Monsters conference in Manchester – call for papers

26 Saturday Nov 2011

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Monsters: Subject, Object, Abject :: April 12th-13th 2012. The Manchester Museum, Manchester (northern England), United Kingdom

From children’s toys to religious architecture, from medical and legal definitions to Gothic romance – cultural products resonate with fear, obsession and desire for the monster.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Proposals are sought for 20-minute papers. Possible topics include (but are not limited to)…

Monsters in literature, art, music and film
Architectural monsters
Subjectivity and the monster
Objectification and the monster
Historical definition of the monstrous
Medical and legal monsters
Theorisations of the monstrous
Mythology, folklore and legends
Hybrids and hybridity
Cyborgs and the posthuman

Please send 300-word abstracts to conference@hic-dragones.co.uk by Sunday 1st January 2012. For more information, please see our website: www.hic-dragones.co.uk/events.

Following the conference, there will be a two-day public Monsters Convention in Manchester. We would be interested in hearing from anyone interested in offering a talk or seminar at this convention. Please email Dr. Hannah Priest for more info: events@hic-dragones.co.uk

Ann & Jeff Vandermeer interviewed

26 Saturday Nov 2011

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An excellent long interview with Ann & Jeff Vandermeer, editors of the new megathology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories…

Q: “Is there anything that surprised you when researching and compiling The Weird?”

A: “What surprised us, quite frankly, after reading so much across a century of fiction is that some of what has been dubbed “classic” just re-treads earlier work by other writers that most readers don’t know about…”

“We also discovered that some writers are obscure because the reprint rights are so difficult to acquire. […] Contemporary writers should give great thought to who will represent them after they have passed on. Because we also discovered estates represented by agents who had literally succumbed to dementia and were unable to negotiate.”

Read the whole interview at GavReads.

More recent Lovecraft scholarship

25 Friday Nov 2011

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Another quick trawl for recent Lovecraft scholarship published in out-of-the-way places…

* Micheal Gentry. “Parser at the Threshold: Lovecraftian horror in interactive fiction“. In the book: IF Theory Reader, March 2011. (Online, free.)

Also related to IF (interactive fiction), an English summary of a talk given at the Storyworlds Across Media conference (Johannes Gutenberg-Universitat Mainz, 30th June — 2nd July 2011)…

“In a talk on “The Developing Storyworld of H.P. Lovecraft”, Van Leavenworth (Umea) demonstrated that Lovecraft’s works hold two mythical concepts that appeal to his followers who have not only developed a number of textual, audio-visual and interactive fictions but also integrated elements of his stories into obscure cults: the loss of control or ‘cosmic fear’ and humanity’s inability to understand cosmic knowledge. Apparently, these universal human concerns adapt well to different uses and invite recipients to engage in the spiritual and transcendent body of thought that is attributed to the author’s name and persona. Hence, Leavenworth, as the previous speakers, put Ryan’s criteria of consistency and media-exclusiveness of the storyworld up for debate.”

* David Marks (2011). From the will to Wessex to Arkham: Lovecraft’s geophilosophical debt to Hardy. California State University, M.A. dissertation. (Hardy as in Thomas Hardy. Not yet online.)

* Julio Franca (Oct 2011). “Fundamentos Esteticos da Literatura de Horror: A influencia de Edmund Burke sobre H. P. Lovecraft“. (Article in Spanish on the influence of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful, on Lovecraft. Online.)

* Matthew Strohack (2011). “The City under the Hill: Allegorical Tradition and H. P. Lovecraft’s America.” A chapter in the book American Exceptionalisms: From Winthrop to Winfrey, SUNY Press, December 2011. (Already available to read online at Google Books.)

Cold Tonnage

22 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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I’ve added a new bookseller to my ‘Lovecraft on the Web’ list. It’s Cold Tonnage, whose new list leads off with a new Tartarus Press limited-edition of Robert Aickman’s Dark Entries (originally 1964).

There’s also an article on Aickman titled “Some Notes on Aickman’s Plays” by Douglas A. Anderson, in the Tartarus Press journal Wormwood #17. Just published, #17 leads with “World Gone Wrong: H.P. Lovecraft’s mythology of loss (part one)” by Joel Lane.

Haunter of the Dark wins 2011 Machinima Expo

20 Sunday Nov 2011

Posted by in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts

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A Lovecraft machinima movie has won the Grand Prize in the 2011 Machinima Expo (machinima is amateur 3D animation storytelling, rendered in real-time with a videogame engine). Phil Browne’s adaptation of The Haunter of the Dark was made with the real-time animation software iClone. Here’s the film with the director’s commentary…

[vimeo 32303090]

And here’s the original…

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyqoNvcmEcM&w=640&h=360]

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

19 Saturday Nov 2011

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Today in the UK both The Financial Times and Guardian Books notice the new wrist-breaker anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. Amazon UK currently has the book used for as low as £10.

It weighs in at 4lbs, and 750,000 words. So… can I get a Kindle version? No, of course not. What a waste of great publicity. All those potential sales from newspaper reviews just flushed down the drain or diverted to Pirate Bay, because there’s no Kindle version. Seriously, do we need a mass “one-star review” campaign on Amazon, to force publishers to give readers Kindle versions of new books?

Anyway, the chronological anthology looks interesting (even if the only Lovecraft in it is “The Dunwich Horror”, often regarded as a failure), and Weird Fiction Review has a handy table of contents.

Lovecraft Library Volume 1 – shipping early Dec 2011

18 Friday Nov 2011

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A weighty new 232-page collection of comic book adaptations of Lovecraft, The Lovecraft Library Volume 1: Horror Out of Arkham, due 6th Dec 2011 from IDW. Introduction written by Robert Weinberg.

Volume 2 is currently out as a series of traditional comic-book part-work pamphlets, as “H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror” (includes a 100-page adaptation “The Dunwich Horror”, plus other stories), and these will then presumably also be collected into a single volume at some point in 2012. When put together the two volumes should bring us over 400 pages of new comic book adaptations of Lovecraft tales.