11 Sunday Nov 2012
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Extract from Milan M. Cirkovic’s The Astrobiological Landscape: philosophical foundations of the study of cosmic life, Cambridge University Press 2012. The last part considers Lovecraft’s “The Colour out of Space”.
10 Saturday Nov 2012
Posted in Scholarly works
Added to the Open Lovecraft page:
* John D. Sanderson (2011), “The Shadow over Galicia: H.P. Lovecraft’s obsessions resurface in the film adaptation of Dagon (2001)”, Odisea No.12, pp.245-255.
08 Thursday Nov 2012
Posted in Scholarly works
Spoof Halloween submission to arXiv Physics…
Benjamin K. Tippett, “Possible Bubbles of Spacetime Curvature in the South Pacific”…
“In 1928, the late Francis Wayland Thurston published a scandalous manuscript in purport of warning the world of a global conspiracy of occultists. Among the documents he gathered to support his thesis was the personal account of a sailor by the name of Gustaf Johansen, describing an encounter with an extraordinary island. Johansen’s descriptions of his adventures upon the island are fantastic, and are often considered the most enigmatic (and therefore the highlight) of Thurston’s collection of documents. We contend that all of the credible phenomena which Johansen described may be explained as being the observable consequences of a localized bubble of spacetime curvature. Many of his most incomprehensible statements (involving the geometry of the architecture, and variability of the location of the horizon) can therefore be said to have a unified underlying cause. We propose a simplified example of such a geometry, and show using numerical computation that Johansen`s descriptions were, for the most part, not simply the ravings of a lunatic…”
08 Thursday Nov 2012
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
New, Lovecraftian Monster Book…
“over 300 monsters featuring exactly as they are appear and described in … the Cthulhu Mythos … drawn by talented artist Michael Bukowski“
06 Tuesday Nov 2012
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
There’s a 2D royalty-free H.P. Lovecraft ($8.50). It’s rigged with an animator’s skeleton and works with the 2D cartooning and animation software Anime Studio Pro 8…
04 Sunday Nov 2012
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings
Spoof Lovecraft cult stalking the downtown streets of Phoenix. Interview here…
“The goats on fire thing was an accident”
31 Wednesday Oct 2012
Posted in Historical context, Odd scratchings
The Dark Side of the Poles: Dreams and Nightmares in Polar Exploration runs until 3rd November 2012 in the UK, as part of the University of Cambridge Festival of Ideas…
“Throughout the Festival, explore our trail of polar dreams and nightmares. Find untold secrets hidden in drawers and strange objects that have crept into the cases.”
The BBC has a companion essay on the topic, from Fred Lewsey of the University of Cambridge.
31 Wednesday Oct 2012
Posted in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc., REH
I thought I might read R.E. Howard’s six ‘Lovecraft influenced’ stories, for Halloween. As best I can make out from twenty minutes of cursory research, the R.E. Howard Lovecraftian-ish tales are…
* The best two:
“The Black Stone”
“The Children of the Night”
* Lesser two:
“The Cairn on the Headland”
“The Thing on the Roof”
* Two tangential stories:
“Worms of the Earth” (Generally said to be the best Bran Mak Morn story, with a few Lovecraftian bits and bobs mentioned?)
“The Fire of Asshurbanipal” (Reportedly, only the ending is relevant?)
All six are available in the audio book form in the collection The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard [on Amazon USA], read by veteran audio-book reader Robertson Dean. “The Black Stone” is also available for free as a less memorable audio reading.
It’s been quite a long time since I read Howard’s Conan et al, and it’ll be interesting to see what the original Howard experience is like in polished audio-book form. I read Howard as a boy, at about the same time I first read Lovecraft, via the UK Panther paperback collections: Skull-face; The Valley of the Worm; and The Shadow Kingdom. From there I went to the UK Sphere King Kull collection, Tigers of the Sea (Cormac mac Art in the UK paperback), then into the numerous UK Sphere Conan paperbacks (one or two of which were quite rare at that time, and it was difficult to gather a full set) and the Solomon Kane stories (possibly via a tatty import copy of the U.S. Centaur Books paperback). More recently I read one of his werewolf stories, but that’s been it until now.
30 Tuesday Oct 2012
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
The Graham-Wesson collection of amateur journals newly photographed. The Collection is…
“now being indexed for the NAPA, AAPA, and The Fossils”
Including a glimpse of a picture of a young Lovecraft (in his late 20s?) wearing his glasses, a picture which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before…
30 Tuesday Oct 2012
Posted in Odd scratchings
H.P. Lovecraft’s Selected Letters I, II, III, IV, V, all first editions, plus an envelope with Lovecraft’s name and return address written on the back. A snip at £1606.35. Even the most judicious shopper would have to pay about £250 for a set of the later editions, these days, so I guess it’s the envelope that’s costing around £1,200.
29 Monday Oct 2012
Posted in Scholarly works
A new open access ejournal, Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction…
“We are now soliciting articles for the first issue, scheduled for publication April 10th, 2013, and for subsequent issues of the Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction.”
25 Thursday Oct 2012
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works
Super news from S.T. Joshi. He’s to edit a collection of Clark Ashton Smith for Penguin Classics. Stories, but also prose-poems and poems. Let’s hope the forthcoming merger with Random House doesn’t see the planned roster for Penguin Classics affected.
Joshi has also…
“been asked to be the keynote speaker at a conference on weird fiction to be hosted by Birkbeck College, [University of] London, around November 8, 2013”