23 Tuesday May 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Opened 6th May 2023, and perhaps still on, an exhibition of Lovecraftian crafts and illustrations by Claudia Sedler at a gallery near Dusseldorf in Germany. Address: Atelier Andersartig, Alexander-Coppel-Strabe 40, 42651 Solingen.
22 Monday May 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
I see that hplovecraft.com has recently…
Created a series of pages showcasing several Lovecraft-Related Documents including his birth, marriage, and death certificates.
And talking of old documents, Brown University Library (i.e. the John Hay Library) is open again to students and visitors, with masks optional…
Spring 2023: Welcome back to your Brown University Library!
This is pinned on their blog, so I assume the Library has been closed until recently due to Covid? Presumably this re-opening means the 2023 S.T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship in H.P. Lovecraft fellow will now be able to lovingly sniff Lovecraft’s letters in person. Currently…
Applications for the next cycle of fellowships will open in Spring 2024.
21 Sunday May 2023
Posted in AI, Lovecraftian arts
A possible merry task, for a dull Sunday…
A new competition offers $300 for the best sci-fi prompt. The aim is to craft a prompt for an AI-writer that will produce a ‘mind-blowingly readable’ first chapter of a science-fiction novel, such that the story makes seasoned readers want more. Deadline: 31st December 2023.
I assume the organisers are willing to also accept donations to improve the prize-pot or provide second-place prizes or training workshops for entrants.
Also, the fledgling AI Art Weekly newsletter has a Lovecraft challenge. Unfortunately entries can only be submitted on Twitter, which counts me out. But some may be interested, not least by the $50 prize.
Possibly a candidate for the free Dream by Wombo AI’s new “Horror” style module…
… or you could just choose the cute kitties.
20 Saturday May 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
My latest Tolkien Gleanings ‘zine is now available. This is the fourth issue, a free 64-page PDF magazine for scholars of the life and works of Tolkien. May also be of interest to collectors, artists, and in this instance to historians of Edwardian Birmingham.
It has articles, artwork, a book review, vintage pictures, and extensive notes on new Tolkien items of interest which I found from April to May 2023. Basically, it does for Tolkien what I also do for Lovecraft, and as such I also make a number of new discoveries. Not least on the name “Anduin”, in this issue.
Designed for easy reading on a larger digital tablet, such as the Kindle Fire 10″.
Available on Gumroad (no sign-up needed, donations welcome) or on Archive.org.
Contributions, especially reviews of less-known non-fiction books, are welcomed for future issues.
19 Friday May 2023
Posted in Picture postals
This week, more pictures from the Samuel Chamberlain Photograph Negatives Collection, 1928-1971, held at the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem.
Summer is “a cummin’ in”, and thus it seems apt to have the pictures reflect Lovecraft’s summer travels. These show the fabric of some of the Marblehead lanes which he found so alluring.
old streets and gables and chimney-pots, and the endless maze of fanlighted Colonial doorways. … ancient houses set at all possible angles on moss-grown rock foundations and weird terraces
I’ve given them a tickle with Photoshop and a colourising, to give a flavour of the shades he loved. Though these scenes are pictured decades later, at a guess, and in the meanwhile there’s probably been a certain amount of sprucing-up, tourist-ification and antique-shoppery going on.
whilst conversing with natives there [in Salem], I had learnt of the neighbouring fishing port of Marblehead, whose antique quaintness was particularly recommended to me. Taking a stage-coach thither, I was presently borne into the most marvellous region I had ever dream’d of, & furnish’d with the most powerful single aesthetic impression I have receiv’d in years. Even now it is difficult for me to believe that Marblehead exists, save in some phantasticall dream. It is so contrary to everything usually observable in this age, & so exactly conformed to the habitual fabrick of my nocturnal visions, that my whole visit partook of the aethereal character scarce compatible with reality.
18 Thursday May 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings
I see that Sapentia had a thoughtful NecronomiCon 2022 review, “The Odd, the Free, and the Dissenting”.
Also been and gone, a more local event which celebrated Lovecraft and a member of the Circle. Such things, though small, are always interesting to note. “Cthulhu Comes to Quincy: The Curious Friendship of H.P. Lovecraft & Edward H. Cole” happened back in February 2023.
Edward Cole was a teacher at the Chauncy Hall School in Boston, and a charter member of the Harvard Club in Quincy. However, it was his hobby of amateur journalism that put him in contact with Lovecraft. The friendship became close enough that Lovecraft ventured to Quincy a number of times to visit, despite his deep dislike of leaving his hometown of Providence. Cole and his wife were also some of the very few to attend Lovecraft’s funeral in 1937. This program will discuss the unlikely friendship between these two men, and the excursions they took that may have had an influence on Lovecraft’s fiction.
Also over in Paris, I see that the Helene Berr Media Library had a special Lovecraft evening in January 2023, with lectures and screenings.
17 Wednesday May 2023
Posted in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
Erik Davis on Lovecraft, nice. “A Lecture on Dreaming, Writing, PKD, and Lovecraft” by Erik Davis (author of the excellent Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information). Delivered at the 2010 Philip K. Dick Festival, Colorado. As a 150Mb .ZIP file with .MP3 files. The link is still working.
Somewhat related, Poland’s major PhilosophyCon 6 passed me by and seems to have been substantially about Lovecraft, with S.T. Joshi as guest of honour. 14th-16th May 2021. PDF programme and YouTube, though the latter has no full recordings from 2021.
16 Tuesday May 2023
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts, New books
The release of the collected trade paperback for the Lovecraft: Unknown Kadath graphic novel has been put back to 12th July 2023, at least according to Amazon UK. It was supposed to be due out in this week. The eight comic-book series is however complete, and Amazon has them all as a download set. Albeit at £7 more than you’d pay for the collected trade paperback, and without its extras.
The artwork is your usual ‘dynamic comic-book’ sort (think ‘Neal Adams inked by Gene Colan’), but I see that at one point the art drops into a nice homage to Winsor McCay and the surreal Little Nemo — whose run finished the year before Lovecraft wrote Kadath…
16 Tuesday May 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
“HPL in Brooklyn with kitties”. Another Playground.ai experiment, after Photoshop fixing. Playground.ai seems to know more about what Lovecraft looked like, now.
15 Monday May 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
An unusual and refreshingly fresh Catholic take on Lovecraft, in the new article on “H.P. Lovecraft and a Godless Universe”. Making a point I don’t recall hearing put so bluntly, before now…
Lovecraft undermines the notion that atheism and the rejection of religion would lead to the elevation of mankind. […] It isn’t [human] triumph and unrestrained glory and progress; it is madness and idiocy and filth [… This] is a strange combination, one that is not found often; Lovecraft rejected God, but he had no hopes for a world without Him.
Lovecraft himself made the point eloquently enough in the letters, though at more length. To the effect that the quainter Christian trappings were something he valued for their connection to the rooted life of the past and the ways of his forefathers. And that more broadly religion was useful in maintaining a time-worn social coherence among the general populace — at a time (c. 1919-1936) when forces of both the right and left were elsewhere seeking to establish (often by force) their own ‘new world built on new foundations’.
14 Sunday May 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
Popping up on Archive.org, three Lovecraft related issues of the 1980s RPG magazine Different Worlds. Of most interest to non-gamers is Different Worlds #47 which has the long scholarly article “Lovecraft and The Necronomicon”.
13 Saturday May 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings
New on the Arxiv.org open repository of academic papers, “Simulating H.P. Lovecraft horror literature with the ChatGPT large language model”. Using the current…
GPT-4 architecture [and] advanced prompt engineering methods. [texts were generated and undergraduates asked to “distinguish between genuine Lovecraft works and those generated by our model. … the participants were unable to reliably differentiate between the two
The sample was 301 students. But I’m always sceptical of studies involving a group of adolescents many of whom are likely to be sleep-deprived, malnourished, hungover or perhaps all at the same time. One would have hoped that, due to the ongoing questioning of Psychology as a respectable discipline, such student survey-experiments would have been consigned to the dustbin of history.
Admittedly, these students appear (it’s not stated) to be from the Universidad Pontificia Comillas, a private Catholic university in Madrid said to be run on Jesuit lines. So, they were perhaps not as hungover as in other universities.
But the authors of the paper might at least have addressed one other obvious concern. That these religious students, on being openly told that the comparison text was from Lovecraft, might have had some animosity toward him. Due to things they recalled about the author (an ‘occultist’ etc). Putting 2 + 2 together, many might have realised that this was a Lovecraft vs. ChatGPT test, and thus been inclined to deliberately find the ChatGPT extracts indistinguishable from the “140-word excerpt from “The Call of Cthulhu”” (which was the comparison text).