Category Archives: Lovecraftian arts

Coining it

25 Sunday Sep 2022

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The Republic of Palau, the Pacific island-chain nation, has issued a new pure-silver 20 dollar coin commemorating H.P. Lovecraft. I assume it’s real currency that might buy you ⅔’s of a ginger-beer on one of their beautiful atoll beaches.

But isn’t little Palau supposed to be beneath the rising waves by now, like R’lyeh? Nope. Despite many claims heard in the media, none of the Pacific atoll islands with people on them are shrinking.

Incidentally, looking up the spelling of R’lyeh via search shows that Google doesn’t know what it is when slightly mis-spelled. Bing / DuckDuckGo (the Duck is Bing) does, suggesting Microsoft may now have a wider semantic lookup than Google Search.

Lovecraft’s letters geo-located

15 Thursday Sep 2022

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Lovecraft’s letters geo-located. Sadly it’s “one-record, one map point”, rather than the some vast seething tentacular web of points and connections. Still, the database wranglers appear to have done the basic work, parsing the structured records / list published by the Providence-based archives. Thus it may be possible to get just the Lovecraft data out, and then have software make it into a visual map. The correspondence.ie Web site does have visualisations, but I couldn’t spot one on the list for Lovecraft.

A simpler and more creative task would be an artistic wall-chart map showing all his known correspondents, with a uniformly hand-drawn portrait of each (if their appearance is known). The size of the portrait would indicate the size / duration / importance of the correspondence. With small arrows to indicate any notable non-Lovecraft correspondence with other members of the Circle. With insets on the map to cover New York City, California, the British Isles and the British Empire, etc. In fact, such a big wall-map might be a nice incentive to boost sales of the forthcoming mega-index covering all of Lovecraft’s letters.

Linus, September 2022

14 Wednesday Sep 2022

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News from Italy. A chunky new issue of Linus magazine devotes itself to H.P. Lovecraft, with a wide range of articles, art, and comics. It’s in Italian, and is available now.

Includes the following interesting titles, in translation, among others:

Monsters at the corner of the street.
Fantastic narratives.
Between absolute materialism and poetry.
The Call of Cthulhu.
On the rays of the moon.
Alan Moore and the call of Lovecraft.
The challenge to represent the Unspeakable.
Adriano Monti-Buzzetti interviews Gou Tanabe.
Dagon – the inhabitant of the dark.

News from France

01 Thursday Sep 2022

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

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My thanks to Gregory for letting me know that the French magazine Actuality: The Universe of Books has a new article “Lovecraft, Cthulhu and the Old Ones enter the Pleiades”. Here “Pleiades” is a play on the name of the famous French publishing house, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade. Who have now revealed (I translate)…

We are currently preparing an edition of the works of H.P. Lovecraft”, confirms La Pleiade. … “The work is in progress”.

This is not to be confused with the sumptious Mnemos multi-volume edition of Lovecraft now emerging…

Mnemos will soon publish the 4th volume of a gigantic translation, at the end of September [2022] … accompanied by the required scholarly apparatus.

The final third of the article turns into a short interview with the main translator for Mnemos, David Pathe-Camus…

I challenge you to read a text such as “Nyarlathotep” and not think about our own time. It reads like it was written just for us. Lovecraft had a keen awareness of the human condition. [In a way, his work] foreshadows the currents that will come after it — such as existentialism or the absurd.

The same article also notes A Bestiary of the Twilight (Le Bestiaire du Crepuscule, June 2022), a French ‘BD’ (i.e. oversized graphic novel, often in hardcover) which…

takes HPL as the main character

Forthcoming Dunsany documentary

29 Monday Aug 2022

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S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. He’s been doing a lot of travelling, and eventually reached Providence where he reports that in a studio there…

Christopher Nightingale, a young Englishman is working on what promises to be a superb documentary on Lord Dunsany

S.T. spent three hours there being interviewed on Dunsany. If this is the same “Christopher Nightingale”, the award-winning “Composer, Orchestrator & Musical Supervisor”, then the film’s music should be a treat.

Stable Diffusion released in a Web version

25 Thursday Aug 2022

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The open-source AI-powered art-generator ‘Stable Diffusion’ is now available on the Web, as DreamStudio. Not to be confused with the existing Dream by WOMBO.

Working and tested. Log in, generate pictures by typing text with a couple of names or descriptive concepts. You get about 100 goes, before the paywall come up. Then it’s $12 for 1,000 prompts.

H.P. Lovecraft views a fiery sunset in the city of Providence…

The new DreamStudio AI also gave me this, among many mis-fires. Too much of a “Buster Keaton blend”, but not bad all the same. It would probably fool those who had no idea who Buster Keaton was.

Such AI’s tend to have great problems with human hands, feet, and to an extent hair. Often one leg or arm is missing or far longer than the other. Eyes often don’t match. As you can see above, one eye is bulging more than the other. There’s also often a general tell-tale “gloopiness”, and circles are often distorted.