What to do with myself?

[T. Kelly Lee]

Translation: We're going to spend three episodes doing Haunter, and at the end of the third installment we're going to announce the next upcoming episode dealing with the Supernatural essay, and some hints of where we're going after that (CAS, REH, RB, HK et al.). No, we're still not going to do Lurker at the Threshold or the Derleth pastiches, and we're not going to do Quebec, but we have some ideas for other things that might be fun.

amirite?

I'm not real excited about ANYONE doing MOST of the Derleth stories.  One or two of the best might make interesting contrast.  And Quebec?  The longest thing HPL ever wrote.  And man it puts me to sleep. 

[Jape]

Thanks for Podcast to the Curious. Great stuff.

[Chris Lackey]

Translation: We're going to spend three episodes doing Haunter, and at the end of the third installment we're going to announce the next upcoming episode dealing with the Supernatural essay, and some hints of where we're going after that (CAS, REH, RB, HK et al.). No, we're still not going to do Lurker at the Threshold or the Derleth pastiches, and we're not going to do Quebec, but we have some ideas for other things that might be fun.

amirite?

I'm not telling! You'll find out soon enough!

[Ruth - CthulhuChick]

Translation: We're going to spend three episodes doing Haunter, and at the end of the third installment we're going to announce the next upcoming episode dealing with the Supernatural essay, and some hints of where we're going after that (CAS, REH, RB, HK et al.). No, we're still not going to do Lurker at the Threshold or the Derleth pastiches, and we're not going to do Quebec, but we have some ideas for other things that might be fun.

amirite?

I'm not telling! You'll find out soon enough!

I read that as "It'll be all Derleth, all the time!"

[catamount]

I read that as "It'll be all Derleth, all the time!


Yes! Along with the solo works of Adolphe de Castro and C.M. Eddy Jr.!

[Inner Prop]

I was just thinking, there is an HP Lovecraft podcast, an MR James podcast and a CA Smith podcast.  What about other author specific podcasts?

I'm digging Podcast to the Curious and The Double Shadow, but are there non-horror related authors podcasted out there?

[Genus Unknown]

There's the BardCast, for all your Shakespeare podcasting needs.

[old book]

Also, getting back to OP's OQ:

brokensea.com

[Ruth - CthulhuChick]

Hopefully this forum-linking is ok, but we asked people on the Double Shadow forums what they listen to and got a TON of answers. Some good stuff you might want to check out. I'm really getting into a few of them. http://thedoubleshadow.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=13

[Inner Prop]

Woo hoo, looking forward to  Bardcast, and I love Brokensea's Doctor Who stuff.

I've been dabbling with Double Shadow so I will look for those links next time I'm there.

Thanks.

[T. Kelly Lee]

Oh, Derleth.  We know from HPL's writing that he thought Derleth was long-winded and often downright boring.  Derleth was one of America's most prolific authors - yet no one knows who the hell he even was outside of his connection to HPL.  At a very young age, when Conan Doyle decided to stop writing Sherlock Holmes, Derleth wrote him an volunteered to take of the franchise.  When this was disallowed, Derleth created Solar Pons - his own Holmes.  He wrote more Pons stories than Doyle wrote on Holmes.  And they're just not very good. 

Derleth was a man who sought out greatness by attaching himself to the franchise of others - perhaps because, though he could write quickly and endlessly, he never could create the really unique and inspiring character that made authors like Conan Doyle and HPL so damn good.  Derleth's own "Midwest" novels are structured well, but boring.  His hallmarks as a writer are his long-windedness and utter reliance on traditional literary tropes. 

I think the fact that he brings these two hallmarks to the Mythos would have depressed HPL.  His fiction was cutting edge and pushed boundaries and Derleth drug it back to the more traditional G vs. E realms of fiction.  Derleth needed to read more and write less and get schooled up in the esoterica that made HPL such a creative force. 

[old book]

Oh, Derleth.  We know from HPL's writing that he thought Derleth was long-winded and often downright boring.  Derleth was one of America's most prolific authors - yet no one knows who the hell he even was outside of his connection to HPL.

This is funny, sad and true, and the rest of what T. Kelly Lee wrote also seems true to me, except:

Derleth needed to read more and write less and get schooled up in the esoterica that made HPL such a creative force. 

I think Derleth was studying esoterica but was trying a little too hard, it lacked the fun and spontaneity Lovecraft brought to random bits of this and that dragged in by the dog from a meeting of the theosophists at the grange hall last month. Derleth was following up on Ponape, tying Lovecraft things in with NW Coast cultures, all that sort of pan-Cthulhuist stuff, and I think Lin Carter and his cultists were also sort of involved in that, expanding the conspiracy and the hoary vastness of it all, but it lacked the spark of inspiration, it was commentary on and around the Missing Word that appeared when Lovecraft disappeared.

So this isn't a real disagreement--maybe Derleth wasn't studying the right kind of esoterica, although I don't think it would have made any difference what kind he got ahold of.

I enjoy Derleth in small infrequent portions, perhaps the way one might enjoy coming across a Muzak (TM) version of an anthem of their youth. Derleth is the easy-listening, slightly pornographic (in a sense, and not a sexual sense) regurgitation of Lovecraft. Derleth might one day serve as a launching pad for more astute and better-versed cinematographers to transubstantiate his torturous tales into art, if they manage to catch the inspiration Lovecraft had and allow that to inform very free and perhaps even deviant adaptations of the Derleth corpus. Probably never gonna happen. There is some potential there still, though. I guess this idea came up because Derleth's stories are a bit more standard than Lovecraft's. You know, they have beginnings, middles, ends, sometimes even some dialogue, something akin almost to a plot in places, that sort of thing. I could see someone filming Shadow Over Innsmouth and then using Derleth's derivative story (Seal of R'lyeh?) as the point of departure for a sequel, maybe. That is, in some theoretical world where film makers make the films they want without regard to money, and in which Lovecraftian film is extremely popular. Never-Never Land.

[Inner Prop]

I've never read any Derleth.  Should I at least read a little or is it like the Twilight books and best to be avoided at all costs?

[old book]

Inner Prop: give it a whirl, take the plunge. If you need materials, PM me. If you don't like it, it is all easily forgotten, imho, and will not ruin HPL for you.

[T. Kelly Lee]

You should read Derleth's HPL-inspired stories.  They give a little more of the good stuff we like.  Just keep in mind that they're almost entirely his own creation.  Clark Ashton Smith didn't like the mythology Derleth created and thought it too pedantic and blandly Christian.  I would say he adds a CS Lewis touch to it that just really dislike.

And I think Old Book is right - Derleth had studied some esoterica, but he put it into his own American/Christian worldview rather than letting the chaos of the thing run free.  HPL, if he had not read gnosticism, certainly understood it and his mythos was gnostic in nature...random.  But Derleth added the more traditional g vs. e component to the mythos that, though it might have made it appealing to a Cold War pulp audience, tends to put a lot of us post-moderns off.