Anthology Of Empire

11 Thursday Oct 2018

Posted by in Historical context

≈ Leave a comment

New on Archive.org, Anthology Of Empire (1932). The book is a rich and comprehensive historical survey of the literature, with its pages serving as an unwitting swansong for Lovecraft’s beloved British Empire as Imperial responsibilities began to be divested. To a lesser extent the book is also a hymn to dear old Blighty.

Advert from early spring 1932. At 512 pages the above advert states a longer length than the 480-page edition on Archive.org.

The ardent Anglophile H.P Lovecraft must surely have noted the book among the reviews, and almost certainly asked for it at the local library. At this time he was listening regularly to the Empire radio service from Britain, which sent the signal from London toward Canada from 1932 onward. He also had access to the conservative British weekly The Spectator, offering pithy opinion and book reviews, via the Providence Public Library. The Spectator would surely have reviewed Anthology Of Empire in glowing terms.

“Dawn came at North-Scituate, in His Majesty’s Colony of Rhode-Island and Providence-Plantations; and at six-forty-five a.m. I was deposited at the terminal in my native town. God Save the King!” — H.P. Lovecraft to Morton, January 1933, informing Morton his his safe return from New York City by overnight bus.

“To me, Tipperary or Rule Britannia has infinitely more emotional appeal than any creation of Liszt, Beethoven, or Wagner.” — H.P. Lovecraft to Derleth, November 1930.

Fantastic Universe, August 1956

10 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by in Unnamable

≈ Leave a comment

The cover of Fantastic Universe, August 1956. The inner cover has a short evocation of the cover painting, written by former Lovecraft protege and friend Frank Belknap Long.

The artist was Ed Moritz, who had been a Nedor comics artist in the 1940s on the pre-Marvel Doc Strange. My attempted digital restoration of the painting, not entirely successful on the planet surface. Also, I’m currently having to use a lesser old monitor with a low greyscale response, so it may be slightly ‘off’ here and there…

Teoria dell’orrore

10 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by in New books

≈ Leave a comment

Edizioni Bietti has produced a new Italian edition of Lovecraft’s own writings on Teoria dell’orrore [The Theory of Horror], in 580 pages…

“it is not a mere reprint, but a new edition — updated in the introduction, in the notes and in the numerous bibliographies that accompany it. The aim of the book is to offer Italian readers a theoretical framework as complete as possible”.

Given the size of the book, I’m guessing it also includes relevant extracts from the letters, thematically arranged?

Hevelin Collection – now open for transcription

09 Tuesday Oct 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

≈ 1 Comment

DIY History now has the Hevelin Fanzine Collection open for crowd-sourced transcription. Doing the tables-of-contents and artist names for each issue would probably be the best initial route into this. I’d suggest that’s a do-able goal that could be crowdfunded for and then outsourced to paid Web-workers (on Fiverr, Mechanical Turk, etc), rather than taking up the time of someone better suited to more advanced tasks.

Audiobook bookmarking for the Windows desktop

09 Tuesday Oct 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc.

≈ 2 Comments

Why has it always been so difficult for makers of Windows desktop media players to offer simple and easy bookmarking for audiobooks? Maybe they think we’re all using mobile apps on devices nowadays. But there are plenty of audiobook listeners who use Windows desktop + wireless headphones, and wild .mp3 files. Podcasts especially.

Anyway, I finally got fed up of making a screenshot of the audio file being played and its current playback time, to serve as a makeshift bookmark. I went looking for what’s available.

I first tried to fix up my usual VLC player, on discovering it had just the one working bookmarking script that offers bookmarks which persist. The script worked, but was a very clunky fix. I then tried PotPlayer and MusicBee, but after much searching I couldn’t find the supposed bookmarking functions in either one. Both were uninstalled. WorkAudioBook is also free, but is really meant for language learners who need to consult teacher about strange words heard during their listening, and it has rather an old interface. Perhaps the likes of iTunes for Windows desktop offers bookmarking, but there’s no way I’m installing such highly intrusive bloatware. The same goes for any dedicated player Audible may offer.

Eventually I found a player that really does do simple and sensible bookmarking, is currently developed, is genuine freeware and looks nice. It can even rename its bookmarks. AIMP 4.51 appears to be the only maintained freeware that offers simple persistent bookmarks on Windows. Why the others don’t offer this is a complete mystery.

Once the audiobook files are loaded (drag and drop is the easiest option) and saved to a playlist file, then you bookmark the playing audio by pressing the Bookmark star, which you can see in the above screenshot. It’s then easy to start an audio file at the bookmark you made, edit or remove it. You can have multiple bookmarks. You can rename bookmarks. In its Preferences you can also set “Ctrl + B” to instantly load the Bookmarks Manager.

The only problem seems to be that when you select a bookmark without the playlist loaded, the file loads but not the playlist it belongs with. Which means that users will first need to load their audiobook playlist, then load the desired bookmark. No great hassle, but we could all benefit from having one less niggling little workflow to remember.

AIMP also has a graphic equaliser, which is nice for removing sibilance in readings, such as that on Phil Dragash’s magnificent full-cast unabridged LOTR. The user can also adjust playback speed by a fraction, for a slightly slower or faster reading. Pitch can also be shifted, if you have a gratingly high-pitched interviewee on the audio of a podcast. These settings are retained even when you exit and reload the software, and can be saved out to named presets. All this makes AIMP a fine replacement for my Impulse Media Player, which until now I’ve used alongside VLC for audiobooks (despite its lack of bookmarking). Sorry Impulse, I luvved you long time, but… uninstalled.

In AIMP, playlists can themselves be bookmarked after a fashion, by dragging them over to the ‘local files’ panel from either their host folder or from the right-hand playlist panel. By doing that, they make a shortcut which persists in the AIMP interface. Or you can just send the playlist to the Windows desktop as a shortcut, and thus load the audiobook currently being listened to straight from the desktop.

AIMP does not need to be using its own playlist format in order to bookmark. The bookmarks are stored in XML in C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\Roaming\AIMP\Bookmarks.xml

There are also many skins for AIMP, but for a simple night / day switch of the basic colour scheme the user just hits the “Switch the theme” icon up in the top right of the interface. You can see the ‘night interface’ above.

VLC is still needed as a videoplayer, though. VLC also usefully offers the ability to easily take a pure screenshot from any frame of a video. I had no success with saving VLC playlists out to standard .M3U playlists for opening in AIMP. Nor older Windows .WPL playlists. But it’s no great hardship to re-make old saved playlist files as you listen again to albums and audiobooks. As with most audioplayers, AIMP can also scan your dedicated audio and music folders and then load everything in them into its sortable database. Once that’s done, search filters and keyword search become possible.

All in all, AIMP appears to be the only viable option for regular listeners of downloaded audiobooks, mp3-saved YouTube playlists or long lectures, podcast .mp3s, and similar audio that doesn’t come to you through proprietary channels such as iTunes and Audible.

Update: AIMP also has a fine free Android app you can download from their website. This also does bookmarking.

“Must not touch the preciousss…”

07 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by in Unnamable

≈ Leave a comment

Wormwoodania today…

“‘The Lost Tragedy’ by Denis Mackail, is a gently humorous piece (which was very much his style) set in a London second-hand bookshop. The narrator says: “Mr Bunstable’s book-shop represents a type of establishment which has pretty well disappeared from our modern cities. [It is a ‘dusty, labyrinthine bookshop, with teetering piles of titles everywhere’] As all who have considered the subject must agree, the principal object of any book-seller is to obstruct, as far as possible, the sale of books…”

Yes, I’ve often thought something similar about librarians as well.

State of Fantasy, 1977-2011

07 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

Yesterday I stumbled across Dave Cesarano’s 15,000-word catch-up overview of epic/high fantasy from 1977 to 2011. I found it usefully informative, as someone who hasn’t taken much notice of newly-published epic fantasy books since Thomas Covenant t’wuz a lad, and who thus welcomed hearing a fan’s succinct plainly-spoken overview of how it all turned out.

It turned out badly, it seems. On the one hand, a cadre of sour Tolkien-haters racing ever-downwards into despair, gore, rape and angst, all chasing an adolescent’s shallow idea of what “edgy” and “realism” is meant to look like. On the other hand, waves of badly-written lacklustre Tolkien pastiches, foaming out to ever-wider lengths at the behest of cynical publishers. And in between the two, the slowly widening chasm of tone-deaf political axe-grinders.

That’s the impression that I came away from Cesarano’s essay with, anyway. Possibly there are other weightier surveys of the epic fantasy novels of the period, akin to Joshi’s sweeping critical take on the history of recent weird fiction. Though I don’t know of any offhand.

But if Cesarano’s fan-viewpoint is to be trusted, and I’ve no reason to doubt his sincerity, then evidently I didn’t miss much in terms of the big post-Covenant works. Except perhaps for Tad Williams’s Memory, Sorrow & Thorn series (though he’s on record was wanting to infuse leftist “politics” into the genre), and some Marion Zimmer Bradley. Elsewhere I hear good things about Ardath Mayhar’s first Dunsany-like book How the Gods Wove in Kyrannon, and her later Crazy Quilt: The Best Short Stories. Also Jon Brunner’s The Compleat Traveller in Black (1986) and David Gemmell’s debut novel Legend (1984). If I’d have heard about those in the mid 80s, rather than the gloomy-but-worthily ‘grown up’ Thomas Covenant books, which eventually killed my interest, then I might still be reading fantasy.

Anyway, here are the links for Cesarano’s “The State of Fantasy Since 1977”. Keep in mind that he’s talking about epic fantasy novels here, and is not straying off into short-stories, anthologies, fantasy-steampunk, schoolboy wizards etc.

Introduction: The State of Fantasy in 1977.

1. Fantasy: 1977-1989. (If you’re short of time, just start with “1982”).

2. Fantasy: 1990 – 2000. The Age of the Doorstops and Gimmicks.

3. Fantasy: 1999 to 2011. Disillusionment and Nihilism.

Conclusion: Fantasy: 1977 to 2011. Wrapping It All Up.

Conan the Swordsman collection in audio

07 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by in Podcasts etc., REH

≈ Leave a comment

Added to my R.E. Howard audio books listings page, which is a page of free Conan readings listed in their story-world chronological order:

There is also a Books for the Blind audiobook of the collection of stories Conan the Swordsman (1978). This collection of briskly-plotted gap-fillers for the Conan chronology is from Nyberg / Lin Carter / de Camp. Their stories successfully mimic Howard, only lacking some of the small telling details that he carefully wove into his stories. Their book has, in order:

“The People of the Summit” (after “Rogues in the House”) (begins at 1 hour 12 minutes into the book reading)
“Shadows in the Dark” (after “Black Colossus”)
“The Star of Khorala” (after “Shadows in Zamboula”)
“The Gem in the Tower” (between “The People of the Black Circle” and “The Pool of the Black One”)
“The Ivory Goddess” (before “Beyond the Black River”)
“Moon of Blood” (after “Beyond the Black River”)

I see there’s also a Books for the Blind audiobook of the Carter / de Camp Conan the Liberator, but I’ve left that off my page. It does fit a big gap in the Howard chronology, telling of how Conan became a King, but is not very well reviewed. While painted on a suitably wide canvas, it’s apparently more of a medieval military novel in which the depiction of Conan is sparse and a bit iffy in terms of his characterisation.