Kudos to the Thomas Lovell Beddoes Society for making its journal, Doomsday, openly accessible using John Willinsky’s OJS software. There’s no content available yet, but I imagine it will be there soon, since I received my print copy of the latest issue a couple of weeks ago.
Now I just have to remember to pay my back dues . . .
The departments of philosophy at the University of Southern Mississippi and the University of Tennessee, of all places, “are looking for scholarly philosophical essays written for a lay audience to be included in Doctor Who and Philosophy, to be published by Open Court Press.” There’s more info. available here.
Update: My friend, Ed Webb, and I wrote a chapter for the book, titled “Should the Daleks Be Exterminated?”, and the book is now available.
My article, The Return of “The Notorious Canary-Trainer”, has just been published in the Spring 2008 issue of The Baker Street Journal. It’s a rather tongue-in-cheek reflection on Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Morrison’s Martin Hewitt, The Strand magazine, and naturally, notorious canary-training, and I’m extremely pleased that it’s appearing in this, the oldest and most prestigious journal devoted to Holmes and Watson.
I honestly think I enjoy writing about Holmes more than any other subject, and some readers of this blog may remember that The Baker Street Blog featured a Sherlock Holmes pastiche of mine last year.
Today marks the 75th anniversary of the birth of Doc Savage, one of the most popular characters in the history of pulp fiction. Capitalizing on their success with The Shadow, Street and Smith publishers decided to create a new character who was more of a superhero adventurer than detective (though Doc could have easily matched wits with The Shadow, himself). The first adventure was published just two years after the Shadow’s debut in 1931, and like The Shadow, was written under a pseudonymous by-line, “Kenneth Robeson”. Lester Dent was Doc Savage’s actual creator and wrote the majority of the stories.
In his debut, titled “The Man of Bronze”, Doc and his “Fabulous 5” companions, shortly after the funeral of Doc’s father, Clark Savage, Sr., find themselves under attack by a warrior from a lost South American civilization. After this has been thwarted, the team goes on the offensive and flies to the “lost valley” in South America, where they become entangled in a civil war and treasure hunt. It’s a classic, H. Rider Haggard-like, adventure yarn, modernized and paced for an audience who would, in another five years, be reading the exploits of Savage’s comic book descendant–Superman (N.B. Dov Savage was the owner of the first “Fortress of Solitude”).
The story has been reprinted many times over the years and is available in several formats, but if you want to really experience the look and feel of the original, please check out Anthony Tollin’s reprint (and the others he has done). Also, for bibliographic information, I highly recommend Chuck Welch’s Doc Savage Organized site.
Last Halloween, I wrote a post featuring the BBC television adaptation of M.R. James’ “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”. Last night, I was lucky enough to stumble across its adaptation of his story, “A Warning to the Curious”, and didn’t want to wait until next Halloween to mention it.
Like the other short film, this production was part of the BBC’s “Ghost Story for Christmas” series. It takes more liberties with the plot than “Whistle”, but all of these are dramatically effective and, in conjunction with some striking incidental music, help to create a real atmosphere of menace that persists throughout the entire film.
I’ve been meaning to blog this for awhile now, and with the holidays approaching (and, presumably, book store gift cards), this seems like a good time to mention it. Just the other month, Hippocrene Books published my friend Chris’ book, Ancient Rome in So Many Words, which explores several facets of Roman culture by examining the many distinctive and often unusual Latin words associated with them. I was fortunate enough to have read this in manuscript and am pretty certain that it will appeal not only to classicists but also to casual readers who have an interest in Ancient Rome and the Latin language.
Chris Francese is an associate professor of classics at Dickinson College. I’ve mentioned him before in this blog in order to spotlight his series of Latin poetry podcasts.
Note: Those of you who know me and have time on your hands can search inside the book at Amazon for my name.
A YouTube member by the name of vidlad has been posting some eerily realistic animations of famous poets reciting their works. The one above is particularly striking.
My short story, “Le Péril Vert”, about an artist’s increasingly disturbing absinthe binges, has been published in the November issue of The Willows magazine.This magazine, named after an Algernon Blackwood story, first appeared last May and is dedicated to “assembling the finest in classic-style weird fiction.”*Now, I haven’t yet read the issue in which my story is appearing, but I have read the magazine’s first issue and was very impressed.Several of its stories were reminiscent of very early Weird Tales pieces, such as “Fool’s Gold” by Cheryl Nantus, and there was also a nod to Victorian science fiction, “The Incident at the 27th Meeting” by Chris Paul, and even a sort of Nathaniel Hawthorne pastiche, “Mercy Hathaway Is a Witch” by Ken Goldman.My story aside, this is definitely a publication the readers of this blog should look into.
In the back of an old Pinnacle paperback, I found this introduction to its then upcoming Doctor Who books–
“They could not have been more offended, confused, enraged and startled. . . . There was a moment of stunned silence . . . and then an eruption of angry voices from all over the fifteen-hundred-person audience. The kids in their Luke Skywalker pajamas (cobbled up from older brother’s castoff karate gi) and the retarded adults spot-welded into their Darth Vader fright-masks howled with fury. But I stood my ground, there on the lecture platform of the World Science Fiction Convention, and I repeated the words that had sent them into animal hysterics:
‘Star Wars is adolescent nonsense; Close Encounters is obscurantist drivel; ‘Star Trek’ can turn your brains to purée of bat guano; and the greatest science fiction series of all time is ‘Doctor Who!’ And I’ll take you all on, one-by-one or in a bunch to back it up!'”
Here is another short video for this Halloween, based upon Frank Belknap Long’s famous short story “The Hounds of Tindalos”. The story, first published in Weird Tales in 1929, is significant not only for its quality but for being the first to actually add an entity to H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Though they had met before through their amateur press connections, Lovecraft and Long became close friends while Lovecraft was living in New York, and Long was a founding member of the Kalem Club, which was the literary circle Lovecraft cultivated during his brief exile from Providence. “The Hounds of Tindalos” is Long’s most famous supernatural tale, and I very much wanted to provide a scan of it. However, it is still under copyright, so I’ve decided to post this video instead.
In the original story, which can still be obtained here, a writer and expert on the occult summons his friend to his apartment in order to take notes for an experiment. The experiment involves ingesting a drug in order to psychically travel through the fourth dimension in order to witness both the beginning and end of time. Needless to say, something goes wrong, the writer is observed, and after being awakened by his friend, the man is pursued by the “hounds” of the title. These can only enter our dimension through the angled intersections of surfaces, but not through curves. The writer’s only hope lies in using papier-mâché to round out the corners of his flat before the hounds can enter.
The animated version is a sort of sequel to the original, in that it presents an investigation into the tragic results of the above experiment and then perpetuates them.