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New book: H.P. Lovecraft: Midnight Studies

11 Thursday Jul 2024

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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Scholar Jan B. W. Pedersen’s site has a cover and a table-of-contents for his new 170-page book H.P. Lovecraft: Midnight Studies published by Peter Lang. And I see it’s now on Amazon in ebook and paper, and appears to be shipping.

Foreword by S. T. Joshi.

Introduction.

Chapter 1: On Lovecraft’s Lifelong Relationship With Wonder.

Chapter 2: Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Romantic on the Nightside.

Chapter 3: ‘Now Will You Be Good?’: Lovecraft, Teetotalism and Philosophy.

Chapter 4: Lovecraft’s Garden: Heart’s Blood at the Root.

Chapter 5: Weird Fiction: A Catalyst for Wonder.

Chapter 6: H. P. Lovecraft and the Dunsanian Conjuration.

Afterword.

I recall that one or even two of these have been in The Lovecraft Annual.

Also, in the left-leaning Times Literary Supplement this week ($ paywall), a review of the academic book Horror as Racism in H.P. Lovecraft by another author. Rather amusingly, the reviewer implies that the book’s author has not read “The Horror at Red Hook”, which one might think would be the vital ur-text for such a study. He also notes that several of the biographical details are off…

[his explanations] can seem heavy-handed and his belabouring of the author unconvincing. […] why call Thomas F. Malone the “privileged, white, Anglo-Saxon protagonist” of “The Horror at Red Hook”, when he is an Irish-American policeman, described as “the sensitive Celt”? […] Steadman’s Lovecraft, meanwhile, can do nothing right (his mother’s mental state is blamed on the fourteen-year-old Lovecraft’s inability to get a job)…

Armitage Symposium programme

09 Tuesday Jul 2024

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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The Armitage Symposium at NecronomiCon Providence (August 2024) now has a full programme online. Including, among many others…

* The Phonotactics of Fear: H.P. Lovecraft and ‘Unknowable’ Languages.

* The Shadow Over Lake Erie: A Trip to Cleveland and its Influence on H.P Lovecraft’s Innsmouth.

* Time as a Narrative Tool in “The Silver Key”: A Figural Interpretation of Randolph Carter.

* Rhode Island in 1912 AD: Immigration, Catholicism, and the Nativist Grotesque.

* Madness and Psychosis in Lovecraft’s World.

Note that Hippocampus also has a new page for Lovecraftian Proceedings No. 5, being the Armitage Symposium proceedings for 2022. No table-of-contents, as yet.

Pseudo-mediaeval dialogue, translated

08 Monday Jul 2024

Posted by in AI, Odd scratchings

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An interesting finding, with thanks to the experts at Reddit. Wooden pseudo-mediaeval dialogue, of the type sometimes found in 1870s-1920s historical and fantasy literature, can easily be translated into modern English via large-language model AIs.

By pseudo-mediaeval I mean all those interminable over-uses of thee and thou, plus wherefore goest ye, what meaneth it, we twain, thou wert before me, unto yonder hillock, therewith he laughed, and so on.

William Morris, and many other users of clotted pseudo-mediaeval Victoriana, made readable… with AI assistance. Potentially, it would be possible to build a dedicated translator for entire novels. Which would also aid the production of human-read audiobooks, as these books would no longer be so daunting to either readers or listeners.

Turlogh Dubh

07 Sunday Jul 2024

Posted by in REH

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A guest post on spraguedecampfan usefully outlines and surveys Robert E. Howard’s Turlogh Dubh in ‘part one’ . This little-known Howard hero is…

an Irish outlaw whose adventures are laid in the half century preceding the battle of Hastings [in 1066 A.D.].

The three primary stories, “Dark Man,” “Bal-Sagoth,” and “Shadow of the Hun” are so closely connected that they could easily be read as respective chapters in a novel.

Though it seems no-one has yet ‘written the novel’ around Howard’s originals.

There is a slight overlap with Lovecraft, in the form of the somewhat Lovecraftian “Cairn on the Headland”…

Howard also rewrote the [Turlogh] story [“The Spears of Clontarf”] a third time, as a modern horror tale, titled “The Cairn on the Headland.” [The hero] Turlogh is neither present nor mentioned in the story, but many details of the Battle of Clontarf are revisited.

Be warned that the last third of the long blog article has plot-spoilers. There’s also Part 2 which sifts and weighs up what the ideal Turlogh book collection would contain.

Incidentally, spraguedecampfan is looking for guest-bloggers who can provide articles of similar quality.

Update: now with Part 3.

Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath in audiobook

06 Saturday Jul 2024

Posted by in Podcasts etc.

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Something for the weekend? Here are some listenable choices for hearing an unabridged reading of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, in audiobook.

* By the venerable HorrorBabble, free on YouTube. Four hours. The closest to a British accent.

* By Dagoth Ur, free on YouTube. Three hours and 40 mins. Good, but you may want to de-echo it with iZotope RX 7 and then slow it down a bit in the player. Too fast, too much ballroom echo.

* As the SFFaudio Podcast #354, freely online. Nicely paced in five hours, but still a difficult listen in terms of distinguishing the separate words. That may just be down to a variety of American accent unfamiliar to my ear, though. You may have more success. Download available. The discussion came later, in another podcast.

* In paid-for there’s the HPL Historical Society’s Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft audiobook. A clear steady reading by a professional actor. Probably the best choice if you can afford the £40. Too fast for me, at four hours and 23 minutes. For the AIMP player I used a speed of 93%, ‘Voice’ preset in the Equalizer, and a Bass boost.

* You might even pop the text into a Word .DOC, then make sure there is no text that flows across page-breaks. Then save it to a PDF, and drop that into the Microsoft Edge browser. Edge currently offers sustained text-to-speech reading of a PDF, with Microsoft’s advanced AI TTS voices. These are free in Edge, and would otherwise be paid-for.

There is, as yet, no Phil Dragash-like unabridged ‘fully voice-worked’ reading, with music and environmental FX. Note that there are now AI sound FX makers to help things along. Another local one was released just the other day, Stable Audio Open.

A view of “the town in 1762”

05 Friday Jul 2024

Posted by in Picture postals

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This week’s ‘Picture Postal’, from the Providence Magazine, the local Board of Trade magazine in 1915. This was the ‘early view’ Lovecraft was referring to in a letter written after he visited the Shepley Library in Providence in 1923. I thank Ken Faig Jr. for the identification.

there is one monstrous fine drawing of the town in 1762 […] precisely what I had long wish’d to see

Thus the Curator was not being snide or fobbing off Lovecraft, when he suggested that he could have a copy… if another was found to exist in the archives. It was not an antiquity, and the archives might indeed have a duplicate copy of a liberally-dispensed magazine from less than a decade ago. Or there might be duplicate prints of such a modern item.

It’s possible Lovecraft may have seen the more expansive un-cropped version, and in a less harsh contrast…

His use of the word “monstrous” perhaps even indicates he saw the original large sheets, meant to be transferred by tracing to a stage backdrop.

On the map

04 Thursday Jul 2024

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Maps

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The Lands of Dream wall-map of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, by Jason Bradley Thompson, makes it into the University of Wisconsin Collection. Via their acquisition of the American Geographical Society Library Digital Map Collection. At their page, ‘open image in new tab’ + zoom, for a larger, readable version of the map.

Useful to have as a wallpaper on your tablet while listening to an audiobook of Dream Quest, and with its muted colours it’s not as a super-gloss as other versions. You can also have this in your own collection in super-gloss though, as I see it’s still available as a 24″ x 36″ wall poster.

In the same American Geo. Soc. collection, I see another imaginary world wall-map, The Land of Make Believe (1930).

Also, on looking at Jason’s website I see he has an update on his RPG, with a post on Dreamland 2024 Plans and an accompanying Dreamland PDFs Update to “version 2.0 of the public PDFs” (Quickstart, Character Sheet, and ‘The Paradise of the Unchanging’). Travel rules for the game “have been significantly revised” after playtesting, and he shows a map of the regions around Ulthar together with travel routes…

Tanabe’s Cthulhu – re-dated, in English

04 Thursday Jul 2024

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books

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After countless aeons of waiting, Gou Tanabe’s mountainous 288-page graphic-novel adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu finally surfaces as an English translation. Due from Dark Horse, 15th October 2024. Re-dated, as it was originally July 2024. Why the heck are translations of graphic novels so slow to appear? It’s 2024 and the AI revolution is full flow. The publishers should have AI and virtual assistants all over this sort of thing, and it should be done in a week.

The Selenite Invaders / Listing of Lovecraft in paperback 1944-1994

03 Wednesday Jul 2024

Posted by in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated with a post giving lots of news. Take a look to see everything. The three items that stood out for me were: i) the first part of his massive survey-history of atheism (from prehistory to 1600) is now in proof, and is being hand-indexed; and ii) Ken Faig Jr. has a Lovecraft-as-character novel out, The Selenite Invaders…

This engaging novel features a character (Herbert Hereward) clearly based on Lovecraft, and other elements of this science fiction tale echo events in the life of Lovecraft or his relatives. The novel spans much of the twentieth century, showing Hereward (unlike Lovecraft) repurchasing his birthplace at 454 Angell Street [plot spoilers … ] all while battling [plot spoilers].

I’m pleased to see there’s an affordable Kindle ebook edition of this on Amazon UK. Don’t read the blurb there, unless you want possible plot spoilers.

Also iii) news of the forthcoming booklet H.P. Lovecraft in Paperback Books: The First 50 Years. The page linked suggests the full title is A Complete Listing Of All the English Language Editions Of The Collected Works of H.P. Lovecraft In Paperback Books With Cover Art And Printing History 1944-1994.

L’ Antique Sentier

02 Tuesday Jul 2024

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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In French, the elegant new blog L’ Antique Sentier peeps into Lovecraft’s collection of The Old Farmer’s Almanac. The blog is subtitled “H.P. Lovecraft, New England, old books, antique photos…” and has some fine photography of books and the man himself.

Incidentally, I read in the Sully letters that at least one 5″ x 7″ negative of Lovecraft was made by Barlow, and in (presumably) the good light of a Florida summer too. I wonder what happened to those negatives?