Author Archives: asdjfdlkf

Maps for Lovecraft’s letters

01 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by in Maps, Odd scratchings

≈ 1 Comment

The eastern part of America, visualised as a map of the Greyhound long-distance bus routes for 1935.

Lovecraft was, of course, an experienced bus-hopper in the summer months. Though in his later years his poverty could usually only countenance the cheaper options for such transport, and the Greyhound lines were not the cheapest….

“We’ll have to investigate Chauncey. Westerly coaches pass through Hope Valley (so do the New York Greyhounds), but the fare is probably rather formidable.” — letter to Morton, January 1933.

He may also have juggled a cheaper fare by not going all the way…

“I generally proceed by coach out some main highway, then striking across country afoot till I reach another coach-bearing highway along which I can return. In this way I have explored many regions which I never saw before — some delectably-unspoiled” — 1933 letter.

Still, the map is indicative of the key destinations that could be reached by the long-distance coach-bus routes, and may be something to print out and slide in alongside the volumes of his letters. In order to keep track of him, as he reels off the more major placenames to his correspondents. The more fine-grained map of his home ground, which I posted here earlier, would be needed for the smaller little towns and settlements in Mass. and Rhode Island.

More generally useful, especially for those outside the USA, is an Erik Nitsche map of the ‘mental picture’ that Americans had of the nation’s patchwork of regions in 1939, without all the state lines confusing matters…

I also found a good map of the British Empire, as the Anglophile Lovecraft would have known and understood it, in a map of 1929…

The dozy-looking “Prince in whom we all delight” turned out to be a duffer, but was replaced by someone better (see the excellent movie The King’s Speech for the story).

Robert E. Howard’s “The Hyborian Age” in audiobook

30 Friday Nov 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc., REH

≈ Leave a comment

Another audio experiment. This time it’s an experiment with the voice of a human reader, rather than a generated TTS robo-voice.

Text: Robert E. Howard’s “The Hyborian Age” (c. 1930s), in which Howard recounts the historical background for Conan.

Source: A full reading of “The Hyborian Age” in the form of the April 2018 public-domain Librivox recording. The Librivox reading was done by a young reader named ‘Klaatu’ whose voice I felt was not quite suited to the weight of the material. I added some pauses to this audio, for pacing, and I also had to remove one section in which a few lines of text had been repeated twice but not excised.

Task: To use the free audio software Audacity to try to change this higher Librivox voice down to a more suitably deep “Wayne June” style, if possible. Listeners to H.P. Lovecraft audiobooks will be familiar with Wayne June’s deep gravelly voice. More bass could of course be approximated on-the-fly in real-time with the likes of AIMP and its pitch-shift and bass-boost options, but here I wanted to see if a better result could be had by using the power of Audacity and its specialised plugins.

Workflow:

1) I added a “Wayne June” effect in Audacity with the free RoVee VoiceChanger plugin. Settings used are seen on the screenshot…

2) The result was certainly rather “Wayne June”, but was slightly ess-y in my high-response headphones. I then de-essed in Audacity, with the free Spitfish De-esser plugin.

3) There was some “bass bubble” on the pitch shifted reading. I tried the addition of suitable background music, as a subtle form of masking.

Conclusion: Successful, but not entirely so… mostly due to a little ‘more bubble than gravel’. A slightly lighter touch on the RoVee VoiceChanger settings might be tried next time. However, the level of the success suggested that longer audiobooks on Librivox could be “Wayne June-ised” with relatively little effort, and with more aesthetic success than pitch-shifting and bass-boosting in AIMP.

The result: A reading of R. E. Howard’s “The Hyborian Age” on Archive.org. 55 minutes.

Friday “picture postals” from Lovecraft: Wilbraham Academy

30 Friday Nov 2018

Posted by in Picture postals

≈ Leave a comment

Entrance to Wilbraham Academy, Mass. Note the curiously Eastern looking sculpture on the frontage, with the light-globe resembling a turban.

“I tarried eight days in Wilbraham, picking up many strange legends of great interest to me, since both Mrs. Miniter and Miss Beebe are expert in the curious folklore of that archaick region. I am at this very moment introducing one, as subsidiary colour, into a weird novelette I am writing. [This would become the famous “The Dunwich Horror”, set just east of Wilbraham and heavily inspired by the district.] I visited all the church­yards and burying places, and inspected the pleasing village of Wilbraham proper, where still flourishes the old academy founded in 1825.” — H.P. Lovecraft, “Observations on Several Parts of America”, in Lovecraft’s Collected Essays, Volume 4: Travel.

Have you enjoyed Tentaclii this month?

30 Friday Nov 2018

Posted by in Odd scratchings

≈ Leave a comment

I hope you’ve enjoyed, and perhaps even profited, from reading Tentaclii this month.

I count 76 blog posts sent into the luminiferous aether during November 2018. With a total of 20,000 words, not counting the PDFs (such as my free chapter on Lovecraft and Zimbabwe). Some posts were quite substantial, and had new discoveries about the lives of those in the Lovecraft Circle. There was also a short (but very popular) post which surveyed the Black Friday sales.

If you can help me out with a $ or two per month via Patreon, please, then it would help greatly with the ginger-beer supply needed to fuel Tentaclii through another month of blogging.

Recommending Tentaclii in social media, and linking here, is also very useful.

Thanks again for reading!

“Borges leitor de Lovecraft”

29 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

Added to my Open Lovecraft page…

* R. F. de Medeiros, “Borges leitor de Lovecraft”, Nau Literaria, Vol 4. No 1, 2008. (In Spanish. “This article analyzes J. Borges’ short story ‘There are more things’, seeking to unveil the way in which the writer assumes the authorial identity of H. P. Lovecraft, realizing what he calls a ‘posthumous tale’ by the American writer”).

There appear to be no MP3 audiobook readings of this short story online, only someone reading the story’s Wikipedia entry (such fun…). There’s one commercial physical CD from Penguin from 2010, of all his fictions. But oddly Borges appears to have nothing in English translation on Audible. Apparently the Penguin recording is tinny and the reading rather fast, so one might want to rip from CD to files and then use AIMP to pitch-shift, equalise the sound and slow down the speaker.

Also added to Open Lovecraft:

* B. Siegel, “In Defense of Dagon: Intertextuality in “The Shape of Water””, 2018. (Detects influences from Lovecraft and the Bible in del Toro’s movie The Shape of Water).

* A. Barroso, “Fear and (non) fiction: Agrarian anxiety in “The Colour Out of Space””, 2018. (Masters dissertation for East Michigan University, 2018).

Paris in the springtime

28 Wednesday Nov 2018

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

A new blog post from S. T. Joshi. He’s planning to travel to Paris in May 2019, for the formal launch of Je Suis Providence, and he notes…

One of the people I hope to meet in Paris is Martine Chifflot, a professor at Universite Lyon who has just issued a charming little book, Howard, Mon Amour (Aigle Botte Editions, 2018). This slim (88 pp.) is a series of 23 scenes [from Lovecraft’s domestic life]

Ah, ‘Paris in ze springtime’…. nice. Hopefully with the scent of apple-blossom and coffee drifting down the boulevards, rather than (as currently seem more likely, from the news) the scent of petrol-bombs.

The book, at 88 pages and originally a play of “23 spooky and musical scenes”, sounds like it might make for the basis of an interesting graphic novel in English translation? The market for ‘Lovecraft’s life as graphic novel’ might seem to be becoming a little crowded, but the three we have so far seem only to have scratched the surface with broad surveys. There are ‘worlds within worlds’ in Lovecraft’s life that could be focussed down on in 120 pages.

Joshi also notes he has a screenplay in progress, which will focus down on Sonia and Lovecraft…

“The appearance of this book is very serendipitous, as it partly echoes the themes in my own screenplay of the film The Lovecrafts on which Ryan Grulich and I are currently working.”

del Toro’s partial ‘possible projects’ slate

28 Wednesday Nov 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

≈ 3 Comments

del Toro has this week revealed a list of possible or shelved projects for which he has finished screenplays, in addition to the Mountains of Madness project that everyone already knows about…

SECRET PROJECT (UNTITLED)

SUPERSTITIOUS [at a guess – old school superstitions, such as ‘throw salt over your shoulder for luck’, become ‘real’ in some way?]

NIGHTMARE ALLEY [perhaps his Water-like take on the 1947 film noir set in a seedy carnival?]

HAUNTED MANSION [apparently a movie to be built around the Disney theme park attraction?]

THE HULK pilot [TV reboot]

THE BURIED GIANT [live-action sequel to The Iron Giant? or perhaps a movie of the great children’s book The Giant Under the Snow?]

THE COFFIN [? my complete guess would be a traditional Poe-style horror, with many del Toro twists?]

DROOD [presumably his take on Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood?]

LIST OF 7 (Mark Frost) [apparently it’s a 1993 occult murder mystery novel in the Sherlock vein, but one that spirals up and out into a sort of wild theosophical da Vinci Code. Sounds fun, though it seems there’s no graphic novel which is a pity. Not even an audiobook, other than a 1993 cassette-tape edition.]