus a short list of the top ten main current-and-planned areas of research interest for each person.

Perhaps someone might undertake to get a well-designed paper form circulated to all scholars at NecronomiCon 2013, with a main-lobby drop-off box for completed forms? By “well-designed” I mean with a clear check-box system that enables rapidly focusing down on types of personal research interest within the general taxonomy of our research areas, to save a lot of pondering and hair-splitting and “I’ll have to get back to you on that”. The Taxonomy might be cribbed largely from S.T. Joshi’s excellent indexes and might look like:

  Lovecraft -> Biography -> His relationship with… -> Everett McNeil; or

  Pulps -> Publishing Industry -> Censorship; or

  Philosophy -> Contemporary Developments -> Speculative Realism; or

  Lovecraft -> Fan Cultures -> Contemporary -> Cute Toys.

Could be a good ice-breaker for someone, and someone who’s tech-savvy might even input the data straight into the database via a portable device — and thus save a lot of transcription time later on. MS Office Excel-to-Omeka would be one good off-the-shelf solution to put that together, and to get it online in an easy-to-maintain and elegant form. Omeka is mature and is specifically designed to present online academic collections, and it works a lot like WordPress.

The Conservative, complete run reprint

06 Tuesday Aug 2013

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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Arktos has a new complete book collection of The Conservative, Lovecraft’s own journal which ran between 1915 and 1923. I seem to remember this run has been reprinted before. Yup, I just looked: there was a 1976 Necronomicon Press collection of c.400 copies in two variants, edited by Marc A. Michaud and with a Foreword by Frank Belknap Long. In 1990 S.T. Joshi also published a selection of essays from The Conservative, also from Necronomicon Press. I doubt this new one is a facsimile edition, or else the blurb would have said so.

conslove

Free book on the early pulps

04 Sunday Aug 2013

Posted by in Historical context, Scholarly works

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Now free, Sam Moskowitz’s 1970 book Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of “The Scientific Romance” in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920. On Archive.org, with .ePub and Kindle .mobi versions available.

under

munseys

Put the Munsey magazines in context with SFFAudio’s .mp3 podcast interview with Robert Weinberg about the history of pulps before Amazing. Starts at 5:54.

Fantastika and the Classical World / Translating Myth

03 Saturday Aug 2013

Posted by in Scholarly works

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Totally missed hearing about this one… The Fantastika and the Classical World (29th June – 1st July 2013, Liverpool UK)…

“scholars of Classical Reception are increasingly investigating all aspects of popular culture, and have begun looking at science fiction. However, scholars of the one are not often enough in contact with scholars of the other. This conference aims to bridge the divide, and provide a forum in which SF and Classical Reception scholars can meet and exchange ideas.”

But this one is still yet to happen… Translating Myth, a conference in Colchester, UK, from 5th-7th September 2013. On…

“all aspects of myth that involve the idea of translation … [i.e.] the process of conversion or transfer of cultural sources construed as mythic”

Archival Research in Science Fiction #1

03 Saturday Aug 2013

Posted by in Scholarly works

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The open access Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction has its issue No.1 available. Articles that caught my eye…

“Terraforming and Proto-Gaian Narratives in American Pulp SF of the 1930s-1940s”.

“Aerofuturism in the Archive” (fascinating hindsight article, recalling the pinball-like research strategies used in discovering the literature of aerofuturism in American culture).