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.
29 Monday Aug 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
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.
25 Thursday Aug 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
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.
23 Tuesday Aug 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works
Illustrators Quarterly Special #14: The Illustrated History of Warren Comics. 144 pages.
A searcher for “Illustrators Quarterly” special would get results indicating that Amazon UK doesn’t carry the “Special” versions, other than #1. But it is there, awkwardly titled as “The Illustrated History of Warren Magazines: illustrators Special 14″. On Amazon the Specials go under the title of “illustrators Special” for some reason.
What a wonder a Euro companion volume might be: The Illustrated History of the Toutain Magazines, though obviously far more difficult to research.
21 Sunday Aug 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
This is about as good as I can get the Meshbox 3D HPL for Poser, with some SSS on the skin and quite a bit of Photoshop. I’m not a skin expert in such matters. I’ve gone for the paler skin look, rather than shrimp-pink n’ healthy. The skin shader is my tweak of the generic Ghostship SSS, rather than EZskin 3 which lacks a profile. Rendered in Poser’s SuperFly (aka Blender’s Cycles, same thing).
After some retro-i-fication…
