01 Wednesday Nov 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
John Coulthart takes a long dive into “The Great Drone Ones”. Being his survey of… “the series of Lovecraft-themed albums that Cryo Chamber have been releasing each year since 2014”. The “wholly instrumental” “dark ambient” music…
is a better match for weird fiction than most of the rock music derived from Lovecraft’s stories, in part because it resembles the kinds of atmospheric timbres that you find on the better horror soundtracks.
31 Tuesday Oct 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
A review of the multi-author book Theology and H.P. Lovecraft (2022). Paywalled at Project MUSE, but a substantial chunk of the review is available free. Useful and detailed, even with ‘what there is’ of the review. The reviewer makes me want to take a look at the book, bouncing off my very slightly deeper understanding of theological points which I’ve glimpsed due to my interest in Tolkien. The books TOCs also look quite enticing…
30 Monday Oct 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The AI Art Weekly newsletter ‘$50 challenge’, themed as “Twilight Zone”. Submission via Twitter only.
29 Sunday Oct 2023
Posted in New discoveries
Deep Cuts examines what can be known about the lost Lovecraft correspondent Alice M. Hamlet, and finds a good photographic portrait. She was a Boston concert pianist and a keen amateur journalist.
I see the New England Piano Teachers’ Assoc. still holds an annual Alice Hamlet Competition, presumably named after her and in her memory. They may be interested in knowing about the pictures of her?
29 Sunday Oct 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The latest Illustrators #42 magazine (October 2023) leads with a Richard Corben feature.
The Halloween comics are also flying freely through the mists here in the UK, from the new This Comic Is Haunted British horror comic, to a set of Halloween themed Commando releases.
28 Saturday Oct 2023
Posted in New books
Art of the Grimoire: An Illustrated History of Magic Books and Spells (October 2023) from Yale University Press. Reviews describe the new book as a “copiously illustrated” “coffee-table book”, covering everything “from ancient papyri to pulp paperbacks”.
Very possibly this is a cut-down repackaging of the same author’s Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (2010)? Just a guess. His earlier book was a chunky 380 pages from Oxford University Press, and is on Archive.org. It also looks like you can easily pick it up in paperback for £10 (about $15). This earlier book sounds very similar to the new one, and had a few pages outlining Lovecraft and the Necronomicon.
28 Saturday Oct 2023
New on Archive.org, an academic book on Alan Moore: Out from the Underground (2018), one of the Palgrave series which discussed comics and graphic novels.
Has little to say about Lovecraft, but does show that the Lovecraft influence was strongly present as early as 1969…
Having met the young Dave Womack at the second British comics convention in 1969, he [Moore] sent him some illustrations and an article on Lovecraft, the latter of which featured in the first issue of his dual comics fanzine/adzine Utopia/Valhalla in February 1970.
And adds one more item to the list of early Lovecraft as character appearances…
Moore’s “Breakdown” in Embryo 4 [circa 1971?] had similar Orwellian themes (‘Cold terminal eyes in the control chamber fingerbutton proseflash’) and ends with a conversation between Orwell, Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury.
Embryo #4 is a zine that doesn’t appear to be on Archive.org.
27 Friday Oct 2023
Posted in Picture postals
This week on ‘picture postals’, news-stands of the 1930s and 40s, via the best images to be found at the Library of Congress. Here cropped, contrast-adjusted and reduced to a manageable-but-still-big size from the huge .TIF files.
It’s interesting to see how they were purveyed. Upside down, in one picture.
And quite mixed in another picture from 1939, where Sky Devils can end up right next to Complete Love, and Weird Tales is jammed between Home Friend and Consumers Digest…
Perhaps the war made them more organised, so that they could be more easily given the once-over for seditious material during wartime?
26 Thursday Oct 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A clever stylised Kitbashed Cthulhu, via Propnomicon…
This is a bag of sea creatures from Target [a big U.S. discount store], a dollar-store bag of Halloween skeleton warriors, and a Vampire bat from the “Todd McFarlane’s monsters” playset from the 90’s
25 Wednesday Oct 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
In the latest Journal of Popular Culture, one of those single-author corpus text-mining / digital humanities papers, “The ‘Cthulhu network’: The process by which the popular myth was made”. This only examines Lovecraft’s works. The many cross-references and allusions found in works by members of the Lovecraft Circle, and also ideas and names shared by letters, are also mentioned. But that aspect of the growth of the Mythos is suggested as needing “further research”.
Freely available, under full Creative Commons Attribution.
24 Tuesday Oct 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
My Tolkien Gleanings ‘zine #7 is now available at Archive.org. A handy PDF digest of Tolkien and related news for August – October 2023, with live clickable Web links.
24 Tuesday Oct 2023
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts
I love that nearly all indie generative AI models know what Lovecraft looked like (‘indie’ because those of Adobe etc are quite obviously censored). And, increasingly, can also generate cats. Cats being a tricky creature, due to their natural camouflage and near-infinite contorting combinations of outline-shape.
Here’s an example from a new AI which makes retro pixel-style images…
HPL returns from the mailbox with his daily haul of letters, ‘zines, books and kittens.