28 Tuesday Nov 2023
Posted in New books
S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. Among other items he notes…
Emilio Soares Ribeiro, has just published a fine book on horror in literature and cinema, O Gotico e seus Monstros, with a foreword by Joshi. Joshi notes “there is much discussion of Lovecraft” in the book.
He also finds a Lovecraft letter extracted in one of the Derleth’s Sac Prairie set of localist novels.
27 Monday Nov 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings
Need a Yuletide gift for your favourite local cultist? New at the HPLHS Store, and in stock, is the Miskatonic University Fountain Pen.
Ah, but is it chew-able? Lovecraft once remarked that the writing of his tales involved… “endless correction and pen-chewing”.
26 Sunday Nov 2023
Posted in Podcasts etc.
Liverpool Sound and Vision has a positive review of a production of a radically re-worked adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness”. No link, but a forum comment I found fully explains what it is. It’s a…
2019 audio drama, adapted in eight parts by Julian Simpson from the story by H P. Lovecraft. Henry Akeley has vanished from his home near Rendlesham Forest, and the podcasters investigate. Updated to the modern day, transplanted to England, and converted to an audio drama, but essentially rewritten from scratch
It doesn’t appear to be online, but Miskatonic University Podcast interviewed the maker.
25 Saturday Nov 2023
Posted in AI, Lovecraftian arts
New free SD 1.5 LORAs of possible interest to pulpsters, RPG-ers, self publishers, and others. These have appeared this week on CivitAI, and are for use with free desktop AI image generation software such as InvokeAI.
Style of Roy G. Krenkel (Golden Age comics artist and illustrator)
Style of Jean-Pierre Gibrat – v2.0 (lesser-known French BD artist)
TangoOne – Gil Elvgren (retro U.S. pin-up style). Specifically for use as an add-on to the M4RV3LS & DUNGEONS model.
Eric Powell Style (comic artist, looks suitable for depicting Lovecraft’s Innsmouth).
24 Friday Nov 2023
Posted in Picture postals
I’ve never seen this card pop up on eBay before, which makes me think it might be scarce. The old Court House on Benefit Street, later a school. Lovecraft knew it and (if I have the correct Court House) described it as “great” in bulk…
“In colonial times College St. was known successively as Presbyterian Lane (from the meeting-house at Benefit St., where the great Court House now stands), Rosemary Lane, & Hanover St.”
But is it of more significance in his life and work? There’s a Court House in Dexter Ward (perhaps not this one?) in which records are searched for. I can find nothing more on it in the time available for a quick search, but others may know differently.
It seems that this is not why Lovecraft knew the giant College Street courthouse as the new Court House…
[The view from his windows] “In the southwest the lofty Georgian belfry of the new Court House loomed up darkly save for the lighted clock-face, the floodlights not having been turned on.”
Since this “new” description was of the 1928 structure…
“the very fine neo-Georgian court house, built in 1928–33, at the corner of College and North Main Streets”
23 Thursday Nov 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Set for the Inferno metal festival in Norway, in March 2024, the live event “H.P. Doomcraft”. Being a…
collaboration between storyteller/visual artist Kim Diaz Holm and musician Costin Chioreanu, translating four works by the father of cosmic horror, into an unique and transcendental audio-visual experience. “Nyarlathotep”, “What the Moon Brings”, “Memory”, and “Ex-Oblivione” were all directly inspired by Lovecraft’s powerful dreams, and haunting narration and art combined with Chioreanu’s otherworldly music will bring it to nightmarish new life.
Looks like both men know Lovecraft well, and are experts at what they do. I’d hope for something on YouTube later in 2024. Though I guess the live event is the real experience, with the full speaker-stacks and a mass of nodding Nordic noggins. Booking now.
22 Wednesday Nov 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings
New to me, The Untranslated : a blog about literature not yet available in English. A decade-long blog, with many reviews of worthy works languishing in languages other than English. The author welcomes Patreon patrons.
21 Tuesday Nov 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Due at Christmas in the French “Pop Icons” books series: H.P. Lovecraft. It’s co-written with Alexandre Nikolavitch, the author of the graphic novel H.P. Lovecraft – He Who Wrote in the Darkness (2018), which inspires confidence. Translating the blurb, one finds it’s also half a comic-book biography…
Alongside Nikolavitch, twenty of the most notable comic-book creators illustrate the most significant episodes in Lovecraft’s life and some of his most famous works.
Sounds good, at a chunky 258 pages with accomplished French BD comics artists and writers at the helm. The book ships in French on 1st December 2023.
20 Monday Nov 2023
Posted in AI, Lovecraftian arts
Hurrah! A very kind benefactor, who was upgrading to a blisteringly fast 40x series graphics-card, gifted me his old GeForce RTX 3060 12Gb graphics-card. This worth-$250 hunk o’ joy has been slotted in to my PC and suitably wrangled. Thus I’m now a proper local/desktop AI image generator. Since I also managed to install InvokeAI 3 on Windows 7 (it runs Stable Diffusion models), with a little .DLL swop-out trick, and everything AI is working fine and fast with the new card.
Nicely timed, released today… the free Alienscape – Strange Landscapes LoRA for SD 1.5. Generates the sort of landscapes you might have seen on an old SF paperback cover, from your descriptive text prompt.
The other thing I’m enjoying is the Stable Diffusion community ethos, once you break free from the paywalled online service-providers. Everything is free, once you have the card to run it locally. UI’s, models, add-ons, tutorials, workflows. All free. Nice.
20 Monday Nov 2023
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
New to me, a 2015 McFarland study I’d missed, The Literary Haunted House: Lovecraft, Matheson, King and the Horror in Between. Finding this led me to note that the same author also put together a Haunted House Short Stories anthology in 2021, and (more in my line) edited a new essay collection book The Scientist in Popular Culture: Playing God and Working Wonders (2022). Amazon has no TOCs for the latter, but Google Books has a basic list of chapters:
Frankenstein Goes West;
“Pay Attention, 007”;
A Space Odyssey;
The Scientist as Sixties Icon;
Why Is Everything So Heavy in the Future?;
Through Heroism and Science, Woman Inherits the Earth;
A Scientific Method to Muppet Madness;
All of It Madness;
A Feeling for the Clone;
Dexter;
Its My Time Now, The Time of Science;
I Suggest You Don’t Worry about Those Things and Just Enjoy Yourself.
19 Sunday Nov 2023
Posted in Podcasts etc.
New on YouTube, “Who The Hell Is Lovecraft?”, a 15 minute explainer for the clueless. Filmed ‘on location’ and with a clear narrator and some production values, a newbie might do a lot worse if they knew nothing at all about the man.
18 Saturday Nov 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings
A multi-day Spanish event of interest this weekend, Especial XV Aniversario SGM – Sui Generis Madrid. Includes among other events…
* Meeting with Spanish writers who love Lovecraft. Participating: Amparo Montejano, Jose Rodríguez Montejano, Nieves Mories and Javier Olmedo.
* “I Am Providence”. Meeting with S.T. Joshi, biographer of H.P. Lovecraft. Accompanied by his editor in Spain, Carlos M. Pla, and by the writer Alberto Avila Salazar. (In English with interpreter).