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Tag: h. p. lovecraft

Something for the Weekend

They Call it Madness — Jess Nevins  reviews the H.P. Lovecraft collection The Classic Horror Stories for the L.A. Review of Books:

Lovecraft was not the best of his era in any of the genres he wrote in. Clark Ashton Smith was a better stylist. Algernon Blackwood wrote better horror. Olaf Stapledon wrote better science fiction. Yet it is Lovecraft who has been canonized with a Library of America edition, who has provided the source material for academic writings, comic books, and even game shows like Jeopardy, and who has been assimilated by capitalist culture to the point that there are plushies made of his characters.

One would never have guessed this fate for Lovecraft at the time of his death in 1937…

Nevins has been heroically annotating all of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill and, most recently, compiled notes to the very Lovecraftian Nemo: Heart of Ice (pictured above). But before you get sucked in, be warned: the annotations have a kind of Borgesian horror all of their own.

(And while were on the subject of Lovecraft and comics, you could do worse than picking up I. N. J. Culbard’s adaptations of The Mountains of Madness and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward published by SelfMadeHero)

Also at the LA Review of Books, Michael Nordine on enigmatic filmmaker Terrence Malick:

Malick has the rare distinction of becoming a celebrity — at least in part — for rejecting the notion of celebrity. At a time when we’re given a direct line into our favorite stars’ streams of consciousness via the social media avenue of our choosing, the 69-year-old continues to let his films speak for themselves. When he was nominated for Best Director at the 1998 Academy Awards, the picture that appeared onscreen was of a chair with his name on it; at last year’s ceremony, a different on-set photo from the same production was used. Each new project of Malick’s is said to come with a contractual stipulation that no photos of him may be used in the film’s promotional materials. No matter: people have repeatedly proven able and willing to create an image of their own. That this picture is incomplete at best and may well be wholly inaccurate matters little. Now more than ever, it seems we still can’t conceive of a famous person who doesn’t want to be famous, and even caricatures are more satisfying than a note reading “not pictured” in the celebrity yearbook.

And finally…

David Berry in conversation Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly at the National Post. Here’s Mouly’s take on RAW:

Basically, there were no venues for comics, and I just thought, “Well, I can do it myself.” The idea was to show people what actually could be done … that it wasn’t so much a style that was one answer to where comics should go, but was more that each person had their own voice.

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Midweek Miscellany

Everybody Thinks Their an Auteur” — Film director and critic Peter Bogdanovich at New York Daily News book blog Page Views:

Auteurism today? Well, everybody thinks they’re an auteur. But nobody seems to understand what the whole auteur thing was. It wasn’t a theory as far as the French were concerned. It was a political statement called la politique des auteurs. Truffaut and Godard were attacking the old-fashioned, well-made film, Franch or American. They thought Howard Hawks was an infinitely better director than Fred Zinnemann. They thought Alfred Hitchcock was a greater director than David Lean. They were against Marcel Carné  and for Jean Renoir. Personal films were what they looking for, where a director’s personality dominated despite who wrote it or who was in it or who photographed it.

Nothing But a Number — An interview with Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story, at CultureMap Austin:

“There’s a kind of anxiety, I think. When you’re ranked you sort of know who you are and where you stand, and people become obsessed in their rankings. The quantitative takes the place of qualitative.”

Does this mean we are starting to reject the belief that we will never be just a number? “That’s the big generational shift from the ’60s of ‘I am not a number’ to 2012, where ‘I am a number but hopefully I’m a good number. I’m a high number,’” he laughs.

A Slow Books Manifesto: “Read books. As often as you can. Mostly classics.”

Not Your Conventional Hell — British horror writer Ramsey Campbell (The Darkest Part of the Woods) on the mighty H. P. Lovecraft for the BBC:

Lovecraft developed his own invented mythology, at least as influential on fantastic fiction as Tolkien’s work. Most of it is set in a New England steeped in history and in hidden occult influences, although the monstrous creatures glimpsed by his characters are frequently from outer space rather than from any conventional hell.

And finally…

Do We Need Stories? — Tim Parks continues his one-man argument with everything Jonathan Franzen has ever said ever:

Of course as a novelist it is convenient to think that by the nature of the job one is on the side of the good, supplying an urgent and general need. I can also imagine readers drawing comfort from the idea that their fiction habit is essential sustenance and not a luxury. But what is the nature of this need? What would happen if it wasn’t met? We might also ask: why does Franzen refer to complex stories? And why is it important not to be interrupted by Twitter and Facebook? Are such interruptions any worse than an old land line phone call, or simply friends and family buzzing around your writing table? Jane Austen, we recall, loved to write in domestic spaces where she was open to constant interruption.

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Midweek Miscellany

An excerpt from Jay McInerney’s introduction to Joy Division (published by Rizzoli), accompanied by a slideshow of Kevin Cummins’ photographs of the band, in Vanity Fair.

Sandwiches with Ginsberg — Patti Smith reads from Just Kids, the story of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, at National Book Awards in New York.

“It’s not all pristine snow and leather goggles”The Guardian reviews I.N.J. Culbard’s adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. Culbard talks about illustrating and adapting Lovecraft at the SelfMadeHero blog.

Also at The Guardian: A 26 letter slideshow from David Sacks’ new book, Alphabets: A Miscellany of Letters (pictured below: illustration by Jonathan Lander, 2009):

Slow Down — An interview with Pushcart Prize editor Bill Henderson at Kirkus Reviews:

My friends in commercial publishing tell me that indeed times are terrifying. Nobody knows where the commercial world is headed as it tries to make a profit. The villains are those who attempt to corner the e-book market and announce that they have hundreds of thousands of titles available instantly… Why is this speed of any interest to anybody? Serious readers take their time in savoring a book. But suddenly we’ve all turned into speed freaks. Those who will suffer most from this, interestingly, are the big-box superstores that can only stock a mere 100,000 titles in their walls… The independent bookstores may, on the other hand, do very well because they can treat customers as human beings.

And finally…

Interviews with typographer Erik Spiekermann and book maven Sarah Weinman at From the Desks Of

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Something for the Weekend

Traditional/Digital — An interview with book designer Sara Wood at nonslick (via Henry):

I’ve always used a variety of media, but my stand-by tools are my pencil (lately I’ve been using grease pencils as well), trace paper, my scanner, and a small library of textures that I bring into Photoshop. My work is most definitely a traditional/digital Frankenbaby. I like juxtapositions of smooth against rough, of lines that are refined against those that are just a little bit more spontaneous, and bringing my physical drawings into Photoshop gives me a great deal of flexibility for exploring that.

Literary Immersion — Writer and über-litblogger Maud Newton featured at From The Desks Of

For several years, Twain has been my standby when I’m really stuck.  I read him and remember that if I’m bored by what I’m writing, the reader will be, too. Basically, he reminds me to entertain myself first, and to assume that if I feel like what I’m writing is bullshit, the reader will see right through it.

The Colour of Cthulhu — Rick Poynor at Design Observer on the difficulty of visually realizing the work of H. P. Lovecraft:

Lovecraft has always posed a problem for anyone trying to turn the writer’s nightmares into visual imagery. The stories’ peculiar pleasure lies in the fully developed mythology that interconnects them, and in the morbidly refined vocabulary Lovecraft uses to evoke cosmic horrors too awful to describe, monstrous things from out of space and time too unfathomable to name, treading a fine line between an exquisitely apt descriptive style and embarrassingly purple prose. Lovecraft’s warped psychology and aberrant obsessions are best savored within the limitlessly accommodating theater of your own imagination. The risk with any attempt to make his spectral inventions literal and solid is that they will just look silly.

And finally…

Some amazing vintage book cover designs from the 1940’s and 50’s by Spanish designer and illustrator Manolo Prieto (via Words and Eggs):

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