Vacation Necronomicon School, summer 2010 reading assignment for 3rd August 2010: “Other media”.

“Your assignment today is to delineate your favourite modern writer, musician, or other artist whose work includes a true […] sense of ‘Otherness’.”

TASK EIGHT: 3rd August 2010.

Premable: I read everything worth reading in literary science-fiction and fantasy (pre-1985), plus the old Heavy Metal comics. But I no longer have the books, and my memory is hazy about all but the classics. In the last couple of years I’ve only read Charles Stross, Richard Calder, Neal Stephenson, Alan Moore, and re-read Kipling and Tolkien. I’m now re-reading Lovecraft. I was never really into outright horror literature, other than Lovecraft, so I can’t really write about that side of the literary experience either.

I can suggest that Lovecraft enthusiasts might enjoy the surrealist New York poems of Lorca, written in the years 1929/30. His attitude to ‘the other’ in New York contrasts starkly with that of Lovecraft. The poems can be found in the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Poet in New York. Similarly Ayn Rand’s atheist libertarian philosophy — as expressed in the monumental novel Atlas Shrugged (1957) — is certainly ‘other’ to the prevailing consensus, and still provokes irrationally visceral antagonistic responses. The novel may also interest Lovecraftians because it is deeply informed by the experience of New York in the 1930s. Rand’s writing and Continue reading →

Vacation Necronomicon School, summer 2010 reading assignment for 31st July 2010: “The Call of Cthulhu”.

“Your short assignment today […] discuss Lovecraft’s influence on [John] Carpenter’s oeuvre”

TASK Six: 31st July 2010.

I can’t talk about the films of Carpenter because I haven’t seen them, and I generally dislike post-1970 filmed horror unless it’s strongly science-fiction.

What I find much more interesting is the possible influence of the early cinema on Lovecraft. This appears to me to be a very neglected area, judging by my Web searches and searches of Google Books. And yet we know that Lovecraft was an avid cinema goer from the early days of the movies onwards…

“I am a devotee of the motion picture” — letter of 1915.

As far as I can tell from Google Books, this is where Joshi’s definitive biography stops in terms of examining the possible influences from early cinema and newsreels. Lovecraft found Chaplin funny, disliked the 1930s Dracula, end of story. A search of the index of Lovecraft Studies finds one lonely article with “cinema” in its title, and that on “Cinematic Interpretations of the Works”. Zero records are found for “film” and “films” or “motion”. Are Lovecraft scholars in need of a joint symposium with the historians of early fantastic cinema?