{"id":65860,"date":"2025-05-25T19:15:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-25T19:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/?p=65860"},"modified":"2025-05-25T22:01:51","modified_gmt":"2025-05-25T22:01:51","slug":"hplinks-39-join-the-esoteric-order-lovecrafts-dark-enlightenment-sculpting-lovecraft-dunwich-revived-mayfair-magazine-and-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2025\/05\/25\/hplinks-39-join-the-esoteric-order-lovecrafts-dark-enlightenment-sculpting-lovecraft-dunwich-revived-mayfair-magazine-and-more\/","title":{"rendered":"HPLinks #39 – join the Esoteric Order, Lovecraft’s Dark Enlightenment, sculpting Lovecraft, Dunwich revived, Mayfair magazine, and more…"},"content":{"rendered":"

HPLinks<\/a> #39. <\/p>\n

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated<\/a> (19th May 2025). Among many other items, he is currently seeking a new acolyte to join his very own secret Esoteric Order. He also notes the ‘zine… <\/p>\n

Nightlands no. 3 (Autumn 2024), containing my article ‘H.P. Lovecraft and Weird Art’ (an article I wrote years ago as liner notes for an album that never appeared)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

* In German, a philosophy journal article whose fragmented title might best translate into English as ‘The Dark Enlightenment of H.P. Lovecraft’<\/a>, from Weimarer Beitrrge<\/em> No. 68 (2022, freely available online 2025)…<\/p>\n

… he develops an atheistic-materialistic philosophy not only in his literature, but also in essays and especially his extensive correspondence, which can be understood as a “dark enlightenment”. What Adorno and Horkheimer do in their dialectics of the Enlightenment, based on de Sade and Nietzsche also applies, ‘mutatis mutandis’, for Lovecraft. His work unfolds an “intransigent criticism of practical reason” and its agent, the too “self-evident subject”. [Only by understanding the] basic positions of Lovecraft’s philosophy, as developed in essays and letters, does his poetics of form [become clear and] open us up to the full understanding of his literature. His works also provide directional concepts for the philosophy and philology of ‘the eerie’. […] Against this background [I engage in] a reading of his “The Color Out of Space” (1927)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

* From Russia, “Preserving the Author\u2019s Style in Translating The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath<\/em>“<\/a> (April 2025). A short conference paper, freely available online. Partly in English. <\/p>\n

* Deep Cuts<\/em> considers<\/a> the very late \u201cOf Gold and Sawdust\u201d (1975), by Lovecraft’s friend Samuel Loveman. <\/p>\n

* “Making an Ultra-Realistic Portrait of H.P. Lovecraft”<\/a> via 3D digital sculpting and texturing. A link from a few years back, but I don’t think I’ve linked to this ‘making of’ page before. Only to the results.<\/p>\n

* New on Archive.org, a pack of three Historic Males SD 1.5 LoRAs<\/a> including Lovecraft. These are free character add-ons for generating images with Stable Diffusion 1.5. Historical personage add-ons having been last week removed from CivitAI (the main Stable Diffusion download website) along with living celebrities. I guess CivitAI didn’t have either the manpower or the cultural savvy to know if a celeb was dead or alive, and thus they junked the lot.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Tip: you may want to put “Spock” in the negative prompt, if the LoRA wants to veer towards Star Trek’<\/em>s Captain Spock. That seems to restore Lovecraft’s face. The above is an Img2Img style transform + the LoRA, starting from a Bondware Poser 13 render.<\/p>\n

* Feuilleton<\/em> has lengthy comments<\/a> on the ‘history of Lovecraft in comics’ academic paper (linked to in my previous HPLinks<\/em>). Reading this history has spurred him to finish his own unfinished adaptation of The Dunwich Horror<\/em>… “This, then, is my major project for the next twelve months. The book as a whole will take at least this long to finish”.<\/p>\n

* The Alan Moore World<\/em> blog has “Lovecraft was an American William Blake”<\/a>… <\/p>\n

In writing about Lovecraft, as I’m doing at the moment, I want to understand where he was, to become him, as it were. We’re both pulp writers trying to express our vision of the truth. In this current book Yuggoth Cultures, I’m trying to divine that knowledge.” (Moore, 1993).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sadly, it appears that his Yuggoth Cultures<\/em> was left in a London taxi-cab and thus lost. Not sure how the book overlaps with Moore’s comic-book series Yuggoth Cultures and Other Growths<\/em>, but I’ll take it on trust that Alan Moore World<\/em> knows that the published comics and the lost book are different things.<\/p>\n

* I missed noticing this event, but managed to snag the poster at a small size. A ‘Lovecraft festival’ on the videogame service Steam, which has now been-and-gone.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But from this I was able to track down the larger and more appealing artwork (same artist, no artist credited) that the poster was partly made from…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

* Bounding Into Comics<\/em> reviews the new Re-Animator<\/em> movie 4K UHD<\/a> set, and itemises the many additional extras newly packaged with the movie.<\/p>\n

* The publisher Dark Horse is preparing to ship a ‘special hardcover’ edition of Richard Corben\u2019s “Lovecraft and backwoods terror” graphic-novel Rat God<\/em>. 184 pages with “remastered lettering”. Unfortunately it’s also being coloured, having originally been in greyscale. Due in the autumn of 2025…<\/p>\n

Terrible things stalk the forests outside Arkham in this chilling original tale from comics master Richard Corben.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

* Viking (an offshoot of Penguin Books, last I heard) is reported in the book trade as being set to publish Penguin Weird Fiction<\/em> later in 2025… “an anthology of stories featuring H.P. Lovecraft, Edith Wharton and Arthur Conan Doyle, among others”. The advance notice makes it sounds like the stories feature these authors as characters, but I suspect it’s not that interesting. Just another cash-in reprint, I expect.<\/p>\n

* New on Archive.org, a set of Mayfair<\/em> magazine (for several decades a leading mass-market British equivalent to the U.S. Playboy<\/em>), which search shows had in its February 1970 issue a reprint of Lovecraft’s “From Beyond”. George Underwood was the artist…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

* Another new batch of short SF\/fantasy readings<\/a> at LibriVox. This time around there are four by Lovecraft’s one-time protege Henry Kuttner, all public domain. Also, I didn’t realise any stories by Marion Zimmer Bradley had slipped into the public domain. But at least one of her stories must have, since she’s in this collection. <\/p>\n

* And finally, a reminder to those who may be visiting Providence this summer, that I have a free Lovecraft’s Providence Map<\/a> online.<\/p>\n

\n

— End-quotes —<\/em><\/p>\n

“”Polaris” is rather interesting in that I wrote it in 1918, BEFORE I had ever read a word of Lord Dunsany’s. Some find it hard to believe this, but I can give not only assurance but absolute proof that it is so.” — Lovecraft to Dwyer, March 1927. <\/p>\n

“As to the charge of modernism against me because of my predilection for Poe & Dunsany, why, Sir, I refute it!” — Lovecraft to Kleiner December 1919 (he instead hails his predecessors in the 18th century gothic, discovered and read in his childhood attic).<\/p>\n

“When I think of Dunsany, it is in terms of \u201cThe Gods of the Mountain\u201d, \u201cBethmoora\u201d, \u201cPoltarnees, Beholder of Ocean\u201d, \u201cThe City of Never\u201d, \u201cThe Fall of Babbulkund\u201d, \u201cIn the Land of Time\u201d, and \u201cIdle Days on the Yann\u201d.” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, November 1936.<\/p>\n

“… a few weird [stage] dramas such as Dunsany’s ‘Gods of the Mountain’ & ‘Night at an Inn’ have demonstrated how a natural expert can weave horror, dread, & mounting tension with skilfully managed dialogue.” — Lovecraft to Natalie H. Wooley, March 1935.<\/p>\n

“I infinitely prefer Dunsany to Cabell — he was a genuine magic & freshness which the weary sophisticate seems to lack” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, August 1926.<\/p>\n

“Imaginative artists have been few, and always unappreciated. [William] Blake is woefully undervalued. Poe would never have been understood had not the French taken the pains to exalt and interpret him. Dunsany has met with nothing but coldness or lukewarm praise.” (Lovecraft, “In Defence of Dagon”, January 1921).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

HPLinks #39. * S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated (19th May 2025). Among many other items, he is currently seeking a …<\/p>\n

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