Амстердам: завтра (и рабочее-пунктирное)

В кои-то веки я (почти что) молодец: разослала авторам своего сборника рецензии с подтверждением их участия (повезло не всем, ну да что поделать) — корпела над формулировками весь день, но, наконец-то, все сделала.
А завтра, меж тем, Амстердам! А у меня еще конь не валялся и чемодан не собран. Но предвкушение Рембрандта, мельниц и каналов несомненно радует!

“Quicker Than Thought: Prophecy in a “Shocker” that Has Come True” by Arthur Machen

Just spare a minute and read this short gem from Machen about weird peculiarities of wireless telegraph transmission as scientific prophecy: you won’t be disappointed.

“I need scarcely add that the possibility of “wireless” had never entered my mind.” ©

«Под знаком -нео»: вышла!

Так, ну что) у вашей покорной вышла тут долгожданная статья в коллективной монографии, которая смогла состояться только лишь благодаря усилиям прекрасной Вероники Зусевой-Озкан, за что я ей бесконечно признательна. Даже не верится, что мой кропотливый труд многих месяцев, долго ждавший своего часа, наконец-то, увидел свет. Ура! Неплохой подарок к грядущему пятидесятилетию, я считаю)

“Harsh Sentences: H. P. Lovecraft v. Ernest Hemingway”: a brilliant comparative essay from Deepcuts

TWIMC. Just a friendly reminder of how a picture perfect article in comparative studies must look like. Impeccably done: chapeau, Bobby Dee.

For H. P. Lovecraft, missing Hemingway would have been much more difficult—nor did he. Though they were very different in their fictional focus, output, and success, Lovecraft and Hemingway were still contemporaries, and there are a number of references to Hemingway and his works in Lovecraft’s letters. These mentions of Ernest Hemingway, who had not yet become “Papa” of later years, reflect more on Lovecraft than on Hemingway himself, but show Lovecraft both coming to grips with a Modern writer of very different style and interests and how Hemingway’s influence spread.

Trends come from deeper sources than what is written on the surface of literature, and the average domestic adjustments of 1980 or 2030 will not depend on the question of whether Ernest Hemingway is suppressed or encouraged in 1930.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Maurice W. Moe, June 1930?, LMM 267

A Gothic Machen-esque/Jamesian hauntological travelog that I briefly mentioned in March, is finally here. The chapter that immediately drew my attention was the one about Sebald’s Land: so far so good.

World Fantasy Convention 2025: saving the dates for the late October 2025

Looks like NecronomiCon, but in autumn Brighton: there’s time to make plans! Added to my bookmarks.

“Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror, and the Spectre of Nostalgia” by William Burns: already in Cambridge

I finally got my copy of a book I featured in my post a week or so ago: a brief look gives a pretty good idea of what this book is about (“A critical analysis of the 21st-century fascination with the past, from horror films to haunted music,” as the publisher’s website describes it), and I like it so far.

“Horrifying children” (Bloomsbury, 2025)

The collective monograph on hauntology as a core element of British children’s television (Bloomsbury, 2025) has arrived: the authors of the essays are analysing the spectral elements of the cinematic (as well as living) experiences of children on British TV in the past and present. I am reading a novel recommended to me by a dear friend, so I’ll have a chance to read this one a bit later. At first glance, not all pieces sound equally interesting, but the vast majority of them look good; let’s see.

HPL: 88th anniversary of death

Lovecraft died on this day 88 years ago.

He met his death stoically and was granted a peaceful departure from all his torments and the anguish of the final years of his life, filled with unbearable cancerous pain. It’s somewhat consoling to think that the 1937 Lovecraft was not the same as the Lovecraft of the 1910s or 1920s—he had become less and less rigid and deplorably prejudiced in his societal views than before, his milieu had got more diverse, but we will never know for a fact about the ultimate result of it all.

He was challenged by life yet persevered through his works: not exactly a cautionary tale for any resentful hypochondriac, but a complex (for the lack of a better word) story of a mighty talent that emerged and grew against all odds. And, of course, his own narration of what later was called by Ligotti “The Nightmare of Being” is a seminal continuation of Schopenhauer’s Pessimism, Mainländer-Nietzschean Deicide and “Menschliches, Allzumenschliches” frustration in the face of cosmic indifference.

I have seen the dark universe yawning,

Where the black planets roll without aim;

Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name. ©

Planets will roll; casting aside aloofness, we will remember.

“Gothic Crossroads” 2025

On a brighter note, my abstract “The concepts of the Supernatural path and barrier as markers of “outsideness” in the works of Leonid Andreyev and M.R. James” has been accepted for “Gothic Crossroads,” a conference in Gothic and Horror Studies organised by Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University.

See you later in June, Manchester.