13 Thursday Apr 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
Gary Romeo usefully takes a comparative look at The Weird Tales Story in its three editions, including the “expanded and enhanced” third edition of 2021. This is then reviewed, and the new additions and omissions noted.
It seems the third edition is still only available in paperback, at present. No ebook, at least not on Amazon UK.
The Dark Man journal also has an online review of the latest edition.
09 Sunday Apr 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
My Tolkien Gleanings issue 3 is now available. A free 48-page ‘zine for Tolkien scholars, collectors, and others.
Collecting my January-April 2023 ‘Tolkien Gleanings’ blog posts into one handy PDF. The clickable Web links are retained in the PDF. Also articles, reviews, and a gallery of vintage material.
Also available via Gumroad, if you care to make a donation for it.
Happy Easter.
09 Sunday Apr 2023
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Hurrah, I see that Ken Faig’s Lovecraftian People and Places (April 2022) now has a Kindle ebook edition, published before Christmas 2022. The table-of-contents is available at Hippocampus. There you’ll also find details of his print books Lovecraftian Voyages (effectively his biography of Lovecraft), his other book of essays The Unknown Lovecraft, and three books presenting the life and work of Lovecraft’s friend Edith Miniter.
08 Saturday Apr 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
The latest issue of the UK’s open-access Rosetta Journal (Summer 2022) leads with the article “Ancient Astronauts and Sumerian Aliens: The Fourth Kind as a Pseudo-Archaeological Narrative”. Later in the same issue there’s a review of the new Oxford University Press book The Werewolf in the Ancient World.
06 Thursday Apr 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
The S.T. Joshi Bibliography Web page has been updated, March 2023.
05 Wednesday Apr 2023
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
The final volume of the new French translation from Mnemos has shipped, and by now should be in the hands of those who pre-ordered it. I had been uncertain if it was to be about Lovecraft or Lovecraft’s circle, given the uncertainty of the title’s translation. Turns out it’s not about the Circle.
Book 7 (Autour de Lovecraft) has…
* The Diary of an Impossible Translation by David Camus, which recounts the intellectual and personal adventure that was this major work [of translation] carried out over more than ten years.
* A study on the influences of [on?] Lovecraft.
* The reception of Lovecraft in France and a chronology of his publication in French.
* The difficult genesis of Weird Tales.
* A glossary of the most important Lovecraftian terms and words.
Elsewhere we learn there’s also a Joshi section in the book, in which he addresses the earlier volumes in order…
Studies by S.T. Joshi:
Study of volume 1: The Dreamlands.
Study of Volume 2: The Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Exploration.
Study of volume 4: The cycle of Providence.
Study of volume 5: Horrific stories – tales of youth – humorous stories.
Study of volume 6: Lovecraft as an essayist and letter writer.
Congratulations to all concerned at Mnemos and elsewhere, on the successful completion of this acclaimed set.
03 Monday Apr 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
New, to borrow on Archive.org, Robert Bloch: appreciations of the master (1995). Being a collection of memoirs, appreciations and introductions to his books or tales.
02 Sunday Apr 2023
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
The German Lovecraftian organisation has issued the March 2023 round-up. Of note are…
* In March 2023, “double-issue 7 & 8 (‘Von Hexen’ und ‘Hexerei’) of the German annual Lovecrafter appeared on DriveThru” as a PDF download. Although both issues seems to be mostly RPG related, judging by the DriveThru table-of-contents.
* “The literature team are currently working on the completion of the planned volume of Lovecraft’s essays in German, and an end is now in sight.”
30 Thursday Mar 2023
Posted in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
New on Librivox as a free public-domain audiobook, Dorothy Scarborough’s pioneering book The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917). S.T. Joshi called it…
a thematically exhaustive but critically undistinguished work that nevertheless is a landmark for its mere existence. […] Lovecraft would not read [the book] until 1932; but when he did so, he rightly criticised it as being overly schematic in its thematic analyses and hampered by an amusing squeamishness in the face of the explicit horrors of Stoker, Machen, and others.
Still, it may be of interest to Lovecraftians who would have liked the convenience of an audiobook version. Or those looking for a succinct contemporary “thematic analysis” of the available pre-WWI material, unhindered by the psychological theory / leftist politics of later eras.
Cornell University Library has a nice scan of the paper book, free on Archive.org.
28 Tuesday Mar 2023
Posted in New books, REH, Scholarly works
Howard Days usefully rounds up the Robert E. Howard publishing which is set to coincide with the 2023 Days. Including…
The long-awaited R.E. Howard Photo Album
21 Tuesday Mar 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
New on Archive.org, an open scan of the 1945 printing of Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature.
And on fanac.org, a partial run of Reader and Collector, the fanzine of H. C. Koenig, Lovecraft’s industrious New York correspondent. A high-quality ‘zine, e.g. Vol. 3 No. 3 was a William Hope Hodgson special with essays.
20 Monday Mar 2023
Posted in AI, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
It was only a matter of time before text-generating AI became as open and free as graphics AI. The first such is here now and ‘live’, OpenChatKit…
“a ChatGPT-like dialogue language model that is fully open-sourced, with full access to code, model weights, and training data. The released OpenChatKit model can perform natural-language reasoning tasks, answer questions about documents with retrieval, and browse the Web much like BingChat. The model has 20 billion parameters and is trained on 43 million instructions. […] The release also comes with fine-tuning guides that allow users to easily fine-tune the model for their own applications. […] Apache-2.0 license.”
20 billion is not enough for complex tasks (it can’t write long working Python scripts, or pop out complete essays/stories), but it’s good enough to be useful so long as you know how to ask the question. For instance…
Show me an example of the use of taskkill in a Windows batch file
… gets a line of valid working code. Though you still need to know to wrap it in @echo off and exit, and then save as a .BAT file.
But this is just the starting release. The initial live/free public demo is here, if you want to see what arcane Lovecraftian blurblings it might produce if given the correct prompt. It’s fast and easy to use. Though obviously knows nothing about R’lyeh as a holiday destination. Pity.
I’m uncertain if it can be operated purely locally on a desktop PC, being open source. (Update: Yes it can, it now has a downloadable “7B” model). If not then such things can only a matter of time and the right slot-in card.
So far, this is the only genuinely free / public and ‘no sign-up’ text-generating AI I know of.
Meanwhile, Grammarly will reportedly be plugging in AI auto-writing assistants sometime in April 2023. For a price, of course.