30 Sunday Jun 2024
Posted in Scholarly works
A new book, The Mirror of Desire Unbidden: Retrieving the Imago Dei in Tolkien and Late Medieval English Literature (2024) is in open access. Note that Part One attempts to offer a general history of phantasia from antiquity to 1300, in some 150 pages.
30 Sunday Jun 2024
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
New to me, a 376-page 2022 Italian bio-book on Lovecraft that’s not a translation of Joshi.
It’s not a complete life, which would require 3,500 not 350 pages, but instead focusses on the childhood and the death…
With this volume, edited by Pietro Guarriello, we have tried to look more deeply into these two aspects, the most hidden, of Lovecraft’s life: his childhood and his death, essential phases to understand how he developed his philosophical though and then his mature thought. We therefore find collected here a series of biographical materials, some of which are truly rarities, documenting those still rather elusive years of HPL’s life. Between testimonies of those who knew him as a young man and critical writings by major specialists, aspects of Lovecraft as a man are reconstructed which will not fail to illuminate and surprise, but also to move. These testimonies range through the memories and tributes of his friends in Weird Tales, or the reconstruction of his last harrowing days in hospital which also saw him draw up an infamous Death Diary, translated here for the first time in Italy. All documents have been meticulously annotated by the editor, and are important to understanding who Howard Phillips Lovecraft was and why he wrote what he wrote. As Gianfranco de Turris underlines in his Preface, “this is not a picky snooping, but a sincere interest in details, even minor and minimal, of a life which deserves to be investigated to fully understand this personality who endlessly fascinates us.”” (Auto-translation, tweaked for sense in English).
Well-illustrated, according to the blurb.
29 Saturday Jun 2024
Posted in New books
Newly listed at Hippocampus, In the Shadow of Boulder Ridge: The Complete California Tales of Clark Ashton Smith… “this volume emphatically demonstrates how vital his birthplace in the Golden State was central to his life and imagination”. Also includes relevant “poems and prose poems”. No mention of maps, for the orientation of those who only know ‘California is always sunny’ (and are wrong about even that, as apparently it’s cycled between drought and deluge for centuries).
I guess now there’s an opportunity for someone to make/sell a nice hand-drawn map though, as a postcard bookmark to slip into the book on the bookshelf. Possibly the cover-artist. The pleasing cover artwork is by Gregory Nemec.
Here is Lovecraft in 1934 talking of…
the typical Placer County landscape — American River, Donner Lake, Crater Ridge etc — so familiar to me through the view cards and descriptions now and then furnished by Kkarkash-Ton [Smith]
And in 1935, on what lay below…
I wish that I could be in on the expedition to Placer County, where the thousand-mile shaft to evil Tsathoggua’s nighted abode hits the surface of the planet.
28 Friday Jun 2024
Posted in Picture postals
This week in my regular ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’ slot, a picture via the archives of the Rhode Island School of Design. A side-on look at College Street on College Hill in Providence, as Lovecraft knew it in spring 1936 when he lived a little further up the hill.
Illustrator and Club member Helen M. Grose offers a postcard view across the street toward the Handicraft Club. This was a place well known to Lovecraft’s aunt and her friends. Lovecraft’s aunt lived here in 1927, and he sometimes harked back to its earlier days in letters and called it “the old Truman Beckwith house”. He enjoyed its “old-fashion’d terraced garden” and we know he took his friend Morton round it when he visited. Probably other visitors too, if he felt they would appreciate it. At Christmas 1933 Lovecraft was even to be found cheerily listening to carols sung in the Club’s courtyard…
… a stroll half-way down the hill to hear the carol-singing at the old Truman Beckwith mansion.
This 1936 drawing seems to confirm that (by mutual agreement and common sense) the university students traditionally used only one side of the street, while the residents had the other. Note also the upper ‘monitor’ roof section with small windows, looking similar to the one on Lovecraft’s last home at the top of the hill (he had access to it, and Brobst managed to work out how to open its door to the outside roof/railing).
The Club was one of thousands of examples of the tradition of free association, in what some have called the ‘little platoons’ of civic society. No permission from the state / church was required to establish or run a group of like-minded people of proven interests and skill. Nor did the state regulate who could or could not be admitted to membership, or require onerous and disfiguring accommodations to ‘the legal regulations’ etc. Not did the state send secret police to monitor the Club’s exhibitions for political correctness. Things were very different elsewhere in the world in 1936, where many people found themselves hurrying quickly through the murderous springtimes of the new political religion of Soviet Socialism or its heresy National Socialism.
27 Thursday Jun 2024
Posted in AI
Newly-spotted AI image generation plugins, of possible Lovecraftian interest. For use with Stable Diffusion 1.5 models running locally in InvokeAI, ComfyUI or similar.
Ivan Aivazovsky style, for atmospheric sea-scape images (just add monsters). Could be used with the new Cinematic Tools – Volumetric Lighting for backdrops needing more eerie depth-haze/fog.
A few creature plugins of note. Auraplanktons for slides of lit deep-sea specimens.
Swamp Mysteries generates ‘somewhat toony but still mysterious’ swamp monsters in swamps.
And today there’s Black Cat. Seemingly meant to be an eldritch mystery moggie so it looks a bit rough, more Lovecraft’s battered ‘Old Man’ cat than kute kitten. Still, all the more suitable for a desperate messenger from Ulthar, etc.
For steampunk and 1920s RPG makers, Style of patent drawing may interest.
26 Wednesday Jun 2024
Posted in Podcasts etc.
New on Librivox, The Weird Fiction of The Fantasy Fan. Including R.H. Barlow’s complete ‘Annals of the Jinns’ series. Also Lovecraft’s possible 1934 revision of a short tale by the emerging young Rimel, “The Sorcery of Aphlar”…
“Very glad to see the new tale [Sorcery of Aphlar] — which reminds me somewhat of Dunsany. I’m returning it with a few changes which I think would help somewhat. … [also] I’ve taken the liberty of changing the name of the hero …” (23rd July 1934)
Which could be Lovecraft-ese for ‘I’ve ripped it to shreds and re-written it’, or perhaps he did make only a few tweaks. We don’t know. The first two thirds often reads like a Lovecraft tale of the Dreamlands. However, we do know from the letters that Lovecraft finds Rimel’s next tale much better, and therefore he only gives it a light revision…
“The Jewels of Sharlotte” … marks a vast amount of progress … Good work! … as you may see I haven’t made a single major change. Just a few re-arrangements and substitutions, & it stands as originally written.” (23d August 1934, Lovecraft’s emphasis).
This might be taken to mean that the previous and lesser tale had had major changes and re-writing to make it fit for publication. The same letter reveals no quibbles from Rimel about the revision, but celebrates in passing that “Sorcery of Aphlar” had just “landed with Hornig” in The Fantasy Fan.
The tale adds a new and very minor Tolkien/Lovecraft comparison. Both managed to anthropomorphise a snail in fiction, though it was probably Rimel’s idea to do so here.
25 Tuesday Jun 2024
Posted in Odd scratchings
An update on the genuine Windows freeware VoiceMacro 1.4, which I found as a replacement for Cortana voice control (removed from Windows 10 by Microsoft, who want to force people to use Windows 11 and AI). VoiceMacro has now been tested. The freeware enables ‘speak a simple word to turn a page’ on a Microsoft Surface tablet.
On testing I find that ‘nine’ and ‘he’ are trigger words that, even when softly spoken, are always recognised via the built-in pinhead microphone. These have been set to trigger ‘previous page’ / ‘next page’ in the target ebook reader(s), and work perfectly. Hands-free page turning of ebooks! This was probably ‘a thing’ a decade ago, for many, but it’s new to me.
However, it means I’ll be sounding like a cackling German scholar who’s just read Ludwig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis… “Nine, he he he he, Nine!” etc. (Nein is German for ‘no!’).
Update: I found the recognition problem. The Windows 10 app-style for-dummies controls give you no control over adjusting mic levels, which are set too low (by default seemingly). You need to go into the proper Windows Control Panel and then | Sound | Recording | Microphone Array | Properties | Levels – set these to 65 | Advanced – uncheck both ‘Exclusive mode’ boxes | Apply | OK | Exit. Word recognition accuracy via the built-in mic and VoiceMacro then goes to 95-98%. You of course also need to have your microphone set to ‘Array’ in the for-dummies control settings. At a setting of 65 you would also need a fairly quiet environment.
25 Tuesday Jun 2024
Posted in REH
500 pages of Robert E. Howard’s El Borak and Other Desert Adventures in the Del Ray Kindle edition. Currently showing at a nice price for me in Amazon UK, with 70% off. About $5 U.S. Some readers may be interested.
Sadly, the 2012 Michael McConnohie audiobook version has been removed from Amazon and Audible and appears to be no longer for sale anywhere. Possibly due to a copyright troll?
25 Tuesday Jun 2024
Posted in Odd scratchings
New ebook findings re: my new Microsoft Surface Pro 3 12″ as an entertainment touchscreen tablet. Which may interest some readers.
I settled on Cover as the free reader for .CBR etc comics. Free, superb, and lovely design/usability. Set a landscape-orientation screen on the Surface, ‘fit width’, tap to scroll down a third of the comic page. Assuming a traditional page-layout, it’s then almost better than guided panel-by-panel view, as at the high screen-resolution you’re effectively on a huge BD-sized page — which means you can focus on a panel but also see parts of the panels around it. Cover is one of the best comics readers I’ve seen, and I tried quite a few on the Kindle (Android OS). Cover is now also my default .PDF reader on the Surface, as it’s lovely for that and can do double-page magazine spreads without a gutter-line.
Sadly, Cover has no .ePUB support other than for any images inside the file. But I need .ePub on a tablet for monthly Instapaper-like bundles of news and magazine articles I save from the Web for later armchair reading. Windows .ePub readers are nearly all deficient in some way, but I’ve found Koodoo Reader just pips the latest Thorium to the post, due to ‘swipe to turn a page’. Thorium only has fixed page-turn buttons, at the bottom of the screen (poorly placed, for a Surface held propped in hands). Possibly I’ve yet to discover some Store app that does .ePubs better, though.
The Kindle app is deliberately dire on Windows, so purchased Kindle ebooks can be read in your favoured browser at read.amazon.com/kindle-library.
The Windows donationware VoiceMacro also looks useful, though has not yet been tested. (Update: tested and useful. The words ‘nine’ and ‘he’ are trigger words that, even when softly spoken, are always recognised). The OS’s built-in Windows Speech Recognition is very flaky at transcribing my speech-words from the built-in microphone, but maybe this freeware will handle a basic utterance. Say “turn”, send a keypress = the book page turns. That’s all I want. One Android comic-book reader has a ‘turn page by any noise’ feature, but that’s the only place I’ve seen the idea implemented.
That’s it, hope this helps some Tentaclii readers with a Windows touchscreen tablet in desktop mode, and reading ebooks of various sorts.
24 Monday Jun 2024
Posted in Scholarly works
The Knight Letter, free on Archive.org and running to 2022 thanks to the latest uploads. It’s the long-running Newsletter of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America.
23 Sunday Jun 2024
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated, and he reports receipt of copies of his new edition of Lovecraft’s Library: A Catalogue. 148 new additions for me, as I only have the 2002 paper edition on my shelves. Same cover art as before. I see it’s now properly listed at Amazon UK as Lovecraft’s Library: A Catalogue (Fifth Revised Edition), so buyers can be sure of getting the right edition. Amazon is currently saying it might take four weeks to deliver to the UK.
Incidentally, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a visualisation of the attic library in which Lovecraft did his first serious ‘bookworm’ reading among ye olde discards from the family collection. This is as close as I can get without using AI, my Photoshopped version of a picture showing an untouched-for-100-years Rhode Island attic library.
22 Saturday Jun 2024
Posted in Housekeeping
No post today, as I’ve been wrangling a bargain mid-range (i5 CPU) £90 Microsoft Surface Pro 3. For use mainly as an ebook and entertainment touchscreen tablet.
This was Microsoft’s flagship 12″ product from nine years ago and accordingly built like a tank (though considerably lighter). I had it in nice condition from a reputable UK refurbisher, and on arrival it turned out to be almost un-used. Nice. Just 222 charge cycles on the battery and only 2Tb written to the Samsung SSD (they only need replacing around 125Tb). That’s ‘little old lady user’ good, though various clues make me think it was lightly used in a U.S. school’s IT lab for a few years, before being part-exchanged back to Microsoft. Probably been in a warehouse ever since.
So… many thanks to my Patreon patrons, since your regular PayPal has eased this fine upgrade to my armchair reading.
Hours of wrangling it into shape today, not least due to chopping off the manic tentacles of the eldritch Windows 10, with only an unfamiliar touchscreen (a bit like tackling Cthulhu with a machine-gun). But it’s done now, and thus I’ve broken free from the increasingly annoying and flaky Amazon Kindle 10″ tablet (2017, when they were subsidised and thus dirt cheap) for a better 12″ tablet with far better colour and far more user control — since it’s running the full Windows desktop OS. Though I can still see/read my purchased Kindle books via read.amazon.com. The online Kindle reader is vastly better than their dire Windows desktop app, and I’m pleased to find it can also even do ‘guided view’ for purchased comics.
I might still put Winux 7 (Linux Mint that looks and feels like Windows 7) on the new SP3, but it’s too early yet to say. I also need a suitable pen (and perhaps a keyboard-cover called a ‘type cover’), in order to write notes on the screen. But I do like to get bargains, so I’ll wait until I can find a cheap one.