Personal / Website News
Black Emanuelle Boxset Unboxing
Severin Films recently released a titanic boxset of the Laura Gemser Black Emanuelle films. I, of course, did an unboxing article of it.
I also bring up prior incarnations of Black Emanuelle DVD releases. Check out the write up here.
Citation News
There’s been an uptick in work being cited lately and I am here for it!
Firstly, my essay “Lost Nights and Dangerous Days: Unraveling the Relationship Between Stranger Things and Synthwave” from Uncovering Stranger Things has been cited in the essay “‘Dad, every serial killer is somebody’s neighbor!’ The Problem of White Supremacy in Summer of ’84” by Erika Tiburcio Moreno and published in the edited collection The ’80s Resurrected: Essays on the Decade in Popular Culture Then and Now.
The book was published by McFarland in March earlier this year. More info can be found on the book’s product page at the McFarland website.
Next, Hannah Mueller’s essay “Male Nudity, Violence and the Disruption of Voyeuristic Pleasure in Starz’s Spartacus” from The New Peplum has been cited by James K. Beggan in his essay “Why is he there? Male presence in a sexually explicit magazine geared towards heterosexual men” that was published in the Porn Studies journal.
If you have access the essay can be read at the journal’s page at Taylor and Francis.
New Episode of HP Lovecast
A new episode of our monthly Transmission program is now online.
For July we interviewed Chelsea Pumpkins, editor of the horror anthology AHH! That’s What I Call Horror: An Anthology of ’90s Horror. The episode can be streamed via our Buzzsprout page, the embedded player below, or through your podcast app of preference.
HPLCP Transmissions – Ep 24 – Chelsea Pumpkins – H. P. Lovecast Podcast
CoKoCon Schedule
The schedule for CoKoCon 2023 is starting to take shape! You can find Michele and I on the following panels:
- Saturday Sept 2 9pm – Fiesta Ballroom 2: From EC Comics to Shudder: Horror Comics That Excite and Scare Us
- Sunday Sept 3 6pm – Coronado: Creepy, Crawly, Otherworldly Bumps in the Night, or Cosmic Horror Films
- Monday Sept 4 1pm – Coronado: 1pm: Weird West in Popular Culture
I’ll be on premises the entire con, so feel free to hunt me down to say hi! Michele and I will also have a table we were sill be selling and signing books.
Publishing Recap
Below is a recap of my publishing endeavors so far in 2023.
Published in February, this collection contains my essay “Dance or Dēcēdere: Gladiator and Industrial Music Sampling.”
Published in May, this issue of Weird Tales contains my essay “When the Stars are Right.”
Published in late March, the first issue of the zine Footage Fiends, contains my essay “Analisi Della Cosa: Found Footage in Caltiki and Italian Theater Going Practices.”
Limited to 50 physical copies.
Essay about mimetic desire in Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu in Dark Dead Things #2/
Miscellaneous Tidbits
New Acquisitions
Kino Lorber just had a summer sale on their Blu-rays so I took the opportunity to pluck up some Italian films for the library.
The Last Hunter I already had on DVD, from Dark Sky Films. In fact, here is my copy autographed by Antonio Margheriti’s son, Edoardo Margheriti:
I did a presentation on The Last Hunter at the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association conference waaaaaaay back in 2010. Not my best presentation and still very green at being an academic, but the text of it can be read at my Academia.edu account.
Ironmaster I have not seen. It sounds like an Italian sword and sorcery flick, but in a prehistoric age. I am a fan of Umberto Lenzi’s work so this should be a fun watch.
Lastly is Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, which I also have not seen. I’ve seen the iconic image of Sophia Loren slipping off her stockings that I feel like I’ve seen the film. I always think of Mastroianni from Divorce, Italian Style.
Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew Commentary
Matt Page, author of 100 Bible Films, has recorded a commentary for Paolini’s 1964 Biblical peplum, The Gospel According to St. Matthew. The commentary and be streamed from YouTube. Criterion Collection recently released a Pasolini boxset that contains this film.
Call for Papers
Michael Torregrossa has a few CFPs out there. I’m sharing them here to help get the word out. Check them out and consider submitting!
Beowulfs Beyond Beowulf: Transformations of Beowulf in Popular Culture (Panel)
Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture and the Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association
Organized by Michael A. Torregrossa, Richard Fahey, Carl Sell, and Benjamin Hoover
Call for Papers – Please Submit Proposals by 30 September 2023
55th Annual Convention of Northeast Modern Language Association
Sheraton Boston Hotel (Boston, MA)
On-site event: 7-10 March 2024
The Old English epic Beowulf remains an important touchstone for connecting us to the medieval past, yet it also has continued relevance today through its various transformations in cultural texts (especially works of popular culture). Our hope with this session is to expand our knowledge of these works and assess their potential for research and teaching.
Please visit our website Beowulf Transformed: Adaptations and Appropriations of the Beowulf Story (available at https://beowulf-transformed.blogspot.com/) for resources and ideas.
The full call for papers (with complete session and submission information) can be accessed at https://tinyurl.com/Beowulf-Transformed-NeMLA-2024.
Session Information
Over a millennium old, the story of Beowulf is disseminated primarily through its editions and translations and its transformations. These three types of Beowulfiana represent a massive corpus of over 1000 works according to the Beowulf’s Afterlives Bibliographic Database; though, as medievalists, we tend to focus on the first two categories rather than the last concentrating on scholastic pursuits rather than entertainments. Consequently, many are often surprised by the variety and vitality of this corpus and its vast potential for research and teaching.
New versions of the Beowulf story feature in all forms of modern mediævalisms, yet (as is true with most medieval texts) research continues to focus primarily on depictions of Beowulf on screen (about 100 examples according to the Internet Movie Database). We hope in this session to expand our view of Beowulf’s reception by creators and look more deeply at the text’s wider use.
We are particularly interested in explorations of the adaptation and/or appropriation of the text, its characters, and its themes in works of fiction (at least 250 examples according to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database and much more recorded by the Beowulf’s Afterlives Bibliographic Database) and comics (at least 380 examples according to the Grand Comics Database), as well as their representations in new and neglected works on screen (including film, television, entertainment consoles, and the Internet). Additional versions of Beowulf can be found in works of creative, performative, and visual arts that also need more attention.
We hope to make our conversation productive. Therefore, we request that submissions highlight the ways the new text transforms the old (for example as interpretations or appropriations of the poem or as an intertext for another work) as well as its value in furthering the Beowulf tradition rather than focusing solely on any perceived defects.
Please see our website Beowulf Transformed: Adaptations and Appropriations of the Beowulf Story (at https://beowulf-transformed.blogspot.com/) for a growing list of ideas, resources, and support.
All proposals will also be considered for a themed issue of the open-access journal The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe.
Please address questions and/or concerns to the organizers at popular.preternaturaliana@gmail.com.
Submission Information
All proposals must be submitted into the CFPList system at https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20596 by 30 September 2023. You will be prompted to create an account with NeMLA (if you do not already have one) and, then, to complete sections on Title, Abstract, and Media Needs.
Notification on the fate of your submission will be made prior to 16 October 2023. If favorable, please confirm your participation with chairs by accepting their invitations and by registering for the event. The deadline for Registration/Membership is 9 December 2023.
Be advised of the following policies of the Convention: All participants must be members of NeMLA for the year of the conference. Participants may present on up to two sessions of different types (panels/seminars are considered of the same type). Submitters to the CFP site cannot upload the same abstract twice.(See the NeMLA Presenter Policies page, at https://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention/policies.html, for further details,)
Thank you for your interest in our session.
Again, please address questions and/or concerns to the organizers at popular.preternaturaliana@gmail.com.
For more information on the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture, please visit our website at https://MedievalinPopularCulture.blogspot.com/.
For more information on the Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association, please visit our website at https://popularpreternaturaliana.blogspot.com/.