The problem with Joshi is that as soon as he is operating outside of his own rather limited sphere of knowledge, he is invariably wrong. This does not stop him, however. For this reason it is problematic that he is now considered the man to turn to when it comes to certain authors.

Consider the case of the Penguin annotated M R James. I quote myself from another message board:

Quote:

Penguin Classics recently released COUNT MAGNUS AND OTHER GHOST STORIES: THE COMPLETE GHOST STORIES OF M R JAMES, VOLUME 1, said to be "the only annotated edition of M R Jamess writings currently available," which I suppose is true insofar as the Ash-Tree Press complete James edition is out of print. The annotation has been performed by S T Joshi, who occasionally goes out of his way to provide incorrect information when James, naturally, has it right in the first place.

Consider the case of "Count Magnus" himself. The story takes place at the fictional Råbäck manor in the province of Vestergothland in Sweden. At one point a character is said to travel to Skara, which prompts Joshi to insert the following note: "I.e., Skåre, a city in Vormlands Lan province in southern Sweden, five miles northwest of Karlstad." Well, it turns out there is in fact a Skåre, but it seems more likely that James had precisely Skara, a city in Vestergothland, where the story takes place, in mind---just like he said.

Why does Joshi, whose first-hand knowledge of Swedish geography, one has to assume, is considerably inferior to that of James, who had after all traveled in Sweden himself, take it upon himself to "correct" James on this point? Could he not at least have checked Wikipedia? And why does Penguin choose a scholar whose research is so flawed, and who is subject to such strange impulses, to provide annotation for James?

And further:

Quote:

[I]n THE ANNOTATED H P LOVECRAFT it is clear that the editors think that "many-pillared Irem," the lost city, is something that Lovecraft himself invented. Can you imagine? Even a glancing acquaintance with Arab literature, of the kind Joshi obviously does not have but which a child in Lovecraft's time would often have had through reading even an expurgated edition of the ARABIAN NIGHTS, would be sufficient in order to know that this is an authentic legend. Ibn Khaldun himself, of course, in his MUQADDIMAH remarks that the pillars of Irem must in all likelihood be the distorted memory of tent-poles at some large nomadic gathering in prehistory. Do people not read Ibn Khaldun anymore?

My relationship with S. T. is now eerily close to that of the young Mythos writers who worked with Derleth and had their first books published by Arkham House. Working with him on THE FUNGAL STAIN was the first time that I worked with a professional editor on one of my books. Before then, I was my own editor, and I got away with gobs of grammatical anarchy and bad writing. I love, in my correspondence, to ape Lovecraft's odd spelling, and I began to use "shew," "antient," &c in my fiction. I like to make up words, and in the Hippocampus book I used the word "vampirically," which he wou'd not allow. He corrected some really clueless repeated misspellings and, more important, he fill'd me with a desire to write better, more professionally.

As Lovecraft's editor, the most important such editor since Derleth, S. T. has been responsible for making this the greatest time to be an obsess'd Lovecraft fan. I am astonished at the work he has done in what seems so short a time. I look at my bookcase of hardcover weird titles and see the Corrected Text Arkham editions, ESSENTIAL SOLITUDE, the five volumes of essays, Lovecraft's Collected Poetry, the hardcover edition of H. P. LOVECRAFT: A LIFE. In a box I have my copies of LOVECRAFT STUDIES and other Necronomicon Press titles he has written or co-edited. On my shelves made of milk crates I have the many Hippocampus books for which he is responsible. Just got the Tampa University Press edition of his edited Lovecraft's letters to Barlow. On my special shelf where I keep my Penguin Classics I have those three magnificent volumes of Lovecraft, two of M. R. James, one of Dunsany, plus his fabulous anthology of American supernatural fiction, and an edition of Blackwood.

The book of which this thread is supposedly the topic has changed my life in exactly the way that reading Lin Carter's A LOOK BEHIND THE CTHULHU MYTHOS affected me when I was a clueless Cthulhu kid -- it has fill'd me with an overwhelming need to work with every ounce of whatever I possess as an artist and create Lovecraftian Mythos fiction that is authentic tribute to Lovecraft, not just tales that rip-off HPL's ideas. I've had writer's block for almost two months because I had convinc'd myself that it was time to write a collection of non-Lovecraftian fiction, since I've completed three new books of Mythos fiction since October. I realis'd last week that I don't WANT to write non-Lovecraftian horror -- I wanna be Mythos to the core of my adolescent soul. I feel this keenly, more than ever, because of THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS. For some of us, the Mythos weaves a spell from which we cannot escape; it fills us with such joy when we try to add to it with weird fiction of our own. It's like a ritual, to return to Lovecraft and not just read his fiction but study it with pen in hand and pad on lap, taking notes, gleaning from Lovecraft's work the ideasm the inspiration, that will lead us to creating new works of our own. I feed on this with my brain, my soul. It intoxicates me. And S. T.'s book has increas'd my appetite tenfold.

And now I get to work with him as he enters this flipping strange new role as Mythos editor! Who woulda thunk it!!?? S. T. JOSHI EDITING MYTHOS FICTION!!! My gawd, the stars are spinning in ye merciless cosmos! To have him chose one of my newer novelettes for his anthology of modern Lovecraftian horror, BLACK WINGS, is like living in a dream. I cannot describe completely the effect he has had on my life as a weird phantasist. If I sound like I'm in love -- I am, with his astonishing work, with his kindness as a friend, with his firmness as an editor. To have walk'd Providence with him, as he led a few of us on a tour of Lovecraftian sites in October of 2006, is the happiest memory in my skull. The finest moment in my life came as we stood before #10 Barnes Street and I listened as S. T. began to chant as mantra the works that Lovecraft penned as he lived there. I was carrying the three Penguin editions of HPL plus ye olde pb reprint of FUNGI FROM YUGGOTH in my hand. As S. T. declaimed, "This should be an American literary site!" I went to the house and placed my hand against the #10 -- a photo of which is ye back cover for an issue of my EOD zine. It was my finest moment on earth. I've never felt such pure ecstasy. Joshi's influence on my life as a writer has been overwhelming, and will continue to be so. This book that we discuss here has return'd me, after two months of delusion concerning my next book, to Lovecraft -- the happiest realm I know. Sorry to be so long-winded, but I love this love with every fiber of my soul, this writing weird Lovecraftian fiction full time. So much is tied to it, including my growing love and admiration for Clark Ashton Smith, which has increas'd exponentially since the wonderful edition of Smith's collected tales and the awesome three editions of poems have been publish'd. The reason S. T. was in Providence during my week there was to work at John Hay on the poetry volumes. We were allow'd into the room wherein he work'd, and there were BOXES of CAS papers, poems writ in pencil and pen on frail sheets on yellowing paper. To see it was an amazing experience! S. T.'s opinion of CAS's fiction disappoints me -- but his work on the poems is entirely appreciated!

"I'm a little girl."
--H. P. Lovecraft, Esq.

Kyberean Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> If I had my copy of the book handy, then I could
> be more specific, but it was lost/stolen during a
> move a few years ago, and I have not yet replaced
> it. I do know that Joshi strongly implies, or even
> states, in the relevant endnote that next to none
> of Meyrink's weird fiction was available in
> English. The fact of the matter, however, is that,
> at the time Joshi published this work, the
> majority of Meyrink's weird fiction had, in fact,
> been translated into English. Is "majority",
> therefore, enough for you? It certainly is, for
> me.

Oh, definitely. Thanks for explaining it. You were a wee bit unclear earlier.

Jojo Lapin X Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> And further:
>
> n THE ANNOTATED H P LOVECRAFT it is clear that the
> editors think that "many-pillared Irem," the lost
> city, is something that Lovecraft himself
> invented. Can you imagine? Even a glancing
> acquaintance with Arab literature, of the kind
> Joshi obviously does not have but which a child in
> Lovecraft's time would often have had through
> reading even an expurgated edition of the ARABIAN
> NIGHTS, would be sufficient in order to know that
> this is an authentic legend. Ibn Khaldun himself,
> of course, in his MUQADDIMAH remarks that the
> pillars of Irem must in all likelihood be the
> distorted memory of tent-poles at some large
> nomadic gathering in prehistory. Do people not
> read Ibn Khaldun anymore?

I need to look that up -- Irem isn't mentioned in any of the stories in that book, so I wonder in what note it could have been dragged in.
It is correctly identified as "An ancient Arabian city" in the companion volume, More Annotated Lovecraft, by the same editors.

There is one error on that message board, BTW: Råbäck was not the residence of Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 17 May 09 | 04:33PM by Martinus.

Kyberean Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Joshi's mixed competence as an amateur scholar
> and editor would make for a much more substantive
> discussion. The fiasco with the Penguin editions
> of Lovecraft's tales is well known.

This will probably brand me as quite ignorant, but... what "fiasco"? I'm aware of the typos, of course, but what else are you referring to here? (I note the mention of Irem further down by JoJo Lapin; are the two related?) Pardon me if this seems a foolish question, but I wasn't aware of any sort of problems with these editions which would merit the term....

> One of my favorite Joshi howlers occurs in his edition of
> Lovecraft's Annotated Supernatural Horror in
> Literature, where he mentions in a footnote that
> very few of Gustav Meyrink's works had been
> translated into English. In fact, at the time of
> the publication of The Annotated Supernatural
> Horror in Literature, at least a half-dozen of
> Meyrink's works had been translated into English.

Yes, that does constitute a serious error. The passage is as follows: "Aside from The Golem almost none of his work has been translated into English." Obviously that isn't the case, and requires correction. (Even in Lovecraft's day other of Meyrink's work had seen English translation; consider "The Man in the Bottle", included in Julian Hawthorne's Lock and Key Library, for example -- which, curiously, is given on the TOC as "The Man in the Bottle" and on the first page of the tale as "The Man on the Bottle".) Nor is it the only mistake made by Joshi in his rather large body of work.

But I would argue that such errors are relatively few given the amount of work he has on such subjects, and I've yet to encounter any scholar who hasn't made occasional boners, no matter how good they are. This may also tie in with the discussion about problems with proofreading, editing, and typographical mistakes, as I would imagine it, too, is linked with the pressure of scheduling production of these things, which often doesn't allow for as many errors to be caught along the way.

As you say, this isn't an excuse, but it may be part of the reason for such nonetheless. In any event, where such errors occur, they should be brought up and addressed.

Even so, I'd say Joshi remains one of the more knowledgeable and insightful scholars working in the field.

Martinus:

My apologies for the lack of clarity, which I can now see from hindsight. I would have been more specific had I not been working strictly from memory. Thanks to jdworth for providing the exact quotation from Joshi's edition.


jdworth:

Just to be clear, I am not anti-Joshi. Far from it. I have defended his Lovecraft biography against those who feel (wrongly) that it soft-pedals Lovecraft's racial views. I also strongly take Joshi's side with respect to his generally harsh but accurate assessment of August Derleth's role in publishing Lovecraft's writings. I am glad that Joshi has dedicated himself so indefatigably to weird fiction, and I have largely supported him, just as I support the amateur CAS scholars, in the way that counts: namely, with my wallet.

That said, wilum pugmire (inadvertently?) makes plain the problem with Joshi when he writes,

Quote:

I am astonished at the work he has done in what seems so short a time.

So am I. To be blunt, Joshi's prolific output comes with a price; namely, often slipshod editing. "Fiascos" are in the eye of the beholder, I realize, but when there are an average of one hundred or so typographical errors and textual oddities per volume*, as is the case with the Joshi-edited Penguin Lovecraft editions, then that, to me, is a prima facie example of a fiasco. Granted, Penguin, too, deserves much of the blame for this, but Joshi is the editor, and the buck stops with him.

So, while Joshi's efforts and intentions are to be commended, I also feel that he over-reaches his capabilities, and that he errs far too often, and far too sloppily. I hope that he has a long career ahead of him, but he needs to slow down and curtail his ambitions.

Semi-related aside: Who was it that claimed Joshi's Penguin edition of M.R. James to be the only annotated edition available? Penguin? So far as I know, the annotated Oxford World's Classics volume Casting the Runes, edited by Michael Cox, was available at the time of the Penguin M.R. James edition.


*Credit again goes to Martinus for his outstanding errata lists.

Kyberean Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> To be blunt, Joshi's prolific output
> comes with a price; namely, often slipshod
> editing. "Fiascos" are in the eye of the beholder,
> I realize, but when there are an average of one
> hundred or so typographical errors and textual
> oddities per volume*, as is the case with the
> Joshi-edited Penguin Lovecraft editions, then
> that, to me, is a prima facie example of a fiasco.
> Granted, Penguin, too, deserves much of the blame
> for this, but Joshi is the editor, and the buck
> stops with him.
>
> So, while Joshi's efforts and intentions are to be
> commended, I also feel that he over-reaches his
> capabilities, and that he errs far too often, and
> far too sloppily. I hope that he has a long career
> ahead of him, but he needs to slow down and
> curtail his ambitions.

Again, thanks for clarifying the matter. And on this, I'd have to agree with you, at least to a degree. That was part of what I was addressing with my own comments about the pressures of production, especially at such a rate. As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, I spent many years as a typesetter, and saw how many times things were returned to attempt to make books as error-free as possible. From my understanding, a number of those steps have been eliminated in the process, thus allowing less and less opportunity for catching these, while at the same time allowing less and less time for the editor/proofreader to go over the "galleys"; at least, this is (from what I hear) quite often the case, especially with mass-market publishing, and I would imagine this extends to various small presses as well, to eliminate costs.

So yes, I think it would be helpful for STJ to slow down a bit and allow himself more time, but I also think that a fair amount of this is the inevitable result of alterations in the publishing business of recent years.

And yes, Martin deserves considerable credit for all his efforts on such things, and is definitely to be commended....

I largely agree with you, especially with regard to such matters as typographical errors. No doubt, it's the result of a pathology that has infected the publishing industry, as a whole. I still hold the editor responsible for them, though.

Also, the accelerated schedules don't excuse or explain such errors as the Meyrink English translation misinformation. However many errors even academics may propagate, I doubt that that would have been one of them, since it would have been a simple matter for a research assistant to have updated the annotations and footnotes to Joshi's edition of Supernatural Horror in Literature and make certain that they were up to date.

In any case, the moral of the story remains, "Don't bite off more than you can chew".

I've always held Joshi in high esteem, because it was through his work in binging and many of the writers associated with Lovecraft (for example Blackwood, Machen and so on) out of relative obscurity that I was able to explore the genre of weird fiction in a far more informed way. Indeed, if it was not for my discovery of his annotated editions Lovecraft and the mention of Blackwood's name (among others) therein, I seriously doubt I would have encountered Blackwood, Machen, Smith, Dunsany and so on at all. He’s worked wonders for Lovecraft and weird fiction scholarship, even if it’s not perfect; I only wish that some more critics, serious, thorough and authoritative in their methods, would write some more criticism to provide an alternative perspective on the genre; a single critic dominating the entire field cannot be entirely healthy.

I read a recent, online interview with Joshi in which he related the likelihood that he'd release a grand, all encompassing history of horror fiction. I quote "My big, long-range project is a comprehensive history of supernatural fiction, which may extend to 2 or 3 volumes and take years to finish". Now that's an exciting prospect. Up until now, three of his major books on the horror genre in general, The Weird Tale, The Modern Weird Tale and The Evolution of the Weird Tale have been, in reality, just collections of loosely associated essays, each one focusing on one author. Indeed, many of the individual essays in these books were copied and pasted from earlier appearances in magazines/anthologies, and not written specifically for the book in question; this results, in my opinion, in the books lacking a sense of a self contained unity. If Joshi wrote a detailed, comprehensive history of weird fiction, examining the genre from every angle, its relation to society, other literature and Western culture, in the same way as he wrote H.P. Lovecraft: A Life, I.e. a completely original unified work, divided only by chapters and every word written specifically for that book, and not just a heterogeneous author-by-author anthology, in the same way that The Weird Tale was, then it could be a masterpiece. A decent, complete and scholarly history of weird writing has been long overdue.

Thanks for the kind words -- again! :)
LurkerintheDark: STJ's history of horror fiction is progressing slowly but steadily.

Another big gripe I have with Joshi's criticism (one which becomes more annoyingly apparent each time I pick up one of his books) is his habit of slavishly recounting the plot (sometimes in much detail) of almost every tale or novel he discusses. Even his biography of Lovecraft has enormous plot summaries, and in some of his other books they seem to occupy more space than anything else! These synopses tend to leave little room for genuine literary criticism or any other meaningful exploration into the work of the author in question - indeed, if one's already familiar with the author's work, and thereby the plots of his stories, then huge swathes of Joshi's books become totally redundant. In short, Joshi just spends far too long re-treading the plot of a given story than commenting on it in an illuminating way. However, sometimes these plot summaries can be useful; for instance, in the work of Ramsey Campbell (and especially in stories like those found in his collection Demons By Daylight) the writing can be a little opaque, leading to some confusion over what actually happens in certain tales, and to get a second opinion on what these tales are about (and especially what occurs at their conclusions) can be very useful. But, in general, I do think that Joshi's books are marred by his often unnecessary and irritatingly frequent and lengthy plot synopses.

Anyone agree?

I much prefer Joshi's approach to that of LSdC in his HPL biography, which is much too brief and incomplete. It always annoyed me the way he let every plot summary peter out in "..."

When it comes to plot summaries, I'm not overly fond of them, though they do have their uses; for example, if the work is an obscure one, difficult to find, then it can aid immensely in understanding various points in the following criticism. Likewise, if it is a work someone has not read in some time, it may help to refresh their memory in aid of the same goal.

As for Joshi's plot summaries in particular... no, I don't mind them, though sometimes it appears that he makes some minor errors as well in his recounting of the tale -- perhaps because of a lapse of memory, as it may have been some time between his last reading of the piece and his writing about it. But at times his summaries, including as they must a certain amount of his own take on things, can add a somewhat different perspective on some point in the tale, and that can be quite interesting.

But I would prefer a bit more commentary within the summaries as well, as I think that might serve both ends quite nicely....