Machen in Penguin 'The White People and Other Weird Stories'

Another exciting piece of news on the Machen front last year was that an edition of Machen's work was coming out in Penguin Modern Classics in 2011. This was discussed at the Abergavenny AGM.

Obviously this is a real indication of Machen's status over sixty years after his death. S.T. Joshi has been pressing Penguin to do this for years and it follows his excellent editions in Penguin of the works of Lovecraft, Blackwood, M.R. James and Lord Dunsany. The negotiations for the book have been noted on S.T. Joshi’s blog at stjoshi.org:

3 March 2010 – I have now indeed received a definitive offer from Penguin to edit an Arthur Machen volume for Penguin Classics. I have tentatively titled it The White People and Other Weird Stories, and the following items will be included: “The Inmost Light”, “Novel of the Black Seal”, “Novel of the White Powder”, “The Red Hand”, “The White People”, “A Fragment of Life”, “The Rose Garden”, “Witchcraft”, “The Bowmen”, “The Soldiers’ Rest”, “The Great Return”, “Out of the Earth”, and “The Terror”.

The volume will be annotated by Joshi and will have a foreword from Guillermo del Toro which will be interesting. The previous Machen Penguin volume Holy Terrors
appeared in 1946 in the classic orange livery. This was I believe the last of his books that Machen saw produced in his lifetime.

Weird Winter Tales - Reviews

A couple of reviews of the event Weird Winter Tales

John Llewellyn Probert -

"Well the event went really well and was surprisingly well attended by absoultely nobody I knew, whcih is always encouraging for...ahem...influencing new potential readers. The day began with Gwilym Games giving a lecture on libraries in HPL's work, followed by a panel discussion on The Necronomicon. After this we had a talk on Kenneth Grant, the real-life 'magician' and how HPL's stories may have influenced his own writing.

After that was Gwil Games' often hilarious account of the Samuels-Games Expedition (his title) to Devon to seek out HPL's ancestors. Gwil kept us rolling in the aisles with this and some of the pictures were classics - especially one of Mark Samuels, Quentin S Crisp and Dan (?) where they reminded more than a few audience member of The Goodies

After I read from The Iconostasis of Imperfection Gwil hosted an hour of the two of us discussing HPL in Cinema, interspersed with clips and trailers from Lovecraft movies where I got to talk about Charles Band & the whole 17 year saga of the making of Stuart Gordon's Shadow Over Innsmouth, AIP's HPL movies, Tony Tenser's technique of coming up with movie titles, and finishing off with a big plug for Rare Exports.

All this, mulled wine and Lovecraftian mood music as well - well done, Reading Central Library!"

Cardinal Cox:

http://suptales.blogspot.com/2010/12/weird-winter-tales.html

Latest Friends publications

Due to illness on the committee our publications shipped in December.

Faunus 22 had its usual collection of articles included two fascinating letters from Arthur Machen to Montague Summers the famous demonologist and master of vampire lore regarding their mutual interest in witchcraft. “Fairy Lore and Its Influence on Arthur Machen and Some Other Contemporaneous Gentlemen” by Thos. Kent Miller discusses Machen’s mysterious Little People. “A Patchwork of Digressions: Arthur Machen and The London Adventure” by Nick Wagstaff covered one of Machen’s most curious books which is a keystone of Psychogeography. “Spectre vs. Rector: The Fall and Arthur Machen” by Mark Goodall discussed the longstanding interest of Mark E. Smith in Machen in depth in an article by the author of a major new book on The Fall. And to close Harold Billing revealed the answer to the salacious mystery of whether M.P. Shiel actually slept with Machen’s French maid.

Machenalia Autumn 2010 contains accounts of the FOAM weekend in Abergavenny, and the text of the London vs Gwent debate which was performed there. It has reviews two new important editions of Machen: S.T. Joshi's annotated edition of Machen from Arcane Wisdom, and the two volumes of the Library of Wales paperbacks which bring back Machen into mass market paperback in the UK. It has the usual other Machen related articles covering Machen events on Hay on Wye and Stoke Newington, and various other film and book reviews.

The Forbidden Forest

Keith Rondinelli created this delightful short: "The Forbidden Forest is a short animated film I created as a personal project. Loosely inspired by Arthur Machen's short story "The White People", I animated, edited and scored the film."

It was shown as part of the Weird Wales event in Swansea.

The Forbidden Forest from Woodhouse on Vimeo.

There is an interview with Keith here at Cartoon Brew:

Weird Wales - Rhys Hughes, Arthur Machen and Welsh Forteana

In this FREE event discover the Weird Tales of authors Rhys Hughes and Arthur Machen, and hear True Tales of Weird Wales.

11 December · 12:00 - 15:30
Discovery Room, First floor,
Swansea Central Library, Civic Centre,

Oystermouth Road,

Swansea, Cymru, SA1 3SN

Rhys Hughes - The Postmodern Mariner
Master storyteller Rhys Hughes will reveal the Welsh roots of his amazing surreal imagination by discussing the strange sea stories of his book The Postmodern Mariner (Screaming Dreams). You can take a glance at the work of this hugely prolific Swansea based author at his website:
http://rhyshughes.blogspot.com/

And the Postmodern Mariner blog:
http://postmodernmariner.blogspot.com/

Arthur Machen - Master of the Weird Tale
Gwilym Games, Swansea Local Studies Librarian and Editor of Machenalia, the newsletter of the Friends of Arthur Machen, will be discussing Arthur Machen, the famed Welsh fantasy and horror writer, admired by Oscar Wilde, HP Lovecraft, Stephen King, and Alan Moore amongst others. His weird tales horrified Victorian audiences and created the incredible fable of The Angels of Mons in the First World War. Machen has now been republished in the prestigious Library of Wales series in two beautiful volumes.
www.machensoc.demon.co.uk/
http://www.libraryofwales.org/english/low_detail.asp?book_ID=61
http://www.libraryofwales.org/english/low_detail.asp?book_ID=62

The Forbidden Forest
We will also be presenting the Welsh première of Keith Rondinelli's animated short film The Forbidden Forest which was inspired by Machen's "The White People".

True Tales of Weird Wales
And in the talk True Tales of Weird Wales discover the dark truths behind reports of Welsh sea monsters including the Gower Sea Wyrm, mystery airships, Spring Heeled Jack in Gower and other bizarre fortean events.

Mark Howard Jones, a Cardiff based writer of weird tales and author of the recent anthology Songs From Spider Street (Screaming Dreams) will also be reading one of his strange stories.

Facebook event here:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=171808102843393

Weird Winter Tales - A day festival in honour of H. P. Lovecraft

I suppose one should start in the cold December of 1880, when the ground froze and the cemetery delvers found they could dig no more graves till spring.

In The Vault by H. P. Lovecraft

It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten.
The Festival by H.P. Lovecraft

That child, a boy, came in December; but was still-born. Nor was any child to be born alive in that house for a century and a half.
The Shunned House by H. P. Lovecraft

Weird Winter Tales - Saturday December 4th, 12-6pm

A seasonal celebration of the works of cult author H.P. Lovecraft at the end of the year which marks the 120th anniversary of his birth on August 20th, 1890. With readings, sound installations, and talks from authors and experts reflecting upon Lovecraft's inspirations, work and influence on popular culture. There will also be a special screening of The Call of Cthulhu (H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, 2005) the film adaptation of one of Lovecraft's most famous short stories.

Location : Reading Central Library, Abbey Square RG1 3BQ.

The library is in central Reading. It is built on the remains of Reading Abbey which is haunted by the tortured ghost of its last abbot Hugh Farringdon. It is 5 minutes away from Reading Gaol where Oscar Wilde spent more than a year imprisoned.

Tickets available from Reading Central Library or e-mail info@readinglibraries.org.uk

£3, Library Members £2

Google Maps to Reading Central Library

http://tinyurl.com/3ymxscb

Facebook event

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=106949902706385&num_event_invites=0

Our mysterious cast of curious scholars and doom laden writers include:

Dr David Evans – author of The History of British Magic After Crowley, will be examining the sanity-blasting mysteries of magus Kenneth Grant, who, in his relentless pursuit of the secrets of Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones, could almost be one of Lovecraft’s characters come to life.

http://westengland.academia.edu/daveevans

Cardinal Cox - Poet Laureate of Peterborough in 2003 and author of numerous poetry pamphlets, will be reading extracts from the recently discovered Codex Dagon, a special selection of poetry and prose, produced exclusively for those attending Weird Winter Tales.

http://www.booksmusicfilmstv.com/CardinalCox/CardinalCoxIndex.html

John Llewellyn Probert, horror film connoisseur and author of the terrifying collections Wicked Delights and The Faculty of Terror, will be reading from his work and discussing Lovecraftian cinema.

http://www.johnlprobert.com/

Gwilym Games, Editor of Machenalia, the newsletter of the Friends of Arthur Machen, will be presenting a talk "The Shadow Haunted Library" - a discussion of the role of libraries and Librarians in Lovecraft's work, leading onto a panel on the mysterious Necronomicon.

He will also report on the Samuels-Games Devonian 2010 expedition. He is one of the few relatively sane survivors of this expedition which made terrifying discoveries when exploring the origins of Lovecraft’s paternal ancestry in Devon.

www.machensoc.demon.co.uk/

Chris Lambert, sound artist, has devised specially created soundscapes of some of the most terrifying of Lovecraft’s stories for Weird Winter Tales.

http://www.chrislambert.net/

The horror podcast, Cast Macabre, has recorded a Lovecraftian episode especially for Weird Winter Tales.

http://www.castmacabre.org

Machen’s Melbourne: The Australian connection

by Gwilym Games

The Editor of Machenalia, for The Friends of Arthur Machen

There is a long history of Machen admiration in Australia the most prominent example being the famous actor and performer, Barry Humphries who first read Machen’s work as a teenager in Melbourne. On arriving in London in 1959 he was excited to walk some of the locations Machen mentioned in his work such as the London streets described so mysteriously in The Great God Pan. It is thus rather appropriate that this production is being held in Humphries’ home town of Melbourne. Humphries was later President of the Arthur Machen society, the forerunner to the present society The Friends of Arthur Machen of which he is still a member, one of a number of members from Australia.

Machen’s fantastic work has had a strange direct impact on Australian life. In the First World War Machen was a journalist and one of Machen’s fictional stories in a newspaper “The Bowmen” published in September 1914 portrayed the ghosts of Agincourt bowmen and St George arriving to save British soldiers in battle against the Germans. This resulted in one of the strangest rumours of the war as six months later in April 1915, just as Anzac troops were landing in Gallipoli, tales spread in Britain that the story was true and that supernatural beings fought for the British at Mons, only now they were reported as being Angels. Machen argued that the tales were not true, and despite a wide ranging search no solid evidence confirming the Angel’s existence was found at the time, nevertheless patriotic popular pamphlets and reports disseminated the story of the Angels widely. Morale boosting sermons and news reports on the Angels of Mons spread throughout the British Empire and Dominions and Australia was no exception. The Australia War Memorial has a page on the Angels of Mons here including a response written to an enquiry regarding the Angels in 1951.

Machen remained embarrassed by his role in the Angels story for the rest of his life.

You can hear an adaptation of Machen's story The Bowmen by Charley Sherman online via this link.

Brian Lewis (1906-1991), later Professor of Architecture at the University of Melbourne, mentions the Angels in his book Our War which relates stories of his Melbourne childhood during the war. He says regarding the Battle of Mons with obvious irony: "It had been a near-run thing and they only got away with divine assistance. It is a pity that we only heard about it a year later; it would have been very heartening at the time [...] it would have given us an early assurance that we were fighting on the side of God and right".

Lewis mentions too seeing a striking colour newspaper picture of the Angels at Mons one of the many artistic illustrations of the story available during the war. The most popular spiritualist journal in Australia Harbinger of Light, founded in 1870, was published in Melbourne and it published tales of the Angels prominently during the war.

Another interesting connection is that Machen later in the war interviewed the Prime Minister of Australia Billy Hughes, on a visit to Britain, for his London newspaper The Evening News, making play of their shared Welsh roots.