Lovecraftian Archetypes: the eternal feminine

25 Wednesday Apr 2012

Posted by in New books

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Interesting new book on Lovecraft’s treatment of the feminine, in Italian by Renzo Giorgetti, Lovecraftian Archetypes: the eternal feminine. The English summary…

“In the study of the work of H.P. Lovecraft one theme seems always to be neglected: that of women. In Lovecraft’s intellectual odyssey and his dreaming, always lost in seas of fantastic creation, this theme seems almost deliberately forgotten or relegated to a corner of his conceptions. But on closer examination the female appears numerous times: transformed, concealed, disguised, but ever-present and ready to play a key role. Whether it be ordinary women, or goddesses, monsters and entire civilisations, the female has her place in the Lovecraftian universe, exercising with a magical influence a magnetism towards the unknown and the unfathomable, and always ready to unleash surprising and unexpected potentialities.”

Why AR horror rarely works

24 Tuesday Apr 2012

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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As Google gears up for the augmented-reality gaming home, delivered to wireless AR glasses straight from the Web browser (no DVDs involved), Philip Reed muses on why augmented reality horror doesn’t work…

“its scares, for technological reasons, need to be telegraphed. If a scary face is going to come out of a book, that can be scary. But when the game requires you to meticulously create a scenario in which that is possible, it’s easy to guess what’s coming, and the simple surprise — and subsequent scare — is lost before it ever comes.”

Erik Kriek

19 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books

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Broken Frontier reports on a new book of Lovecraft adaptations by Dutch comics celebrity Erik Kriek….

“It would be tempting to illustrate Lovecraft’s highly descriptive style with as few words as possible but Kriek – perhaps aided by producing his wordless Gutsman comics for so many years – recognizes the importance of Lovecraft’s particular wording and rhythmic stance. He opts to use captions in combination with their visual representations but adds enough visual stimulus so that words and pictures form an interdependent relationship. It is a decision prone to many traps (as many a literary graphic adaptation can attest to) but Kriek succeeds fairly well. He knows when to step back, let the dialogue take over and when to cut back on the caption level.”

Update, 2021: A decade later, and still no translation into English. In fact, almost nothing of his is in English. Does he just ask too high a price for the translation rights?

Lovecraft project wins Amazon Studios attention

19 Thursday Apr 2012

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Online retailer Amazon recently decided to start Amazon Studios, hoping to snag original scripts and pitches, and turn them into movies.

Fear.net has a new interview with screenwriter Alex Greenfield…

“His biggest success so far has been The Temple, a Lovecraftian tale about evil in the Afghani desert. With The Temple, Alex won Amazon’s July 2011 overall Best Script Award — then Amazon gave him a bunch of money to create a “test movie.” Alex took us through the process of working with Amazon Studios, and tells us about his upcoming genre projects.”

Rather than the underwater setting of the Lovecraft story, in Greenfield’s version the temple is found by U.S. Special Forces in the lawless mountain region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Namecraft of Lord Dunsany

17 Tuesday Apr 2012

Posted by in Scholarly works

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It’s behind a paywall, but this new academic article might interest…

Robinson, Christopher L. (2012)   “The Stuff of Which Names are Made: A Look at the Colorful and Eclectic Namecraft of Lord Dunsany”.   Names: A Journal of Onomastics.  Volume 60, Number 1, March 2012, pages 26-35.

“Lord Dunsany’s prolific namecraft provides a rich field for study, but poses difficulties for traditional approaches to names in literature, which typically seek out the hidden meanings or symbolisms of isolated names. An alternative approach is to look for trends in the forms and substances of the author’s inventions as a whole. To this end, Emile Souriau’s threefold typology of neologisms proves useful. In the first category, Dunsany camouflages pre-existing vocables of diverse origins. In the second, he employs anglicized versions of forms identified with foreign languages and nomenclatures, though he does not introduce actual foreign sounds. In the third, he constructs names from morphological building blocks. Whether English or foreign, Dunsany divests his source materials of their original referents, yet retains traces of their idiomatic provenance. Colorful and eclectic, his inventions resonate within a mythopoetic encyclopedia of diverse literary, historical, and cultural traditions.”