“Of course, it’s in January that I really dig down into the nethermost recesses of my burrow,” — H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters: Volume 2.
January
19 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted in Odd scratchings
Intersectionality and Lovecraft
19 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted in Unnamable
Roundtable: Intersectionality and Lovecraft, from a 12th Jan Locus Online roundtable. “Intersectionality” is a feminist theory term that suggests one’s different social and cultural identities — being a woman, being lesbian, being black, being disabled, being a daughter — interact in society to form more intractable tangles of discrimination. It has since been ported more generally into a variety of leftist academic approaches such as sociology and cultural studies, where it knocks around with subtler theories of hybridity, ‘fluid identity’ versions of queer, and various ideas on how online identities are lived out.
Fine Books and Collections mag on Lovecraft
18 Wednesday Jan 2012
Posted in Historical context
Back in May 2011, Fine Books and Collections magazine led with a Lovecraft article, now freely available online…
Lovecraft’s Providence: “The homes and haunts of horror and science fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft”, By Nick Mamatas. With a breakout mini article on the question of “Lovecraft’s First Book?”
More recent academic work
17 Tuesday Jan 2012
Posted in Scholarly works
A couple of interesting academic works in open PDF form, from 2011…
The Indigenous Gothic Novel: tribal twists, native monsters, and the politics of appropriation, by Amy Elizabeth Gore. M.A. dissertation, 2011.
“Bibliographica Necronomica : selections from the literature of grimoires, cursed books and unholy bindings” by Kurt X. Metzmeier. Newsletter of Legal History & Rare Books (Special Interest Section, American Association of Law Libraries), Volume 17 Number 2, Fall 2011.
Peter Konig
16 Monday Jan 2012
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The sculptures of Peter Konig, one of the creatives who worked on the pre-production for del Toro’s At The Mountains of Madness…
Doctor Fate
15 Sunday Jan 2012
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts
A long tribute to the Doctor Fate title from the Golden Age era of comic books (it’s the DC equivalent of Marvel’s Doctor Strange title)…
“For the first 135 pages, Doctor Fate Archives [printed volume collects More Fun Comics #55-98] features some of the wildest, eeriest and most entertaining stuff the era has to offer as far as mainstream comics go. […] While Doctor Fate is generally characterized as a sorcerer hero in modern comics, he’s actually presented here as a scientist who has discovered a way to manipulate his atomic structure and the atomic structure of other things as well, thus making it appear that he can do magic. The man who gives Fate his powers is not a sorcerer, but an alien who was worshipped as a god (just like Lovecraft’s great old ones). Fate even denies the existence of vampires and werewolves in one story, just as how Lovecraft often showed contempt for such “traditional” horrors and hardly ever used them. We also have a “witch haunted Salem”, characters who speak in odd, stilted dialogue with truly bizarre tense, hidden races, abandoned megaliths, as well as half man and half fish creatures that clearly were inspired by Lovecraft’s Deep Ones. Doctor Fate may well be the first Lovecraft pastiche in mainstream entertainment.” [my emphasis]
The Revised Adolphe Danziger de Castro
14 Saturday Jan 2012
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
Chris Powell’s “The Revised Adolphe Danziger de Castro“, free…
“The following article was published in the Spring 1997 (Number 36) edition of Lovecraft Studies, a small, academic journal for devotees of H.P. Lovecraft and fiction of the weird. It describes a phase of Danziger’s writing career where he used ghostwriters to revise and improve his writing. Most notable among those ghostwriters was horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.”
Portland, city of SF and weird
14 Saturday Jan 2012
Posted in Unnamable
IFC profiles Portland: The Science Fiction Capital of America?
More Lovecraftian places that really exist
13 Friday Jan 2012
Posted in Lovecraftian places, Odd scratchings
Hang Son Doong cave, Vietnam.
Entrance to Derinkuyu Underground City, Turkey.
Lake Taupo, New Zealand.
Goreme, Anatolia.
Prehistoric structure, Black Sea coast of Russia.
Bridge to the ruins of the ancient Wycoller Old Hall, England.
JURN
12 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted in Scholarly works
Independent scholars seeking free access to full-text articles in academic journals may be interested in my JURN search-engine. Built over three years, JURN now indexes and searches 4,336 free ejournals in the arts & humanities. These are a mix of full “open access” journals, and serious publications that simply put some or all of their content online for free.
I also have a JURN Directory, an organised single-page display of 3,000 links to all the English-language titles indexed in JURN.
Both resources are kept free of link-rot via regular automated checks.
Graceless No.1
12 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted in Odd scratchings
Graceless : a journal of the radical gothic. It’s a 116-page goth subculture journal, but it looks a serious endevour. No fiction, but rather a mix of interviews, photography and articles on aspects of the gothic subculture scene, plus occasional more serious-sounding articles such as “Jeepers Creepers!: The Dark Side of Victorian Childrens’ Literature”. May interest photographers and Lovecraftian goths.
Gothic Science Fiction: 1980-2010
11 Wednesday Jan 2012
Posted in Scholarly works
An interesting sounding new book from Livepool University Press in the UK, Gothic Science Fiction: 1980-2010 (Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies)
“This timely book explores what might be termed Gothic science fiction of the last three decades, 1980-2010. Identifying texts by this category may at first appear contradictory, as the Gothic’s connotations of the irrational and supernatural seems to conflict with science fiction’s rational foundations. However, this collection demonstrates that the two categories have rich intersections.”