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Post by andydecker on Feb 16, 2023 15:40:52 GMT
Robert E. Howard is interesting, his main creation Conan has entered popular culture, but in a form generally unlike the book one. He is basically an Austrian accented bodybuilder. . The governor was the end of the development. The picture of Conan as this hunk was made popular by Frazetta's cover-art and Marvel Comics successful Conan the Barbarian, which ran for 10 years already before there was a movie. And considering how much successive efforts failed, thanks to low budget and/or not very good scripts, that was a fluke. Just another example that movie audiences are not literature audiences.
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Post by andydecker on Feb 16, 2023 15:59:40 GMT
But who knows Belknap Long any longer? I think I read a weird tale by Belknapius some time, but found it mediocre. I found Robert Bloch's Cthulhu Mythos stories mediocre too, compared to Lovecraft. To me, most of the literary circle around Lovecraft seemed mediocre, except for Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard. I only associate Long to being perhaps Lovecraft's closest friend, a lowkey mellow person, who lived a long life, well overlapping my own adult life. It is exciting to have been only one body away from, so very close to, actual contact with the person of Lovecraft. Almost born of the same generation! It feels as if I theoretically in principle could have met Lovecraft in real life. Someone like Ramsey Campbell had contact with August Derleth already in the 1960s. That is even closer of course, depending on how you see it. Derleth was something else, he never met Lovecraft in real life. I am about 20 years younger, but it still feels exciting, just the same, to have been fairly close in time to the Weird Tales legends. I know, ... I 'm a fanboy. Don't forget Hoffmann Price, as far as "friends" are concerned, who died in 1988. Or Barlow, who was actually been named Lovecraft's literary executor.
Belknap Long was not a memorable writer. In Bloch's case he outgrew the small sandbox of the Mythos very fast. His Mythos tales are entertaining, but doubtless very formula. I like them, but they are not in the league of Howard and Smith. When I re-read some Smith story recently, I thought that he seemed to be the only guy of this circle who in his writings seemed to leave the impression of being an adult.
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Post by šrincess šµuvstarr on Feb 16, 2023 16:05:36 GMT
Robert E. Howard is interesting, his main creation Conan has entered popular culture, but in a form generally unlike the book one. He is basically an Austrian accented bodybuilder. . The governor was the end of the development. The picture of Conan as this hunk was made popular by Frazetta's cover-art and Marvel Comics successful Conan the Barbarian, which ran for 10 years already before there was a movie. And considering how much successive efforts failed, thanks to low budget and/or not very good scripts, that was a fluke. Just another example that movie audiences are not literature audiences. Pop culture (with a few exceptions) is not a literate culture. It is mostly sound and image.
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Post by helrunar on Feb 16, 2023 16:11:52 GMT
Andreas, I highly recommend a fan produced documentary about Clark Ashton Smith, Emperor of Dreams. I didn't really know most of the people interviewed for it apart from Scott Connors, Harlan Ellison and Donald Sydney Fryer (a poet who was a friend of Clark's when Fryer was in his 20s), but they all have really interesting things to say and contribute, and the film sports some great images and music to support what it is conveying.
Smith had various life experiences, including work as an artist and poet, that seem to have eluded most of the people in the "Lovecraft circle." I think C. L. Moore is also worthy of mention. It was a sign that HPL was becoming a somewhat different person from the caricature of him generally represented on the interwebs that when Moore published "Shambleau" in W. T., HPL immediately proclaimed her the finest exponent of the weird tale currently writing--I think it did take him a while to realize she was a woman.
Best, Steve
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Post by šrincess šµuvstarr on Feb 16, 2023 16:23:59 GMT
A relative told me Henry Kuttner, C.L. Moore's husband, wrote Lovecraft Mythos fiction, before he outgrew it. But every writer starts somewhere. He died too young, very sad.
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Post by šrincess šµuvstarr on Feb 16, 2023 16:29:57 GMT
Lovecraft has become a saint to his fans. It's the same with Howard. It's hard to know where to start reading a balanced biography. I'd like to read the memoirs of Howard's girlfriend, Novalyne Price, One Who Walked Alone ā Robert E. Howard: The Final Years. There was an enjoyable film made based on them.
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Post by helrunar on Feb 16, 2023 18:20:46 GMT
Yes, Clea, O thou Maiden of many names, Kuttner's story "The Graveyard Rats," originally published 1936, has been frequently included in various "Mythos" themed anthologies. I seem to recall hearing it was dramatized in a series executive produced by Guillermo del Toro a few months ago, too.
cheers, Hel.
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Post by helrunar on Feb 16, 2023 18:24:01 GMT
I keep thinking I should try again with R. E. Howard. "Skull-face" was entertaining, and I have held onto that paperback. But everything he wrote, that I have seen--obviously only a small percentage of his impressive output--just comes across to me as cheap, repetitive pulp trash. And even though I post on here so often I am only very intermittently in the mood for cheap pulp trash.
Of course I'm reading one of my favorite Sax Rohmer novels yet again on my commute today, and I bear in mind that to most people, Rohmer was either a bad writer, or simply could not write at all. And then I fall back on that old saying of the Romans, de gustibus non disputandem.
Hel.
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Post by andydecker on Feb 16, 2023 21:00:58 GMT
I keep thinking I should try again with R. E. Howard. "Skull-face" was entertaining, and I have held onto that paperback. But everything he wrote, that I have seen--obviously only a small percentage of his impressive output--just comes across to me as cheap, repetitive pulp trash. And even though I post on here so often I am only very intermittently in the mood for cheap pulp trash. Of course I'm reading one of my favorite Sax Rohmer novels yet again on my commute today, and I bear in mind that to most people, Rohmer was either a bad writer, or simply could not write at all. And then I fall back on that old saying of the Romans, de gustibus non disputandem.Hel.
Like a lot of his collegues Howard wrote to earn money in difficult times. Not to produce deathless, thought-provoking prose, but to entertain. Of course it is repetitive trash. But it is read and discussed nearly 100 years later. Not bad in my book.
This old pulp stuff is a bit like Jim Starlin once wrote so scathingly in one of his Adam Warlock comics when he really wanted to stick it to his employer Marvel. Warlock is brainwashed by clowns who are stand-ins for Stan Lee and the rest of editorial. There is a tower of trash, to which clowns are adding wheelbarrows of garbage. When the tower collapses, Warlock finds a diamond in the wreckage. "Oh, that stuff", says Len Teans (Stan Lee). "We just can't keep it out of our refuse. Someone keeps putting it in while we are not looking." This discribes quite a few of Howard's stories. He wrote a lot of by the numbers stuff, but when he was good, he was memorable like all the great writers of the macabre.
Why don't you just try three very different stories, which are often are held in high regard? The Black Stone, which is a well done and imaginative (and in some regards a very un-Howardian) pulp horror story . The Shadow Kingdom, a King Kull story, which also packs a whole invented new mythology in its few pages. Worms of the Earth, one of those pseudo historic Pict tales, more horror than fantasy.
If you think those dull or too generic or without atmosphere, maybe Howard is not for you. ;-)
And Sax Rohmer wrote one of the best horror novels of his times. Brood of the Witch Queen. I thought a lot of his other stuff I started underwhelming, but alone for this novel he is forgiven.
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Post by helrunar on Feb 16, 2023 21:25:16 GMT
Thanks, Andreas, for those recommendations. I will look for those Howard tales.
H.P. Lovecraft who was usually fairly fussy had a huge admiration for REH, but I sometimes wonder if Lovecraft was simply more than a little infatuated with the big he-man. I remember he had one of his playful nicknames for REH and it was either Conan or something like "the Berserker."
That's fascinating about that Adam Warlock narrative, and the parable sounds accurate, from my own limited knowledge.
Saluting, Steve
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Post by andydecker on Feb 17, 2023 11:07:06 GMT
Thanks, Andreas, for those recommendations. I will look for those Howard tales. H.P. Lovecraft who was usually fairly fussy had a huge admiration for REH, but I sometimes wonder if Lovecraft was simply more than a little infatuated with the big he-man. I remember he had one of his playful nicknames for REH and it was either Conan or something like "the Berserker." That's fascinating about that Adam Warlock narrative, and the parable sounds accurate, from my own limited knowledge. Saluting, Steve You could be right. Howard was much Lovecraft wasn't. Big, healthy, what was then regarded as a sportsman. On the writing front he could also do things HPL just wasn't capable of, for instance writing action. I don't think this interested HPL at all in terms of mastering it, but I guess he could admire it in a collegue.
The quoted Warlock is Strange Tales 181 from August 1975. But it was reprinted in many forms. That was the glorious time at Marvel when writers and artists could experiment, especially in those books always on the verge of cancellation. Doubtless a lot of this stuff has not aged very well, but at least it was alive.
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Post by Knygathin on Feb 17, 2023 11:32:08 GMT
In the Hippocampus edition "thank you" has been replaced by "thanks". Was the contraction "thanks" spoken and written in 1895? To me it sounds so modern and sloppy, not befitting the well dressed and behaved genteel of that time.
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Post by šrincess šµuvstarr on Feb 17, 2023 11:54:24 GMT
In the Hippocampus edition "thank you" has been replaced by "thanks". Was the contraction "thanks" spoken and written in 1895? To me it sounds so modern and sloppy, not befitting the well dressed and behaved genteel of that time. In the version in Victorian Tales of Mystery and Detection: An Oxford Anthology (1992) it is "thank you" too. Does Joshi explain in any way in the introduction how he chose or edited his texts? I think if I buy an actual physical edition of Shiel's works this won't be it.
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Post by šrincess šµuvstarr on Feb 17, 2023 12:01:15 GMT
The quoted Warlock is Strange Tales 181 from August 1975. But it was reprinted in many forms. That was the glorious time at Marvel when writers and artists could experiment, especially in those books always on the verge of cancellation. Doubtless a lot of this stuff has not aged very well, but at least it was alive. I like the 1970s Dr. Strange art a lot. Frank Brunner, Tom Sutton particularly. I have no interest in the current stuff; I try to avoid the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Ant-Man and the Wasp was quite enough.
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Post by Knygathin on Feb 17, 2023 12:26:27 GMT
In the Hippocampus edition "thank you" has been replaced by "thanks". Was the contraction "thanks" spoken and written in 1895? To me it sounds so modern and sloppy, not befitting the well dressed and behaved genteel of that time. In the version in Victorian Tales of Mystery and Detection: An Oxford Anthology (1992) it is "thank you" too. Does Joshi explain in any way in the introduction how he chose or edited his texts? I think if I buy an actual physical edition of Shiel's works this won't be it. Joshi provides notes on the texts: "The Case of Euphemia Raphash" was taken from The Pale Ape and Other Pulses (1911). I don't know if that differs from its original 1895 appearance. The Purple Cloud is from the 1901 edition.
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