18 Saturday Feb 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings
The venerable and trenchant British arts magazine The Jackdaw requires subscriptions to continue. This paper-only magazine, akin to a Private Eye magazine for the British arts world…
has been withdrawn from sale from every museum shop in the UK because of its trenchant criticism (most of it from working artists) of the arts establishment. It urgently needs new subscribers to continue.
And over in Providence, the Lovecraft Arts & Sciences 2023 Winter Fundraiser appears to be ongoing.
17 Friday Feb 2023
Posted in Astronomy, Lovecraftian arts, Picture postals
This week on ‘Picture Postals’, something a little different. In the merry spirit of our new ‘deep fake’ era… HPL seen steering the controls of the Ladd Observatory telescope, Providence. In hi-res colour Vint-o-Vision.
[I had] the freedom of the college observatory, (Ladd Observatory) & I came & went there at will on my bicycle. […] So constant were my observations, that my neck became affected by the strain of peering at a difficult angle. It gave me much pain, & resulted in a permanent curvature perceptible today to a close observer. — Letter to Rheinhart Kleiner, November 1916.
16 Thursday Feb 2023
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Newly listed, what appears to be a new book of translations of Lovecraft’s letters… or at least, new to the French in French. Selection de lettres (1927-1929): De vagues fragments d’un reve dans lequel je n’ai rien s faire (‘Vague fragments of a dream in which I have nothing to do’) was due in March but is now listed as shipping in early April 2023…
The translator Vincent-Pierre Angouillant offers us the translation of a hundred letters by Lovecraft. Knowing his impressive letters makes his fictional universe an even richer experience. Never before published in France, these letters are but a fragment of Lovecraft’s surviving correspondence. Often he reveals what seems an ordinary daily life, yet this is described in a style unique to Lovecraft and we can only marvel at the ways in which he interweaves his immense erudition. The reader will also encounter striking accounts of his dreams and nightmares, sometimes amounting to tales in their own right, in which the master instantly transports us into his horrific universe.
A chunky 600-page book, apparently. Looks good, if you’re a French Lovecraftian.
I see the same translator also has Selected Letters of an Anachronistic Gentleman (2022) which collected in one volume his two earlier volumes of translated letters and one booklet of 1925 letters. He seems to have started with his 1925 booklet in August 2021, and is rapidly working his way through the letters from there.
15 Wednesday Feb 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
New on Archive.org to borrow, a short survey of Ray Bradbury, dramatist (1989), a revised version of a 1977 edition. This 1989 Borgo edition is 56 pages. Amazon only sees one used copy of an out-of-print Borgo Press “second edition” from 1991. I’m guessing that 1989 was the hardback, and 1991 the paperback.
Also noted on Archive.org, and arrived in the last twelve months or so, Listen To The Echoes: the Ray Bradbury interviews and The Ray Bradbury Companion subtitled ‘a life and career history, photolog, and comprehensive checklist of writings, with facsimiles’.
14 Tuesday Feb 2023
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts
There’s now a date for the trade paperback of Unknown Kadath, 17th May 2023. Pre-ordering now. It’s just convention that the comics trade calls such things “Book 1” or “Vol. 1”. It’s the complete series of eight ‘spinner-rack comic-books’ (aka ‘floppies’), in one book. It was actually seven, last I heard, so with eight we could be now looking at over 300 pages for the trade paperback including the alternate covers, art gallery, and bonuses. The final part is due as a ‘floppy’ on 26th April 2023, then we get the trade paperback.
13 Monday Feb 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings
A nice job… Associate Editor, Alumni Magazine, Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Enormous salary, so much so that you wonder if it’s true. In the UK this would be a $28k a year post. Indeed, if they’d let me do it remotely then I could save them $50k a year. No deadline given, but posted five days ago. Details.
13 Monday Feb 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
Well, here’s a turn-up for a Monday morning. The Fantasy Fan: The Complete Writings of Clark Ashton Smith is new on Librivox and in the public domain. As narrator Ben Tucker explains…
The Fantasy Fan Magazine was a periodical dedicated to people professing their love of and celebrating fantasy and weird fiction. In addition to the opinion pieces and non-fiction articles, The Fantasy Fan also included man short stories and poems by some of the authors it celebrated such as H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, a personal favorite of editor Charles D. Hornig. Smith contributed quite a variety of stories, poems and articles to The Fantasy Fan over its two-year tenure, all of which are collected here.
Also on Archive.org if you prefer a .torrent file.
12 Sunday Feb 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Polygon has a long industry-focussed article on Call of Cthulhu in the Far East, in nations such as Korea and Japan…
20% of Call of Cthulhu users play in a language other than English. That’s double the rate of other systems.
There’s also a thriving indie sub-culture…
You go to any game store [in Japan] that carries RPGs and there’s the Call of Cthulhu book, always in the top five weekly, monthly sales. No matter how many years have passed, it’s always there. And you turn to the right and there are three shelves of Cthulhu supplements written by people where not a single penny goes to them or Chaosium.”
11 Saturday Feb 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
The Romanian open-access journal Acta Iassyensia Comparationis has a
‘Monsters in Literature’ special-issue. Includes the lead essay “Sea Monsters: Theoretical Perspectives”.
And in the new 2023 issue of Fantastika Journal, also open-access, “A Tentacular Teratology: The Abcanny Monstrous”.
10 Friday Feb 2023
Posted in Picture postals
This week on ‘Picture Postals’ a pleasingly poetic set of pen-and-ink views of Lovecraft’s beloved Marblehead, almost as if it were a small port in his Dreamlands. In high resolution and crisp.
And a postcard which may interest those who have an RPG game with a Marblehead setting in the 1890s to 1930s, and who want printable and adaptable props. A dramatic storm-cloud over the town, with space enough to paint in any manner of faint but monstrous apparitions.
10 Friday Feb 2023
Posted in Podcasts etc.
Another new Short Ghost and Horror Story Collection from Librivox. One from Lovecraft’s friend Henry S. Whitehead, and two from Lovecraft himself (“The Terrible Old Man” and “Pickman’s Model”). All public domain.
09 Thursday Feb 2023
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
New Book: William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird: Possibilities of the Dark, billed as…
The first comprehensive study of the works of William Hope Hodgson
Pre-ordering now at a hefty ‘academic libraries only’ price, for what’s currently listed as a 1st June 2023 release.
