Dispatches from the silver key

Arcane Arts

I’m taking a long-overdue week off from work. My wife and I are up the family seasonal cottage on Highland Lake, NH, and MAN do I need this. Weeks of accumulated stress and computer tunnel-vision have left me mind-weary and spiritually numbed.

But that didn’t stop me from talking Robert E. Howard.

On Saturday my wife and I hosted a dozen guests for the afternoon, but I closeted myself in the loft, logged onto Zoom, and participated in a panel session in the online conference Afterlives of World Building: The Legacy of Robert E. Howard.

Growing up we had no telephone and just a single 17 inch black and white TV with rabbit ears and three channels at the cottage. Yet here I was in a virtual event hall with folks from all over the U.S. and beyond talking sword-and-sorcery.

I sometimes wax anti-tech but I have to admit, pretty slick. Yay computers.

Because I had guests waiting I had to log off immediately after the panel, so I missed the second panel and the closing keynote speech by Sara Frazetta. But the recordings will be going up on The Dark Man YouTube channel, probably after some post-production work.

A couple thoughts on that.

It was pretty cool serving on a panel with S.T. Joshi, the most recognizable name in Lovecraft studies. S.T. was once quite critical of Howard and his seriousness as a writer, but on this panel he was gracious, mentioned he deserved his own Penguin classics edition and even pushing for Howard for possible inclusion into the Library of America alongside Lovecraft.

Also serving on the panel were Jonas Prida, editor of Conan Meets the Academy; Jeff Shanks, author of dozens of essays including an award-winning series of articles published in the Conan the Barbarian comic book; and Laura Shubert, who completed a Master’s thesis on Howard in 2023.

We spoke broadly about the past and present of Howard scholarship. I was pleased to hear plugs for The Dark Barbarian (1984) as one of the earliest landmark examples. I plugged Amra and its early academic stirrings, The Cimmerian, and REH: Two-Gun Raconteur. Some bona-fides were thrown the way of Fred Blosser, who has been writing about REH and his creations in the pages of SSOC since the 70s and now recently for Pulp Hero Press.

We also discussed why academic studies of Howard seem to lag Lovecraft and Tolkien. Lovecraft underwent a critical reappraisal in the early 70s but it wasn’t until much later that we started seeing a similar shift in REH studies, perhaps due to the lack of widely available pure texts until the Del Reys.

Today there is certainly good writing being done on various websites and blogs, and good videos being made by independent creators on YouTube. But I believe there is a need for commons, shared spaces; how many Substacks can we follow? Is Reddit a great mechanism for scholarship? That’s why we need the likes of Amra, or SSOC with essays and a vibrant letters column, or The Cimmerian, now maybe a (regular) The Dark Man. Academic journals are a challenge; considerable effort, no money to be made, not a fraction of people will read essays or lit crit compared to a monthly Conan comic. It’s much easier to curate your own interests on your own blog or YT channel. But that doesn’t mean they’re any less important. They help facilitate the great conversation of understanding. They keep the legacy of creators alive, the unique and time and place rooted people that must never be forgotten.

We also spoke about the tension of creator vs. creations, and the fact there are a lot more fans of Middle-earth and the Peter Jackson films, or the Conan comics or “Conan the Barbarian”, than JRRT or REH themselves. More people who recognize a Cthulhu plushie than Lovecraft’s bust.

This is perhaps to be expected, but we need to keep the legacy of artists alive, too. Because people, not corporations, create art; individual artists, not AI aggregators, lend art its unique and individual texture. With individuals comes baggage, but art is not supposed to be safe. It is supposed to engage, challenge, entertain, yes, but also surprise, upset, or even anger the reader.

Lovecraft might be “flawed,” as is Howard, but who isn’t? Everyone reading this is certainly flawed and has done or said lousy shit they’d rather forget. It’s not our job to judge, but to understand.

The drift toward mediocrity is the real threat. As is entropy. Many great artists have been lost to the march of time. It’s up to people like you, reader, to keep the flame lit.

TL;DR, let’s hope this new incarnation of The Dark Man journal sticks around.

A doctoral project on Tolkien

Speaking of elevating fantasy authors, John Garth is pursuing a PhD in Tolkien studies, an effort spurred in part by the lingering reluctance to accepting Tolkien into the pantheon of classic literature.

Garth is a first-rate scholar who wrote one of the best works on Tolkien I’ve ever read, Tolkien and the Great War. His doctoral research degree seems to be an expansion of that theme, encompassing WWI of which Tolkien was a combatant but to WW2 as well, of which Tolkien was a civilian with a son serving in the Royal Air Force.

In other words, LOTR is a popular work, but it is also quite serious, and an all-time great novel. Yet (some) critics don't seem to think so.

From Garth’s blog: The Guardian recently published a list of ‘the 100 best novels of all time,’ ‘the greatest literature ever published in English, as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide.’ The only speculative fiction novel to make the critics’ list was Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, scraping in at 91.

No Lord of the Rings.

WTF.

The poll by academics and authors then spurred a second top 100 novels poll by readers. The winner?

The Lord of the Rings.

Which goes to show that the popular/critical divide is often quite stark, and critics are often dead-wrong.

Some new S&S

There is a lot going on in S&S publishing these days. Here’s a few new titles that have caught my eye.

• ​Expanded edition of Worlds Beyond Worlds, John Fultz. The original collection published by DMR was fantastic so I’m sure I’ll pick this up.
• ​Kingdoms Trembling by M. Stern (DMR Books). Drawing comparisons to Schuyler Hernstrom which has me interested.
• ​Blue Fire, a new novella of Jirel of Joiry by Molly Tanzer/New Edge Sword and Sorcery. I liked a previous New Edge Jirel story by Tanzer.
• Issues #9-10 of Old Moon Quarterly, including an Arthurian-themed issue with a story in Middle English (!). I backed this kickstarter and am looking forward to receiving my snail-mail hard copies.

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