"The nearer a man comes to a calm mind, the closer he is to strength." --Marcus Aurelius

Today's reading is:

Smith, Peter. "HP Lovecraft and the Feast of Saturnalia." Crypt of Cthulhu 13 (1): 4-8. I might also tackle an article on Call of Cthulhu (the tabletop RPG) in this issue.

“The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.” --Seneca

Tonight's reading is from one, possibly more, past issues of Crypt of Cthulhu. I picked up the following issues at NecronomiCon Providence this year, directly from Necromonicon Press:

82; vol. 12, no. 1 (Hallowmas 1992)
85, vol. 13, no. 1 (Hallowmas 1993)
85, vol. 13, no. 3 (Lammas 1994)
93, vol. 15, no. 3 (Lammas 1996)
96, vol. 16, no. 3 (Lammas 1997)
97, vol. 17, no. 1 (Hallowmas 1997)
98, vol. 17, no. 2 (Eastertide 1998)

And the newest one:

108, Hallowmas 2017

The other writing iron in the fire is prep work to get the NecronomiCon presentation whipped into shape for publication.

Abstract, reading, world enough and time.

Update: I submitted the abstract on HP Lovecraft and detective fiction to NecronomiCon Providence and was accepted for the Armitage Symposium! I'm glad to be presenting again. I'm also moderating a symposium panel. The schedule should be released soon.

Re: reading, I just finished Maurice Levy's Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic (transl. S.T. Joshi). It had a number of helpful passages, which was gratifying. You never know what you're getting with some Lovecraft researchers, other than the reliable ones.

I really need to read more on aesthetics, but I've got to draft this paper. Maybe after I finish the first draft.

Scrivener, here I come.

Much reading.

I finished Landrum and am almost all the way through Ascari.

Both books have been good sources of ideas, but now I've got to start working on the abstract. May 22 looms.

Page proofs, reviewed.

I got the page proofs in earlier this week and reviewed them last night. All is in order! My many thanks to Dennis Quinn and Niels-Viggo Hobbs for their work on the Armitage Symposium at NecronomiCon Providence and the Lovecraftian Proceedings.

Landrum: Criticism and Theory.

I finally got through the chapter in Landrum on criticism and theory. He's amazingly talented at summarizing the work of others; the section on Todorov was particularly interesting because Landrum takes a wider view of it than I had before. The next chapter is on authors, and I plan to read only through the 1930s. I'll save the others for a different paper.

My notes continue to be solid though fewer than I've written before now. 

I HAVE GOT TO START WORKING ON THE ABSTRACT.

Day three of #The100DayProject.

I'm still reading Landrum, and it's still solid. He's led me back to three Jorge Luis Borges stories that I'd forgotten about, and he linked them to three Poe stories. All of this goes into the hopper for Lovecraft.

The current chapter is a review of literary criticism about detective fiction (today's video is pages of this chapter up through where I've read). Landrum has a gift for summarising a book in one sentence. Most don't realise just how difficult that is.

I've got to start drafting my proposal for NecronomiCon Providence soon. The deadline is 22 May.

Day two of work.

More reading in Landrum today. Not so many notes as last time, but the ideas are solid. I discovered an important parallel between hard-boiled detectives and Lovecraft's narrators that should prove fruitful.

I may read more tonight, and if I do, I'll post that tomorrow.

Next chapter.

It's #the100dayproject again, and I'm working on the next paper for Necronomicon Providence (this August) and the next chapter of the book. Yes, I should speed up things.

This chapter is on HP Lovecraft and detective fiction, and I'm reading a book by Larry Landrum called American Mystery and Detective Novels: A Reference Guide. AMAZING work. The reading is slow going because there's so much to write and think about.

I'm not sure that I agree with Landrum's distinction between mysteries and detective fiction, but I'm going with it to see where he ends up. It may well be useful to talk about how Lovecraft bridges the two ideas with in his stories. No matter what happens with that, just the introduction and the first section of the first chapter have been fruitful for me.