Ecotopian Dreaming in H.P. Lovecraft

06 Saturday Jul 2013

Posted by in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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A conference paper as-mp3 by David Farnell, “Unlikely Utopians: Ecotopian Dreaming in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood”, delivered at the 2010 ‘Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe’ conference in Australia.

All the .mp3 files of talks from this conference are online. One that caught my eye was: Geographies of Hope: The Desire for Place in Californian Science Fiction which might be of interest to those researching weird fiction in California.

“The isle is full of noises…”

04 Thursday Jul 2013

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Interesting conference location in 2014. the Island Dynamics academic network presents Folk Belief and Traditions of the Supernatural: Experience, Place, Ritual, and Narrative, set for late March 2014 in… “remote and windswept cottages on the island of Unst” in the Shetland Islands, in the bleak far north of Britain. It’s followed by the probably-slightly-more-comfy The Supernatural in Literature and Film conference from 29th—31st March 2014, in Lerwick, the capital of the Shetland Islands. Yes, they have broadband — a new £8m undersea fibre-optic cable linked them to the mainland in late 2012.

Lovecraft on the Mississippi

04 Thursday Jul 2013

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Snagged from an eBay auction just ended at $495… a Lovecraft postcard from New Orleans, on 6th June 1932, to Walter J. Coates of The Driftwind Press…

“Greetings! At the far end of one of my annual travel outbursts, & enjoying every minute of it! Shenandoah Valley…. Tennessee…. old Father Mississippi (seen by me for the first time)…. Vicksburg…. Natchez…. & now ancient New Orleans, paradise of the architect and antiquarian. Right in the same class with Charleston & Quebec! Here for over a week, then Mobile, Ala. Have a very faint hope of getting to Charleston. Regards — & hope that spring is getting around to the arctic regions at last! HPL”

lovepost1932card

neworleanscard

Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men

03 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books

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Interesting new work of fiction, due in October. The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men: The Last Letter of H.P. Lovecraft by Gabriel Blackwell. Seems to be inspired by Lovecraft’s stream-of-consciousness style sections sometimes to be found in the Letters, usually in a reverie over a particular landscape he’s experienced. Only Blackwell pins the style to performative delvings into the nature of the self. The new book is 194 pages, complete with faux annotations and precise typographical design. Sounds like a fascinating little fabulation.

“I found myself no longer at my desk and without my body, sprung whole from the womb of human existence and cast out into the shrieking wilds of the barren, ghoulish fifth dimension once more… Instead of unconsciousness, it was now a purer sort of consciousness, I thought, the roaming of a dreaming brain without any of the snares set by the nerves, so that I felt as though I had no body, as though my vision had no connection to the eye.”

Natural_Dissolution_of_Fleeting-Improvised Men

  [ Hat-tip for quote: Whimsy of Creation ]

Crossing Ways of Thinking

03 Wednesday Jul 2013

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Added to the Open Lovecraft page…

* Tristan Garcia (2013), “Crossing Ways of Thinking: on Graham Harman’s system and my own”, Parrhesia : a journal of critical philosophy, No.16, 2013, pp.14-25. (Tristan Garcia responds to Harman’s recent book Weird Realism: Lovecraft And Philosophy, recognising its multiple levels of usefulness for philosophy. Harman responds in his follow-on article “Tristan Garcia and the Thing-in-Itself”).

Also found a long abstract for a Masters dissertation, An examination of contributive narrative: A look at the Lovecraft Circle and the expansion of the Cthulhu Mythos…

“The Lovecraft Circle [i.e. the early use of his mythos in fiction by others] stands as a hybrid example of a controlled Fanfic [fan fiction] that expands a fictional world using techniques from contributive narrative, publication, and acknowledgment. With the support of literary theories and research from accredited Lovecraft scholars, there is concrete evidence that the Lovecraft Circle can be classified as a true literary circle that stands apart from postmodern writing circles.”

And an abstract for the paywalled “Music Against Horror: H.P. Lovecraft and Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics”…

“…it is possible to position “The Music of Erich Zann” as a distillation of Lovecraft’s reading of Schopenhauer into a nuanced and effective dramatic narrative. A reading of Lovecraft that incorporates Schopenhauerian aesthetics, in this instance specifically related to music, can illuminate Lovecraft’s fiction and resonate with both Lovecraft’s and Schopenhauer’s world views.”