18 Tuesday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The complete “Typescripts for Volumes Four and Five” of the Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft are currently up for sale. As typed for Arkham House, from the originals, by Wandrei…
There’s also currently a complete set of the published volumes on Abebooks, for just $400…
16 Sunday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
‘A drawing by CAS’, Acolyte fanzine, Fall 1944. Reproduced on a stencil duplicator.
15 Saturday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
McRassusArt (Mihail Bila, UK) has made a fine selection of Lovecraft concept art…
Lovecraft’s Providence (as he dreamed it).
“He” (old New York City).
The Strange High House in the Mist.
15 Saturday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
“Our entire Rome gallery has been transformed into the surreal living room of Mr. H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), and is imbued with his dreamy and disquieting atmospheres. The walls of Operativa have also become animated pages “torn” from painting and sculpture related to the master’s dreamlike narratives and fantastical horrors, intended to evoke the indifferent and indecipherable cosmos for the wandering being called man. An unprecedented, courageous, and fascinating exhibition project … a selection of works by Joanne Burke, Ennio Calabria, Duilio Cambellotti, Giuseppe Capitano, Fabrizio Clerici, Giovanni Copelli, Michela de Mattei, Cleo Fariselli, Luca Grimaldi, Emiliano Maggi, Marta Mancini, Salvatore Meli, Matteo Nasini, Sergio Ragalzi, Vincenzo Simon.” (Rough translation from the Italian).
At the OPERATIVA in Rome, Italy, September 14th to October 15th 2018.
The website doesn’t have details of the show, not having been updated since July. So here’s a picture on the rather pleasing and somewhat cosmic “MONOLITH / catching spaces” by Edoardo Dionea Cicconi, which was in the Operativa in May 2018.
14 Friday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The London Lovecraft Festival also has a New Playwriting Competition, though for UK writers only. Winners will see their work performed by a professional team at the London Lovecraft Festival in 2019. Deadline is midnight on 25th December 2018.
11 Tuesday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The Rhode Island School of Design (RSID) Museum Collection catalogue is now online. A blank search shows they currently have 12,903 item records online which also have images on them. No results for “Lovecraft”, and almost no local photography or scenes. Not a single “cat” either, which is surprising in so large a collection. Some “Roman” and “Egyptian” items, which we can probably assume Lovecraft once saw, but nothing that seems of interest in relation to his work.
But I did stumble on their record for Gregory Amenoff‘s wonderful “The Starry Floor” (1994).
They only have the one picture by him, but looking at images of his other work from the 1990s and 2000s, I’d say he’s definitely worth a look if you collect Lovecraftian art.
11 Tuesday Sep 2018
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works
I’m pleased to see that Jason Eckhardt’s graphic novel of Lovecraft’s life was published last summer (2017), with what is said to be a well-researched script by Sam Gafford. Some Notes on a Nonentity: The Life of H. P. Lovecraft eventually weighed in at 118 pages of art. It covers the entirety of Lovecraft’s life, using the clever framework of a stage-play directed by HPL himself.
Amazingly, according to the writer…
“Much to my surprise, the project has been passed on by every publisher and agent I’ve contacted. I’m truly gobsmacked at this as I thought it would be an easy sell especially considering the quality of Jason’s artwork.”
The book is still only in hardcover, at present, and at an eye-watering price of £40 here in the UK via Amazon. The UK-based publisher PS Publishing currently has it listed at a more reasonable £25 plus shipping. It looks great and I’d imagine it would do rather well selling as a $6 Kindle ebook for 10″ digital tablets, once the print-run is eventually sold out at PS.
It doesn’t appear that PS has sent out review-copies yet, as there are no real reviews online at present, other than few comments from buyers at Amazon and a brief promo-blurb at Publishers’ Weekly.
10 Monday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
Final Guys Podcast has just posted a new interview (MP3 link) with the well-known Lovecraft audiobook reader Wayne June.
Here’s a sample of his gravelly voicework, on Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls”…
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0eDis-w-90?rel=0&start=22&w=560&h=315]
10 Monday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
A few nights ago a new orchestral work by Guillaume Connesson premiered in Germany, “The Cities of Lovecraft” (aka “Les Cités de Lovecraft”, aka “Les Trois Cités de Lovecraft”). The National German Radio service (NDR) now has a complete audio recording of the 25 minute performance online and this is accessible from outside Germany.
Update: Seems to have been taken down. The Lovecraft work opened the recording I linked to, but a few days later NDR broke the link totally and sent the traffic to their homepage. I guess their online “listen again” service only lasts for a week? But there’s an Archive.org community audio backup available here.
Here’s my approximate translation of the key descriptive section in the venue’s German programme notes brochure, with some descriptive additions of my own which reflect my hearing of the work:
Celephais: In the opening movement, Randolph Carter goes to meet his old friend Kuranes in the shining port city of Celephais. Brass fanfares describe the bronze gate through which he enters the dream-city, before a melody of violins evokes the weaving and bustling dream-life of the city’s streets. In the section “The Temple of Turquoise” colourful trumpets express Carter’s encountering of pagan celebrations, followed by a quiet chorale titled the “Rose and Crystal Palace of the Seventy Delicacies” as he enters ascends to more refined parts of the city. The “Seven Processions of the Orchid Crowned Priests” are then encountered, and given a great crescendo to end the first movement.
Kadath: In contrast to the radiant first movement, the scene then shifts to “Kadath”, the gloomy outpost of ancient gods located in an icy region of Antarctica named “The Plateau of Leng”. Lamenting violas emerge from the noise of the wind machine, then twelve-tone passages disseminate culminating chords (so-called “clusters”). Nyarlathotep, the eerie envoy of the ancient gods, approaches a throne room… He is given voice in a solo viola that sings and ripples in half and a quarter tones above kettle-drums and mad titterings.
The Golden Dream-City: Without a pause, a third short movement follows: Mr. Lovecraft begins to drift up from his nightmare slumber and the scene of his dream begins to change into his familiar dream-vision of a distant mighty city in the golden sunset. This is briefly evoked in the form of an intoxicating short dance, but some orgiastic overtones emerge in it at the very end.
09 Sunday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Oh no, call the culture-police! The Tearoom of Despair thinks Alan Moore’s Providence series of comics to be a turgid terror, and has an entertainingly argumentative review to back up his sentiments.
09 Sunday Sep 2018
An early appearance of H.P. Lovecraft in fiction is to be found in “The Black Druid” by Frank Belknap Long, published in Weird Tales for July 1930. The Editor, Farnsworth Wright, knowingly bills the story on the contents page as: “A short tale that compresses a world of cosmic horror in its few pages”, trusting the regular reader to make the connection between “cosmic horror” and Lovecraft.
The picture illustrates the Lovecraft character in his ‘dream form’.
The story is interesting to scholars of Lovecraft’s life for being a knowing bit of fun-poking fictional commentary on Lovecraft, by someone who knew him on a near-everyday basis during the New York years. Lovecraft is only lightly veiled as “Stephen Benefield” and the character has similar concerns, physical attributes and locales. The story also fictionalises Lovecraft’s wife Sonia. Possibly the Bene in the name Benefield was even a comment on Lovecraft’s frugal diet, hinting at beans.
Archive.org’s OCR of the text is middling, but I’ve made the story readable as a PDF and have given it some annotations and a little introduction — along the way solving a very minor scholarly mystery about an entry in Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book.
08 Saturday Sep 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Unnamable
I’m pleased to say I’ve been sent a low-res PDF of the new Lovecraft graphic novel He Who Wrote in the Darkness, for review, and am currently half-way through savouring it.
When faced with a low-res PDF many reviewers might have preferred to have been sent a proper Kindle app store review-copy. Because that would have opened with the Amazon app — an app which offers a panel-by-panel ‘guided’ view of comics when reading. For the benefit of other reviewers of graphic novels who want such a ‘guided’ view, here’s what you do when you get an awkward layered PDF (i.e.: where the text is on a separate layer that sits above the art).
1. On your Kindle tablet, add a side-load install of the wholly free Comic Time Reader app as a downloaded .APK file. It does ‘panel detection’ (aka frame-by-frame viewing, aka ‘guided view’), just like Comixology and the Amazon Kindle Viewer do for purchased comics. Given this vital feature, seemingly unique among free apps not tightly tethered to a payments ecosystem, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Comic Time Reader is not present on the Amazon App Store where it would impinge on Amazon’s business model. But it works fine on the 2017 Kindle Fire HD 10″ tablet. The only problem is that the app can’t load PDFs.
2. Then convert your .PDF to .CBR with the Windows desktop freeware Comic Book Archive Creator, at maximum image quality and with .JPG output. Unlike its only free rival Comic Rack, Comic Book Archive Creator can correctly handle a PDF with layered text when converting. Also it appears to save pages at 600dpi, which means that ‘the jaggies’ are minimal on the flattened lettering, balloons and captions. Its only problem is that it works v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y and can be a bit of a system hog while it’s working.
3. If you left Comic Book Archive Creator on its default output type, rename its resulting .ZIP file to .CBR format. .CBR is just a bunch of numbered .JPG page-scans inside a re-named .RAR or .ZIP file, so it’s a very flexible format. Now send it over to your Kindle. You’re then ready to read your graphic novel in a ‘guided’ frame-by-frame manner in the excellent free Comic Time Reader. If Comic Time Reader occasionally has trouble detecting a frame edge in a complex layout, you just press and hold in one corner of the frame, then drag your finger to the opposite corner. That tells the app where the frame is.
If you end up with a ridiculously large 600Mb-to-multiGb comic, because the source input was actually high-quality at around 6800-pixels per page and/or a very long graphic novel, then do the following:
1. Simply unzip the page-images to a folder
2. Open the folder with Irfanview, shift-select all images and press “B” to run a batch reduction on them.
3. In the Batch window. selected Advanced and then set a pixel size, say 2400px on one side. Ensure you are setting your output directory to be different than the input directory.
4. Then re-zip the series of images output from Irfanview and re-name into a .CBR or .CBZ file.
Irfanview’s batch has the advantage over Photoshop here, in that it knows how to re-size the pixel dimensions of an image without needing to know the dimensions on both sides. It’s also much faster than Photoshop.