02 Monday Jul 2012
Posted in Historical context, Podcasts etc.
An excellent new half-hour BBC Radio 4 documentary on the meaning and history of ‘the uncanny’. Three days left to ‘listen again’, online. Listeners outside the UK may need to use a UK proxy, to access the audio stream.
02 Monday Jul 2012
Posted in Astronomy, Historical context, Unnamable
Over on the Urania blog, a new scholarly/scientific essay in Italian by Albino Carbognani, on Lovecraft’s first publication in a national journal. This was the letter to Scientific American, advising on a method of detecting the presence of possible planets beyond Neptune…
From the conclusion of Carbognani’s essay (my approximate translation), in which he suggests naming any beyond-Pluto planet ‘Yuggoth’…
“In 1999 two groups of researchers claimed to have proof of the presence of an unknown planet at the edges of the solar system, due to the alignment of [the paths of] long-period comets [but today, to prove such a theory] there is [still] the need to have a [wider] sample of long-period comets that is free from selection effects. Full details of this kind may be provided by the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, to be launched in the spring of 2013. Gaia should allow the discovery of about 1,000 long-period comets during its five year mission. Will an analysis of the distribution of [their] cometary aphelia [paths] give us details about the existence of a true ‘Yuggoth’ planet? It would be very symbolic to call any [new outer] planet by that name, the name summoned from the fervid imagination of Lovecraft to designate the hypothetical trans-Neptunian planetary body that he anticipated astronomers should find the edge of the Solar System.”
Incidentally that very same edition of Scientific American carried an ad for the Remington, the same typewriter Lovecraft had used to type his letter…
02 Monday Jul 2012
Posted in Housekeeping
I’ve completed the annual “check, clean and repair” on this blog’s “Lovecraft on the Web” Directory.
02 Monday Jul 2012
Posted in Scholarly works
A scholarly paper that appears to be new online: Gilbert Lascault, “Lovecraft et ses mythes intimes” (“Lovecraft and his intimate myths”). It appears to be pages 175-190 from Territoires des Fantastiques (1998), published by the Presses de l’Universite de Provence. As best I can judge it’s a survey of the rhetoric of “the monstrous” in Lovecraft’s fiction.
01 Sunday Jul 2012
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
An interesting short survey article on the transforming 18th century understanding of caves, “The Mighty Cavern of the Past“, which may shed some light on the ways in which the young Lovecraft’s mind approached the idea of ‘the cave’.
Above: “The Dead Sea”, engraving of Mammoth Cave by Alfred R. Waud, printed in Every Saturday, 1871.
30 Saturday Jun 2012
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
Two books found on the Internet Archive…
Old paths and legends of New England (1908 edition)
Old paths and legends of the New England border (1907 edition)
27 Wednesday Jun 2012
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Out now, a new issue of Dead Reckonings: a review of horror literature. Including a review of Massimo Berruti’s Dim-Remembered Stories: a critical study of R.H. Barlow (2011).
27 Wednesday Jun 2012
Posted in Odd scratchings
An early dating of the Providence Necronomicon… August 2013. Exact dates and venue to be announced.
26 Tuesday Jun 2012
Posted in Scholarly works
The call is out for the 2012 Jamie Bishop Memorial Award, for a critical essay on the fantastic. 3,000-10,000 words, deadline 1st September 2012.
26 Tuesday Jun 2012
Posted in Scholarly works
Mention of an interesting-sounding academic paper, presented last month at the Queertopia! queer studies conference in northwest Australia…
Alexandra Edwards, “Like some monstrous stealthy cat”: queerness and felinomorphism in Charles Brockden Brown, Henry James, and H.P. Lovecraft.
Edwards won the English Department’s Best Graduate Essay prize with the paper, but sadly it’s not online. The term “felinomorphism” appears to come via the parody Ground Zero by Paul Lysymy, which makes me think the paper might be also in that line(?).
18 Monday Jun 2012
Posted in Historical context
Some photos from the H.P. Lovecraft Photo Gallery that I’d not seen before, of Lovecraft in 1935…
1935: Lovecraft in St. John’s Churchyard, Providence.
1935: Lovecraft in front of the Sarah Helen Whitman House, Providence.
1935(?): Lovecraft in Florida?
1935, March 2 – Lovecraft in the doorway of his home at 66 College Street, Providence.
The last two look like they may have been made by someone familiar with American modernist photography.
16 Saturday Jun 2012
Posted in Historical context, New books
Nodens Books has published a little edition of the collected works of Robert Nelson, Sable Revery: Poems, Sketches and Letters by Robert Nelson…
“Robert Nelson (1912-1935) was a contributor of verse to Weird Tales magazine in the mid-1930s, and of verse and prose to fan magazines like The Fantasy Fan. He was also a correspondent of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. This slim volume collects all of his published poems, prose-sketches and letters, which date from the last four years of his short life. Also included are five letters by H.P. Lovecraft, four to Nelson and one to Nelson’s mother after the young man’s death.”