17 Thursday Nov 2011
Posted in Scholarly works
An interesting new empirical / industry-structure analysis of the rise of SF in America: David Reinecke, “From the Pulps to the Stars: The Making of the American Science Fiction Magazine, 1923-1973”. Princeton University CACPS Working Paper #44, Fall 2011.
16 Wednesday Nov 2011
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Marina Warner’s new book on magic and the reception of the Arabian Nights, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, reviewed…
“The second part attends to the Arab and European habit of attributing foreignness to evil magicians. These dark enchanters come from dark places (Africa and India) and profess dark (pre-Islamic) faiths. During the Enlightenment, black magic became inevitably dark skinned; necromancy became inseparable from “nigromancy”.
Of obvious relevance to much weird fiction from the 1920s and 30s, and Lovecraft’s use of mad Arab wizards, etc. Warner is not your usual theory-clotted lit crit academic, she’s a proper historian and independent scholar.
16 Wednesday Nov 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc., REH
A free unabridged audio reading of perhaps the most Lovecraftian of Robert E. Howard’s stories, “The Black Stone” (1931). The new recording was kindly made by Cthulhupodcast, over the summer in July 2011…
Above: Illustration for the story, by British artist Greg Staples
A ten-page comic book adaptation appeared in Marvel’s Savage Sword Of Conan (March 1982 issue).
16 Wednesday Nov 2011
Posted in Scholarly works
The New York Times obituary for Les Daniels — horror author of Providence, and “one of the earliest historians of comic books” with books such as Comix: A History of Comic Books In America (1971).
Also… “The subject of his master’s thesis was the horror author H.P. Lovecraft” and he wrote on Lovecraft for the local Providence press. It seems S.T. Joshi has a section on the Daniels vampire novels, in the book The Evolution of the Weird Tale. Joshi also suggests, in one interview, that Daniels’s Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media (1975)… “is probably the best we have, but of course it is very much out of date”.
15 Tuesday Nov 2011
The Gothic Imagination: Conversations on Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction in the Media is shipping now. The table-of-contents makes it look a lot more interesting than the publisher’s blurb does (which foregrounds the William Shatner involvement, presumably in the vain hope that Trekkies will buy it)…
Preface by Richard Holmes / Prefatory Note by James Gunn
INTRODUCTION: VOICES HEARD ‘ROUND THE COSMIC CAMPFIRE by John C. Tibbetts
THE LOVECRAFT CIRCLE
* “The Provocative Abysses of Unplumbed Space”: S.T. Joshi Explores the Universe of H.P. Lovecraft
* “I Am Providence”: Henry Beckwith on H.P. Lovecraft
* “Psycho Is Not About a Shower Scene!”: Robert Bloch
* “From Providence to Liverpool”: Ramsey Campbell
* “Certain Things Associated with the Night”: T.E.D. Klein
THE HEROIC AGE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION
* “Robert E. Howard and The Whole Wide World”: Dan Ireland
* “Batman and Me”: Bob Kane
* “The Man Who Explained Miracles”: John Dickson Carr
* “Superman is a Friend”: Christopher Reeve
* “Wonder’s Child”: Jack Williamson
* “Ragnarok and Relativity”: Poul Anderson
* “The Way the Future Was”: Frederik Pohl
* “I Tell People Stories”: Wilson Tucker
* “The Complete Enchanter”: L. Sprague De Camp
THE BRADBURY COLLABORATIONS
* “Stan and Ollie”: Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen
* “Joe and Me”: Bradbury and Joseph Mugnaini
THE BRADBURY CIRCLE (Friends and Associates)
* “Let’s Put on a Show!”: Julius Schwarz
* “Mister Monster”: Forrest J Ackerman
* “Dandelion Chronicles”: William F. Nolan
* “The Repairman Cometh”: F. Paul Wilson
* “A Bradbury Companion”: Donn Albright
DESTINATION: MARS!
* “Back to Barsoom”: Bob Zeuschner Talks about the Mars Books of Edgar Rice Burroughs
* “This Is Where We Start Again”: Kim Stanley Robinson
THE EXTRAVAGANT GAZE
* “A Sublime Madness”: Professors Albert Boime and Tim Mitchell Talk about Goya, Gericault, and Caspar David Friedrich
* “Scenes from Childhood”
* “Album for the Young”: Maurice Sendak
* “There’s a Lot of Reality to These Fantasies”: Charles Sturridge and Fairy Tale
* “The Mysteries of Chris Van Allsburg”
* “Gahan Wilson’s Diner”
“WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE…”: TOM CORBETT, SPACE CADET AND STAR TREK
* Frankie Thomas on “Tom Corbett” and the Early Days of “Live” Television
* Four members of the Enterprise crew speak out about Star Trek: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, De Forest Kelly, and George Takei
THE MUSIC OF TERROR
* “Symphonie fantastique”: Jack Sullivan
POSTMODERN GOTHIC
* “The Night Ride of Charles Beaumont”: Jason V Brock
* “The Kiss That Bites”: Susie McKee Charnas
* “A Magellan of the Interior”: Peter Straub
* “The Billion Year Spree”: Brian Aldiss
* “Savage Pastimes”: Gothic Schlock and True-Crime Horrors: Harold Schechter and Rick Geary
* “Different Engines”: Alternate Worlds and Anachronistic Technologies: Cynthia Miller and T. L. Reid
“THE HERESY OF HUMANISM”: GREG BEAR AND GREGORY BENFORD
EPILOGUE
15 Tuesday Nov 2011
Posted in Unnamable
The New York Times magazine on celebrity culture as a re-invention of gothic spectacle…
“When people talk about a contemporary gothic revival, they’re usually talking about Romantic fictions like Twilight and True Blood. But it’s in the so-called real world of the tabloids, Internet gossip sites and reality TV that the genre is truly thriving. With their troubled heroines, haunted castles (or bad-vibe hotels), fakes and counterfeits, long-buried secrets, madwomen, controlling patriarchs, damsels in distress, reckless cads, depravity and the looming threat of financial ruin, these stories are striking for their endlessly recurring themes of excess, addiction, decadence and madness. And like the pursued heroines of 18th-century novels, the waifs of the tabloid stories seem at once abject — doomed to wander the wilderness while being poked at by the villagers wielding sticks and telephoto lenses — and trapped: sealed off in the glass dungeons of their fame.”
15 Tuesday Nov 2011
Posted in Historical context, Podcasts etc.
A blast from the past: a 45-minute BBC radio discussion on The Gothic (2001). Covers the history of the literary and architectural gothic in the British Isles. May only be available from the online “listen again…” service for those in the UK (others might try here). Part of the BBC’s outstanding “In Our Time” series.
14 Monday Nov 2011
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts
I found a new Lovecraft documentary, or at least new to me. Sponsored by the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities (“major grant awarded in the Spring of 2011”) and the Center for Independent Documentary. The directors of Finding Lovecraft only have this trailer at present, released June 2011…
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N438T1Wylk&w=560&h=315]
“a feature-length documentary fantasy, now in production in Providence, RI. We explore the life and unique style of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, and illustrate his unique legacy using an innovative mix of narrative and documentary storytelling. A Lovecraft-inspired story unfolds for the filmmakers as we delve into the life of this extraordinary character through archival research and expert interviews.”
I was disconcerted to hear the director say in the trailer that he’s one of those who simply dislikes all of Lovecraft’s fiction. Seriously, does he really mean to say he couldn’t find anything to like, not even “The Cats of Ulthar”? But it seems the documentary is to focus instead on the the life and letters, and the various ‘Lovecraft’ places in Rhode Island. I think Finding Lovecraft will be the fourth substantial documentary:— it will follow the workmanlike but flawed The Eldritch Influence: The Life, Vision, and Phenomenon of H.P. Lovecraft (2004); the excellent Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown (2009); and the 45-minute BBC Radio documentaries The Young Man of Providence (BBC Radio 4, 1983), and Weird Tales: the Strange Life of H.P. Lovecraft (BBC Radio 3, 2006). I’d love to see someone make a proper Ken Burns-style Lovecraft documentary about his time in New York City.
14 Monday Nov 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A fine poster for the movie The Captured Bird…
“The film is inspired by a nightmare that Jovanka’s twin brother had when he was a child, the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, the fables of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen”
It’s a successfully crowd-funded $25,000 film, expected to complete in December, and will then be shown only on the film festivals circuit during 2012.
13 Sunday Nov 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A behind-the-scenes look at the miniature sets created for the movie of The Whisperer in Darkness.
Talking of movies, Aaron Vanek has a substantial round-up of the 2011 H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.
13 Sunday Nov 2011
Posted in New books
Coming at the end of November from Night Shade Books, The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith…
“gathers together the adventure, juvenilia and other non-fantastic fiction … editors Scott Connors and Ron Hilger have prepared this volume by comparing original manuscripts, various typescripts, published editions, and Smith’s notes and letters, in order to prepare a definitive set of texts”
12 Saturday Nov 2011
Posted in Scholarly works
Some new open dissertations/theses:
From 2010, The Gothic as a Practice: Gothic Studies, Genre and the Twentieth Century Gothic (doesn’t address Lovecraft in any substantial way, but may be conceptually useful to some).
From August 2011, Radical Realms: A Materialist Theory of Fantasy Literature (undergraduate)
Also noted while searching, though either not online or behind a paywall…
* Smith, P. (2011), “Re-visioning Romantic-Era Gothicism: An Introduction to Key Works and Themes in the Study of H.P. Lovecraft”. Literature Compass, 8 (Nov 2011), pages 830–839.
* Aaron Smuts, “Pickman’s Model”: Horror and the Objective Purport of Photographs”. Revue internationale de philosophie, 2010/4 (No. 254).
* David Farnell, “Unlikely Utopians: Ecotopian Dreaming in H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ and Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood”, Arena Journal, issue 35-36 (2011)
* A Canadian 2010 M.A. disseration called “Spectres of Darwin: H.P. Lovecraft’s Nihilistic Parody of Religion”.