eldritchhobbit

Thanks to everyone who helped make SofaCON 2 a most amazing experience. I had an absolutely brilliant time with my fellow Sofanauts.

Happy St. Patrick's Day to all who celebrate!

And now, my friends, the stars are right for announcing my online summer course for Mythgard Institute:
"'Literary Copernicus': The Cosmic Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft"

In tales such as “The Call of Cthulhu” and At the Mountains of Madness, H.P. Lovecraft – the disciple of Poe and the champion of the Weird – pioneered a new kind of fiction. Fueled by an astronomer’s insights and an antiquarian’s aesthetic, Lovecraft turned his readers’ focus “from man and his little world and his gods, to the stars and the black and unplumbed gulfs of intergalactic space,” leading author and critic Fritz Leiber, Jr. to dub him “A Literary Copernicus.” More than seventy-five years after Lovecraft’s death, his path-breaking work is more popular and influential than ever. Join me as I explore Lovecraft’s stories and the meaning behind them, the shared universe of his mythos, and the lasting impact of his cosmic vision on the contemporary landscapes of literature and popular culture.

Registration is open! More information is here.

The class promo is here.

* Huge congratulations to Glass Hammer's Stephen R. Babb on the publication of his gorgeous The Lay of Lirazel in paperback, ebook, and audiobook form. The Lay Of Lirazel is narrative poetry told in epic fashion, but it is poetry fully equipped with fangs and enough terror to keep a reader turning pages till the last curse falls and death and doom claim their prize! Inspired by the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson, the paintings of John W. Waterhouse, and the writings of George MacDonald, William Morris, and Lord Dunsany, The Lay of Lirazel is the essence of the mythopoeic set to verse. I'm proud to have written the foreword for this remarkable work. Highly recommended!



* I'll be offering a two-weekend-long intense lecture series called "The Dystopian Tradition: What Worlds Gone Wrong Can Teach Us" in Spring 2015 in Asheville, NC (minutes from where much of The Hunger Games was filmed). Accepted undergraduate/graduate students will have hotel and meals provided without cost. Interested students may apply here.

* Sean Pertwee's Halloween costume made me go all mushy inside. (Incidentally, he's my favorite thing about Gotham, and there's a lot to love about that show.)

* So Star Wars Episode VII will be The Force Awakens. I didn't realize that the Force had dozed off. That said, I hope the latest speculations have some truth to them. If so, it could be good, even great. (Anthony Daniels certainly seems pleased with it.)



* I was very sorry to hear of the passing of Elizabeth Peña. She starred in a film I dearly love, Lone Star, and several other great ones (Jacob's Ladder, anyone?). So sad.

* I'm looking forward to Billy Boyd's "The Last Goodbye" for The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies. (We can hear a clip now here and via iTunes.)

Have a great day!

Today's photos are by the brilliant lizziebelle, taken in the burial ground known since 1637 as The Burying Point in Salem, Massachusetts. You can see the rest of her photos from The Burying Point here.

Here is a tragic reminder of the Salem Witch Trials.



Katherine Howe, author of the adult novel The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane and the YA novel Conversion, both about the Salem Witch Trials, also just has edited the brand new Penguin Book of Witches. She recently made this guest post at John Scalzi's Whatever. Here's an excerpt:

On average, the typical accused and executed witch was a woman at middle age—from her 40s to her 60s—who was on the outs with her society in one way or another, usually economically, but maybe personality-wise as well. She was a pain. She was irritating. She made people uncomfortable. She was always begging for something. She was a problem, and she needed to be gotten rid of.

The first person accused as a witch during the Salem episode was a classic example of this. Tituba Indian was a slave in the household of Samuel Parris, the minister in Salem Village. She had come to Salem with him after being enslaved on his failed plantation in Barbados. Tituba was accused by Betty, Samuel’s daughter, of trading her soul to the Devil and using the special powers he granted her to send Betty into “fits.” Tituba confessed, though some historians think that Parris beat the confession out of her, and went on to pass the blame to other women in the community who were vulnerable in similar ways: Sarah Good, who was destitute and begged from door to door, and Sarah Osburn, who had married her handyman and stopped going to church. The idea of “witchcraft” in the colonial period had a lot to do with regulating women, forcing them to comply with cultural ideas of how they were supposed to behave.



Next semester (Spring 2015) Katherine Howe will be a visiting writer here at Lenoir-Rhyne University. Very appropriately, the drama department will be performing The Crucible. I will be offering a new and related course for both undergraduate and graduate students at Lenoir-Rhyne to make the most of this happy confluence of events. It will be called "Witch Hunts, Conspiracy Theories, and U.S. Society."

I'm back from Hogwarts Agnes Scott College, where I had a fantastic time lecturing. My colleagues redefined the word "brilliant": Daniel J. D'Amico convinced me that Alexis de Tocqueville would've loved the second season of The Walking Dead; James Padilioni, Jr.'s economic analysis of the Savoy Ballroom's history gave me a new heroine to research (Ada "Bricktop" Smith); and Robert Anthony Peters reminded me how many different and valuable lessons fairy-tales may teach us. The students were equally great.



In other news...
* The first issue of The Signum Eagle, the newsletter of Signum University, is online now. Check it out! I'm grateful to Curtis Weyant, who wrote a great piece on my upcoming trip to Loncon 3/Worldcon.

* What exhibits would you most like to see at the new Museum of Science Fiction? This survey is your chance to tell the organizers!

I'm going to disappear now into a world of class and departmental preparation, so I can have "Science Fiction, Part I: From Modern Beginnings through the Golden Age," "Monsters and Mad Science," and other parts of my fall semester ready to go before I head off to London.


... One last note: in honor of my new UK blu-ray set of the first season of The Professionals, I'm revisiting the tie-in novelizations. (Apparently "Ken Blake" was a pseudonym for the science fiction author Kenneth Bulmer. How cool is that? I learn something new every day!) Here's a passage that sends me swimming in nostalgic delight.

"Anything -?" Cowley started to say. Then he gripped his leg, chopping his words off. The pain in the man got to Doyle and Bodie. They could feel the agony themselves, clawing and torturing them. Cowley's lips turned white. He held on. Doyle took the chief's glass, refilled it, handed it across without a word. Cowley drank, fighting the pain. He sat back and took a breath, looking up at the other two members of the team.

"Thanks..."

Bodie said savagely: "You should have it out, sir. The bullet in your leg. Get shot of it."

Cowley half-laughed, a mirthless death's-head grimace.

"Oh, they can do that, all right. They're wonderful, these days, so they tell me. But they can't -" Here a fresh bout of pain took him, and his voice trembled, before he fought it down and continued, grating the words out like a gravel-dredger biting rock. "But they can't guarantee they won't have to take the leg with it. What would you do?"

"Me?" said Bodie. "I'd have another drink, sir."

The answer appeared to amuse George Cowley, somewhere in that devious brain of his, and the three men continued to drink slowly as what Billy Turner had spilled out digested itself along with the Scotch. - Where the Jungle Ends (The Professionals #1), Ken Blake

Just a quick fly-by post...

This is worth reading: "J.R.R. Tolkien Has A Touching Message For His Former Teachers In Newly Discovered Letter."

This also deserves a look: from NPR, "Harry Potter And The Forbidden Books."

Consider yourself invited to a free online Q&A session on June 5 for more information on my forthcoming "Science Fiction, Part I: From Modern Beginnings through the Golden Age" online course (Fall 2014) at Mythgard Institute.

I'd love to see you there!

Happy 450th birthday to the Bard himself, William Shakespeare!



And in other news...

* Would you like to see Adagio Teas offer fandom tea blends for Bodie, Doyle, and Cowley of The Professionals? If so, please vote for The Professionals here.

* Do you want to see H.P. Lovecraft's Dream Cycle adapted into a dark fantasy film? Check out this Indiegogo campaign (with three enticing teaser trailers) for The Dreamlands.

* This year, May 13 will be one of my favorite holidays: New Tori Amos Album Day! Very exciting.

* All 36 hours of interactive lecture from my Spring 2014 class for the Mythgard Institute, "The Gothic Tradition," are now available for download here as a "course pack."


Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
- Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

The "campus read" at Lenoir-Rhyne University for the 2014-2015 academic year is the excellent The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Author Rebecca Skloot will be speaking as part of the Visiting Writers Series.

On an intentionally related note, I will be offering the following undergraduate/graduate cross-listed seminar at L-R for Fall 2014.

"Monsters and Mad Science"

Course Description: How should medical science progress? What ethics should shape or even constrain experimentation? What is "good science"? How can new science be scary science? What may we make of science, and what may science make of us? This course will explore fiction that has expressed popular anxieties about the limits and ethics of scientific research and what experimentation means for the human body. We will consider how Victor Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Moreau, and other literary characters have made ethical questions and concerns part of an ongoing debate about the medical search for knowledge and what it means to be human.

Here's my summer course for Mythgard Institute. (More information is available at the site.)

I hope you enjoy the trailer! I'd be grateful if you'd help me spread the word. Thanks!

The new semester begins today! Apologies for my recent silence, but I've been busy getting prepared for the new term. I'm teaching both undergraduate and graduate versions of "Native American Experience in the U.S. Context" for Lenoir-Rhyne University and the graduate course "The Gothic Tradition" for Mythgard Institute.

In other news...

* In the next couple of months I'll have the privilege of interviewing two distinguished and celebrated authors whose works I regularly teach. I'll be interviewing David Brin virtually for StarShipSofa's Sofanauts, and I'll be interviewing Sherman Alexie in person as part of Lenoir-Rhyne's Visiting Writers Series. My students this semester will be reading Alexie's brilliant, U.S. National Book Award winning The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, so I'm delighted that they'll have a chance to see Alexie on campus.

* Here's a Call for Papers that may be of interest: The Inklings and King Arthur.

* Fans of the late (and great) Lewis Collins will want to see this moving message from his family.

* Interesting! "Four Changes to English So Subtle We Hardly Notice They're Happening." (Thanks to James!)

* I've updated the list of my personal appearances this year.

* Sherlock! As much as I enjoyed "The Empty Hearse" and "The Sign of Three" -- and I really did! -- "His Last Vow" blew them both away. Well played, Moftiss. Well played indeed.



I'll leave this on a January-esque note...

The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me
And I cannot, cannot go.

The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow.
And the storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.

Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing dear can move me;
I will not, cannot go.

- Emily Brontë, "Spellbound"