A short month, and a chilly one. My new employment requires venturing out of the Tentaclii Towers grounds, and — lacking the requisite brazier-heated coach and fast horses — I have been re-acquainted with the delights of the English weather. Despite what hysterical cultists would have you believe, the English spring weather is definitely not “boiling” so far as I can tell. It’s set to be sub-zero with a heavy mist tomorrow, as I write.<\/p>\n
In this month’s ‘Picture Postals’ posts I clambered up the mysterious Newport Tower in search of Vikings; I glimpsed the lower depths of Brooklyn Heights, which finally led me to a good artistic vision of what Lovecraft would have seen from atop those same heights; I gazed down Fulton Street in earlier times (which seemed to me to link with Lovecraft’s “The Street”); and peeped at the new excavations alongside the List building at Brown University (the site of Lovecraft’s house at 66 College Street). In another picture based post I wondered at the similarity of Lovecraft\u2019s bibliophile \u2018Great Race\u2019, in \u201cThe Shadow Out Of Time\u201d, to the Surrealist “Exquisite Corpse” of 1927.<\/p>\n
For Valentine’s Day I examined Lovecraft’s one-time epistolary pseudonym ‘Valentine Boiling Fitz-Randolph Byrd’.<\/p>\n
In scholarly work I found four new items. I also noted the use of Lovecraft for a new “Psychoanalysis of Wet Dreams”, which led me to dig up Lovecraft’s suitably soppy parody poem on the topic. I noticed that Fungi from Yuggoth: An Annotated Edition<\/em> is back in print. In forthcoming books, S.T. Joshi announced a forthcoming volume of letters sent to R.H. Barlow, and also remarked on a new French screen documentary on Lovecraft.<\/p>\n In new books I noted: The Weird Tales Boys<\/em> (2023) and Long Memories and Other Writings<\/em> (2022) on Frank Belknap Long. Also the forthcoming artbooks Lovecraft\u2019s Commonplace Book: Weirdly Illustrated by Michael Bukowski<\/em>; and H.P. Lovecraft: Zoomorphic Manual<\/em>. In old books I was pleased to learn of the existence of The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe<\/em> (1981), now on Archive.org.<\/p>\n My occasional highlighting of free AI ‘LORA’ image-generation plugins continued, and I linked to an AI generated video adaptation (Lovecraft’s cosmic “The Poe-et\u2019s Nightmare\u201d from 1916).<\/p>\n Also in freeware, I was pleased to recommend AnyTxt Searcher for scholars. Also free, though requiring a hefty and expensive graphics card for your PC, Nvidia released “Chat with RTX”. Which appears to be an easy way to locally build an in-depth ‘H.P. Lovebot’ AI chatbot from his letters and essays. Now all we need is the humanoid robot HPL to put it in. Ready when you are, Mr. Musk!<\/p>\n Definitely not freeware, a complete set of Weird Tales<\/em> was put up for sale on eBay at around $150,000. Which if you have a mere three bitcoins lying around, would actually be quite affordable. Sadly I only have a tiny fraction of one bitcoin, worth about $80 at the last count.<\/p>\n I updated my PDF of letters from E.H. Price to Lovecraft, which triggered a small but pleasing round of new downloads. Also for the Lovecraft Circle, I was pleased to find a good map for the Conan<\/em> tales. I’m a little surprised there aren’t more such maps, and that I had to dig it up from 1975. In audio I noted R.E. Howard\u2019s Weird Tales<\/em> horror stories had arrived on Librivox.<\/p>\n I also posted on “Brian Stableford as editor and scholar”, and sorted out which of Asimov’s many ‘robot tales’ are said to be the best to start with. In Tolkien, I made more progress with issue #8 PDF ‘zine version of my Tolkien Gleanings<\/em>, which should be out in a few weeks and weigh in at 100 pages.<\/p>\n And… the blog passed 5,000 posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A short month, and a chilly one. My new employment requires venturing out of the Tentaclii Towers grounds, and — …<\/p>\n