Conference: Presence de Lovecraft : l’illustration en question

I just heard about a French conference: Presence de Lovecraft : l’illustration en question (trans.: The presence of Lovecraft: a question of illustration”), which happened in France on 13th-14th June 2013…

“Lovecraft’s works entertain an essential relationship to the very notion of illustration, for various reasons. … Lovecraft consistently managed to include in his short stories blank spaces [Such as the Necronomicon] that seem to call for continuation or illustration of his texts. [There are also many videogames, comics, films to discuss, and wider topics in adaptation of literary works …]”

Participants and programme papers, with my approximate translations…

Denis Mellier (Universite de Poitiers): “Nouvelles notes a distance 1995-2012: sur la poetique de l’exces chez Lovecraft et de quelques solutions graphiques qui lui furent appliquees” [New notes for the period 1995-2012: the poetics of Lovecraftian excess and some of the graphics solutions applied to it]

Christopher Robinson (HEC Paris): “From Necronomicon to Alien“. [Presumably about the influence of Lovecraft on Giger?]

Pierre Jailloux (Paris 8): “Presence de l’indicible: found footage et poetique Lovecraftienne”. [The presence of the unspeakable: found footage and Lovecraftian poetics]

Philippe Met (University of Pennsylvania, USA): “H.P. Lovecraft revu et corrige par Lucio Fulci”. [H.P. Lovecraft revised and corrected by Lucio Fulci]

Isabelle Perier: “Adaptation et transmedialite: Kadath, la Cite Inconnue”. [Adaptation and transmediality: Kadath the Unknown City]

Jerome Dutel (Universite Jean Monnet): “Dessiner celui qui est d’ailleurs: The Outsider (2004) de Gou Tanabe et L’atranger (1999) de Horacio Lalia”. [Drawing that which is elsewhere: on two French comics adaptations by Lalia]

Eric Lysoe (Universite Blaise Pascal): “”The strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich”: le referent pictural et ses fonctions dans At the Mountains of Madness“. [“The strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich”: the pictorial references and their function in At the Mountains of Madness“]

Julien Schuh (Universite Reims Champagne-Ardenne): “L’empreinte : reproduction, transposition, adaptation chez Lovecraft”. [The footprint: transferring and adapting Lovecraft]

Remi Cayatte (Universite de Lorraine): “H.P. Lovecraft: acteur majeur de la culture populaire moderne”. [H.P. Lovecraft: a major figure in modern popular culture]

Roger Bozetto (Universite de Provence): “De l’imagine a l’inimaginable”. [To imagine the unimaginable]

Karen Vergnol-Remont (Universite Blaise Pascal): “Howard Philips Lovecraft: un auteur dont le génie inspire”. [Howard Philips Lovecraft: an author inspired by genius]

Arnaud Moussart (Universite Jean Monnet): “Night Gaunts de Brett Rutherford: entre illustration et (re)creation”. [The Night Gaunts of Brett Rutherford: between illustration and (re)creation]

Round-table discussion with Nicolas Fructus, Gilles Francescano and Philippe Jozelon.

Fine and Dandy in Hell’s Kitchen

Old-style dandyism is thriving in a new shop not far from the main Kalem Club meeting room at 543 West 49th Street, Hell’s Kitchen (the alley that leads to the 543 door is still there, surprisingly un-photographed). Should you be down that way doing a spot of Lovecraftian tourism, pop into Fine and Dandy, a cool menswear accessories shop for the older man or the young fogey. Located at 445 West 49th Street, NYC.

Could be a useful stop off on your way to NeconomiCon Providence 2013, to ensure you don’t present too disheveled an appearance at the con… 😉

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Complete with accessories such as Lovecraft-style vintage typewriters…

Fine and Dandy

Lovecraft and Moby Dick

Lovecraft did read Moby Dick, it seems, in the spring of 1925. I had assumed Lovecraft had never read the book, since it isn’t listed in S.T. Joshi’s Lovecraft’s Library (2nd ed.). But here is Lovecraft in a letter (Letters from New York, p.122) stating that he was about to read the book…

   [Lovecraft about to depart for Washington, 11th April 1925] “Kleiner and Loveman will wave tear-stain’d handkerchiefs after the tail-lights of the [train] coach that bears Kirk & me away. I shall probably wear my light overcoat, checking it at the Union Station in Washington, where I shall also check the book which is to beguile my hours of idleness — “Moby Dick, or the White Whale”, by Herman Melville”.

In “Suggestions for a Reading Guide” (intended as the final chapter of Lovecraft’s revisory work Well Bred Speech, 1936) he notes… “Of Herman Melville at least Moby Dick deserves a hearing.”

His almost-certain reading of Moby Dick seems fairly interestingly timed, given its ocean monster theme: four months later he wrote out the plot of “The Call of Cthulhu”.

Moby Dick was apparently deemed an obscure and rather neglected work until the Melville centenary in 1919 — and it wasn’t until 1920 that Melville’s own unexpurgated text of the work finally reached a modern audience and triggered “the Melville Revival”. This new text of the book was swiftly followed by the biography Herman Melville, mariner and mystic (1921) and Carl Van Doren’s chapter on Melville in The American Novel (1921). The following year saw publication of Melville’s letters. This scholarly interest led in time to a wider public interest, generated especially by the major Warner Brothers silent film of Moby in January 1926, titled The Sea Beast and starring John Barrymore. Predictably the movie makers managed to add a love interest, as seen in the lavish stills which illustrated Warner’s cash-in reprint of the novel of the book titled “Moby Dick Photoplay”. But this movie tie-in reprint cannot have been the edition Lovecraft took to Washington, since it was released 17th December 1925 according to Catalog of Copyright Entries.

The edition of Moby Dick that Lovecraft intended to read in Washington may instead have been borrowed stock from Kirk’s bookshop, and was presumably one of the early 1920s single-volume unexpurgated editions.

Spore Lovecraft

Lovecraft creatures recreated in the Creature Creator module of the videogame Spore

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm9GGHuMI8c&w=420&h=315]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPwXRnMf_uY&w=420&h=315]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kno04MhCVcw&w=420&h=315]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyD9vFS1b9A&w=420&h=315]

To Mary of the Movies

Rheinhart Kleiner, with a New York address of 444 Evergreen Av, Brooklyn, in the mainstream Motion Picture magazine for May 1915…

kleiner1915

This is an appearance three months earlier than the commonly cited “Piper for September 1915″ for this poem. Lovecraft replied to “To Mary…” with “To Charlie of the Comics” (Providence Amateur, February 1916) which started a sort of poetic jousting between the two.