9 posts tagged “lovecraft”
I spent most of my last full day in Providence at the special collections at the John Hay Library at Brown University:
Today was quite a busy day as I enjoyed a wonderful breakfast with fellow travelers at the bed and breakfast. After the morning meal, I set out on foot to Swan Point Cemetery to locate and visit Lovecraft's grave. The cemetery is a remarkable place in its own right and I spent a good amount of time wandering about examining the various tombstones and mausoleums located there. After my feet began to ache, I focused on finding HPL's grave. I located it and snapped the obligatory photo:
Earlier this year, I decided that as a reward for finishing the winter quarter of school, I'd reward myself with a Spring Break trip to Providence, Rhode Island in order to continue work on my Lovecraft copyright project. Unfortunately, not all information is available online, so an actual physical trip to the city became necessary if I were to move my work forward. I have two main goals: discover the claims advanced by the H.P. Lovecraft estate on any of Lovecraft's written works (the actual Estate has repeatedly declined to answer my queries for this information), and to learn more about the events after Lovecraft's death - in particular, the activities of Robert H. Barlow and Albert Baker immediately following the writer's death.
Any and all writings of the late Howard P. Lovecraft which are not copyrighted or are not part of the public domain and all letters, photographs, and books whether published or unpublished and other previously unpublished material. All writings which though copyrighted may not have been copyrighted by individuals, companies, corporations or associations who possessed the right or authority to copyright said materials.
I promise that this blog won't become a 24/7 Lovecraft affair, but I wanted to share some recent reviews of Lovecraft-related media. In this post, I'll be covering print, audio, and video.
The print entry is August Derleth's "The Cthulhu Mythos". This is a Barnes & Noble compilation of Derleth's Cthulhu mythos tales. For those unfamiliar with Derleth, he was a late entry into the Lovecraft circle and after Lovecraft's death he (rightly or wrongly) assumed control of Lovecraft publishing. "Mythos" is a collection of Derleth's tales that build upon the Lovecraft mythos, primarily centered around the entities Hastur and Cthulhu. In Derleth's adoption, Hastur and Cthulhu are members of the "Ancient Ones", a collection of powerful evil entities that rebelled against "The Elder Gods" and were cast to the four corners of the universe. In Derleth's tales, Hastur remains imprisoned among the stars, while Cthulhu is cast below the depths of Earth's seas. Despite their confinements, the Ancient Ones find ways to war against each other, using lower races as proxies and soldiers. In this collection, the big conflict is between Hastur's circle of humans and Cthulhu's fish-like Deep Ones.
I'm not going to get into the debate of whether Derleth's injection of a Christian-inspired good versus evil into the Lovecraft mythos was appropriate. (That's a bigger debate than this post could handle.) I will say that I found Derleth's tales to be a mixed bag. The book opens up with several almost identical stories about a Derleth-created entity called Ithaqua that I found to be rather poor and boring. I really didn't start enjoying the book until I read the short story about a guy and his buddy summoning and dismissing monsters and botching the process. I don't know if the story was meant to be dark humor, but I found it pretty funny.
The other highlight of the book was the collection of Professor Laban Shrewsbury stories that finished the book ("The Trail of Cthulhu"). These short stories are each part of a much larger story describing a mysterious professor working to eliminate Cthulhu's avenues of exit from the city of R'lyeh. The story begins in 1938 and continues past the end of the second World War with the professor and his recruits bombing and assassinating Cthulhu agents around the world. The series ends with the climax where Shrewsbury convinces the American military to detonate a nuclear weapon over the island first described in Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" to seal the Ancient One in the R'lyeh under the sea. I think that this single act (nuking Cthulhu) is probably the point in the extended mythos that separates the classic Lovecraft and Derleth stories from the more modern interpretations by creators like Charles Stross and Mike Mignola.
In the end, I found the book to be a mixed bag of stories that kept me riveted to the book and stories that put me to sleep. I originally picked up the book for a single dollar, and I believe that I got my money's worth. Certainly check out "The Trail of Cthulhu", but feel free to skip the rest.
My only complaint with the film is at the end where Cthulhu emerges from the island to pursue the human interlopers. The film's producers used a form of stop-motion animation to create the monster, but it didn't really work for me. I know that they didn't have a special effects budget, but I wonder if they might not have been better served by showing less Cthulhu and keeping the Ancient One in the shadows. I think that hinting rather than showing would have been more effective. (The way Galactus is presented in the most recent Fantastic Four film is a good example of relying upon the audience's imagination to present the unpresentable.)
In the end, I really enjoyed the film and it's an interesting addition to my DVD collection. The whole retro-schtick completely won me over, and I liked the style so much that I purchased a copy of the movie poster for the day when I have my dedicated movie room.
The HPLHS website has a CD and MP3 version for sale, and I'd highly recommend the compact disc. You'll have to wait for it to arrive via post, but included with the disk are prop photos, drawings, and a newspaper page related to the story. These are fun additions to have while listening. My only complaint was that the audio editing was a bit weak in the section where the radio newsman is interviewing members of the expedition via radio. It was hard to hear in parts, and I think that realism could have been sacrificed a bit in this case to facilitate easy listening.
I highly recommend both the "The Call of Cthulhu" DVD and the "At Mountains of Madness" radio play. Both can be purchased online at the HPLHS online store.
Last night, I finally got around to deciding the fate of the Lovecraft copyright paper I've been holding and I sent it out for consideration for inclusion in a journal. The paper's abstract:
Howard Phillips Lovecraft became a major figure in the horror, science fiction, and fantasy genres when pulp fiction magazines published his stories in the 1920s and 1930s. Since his death in 1937, confusion continually surrounded the ownership of his seminal works. This paper analyzes two prominent hypotheses concerning these copyrights. The dominant hypothesis describes how August Derleth and Donald Wandrei obtained control of Lovecraft’s works via the 1941 Morrish-Lewis contract and the 1947 Weird Tales contract. An alternative hypothesis explains that the works became part of the public domain when no renewal records were filed. Because both hypotheses rely on unverifiable claims, this paper introduces a new hypothesis showing that the works are effectively in the public domain on the basis of court filings in a 1974 lawsuit between Wandrei and his dead partner’s estate. The difficulty required to firmly establish the copyright status of these works illustrates a major problem of American copyright law.
This paper was originally written for a course I took in the fall quarter and the instructor liked it and encouraged me to seek further publication of the work. I've been sending it out to various people to solicit feedback (with mixed results) and I felt that it was finally time for me to push it out the door and get the work out there.
In the end, I decided to send it to Hippocampus Press in hopes that it might be suitable for inclusion in one of their Lovecraft journals. This probably won't do too much for me in terms of the CV, since the field of Lovecraft scholarship is still somewhat obscure and niche. It won't win me the institutional recognition that comes with sending it to a more mainstream communications or American studies journal, but I'm fine with that.
The main reason that I decided to go with this press is that their journals are edited by S.T. Joshi. Joshi's life work has been Lovecraft scholarship and his publications on Lovecraft's life, works, and collaborative circle are as authoritative as they come. His Lovecraft biography "H.P. Lovecraft: A Life" is more complete and detailed than any biography that I've seen. The secondary reason for submitting this paper there is that I wanted it read by people who actually give a damn about Lovecraft and his writings. The copyright question was one where a variety of theories held sway among Lovecraft scholars and enthusiasts. Some believed that the works were copyrighted by Arkham House, while others believed that they were public domain. Some believed that the copyrights stayed within the Morrish and Lewis families, while others believed that they were acquired by Arkham House. My paper is a contribution that clarifies this confusion by deeply digging into the history and documents to discover what's actually known (and what is not).
To be honest, I don't know what the odds are of the paper being accepted for publication. Chances are that the copyright question is not one that interests other Lovecraft scholars and no one cares whether "The Call of Cthulhu" is in the public domain. Despite my work and research on this topic, it may be that there are letters and other references I don't know about that contradict my claims. I've submitted it to the one authority who would know this. Perhaps there is not enough criticism or interpretation. There are probably a myriad of reasons that this paper could be rejected that I don't even know. The important thing is that I've started getting it out there.
PS. I'm still looking for readers, so if any of the above piqued your interest, send me an e-mail and I'll send you a link to the PDF.
On Friday, I finally finished Charles Stross's Lovecraftian spy thriller "The Jennifer Morgue". It is the second book in the Bob Howard series that follows the former Unix system administrator as he undertakes cloak-and-dagger jobs as part of a secret British gov't organization called "The Laundry". For those not following along, in Bob Howard's world, Alan Turing completed a comptational-demonology theorem called "Phase Conjugate Grammars for Extra-Dimensional Summoning". This theorem (also called the Turing-Lovecraft theorem), creates breaches between universes using some spiffy computational mathematics that routinely attract the attention of big nasties on the other side of this reality's veil.
Because of the nasty things that "go bump in the night", Howard's secret organization is tasked with keeping the rest of us safe from these creatures. In "The Jennifer Morgue", we discover in the opening pages that Howard Hughes's Glomar Explorer wasn't trying to recover just any sunken Soviet submarine, but a special one that was trying to phone in to a deceased but very active denizen of the depths. From the initial recovery mission in the 1960's, we readers are taken on a roller coaster ride consisting of spies, demons, and the occasional encounter with a drone from HR.
For an actual review done by someone who knows how to do reviews, read Stuart Carter's take on the book.
...
Now that you're finished reading that, here's my take on the book: I really enjoyed it. It was schlocky in some places, but it was all done in good fun and in homage to Ian Fleming and the James Bond "mythos". I continue to appreciate Stross's use of the Lovercraft mythos. Rather than cast the creatures on one side or the other, Schloss is faithful to Lovecraft and largely keeps the creatures that be out of the affairs of the bald monkeys that they allow to exist on a small subset of the Earth's surface.
I also loved Stross's continued references back to the Lovecraft canon, including a repurposed Dunwich village, descendants of Innsmouth in the service of various world governments, and especially the repurposed Erich Zann violin. In an essay between "The Atrocity Archives" and "The Jennifer Morgue", Stross pens an insightful essay on how the Lovecraftian horror story and the Cold War spy novels are manifestations of the same thing, only with different faces. While "The Atrocity Archives" reads like a classic Robert Ludlum novel, "The Jennifer Morgue" completes the circle by simultaneously imitating and lampooning Ian Fleming's James Bond stories. (A significant portion of the actual plot of the story deals with the Bond archetypes applied in occult settings. How's that for meta?)
In short, I feel that if there were such a thing as custom created fiction, Stross's novels would be the one that the novel machine would spit out for me. It includes elements from some of my favorite kinds of novels, tied in to some of my other interests that I've randomly been picking off over the last few years (including a minor interest in one Howard Hughes). The in-jokes were great and some things introduced in the book (such as including zombie-creating PowerPoint slide transitions) will leave me looking at real-life with a more humorous lens.
In a letter to Robert E. Howard (Stross's protagonist's namesake?), Lovecraft addressed the great fun he was having when other people were claiming that he wasn't writing fiction, but was instead telling the truth:
Stross certainly adopted this technique in his own books and applies it with maximum effectiveness. Why write a spy/horror tale that takes place in some completely fictitious setting when one can repurpose plenty of colorful characters and events from our own history?Regarding the solemnly cited myth-cycle of Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, R’lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Nug, Yeb, Shub-Niggurath, etc., etc.—let me confess that this is all a synthetic concotion of my own, like the populous and varied pantheon of Lord Dunsany’s Pegana... Long has alluded to the Necronomicon in some things of his - in fact, I think it is rather good fun to have this artificial mythology given an air of verisimilitude by wide citation. I ought, though, to write Mr. O’Neail and disabuse him of the idea that there is a large blind spot in his mythological erudition!
(By the way, I'm a huge fan of the cover art for this book. I'd love to see the Bond-esque opening credits of this book should it ever be adapted for the silver screen.)
I'm really enjoying "The Atrocity Archives". It's a mix of classic spy novel, cypherpunk, "Office Space", and Lovecraft. Some choice snippets:
The [Turing-Lovecraft] theorem is a hack on discrete number theory that simultaneously disproves the Church-Turing hypothesis (wave if you understood that) and worse, permits NP-complete problems to be converted into P-complete ones. This has several consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms -- translation: all your bank account are belong to us -- and ending with the ability to computationally generate a Dho-Nha geometry curve in real time.
This latter item is just slightly less dangerous than allowing nerds with laptops to wave a magic wand and turn them into hydrogen bombs at will. Because, you see, everything you know about the way this universe works is correct -- except for the little problem that this isn't the only universe that we have to worry about. Information can leak between one universe and another. And in a vanishingly small number of other universes are things that listen and talk back -- see Al-Hazred, Nietzsche, Lovecraft, Poe, etcetra. The many-angled ones, as they say, live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set, except when a suitable incantation in the platonic realm of mathematics -- computerized or otherwise -- draws them forth. (And you thought that running that fractal screensaver was good for your computer?)
Oh, and did I mention that the inhabitants of those other universes don't play by our rule book?
And another:
"Is that a copy of Knuth?" She homes in on the top shelf. "Hang on -- volume four? But he only finished the first three volumes in that series. Volume four's been overdue for the past twenty years!"
"Yup." I nod, smugly. Whoever she's dating won't have anything like that on his shelves. "We -- or the Black Chamber -- have a little agreement with him; he doesn't publish volume four of The Art of Computer Programming, and they don't render metabolically challenged. At least, he doesn't publish it to the public; it's the one with the Turing Theorem in it. Phase Conjugate Grammars for Extra-Dimensional Summoning. This is a very limited edition -- numbered and classified."
If this book keeps up, it may find itself as one of my all-time favorites.
The estate of James Joyce has been accused for years of trying to intimidate Joyce scholars, especially those dealing with issues sensitive to the Joyce family. After English professor Carol Shloss was forced to cut important sections of a new book on Joyce's daughter Lucia because of worries that the estate would sue, she published the extra material on a web site as an "electronic supplement." She then took the Joyce estate to court, hoping to secure a declaratory judgment that certain primary source materials did not infringe on the Joyce copyright. After months of legal maneuvering, the Joyce estate backed down on March 19, and now Shloss wants attorneys' fees from them.
This is great news for anyone interested in a fair and equitable copyright system. In a nutshell, Prof. Shloss quoted James Joyce materials as part of her academic research and the Joyce estate threatened to sue her for unauthorized use of the dead author's writing while publishing her research findings.
I ran into this suit while researching the H.P. Lovecraft copyright situation last year. The shenanigans pulled by the Joyce estate are very similar to those exercised by Arkham House Press throughout the publishing house's history until recent years. In the decades after Lovecraft's death, Arkham House founders August Derleth and Donald Wandrei claimed exclusive control of Lovecraft's writings and when skeptics would ask for proof, the press would refuse to provide any documentation to support their claims. People wishing to publish Lovecraft were faced with a choice: call Arkham House's bluff (and spend the money on the accompanying litigation) or give up republishing HPL's work. What made the HPL situation somewhat absurd was that the Derleth estate claimed control of the materials in public, while strenuously arguing in court that the HPL materials were public domain in order to avoid paying royalties to Derleth's surviving partner. Sliminess all around...
What interests me about the present Joyce case is that like the estate of August Derleth, the estate of James Joyce was abusing its position to squelch legitimate and valid reuses of the contested material. I'm curious how often this occurs and we simply never hear about it.
And as an aside, I do have a whole paper written on the HPL situation. I'm not ready for wide public dissemination, but if you're interested in these kinds of issues, drop me a line and I can send you a link to the current version.
