01 Saturday Oct 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
A forthcoming national Lovecraft story anthology, Lovecraft in Holland. Foreword by Robert M. Price. As you might expect, Mythos tales with a Dutch flavour. I’m guessing the olde Dutch marshlands of New York City could also feature, as Lovecraft is known to have haunted these in the 1920s.
30 Friday Sep 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
No postcards, this Friday. I sometimes feel that visitors coming hoping for monsters may be a little disappointed to find me chuntering about the places Lovecraft knew/visited. So here’s a selection of full-blown monsters, as if from some unfinished and long-lost 1980s Dreamlands book made under the influence of Brian Froud…
Hopgob
Ambler
Poogmush
Waplee
Gobrot
Made with AI and some Photoshop-ing, of course. I’ve discovered the trick of getting an art-gen AI to consistently produce an isolated figure on a plain backdrop. It’s my understanding that raw AI generated art can’t be in copyright, unless then manually reconfigured (e.g. with significant manual over-painting, or the art used for comic-book panels that are then overlaid with text). So, despite my Photoshop fixes and tweaks on the above, all the above five pictures are here placed under full Creative Commons Attribution. Feel free to use them in your RPG etc. If you need better names, Murray Ewing has a new Lovecraftian Title Generator.
Elsewhere this week, Noah Pinion asks “Is AI a Lovecraftian intelligence?”.
25 Sunday Sep 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
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.
24 Saturday Sep 2022
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
New on Archive.org to borrow, Horrors and unpleasantries : a bibliographical history & collectors’ price guide to Arkham House (1982). Probably superseded now, as a price-guide, but other aspects of it may interest some.
17 Saturday Sep 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
A new Providence Omnibus, being a 720-page complete one-volume translation into Spanish of Alan Moore’s Providence comics series. Due in the Spanish bookshops at the end of September 2022.
Also a new $20 artbook for the Providence series, in English.
15 Thursday Sep 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
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.
14 Wednesday Sep 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
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.
09 Friday Sep 2022
Posted in Astronomy, Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
A new Voluminous podcast, in this case a live audience reading of Lovecraft’s letters. Voluminous: Live from NecronomiCon reads from the Hartmann letters…
an exchange of letters published in the newspaper between a local astrology enthusiast and the astronomically inclined HPL.
05 Monday Sep 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
H.P. Lovecraft – an animated biography, new on YouTube. As you can see here, very toony, but not without charm.
03 Saturday Sep 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
I rarely feature RPGs here, though Robowieland’s cogent short new “Review of the 40th Anniversary Call of Cthulhu Starter Set” may be of interest. Perhaps to those who were thinking of getting the budget Starter Set just to see what tabletop RPG-ing with Lovecraft is like, or even giving the Set as a Christmas gift.
01 Thursday Sep 2022
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
Update: Le Bestiaire du Crepuscule has been re-titled as The Monstrous Dreams of Mr. Providence for the English edition, and since summer 2022 can now be enjoyed by English readers.
31 Wednesday Aug 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
The New Yorker Radio Hour, “Neil Gaiman on the Power of Fantasy in our Lives”. 18 minute podcast, link also has direct .MP3 download link. Starts at 2:10, and there are then ads about a third of the way through the interview.
