28 Tuesday Sep 2021
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Now listed at Hippocampus, Penumbra No. 2 (2021) is the second issue of S.T. Joshi’s new journal. The non-fiction includes…
* Guy de Maupassant: Women, Madness, and the Horla.
* A Matter of Belief: Further Thoughts on Lord Dunsany and Religion.
* [Lovecraft’s 1921] “The Quest of Iranon” and [Dunsany’s 1922] Don Rodriguez: Two Exercises in the Picaresque.
* Icy Portents of Doom: Clark Ashton Smith’s Hyperborean Cycle and the Polar Myth.
* Hodgson, The Night Land, and William Morris.
28 Tuesday Sep 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings
PulpFest 2021 now has a new PulpFest 2021: Reviews and Recordings page, linking up the various items. Also a sidebar note that in 2022…
PulpFest Returns to Pittsburgh! PulpFest 50 will begin Thursday, Aug. 4, and run through Sunday, Aug. 7. It will be held at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Pittsburgh – Cranberry. Please join us for “Action for a Dime!
On reading down the recordings/reviews page one finds the twin themes are announced for 2022…
* the centennial of Fiction House, the pulp magazine and comic-book publisher.
* the ninetieth anniversary of Popular Publications’ ‘Dime’ magazines.
Meanwhile, over in France… this year’s French Lovecraft ‘Campus Miskatonic’ event returns for a second year. It will take place in-person in Verdun (about 100 miles east of Paris) shortly before Halloween 2021. The programme includes…
* Lovecraft’s influence on 20th century comic-books and later pulps. Presumably with reference to French BDs and comics-magazines, as well as to American and British comics.
* Lovecraft’s philosophical and political discussions, and their relevance today.
* What appears(?) to be a general panel discussion with noted French Lovecraftians.
* A screening of The Whisperer in Darkness (2011).
* An RPG games evening.
28 Tuesday Sep 2021
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Lovecraft Annual 2021, now listing on Amazon UK and (for an extra £5) on eBay UK. Sadly not fitted with translucent flexi-cover with washes of faint and unplaceable iridescent colours, as I had rather whimsically expected after seeing the blank slot on the initial Hippocampus listing. More of a ‘hot curry’ colour for the cover, this year. Which I like and I guess will sit well alongside the latest book of Letters… containing as it does a curry recipe.
28 Tuesday Sep 2021
Posted in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, New books
Providence Blue is a new ‘Lovecraft as character’ fantasy novel. Warning: general ‘structure-of-the-novel’ spoilers below.
In Rhode Island mysterious creatures were…
encountered by renegade preacher Roger Williams on his historical journey that ended with the founding of Providence, Rhode Island. [Later in Providence] Lovecraft is an accomplished and impish ‘Magus'”.
He investigates these historical encounters, as these seem to have foreshadowed his own monsters and to have links with a real Cthulhu cult. Even later in Providence…
An anxiety-filled former punk-rocker [Wilum Pugmire?], a drifting Athenaeum employee, and an entire cast of unique and well-developed characters find themselves thrown into a puzzling and some harrowing ride around Providence [and beyond]
Catholic World Report newspaper has an interview with the author (with some detailed spoilers, and also a horrid pop-up page-blocking overlay and nags)…
Pinault is a Professor of Religous Studies at Santa Clara University, and a native of Providence. … The author’s Catholic faith is evident throughout the story, as each character seeks redemption and an ultimate answer to the myriad sufferings of mankind.
Sounds fun but there’s no ebook or audiobook version, sadly, just a paperback. Might make for a good chunky graphic novel, by the sound of it, it you were looking for such a book to adapt.
27 Monday Sep 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A superb emulation of Moebius by Kaja Saudek for the cover of the Czechoslovakian pocket edition of “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, Stin nad Innsmouthem (1990).
According to a local site this was the nation’s first non-samizdat taste of Lovecraft after the collapse of communism…
Writings by H. P. Lovecraft appeared on the common Czechoslovak book market as early as 1990 [as a] series of several parts containing the short stories was published by Zlaty kun (the cover and title pages were illustrated by Kaja Saudek).
This comment suggested to me that there were more covers like this, yet to be found. A little digging finds that there are, and you can actually still some of buy them. Although not the Innsmouth one, for some reason. The cover of the 1991 Randolph Carter translation is also ‘very Moebius’. and there are even a couple of R.E. Howard items.
Daildeli Databaze has what appears to be the full set of covers and interior illustrations…
So far as I can tell, though he made many comics during his career, he never did a Lovecraft adaptation. He appears to have developed his own series, such as Arnal, with a faster and more Crumb-like style that could veer toward pop-art.
27 Monday Sep 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
New on ArtStation Marketplace, a new videogame-ready rigged Cthulhu for $300. ‘Rigged’ means he has a human-like skeleton setup and can thus be fully posed and animated. The look is a bit too squiddy and squid-ink blue, but that could be fixed.
26 Sunday Sep 2021
Posted in Unnamable
How to bulk download a disparate set of PDFs from the Internet Archive? The following workflow may be useful for those downloading sets of publications.
If what you want is already in a neat and discreet ‘Collection’ then you’re in luck. There is already a Collection Downloader. Possibly there are others.
If the set is not in a Collection and you don’t want to make one, or is otherwise jumbled and problematic, this roundabout solution will work.
1. Install the Web browser add-on Copy Open Tab URLs. This can copy the URLs of all open tabs to a list with ‘one URL per line’.
2. Visit Archive.org and find all your uncollected issues of a journal or ‘zine run and its successors. Quickly right-click/open each one into a new Web browser tab. I am assuming there are perhaps 40-70 scattered issues, not hundreds or thousands. And that your PC memory and Web browser can handle that many open tabs without crashing.
3. Using your new Web browser addon ‘Copy Open Tab URLs’, instantly capture all the open tabs into a one-URL-per-line list.
4. Paste the resulting list into my URL converter .XLS spreadsheet. This takes advantage of the fixed format that Archive.org URLs and PDFs links have. For instance…
https://archive.org/ details/fluffy_kitty_tales
The PDF at this page this will almost always be…
https://archive.org/ download/fluffy_kitty_tales/fluffy_kitty_tales.pdf
As you can see in the above spreadsheet, the hidden formulas in the spreadsheet automatically fix the URLs. Copy the final ‘fixed’ list of links from the spreadsheet. Save the list to a plain .TXT file.
I could have done this with a regex, but people are more familiar with the .XLS spreadsheets in Microsoft Office.
5. Now use a simple bit of freeware that will just download a list of files. The well-established free Chrome/Firefox browser addon DownThemAll! will do the job, with a bit of initial wrangling. First set it to go directly to its Manager when opened.
Then in the Manager right-click somewhere, and “Import from file”. Select your list of PDF links.
Ok, you should be done. Start the downloads running, keep your browser open, and go off and do something else. Because it’s going to take a long time.
When finished check the list for any ‘404’ PDFs. They may be a few where the URL failed, and they will need to be manually downloaded from the page.
Ideally, the .torrent file linked in each tab would be extracted instead, loaded up to your torrent software, and then just the .PDF file in each torrent set running and nothing else. But how one would do that in a bulk/automated manner, I don’t know. And it’s possible that the cross-file slaloming of a .torrent means most of the other files also get downloaded anyway, in effect. So maybe straight .PDF links is the best way.
26 Sunday Sep 2021
Posted in Scholarly works
Volupte : Interdisciplinary Journal Of Decadence Studies, a new open access journal. Literary decadence and its fellow swirlers in the incense-scented fin de siecle. The latest issue considers M. P. Shiel, Arthur Machen, Wilde, Baudelaire, and reviews Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism among others.
25 Saturday Sep 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
The Hungarian Black Aether has a series surveying international H.P. Lovecraft fan communities over in Europe.
In Hungarian, but now we have a Necronomicon incantation for summoning The Giant Mouth of Many Tongues auto-translation. There’s Google Translate of course, but in-browser the best add-on for extended Web snippets is Simple Translate 2.6.1. The Auto Translate for YouTube captions add-on is also useful at times — it forces subtitles ‘on’ and into English, but don’t expect perfection unless the source diction was very clear, the speaker had a good microphone, and was using non-technical / non-slang language. Mumbling Japanese hipsters, talking techie… not good. Though often amusing.
Not everything on the Black Aether site gets the Lovecraft tag, such as the new review of the old comics anthology Lovecraft Antologia #1.
25 Saturday Sep 2021
Posted in Odd scratchings
For sale on eBay, Frank Belknap Long’s “Throwback in Time”, aka Escape to Yesterday.
It appeared in Science-Fiction Plus, April 1953. Not Lovecraftian, and by the look of it a sugary sub-Bradbury sci-fi that was pitched to land in the springtime issue. Still, it’s interesting to compare the original and the resulting printed page.
24 Friday Sep 2021
Posted in Picture postals
This week another postcard sent to Lovecraft, rather than by him. He once had this card (or one very like it). I think it arrived from Paris and was sent by his young friend Galpin, though I could be wrong about that. Anyway he remarked, in a letter I recently read, on the very close resemblance of the painting to his elderly friend and adventure writer Everett McNeil. Then living in the slum of Hell’s Kitchen, New York City.
Though I should add that the good postcard promo-photo of the white-haired McNeil that I found (see my book on McNeil) shows no sign of the Innsmouthian nose-blobbling seen above.
Incidentally, now on Archive.org “to borrow”, two of McNeil’s best-selling boys’ adventure books. The librarians complained they were so popular with boys that (even with multiple copies) his books were almost impossible to keep on the shelves…
The Shadow of the Iroquois (1928)
The Shores of Adventure (1929)
McNeil’s later books are still hard to find in open form, due to copyright renewals by a family member… who then failed to keep the books in print. But his work should all fall out of copyright in the U.S. in 2025.
23 Thursday Sep 2021
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy. An open-access annual, now with four issues.
Speaking of philosophy, S.T. Joshi now has his Classical Papers available via through Sarnath Press. The book collects his papers on classical thought, produced during his early career.