All wet

29 Thursday Feb 2024

Posted by in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

≈ 1 Comment

A paywalled chapter in the new book Hydrology and Its Discontents, “A Psychoanalysis of Wet Dreams”. Academia is still peddling Freud, Jung and Lacan into the 21st century, I see. But what’s this…

To chart a course through these hydrologic horrors, we invoke the spirit of H.P. Lovecraft, master of cosmic horror.

Well that’s a start, I suppose. I wonder if the author is aware of a Lovecraft ditty on the topic?

“(Wet) Dream Song”, a parody of a poet of amateur journalism called E.A. Edkins and “signed” by him in inverted commas, though definitely by Lovecraft…

“Oyster stew” here presumably being a euphemism for male masturbation. Which perhaps reveals an underlying reason for Lovecraft’s detestation of sea-food?

The “clamour of flowers / drove one quite frantic” on the beach is probably also a euphemism for bathing youth. One recalls Camus, evoking the beach of Oran in Algeria…

Oran also has its deserts of sand: its beaches. [ covered with flowers in winter, and girls in summer…] the sharp blue of the sky, everything makes one fancy summer — the golden youth then covering the beach, the long hours on the sand and the sudden softness of evening. Each year on these shores there is a new harvest of girls in flower. Apparently they have but one season. The following year, other cordial blossoms take their place […] (Personal Writings)

On the reverse of the card, presumably included with a letter and thus the correspondent is lost, Lovecraft writes… “I will illustrate the kind of [amateur pseudo-decadent] bilge I have in mind by by composing a parody here and now, currente Corona (*) and without apologies to any possible original or originals.” Which seems to imply that he was familar enough with Edkins’ work to parody it impromptu. The various dates, however, indicate that Lovecraft would not have gained his familiarity with Edkins’ work by revising it.

* meaning, with the current of ink still flowing from his Corona pen nib?

1920s Corona nib.

Lovecraft’s correspondent would likely have been attuned enough to see the subtle wit is his picking the word currente for a poem on the topic, in relation to a flowing pen-nib.

Forthcoming: Letters to R. H. Barlow

28 Wednesday Feb 2024

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books

≈ Leave a comment

S.T. Joshi’s blog is back online and has updated. Among the news is a forthcoming (2025)…

volume of Letters to R.H. Barlow. Barlow was in correspondence with a fascinating array of individuals, both in and out of the weird/fantasy/science fiction field, including H. G. Wells, A. Merritt, George Allan England, C. L. Moore, Ernest A. Edkins, August Derleth, and many others. But, aside from his letters to Derleth and to Donald and Howard Wandrei, not many of his own letters survive. The letters he received — many of which are found on a set of three microfilm reels made after his death by his literary executor, George T. Smisor — are full of interesting matter, especially relating to events following Lovecraft’s death in 1937.

Also news of a new two-hour Lovecraft screen documentary from the French, which has so far been seen at “several French festivals”. Apparently an English subtitles version is being prepared. Joshi shows the pleasing promotional poster for the new film.

Call: an oral history of bookselling in America

28 Wednesday Feb 2024

Posted by in Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

Bookstore Chronicles. Being an oral history of bookselling in America, as told by the nation’s own booksellers. The call for participants is still active and they appear to want audio only. One option there is to… “record a self-interview and upload your audio file”. Or if you know an old bookseller you think should be interviewed, pop over with an audio recorder for an afternoon’s chat.

Completely Weird

27 Tuesday Feb 2024

Posted by in Odd scratchings

≈ Leave a comment

Now on eBay, a “COMPLETE SET of Weird Tales“. Yours for a mere £118,310 (about $150,000).

Some nice cover scans are to be found on the listing, including this one which I don’t recall seeing before…

Archive.org can only provide one abysmal and one very-poor cover scan for this issue. Despite the alluring cover, this was an issue from before the ‘golden age of WT’ run started. Lovecraft would not appear in his own right until February 1924, and even then it was the over-the-top self-parody “The Hound”. But March 1924 saw his “The Rats in the Walls” and the bumper May–June–July 1924 issue had his “Hypnos”.

More LORAs

26 Monday Feb 2024

Posted by in AI

≈ Leave a comment

A couple more recent free LORAs, of possible interest to artists and/or RPG makers. A LORA is a ‘style plugin’ used for AI image generation with the free Stable Diffusion 1.5, which is run in free desktop software such as InvokeAI 3.x.

Paper Background makes drawings and plans on vintage paper, of obvious use for emulating field notes or dusty diagrams of dastardly devices. The demo images suggest diagrams, but it can obviously do far more. Might also be used at lower power in combination with the Bestiarum LORA, for making ‘naturalist field notebook’ type monster-spotting guides.

More sci-fi is UFOMaker, now also newly for SD 1.5. Not just your classic 1960s frisbee UFO, but “all types of UFOs and spaceships”.

Also, there’s new Python-based AI freeware that auto-translates comics other than Japanese manga. Such as Euro BDs.

The Poem

24 Saturday Feb 2024

Posted by in AI, Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

Lovecraft’s long and earliest ‘cosmic’ poem “The Poe-et’s Nightmare” (1916), as an AI generated video adaptation. The project…

aims to decode the poem’s innate symbolic space and to project it into a coherent visual realm with a surreal aesthetics of a graphic antique manuscript, abstracting away from the described events. Eventually, what we observe is a dialogue between the written unseen and the unspeakable evident. The collection consists of 304 unique pieces, one per verse line. Each piece is a 23-second video loop with sound.

Fulton Street in earlier times

23 Friday Feb 2024

Posted by in Picture postals

≈ Leave a comment

Not much time this week for a long and research-heavy ‘Picture Postals’ post. But here’s a picture that continues last week’s theme of the view from Brooklyn of Manhattan. An early colonist looks across at the growing city, from the Brooklyn side of what would become Fulton Street. The crossing would long be served by a ferry, the ‘Fulton Street Ferry’. The ferry service seems to have been discontinued by the mid 1920s, thus severing the two streets in favour of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Possibly the flat-wide craft in the centre of the channel indicates the steam-powered ferry?

Lovecraft was fond of this sort of view for his own ‘early Providence’, and he would likely have appreciated this similar view from Brooklyn. The picture also reminds one of Lovecraft’s tale of the development of “The Street” from early times to 1919.

The men, busy with labour, waxed prosperous and as happy as they knew how to be. And the children grew up comfortably, and more families came from the Mother Land to dwell on The Street. And the children’s children, and the newcomers’ children, grew up. The town was now a city, and one by one the cabins gave place to houses; simple, beautiful houses of brick and wood, with stone steps and iron railings and fanlights over the doors.

Which might seem all quaint and antiquarian, but this is Lovecraft… so the horror creeps in more and more. Although the final horror is ultimately given only a superficial supernatural gloss, being a horror the inhabitants have made for themselves.

Robot stories

22 Thursday Feb 2024

Posted by in AI, Odd scratchings

≈ Leave a comment

With un-tethered mass-produced humanoid robots on the horizon of the real-world, I thought I might have a go at revisiting Asimov’s “Robot” stories, not having re-read them for so long that I’ve forgotten them. Other than to recall that they were enjoyable.

There turn out to have been a lot of them, written over the years. 31 by 1982, which was when we had The Complete Robot collection. More later.

I don’t wish to repeat the completist effort that was trying to read all Asimov’s Foundation novels, including the later ‘leads in’ and ‘lead outs’. Thus, a ‘best of’ selection is required for the robots.

After some research, I find that the widely-agreed must-read ‘best’ boil down to just nine…

“Runaround” (starter story) (IN: I, ROBOT);
“Little Lost Robot” (IN: I, ROBOT);
“Bicentennial Man” (IN: ROBOT VISIONS);
“Liar!” (IN: I, ROBOT);
“The Tercentenary Incident” (IN: THE COMPLETE ROBOT);
“The Evitable Conflict” (IN: I, ROBOT);
“Evidence” (IN: ROBOT VISIONS);
“Reason” (IN: ROBOT VISIONS);
“Someday” (IN: ROBOT VISIONS).

In audio, that’s just over eight hours.

And if one then wants more, the novels The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, Robots of Dawn and Robots and Empire follow these stories, in Asimov-time.

After that, in Asimov-time, you’re into the other two Empire novels, then the Foundation novels.