12 Saturday Nov 2011
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi has updated his blog with news of new projects and progress on old ones. A updated and enlarged edition of the collection of Lovecraft’s poetry, The Ancient Track. The possibility of “an anthology of original stories based on At the Mountains of Madness“. Joshi’s history of supernatural fiction, Unutterable Horror, in set for Autumn 2012.
12 Saturday Nov 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Miskatonic School for Girls raises $36k on Kickstarter.
Does any reader know how someone from the UK might get on Kickstarter? It seems to be the only site worth using for crowd-funding, but they’re apparently “USA only”.
12 Saturday Nov 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Alan Moore’s Neonomicon mini-series is collected as a graphic novel, and available for pre-order with a 25th Nov release date. The book also includes the earlier The Courtyard. Not sure if there are any nice extras like a text-fiction continuation of the story. It seems not. Personally, I found the art more memorable than the story…
11 Friday Nov 2011
Posted in Odd scratchings
Zompist gives an intelligent newb’s impression of first encountering H.P. Lovecraft (specifically, the classic At the Mountains of Madness). This may just about sum up some people’s reaction to a great deal of Lovecraft and similar ‘old fashioned’ writing, among those who buy such books expecting all the streamlining of a modern ‘speed-read’ supermarket novel…
“What stands out about both stories is the narrative technique, which I find so antiquated that it’s hard to deal with. Bluntly, the narration hides the good stuff as long as possible. It approaches the theme from way off, teases us with ambiguous details, goes out of its way to suggest that there may be rationalistic explanations or it may all be mad hallucinations. This was kind of standard for the period, of course, but Lovecraft takes it to an extreme. I let him go on and on, but I think it’s not to modern tastes.”
11 Friday Nov 2011
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Click on the “Look Inside” at the Amazon page for the new The White People and Other Weird Stories — and the 10% Kindle preview gives you the excellent introductions by del Toro and S.T. Joshi, for free…
del Toro: “Philosophers, writers, and artists are rarely emotionally successful human beings.”
S.T. Joshi: “…the supernatural can only manifest itself in literature when a relatively stable and coherent idea of the natural has been arrived at.”
S.T. Joshi: “…the best weird writers understood that supernatural motifs could serve as metaphors for the expression of truths about the human condition (the vampire as social outsider, for example) in a more vivid and pungent manner than in conventional mimetic realism.”
The book is not available in the U.K. Kindle Store (sigh…, when will publishers learn that publicity is now global and not national?), but U.K. readers can read the intro by going to the American Amazon store and clicking “Look Inside”. I guess you may have to be registered with the U.S. Amazon to do this.
11 Friday Nov 2011
Just found out about a 200 page book that gives an overview of the various incarnations of R.E. Howard’s Conan, Conan: the Phenomenon. Currently the hardback can be picked up on Amazon, used, for about $2.50.
10 Thursday Nov 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
New free audio reading of Lovecraft’s “The Moon-Bog” (1921). 22 minutes, 3,400 words.
Above: artwork by Stephen Fabian.
10 Thursday Nov 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Yet more H.P. Lovecraft theatricals. Dover Players in the USA get hip with the remix culture, and freely combine and remix “Cool Air”, “Dreams in the Witch House” and “The Rats in the Walls” to make a new Lovecraftian work for the stage…
“the play’s climax perfectly expresses the moral-emotional tone and thematic fixations of a Lovecraft story. The tone is dark, and the themes decidedly bleak. […] But the project is not mere sensationalism. Evangelista’s undertaking is the most ambitious community theater of recent memory, and his boldness pays off for both the Lovecraft devotee and open-minded and strong-stomached theatergoer.”
09 Wednesday Nov 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
H.P. Lovecraft’s poetry, set to music in folk, jazz, bluegrass and country styles on the new album Back to Lovecraft…
“Back to Lovecraft” is an album by four Corsican artists (Frederic “Tonton” Antonpietri, Paul Cesari, Armand Luciani, Marie Ange Tosi-Abbati) […] finalised in London at the Abbey Road Studios.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JD46JBxWTHc&w=560&h=315]
09 Wednesday Nov 2011
Posted in Historical context
SF author William Gibson interviewed in The Paris Review…
“It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve already been there and nobody paid any attention. That world is gone.”
Actually… H.P. Lovecraft was there, he paid attention. So did Helen Levitt and many other artists and writers. There had also been a wave of recent academic books on many aspects of the culture and times of New York City in the 1910-1930 period.
08 Tuesday Nov 2011
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Hannes Storhaug-Meyer has just published his M.A. dissertation as a printed book, The Morphology of the Unknown: The Narrative Technique of H. P. Lovecraft…
“This thesis shows that the unknown actually forms the core of a narrative technique which we can identify in most of Lovecraft’s works. Through close readings of three of his most famous texts, “The Call of Cthulhu”, “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”, this thesis analyzes the central role that unknowns play in them. It highlights how unknowns are created, maintained and resolved in the course of the narrative. The analyses also show how these unknowns affect the narrative flow and how the reader is affected by their presence. Ultimately, this thesis describes a narrative technique or model which is centered on the unknown and which is commonly found in Lovecraft’s texts.”
“Hannes Storhaug-Meyer is a teacher of English at Honefoss High School in Norway. He has studied British and American literature at the University of Oslo and received his M.A. for the thesis ‘The Morphology of the Unknown’.
08 Tuesday Nov 2011
Posted in Unnamable
Lovecraft is Missing‘s polished evocation of those old used bookstores that don’t seem to exist any more…
“All those stores are gone now, the buildings torn down for urban renewal; the store owners are gone to their reward as well. I have to say I miss them. They were all eccentrics, and maybe that is what I find so disagreeable in the local Book Rack or Paperback Shack, usually located in malls, manned by well-meaning but featureless men and women, the air scented with Glade, or worse, incense. I guess I miss the cat pee and the mold.”