More LORA picks

A couple more new free LORAs (‘style-guide plugins’) spotted among the daily tidal wave of anime character LORAs, for use with local AI image generation on your PC.

Ernst Haeckel LORA. For creating bookplates showing deep-sea creatures.

Books World LORA, for characters in proper libraries with lots of books on shelves. The demo images are almost all anime, but it looks like it should also cope with a ‘painted photoreal’ look.

Back to school…

This week on ‘Picture Postals’, Lovecraft’s Hope Street high school, in an (admittedly rather mundane) view I’m fairly sure I’d not seen before…

And his Grandpa Whipple’s school, the East Greenwich Academy, in another more pleasing card…

This gave Lovecraft a very significant element of his own schooling, via a book from his grandfather’s time…

I had always had an ear for rhythm, and had very early got hold of an old book on “Composition, Rhetorick, and Poetic Numbers” […] used by my great-great grandfather at the East Greenwich Academy about 1805.

[As a young boy] for my guidance in correct composition I chose a deliciously quaint and compendious volume which my great-grandfather had used at school, and which I still treasure sacredly minus its covers:

THE READER:

Containing the Art of Delivery — Articulation, Accent, Pronunciation, Emphasis, Pauses, Key or Pitch of the Voice, and Tones; Selection of Lessons in the Various Kinds of Prose; Poetick Numbers, Structure of English Verse, Feet and Pauses, Measure and Movement, Melody, Harmony, and Expression, Rules for Reading Verse, Selections of Lessons in the Various Kinds of Verse.

By Abner Alden, A. M.

This was so utterly and absolutely the very thing I had been looking for, that I attacked it with almost savage violence. It was in the “long S”, and reflected in all its completeness the Georgian rhetorical tradition of Addison, Pope, and Johnson, which had survived unimpaired in America even after the Romantic Movement had begun to modify it in England. This, I felt by instinct, was the key to the speech and manners and mental world of that old periwigged, knee-breeched Providence whose ancient lanes still climbed the hill …

The edition is online at Archive.org.

Barlow’s house

In the latest H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society newsletter for winter 2023/24, a rare peep at the Barlow House. It’s is the “Featured Member” post re: a member in Cocoa, Florida. I kind of imagined it as much less rustic. Perhaps even more of a modern (for the early-30s) single-storey lakeside place, suiting a military man. But here it looks like an 1880s wooden building that one might find in a Lovecraft tale.

A skull for Christmas

The booklet Christmas with H.P. Lovecraft now has a page on hplovecraft.com, with detailed description and table-of-contents. This usefully shows that none of the letters were excerpted, which seems a pity. The publication is poems, “The Festival” and the ‘Christmas Greetings’ ditties sent to friends (and friends’ cats) at Christmas. One might have hoped that the compiler could have slipped in just two or three bits from the letters. Which Brown considers to be in the public domain. I mean, how could one leave out something like this…

[Yule (Christmas)] here was commendably cheerful — including a turkey dinner at the boarding-house across the garden, with a congenial cat meandering among the tables and finally jumping up on the windowseat for a nap. We had a tree by the living-room fireplace — its verdant boughs thickly festooned with a tinsel imitation of Florida’s best Spanish moss, and its outlines emphasised by a not ungraceful lighting system. Around its base were ranged the modest Saturnalian gifts — which included (on my side) a hassock [a cushioned wooden foot-stool] tall enough to let me reach the top shelves of my bookcases […]. Of outside gifts the most distinctive was perhaps that which came quite unexpectedly from one of the kid fantasy fan group […] when I had removed numberless layers of corrugated paper and excelsior, what should I find before me but the yellowed and crumbling fragments of a long-interred human skull!

Not At Night (1937)

New on Archive.org, a scan of the 1937 Not At Night Omnibus. This had Lovecraft between hard covers, if only in the British Isles. In the form of his “Pickman’s Model”, and the revision tale “The Horror in the Museum”.

Weird Tales offered their most suitable grue-some stories, these being selected by the magazine’s London agent Charles Lovell. The Selwyn & Blount anthologist Christine Campbell Thomson then made the final selection and ordering for the chunky mass-market hardback. One might have thought it would appear for Halloween in the autumn lists, but it appears to have been published in April or May 1937.

A few more LORAs

A few more free LORAs, newly released and of possible interest to Tentaclii readers. For use with the free AI image-generator Stable Diffusion 1.5 on a PC.

Chriss Foss style LORA, for generating Chris Foss ‘wasp’ spaceships.

The Mist LORA, for deep mist with huge monsters looming out of it. Might work well with Lovecraftian shorelines?

Xenozoic Tales – v1.0 LORA, with a nice retro-comics inking style which may be suitable for 1950s pulp illustrations.

Also a rare (the only one?) Anaglyph Image Generator LORA. If you’re lucky, it will generate viable old-school 3D images of the type you view with red-blue glasses. Which may interest some. Perhaps combine with the new Psychedelic Landscape LORA for way-out-there 1970s posters / album-covers with depth?

Dr. Henry Armitage Memorial Scholarship Symposium 2024

NecronomiCon Providence has issued the call for the Dr. Henry Armitage Memorial Scholarship Symposium, to be held at the impressive Omni Hotel, Providence – 15th-18th August 2024. Among the most interesting suggestions for possible topics are…

* Lovecraft’s correspondence as pre-blogging/travelog

* [Publisher] “Arkham House” and its heritage: further discoveries in its archival history

“Pre-blogging” is a new one to me. Never heard of it before. Seems that it may mean ‘a blog post you write before you actually do something, which you then also blog about afterwards’. Or they may just mean historically, that Lovecraft was ‘using letters as a form of blogging, before blogging was invented’? If the latter, it raises the question of his often phenomenal memory. Did he, like a modern blogger today, have substantial ‘search access’ in his mind to much of importance that he had written in his correspondence? “Lovecraft’s memory” might make an interesting topic for a short talk, showing just how good it was, how it worked, pointing to where and why it might have failed over time, and all the while drawing examples from the correspondence.

Anyway, submission deadline for the 2024 Symposium is 24th May 2024 and “early submissions are encouraged”.

2024 Call Flyer and contact details.

Omni Hotel

The long walk…

For this week’s ‘Picture Postals’, a few more images to accompany my earlier and more in-depth look at St. Paul’s Chapel, Broadway and Vesey. This was the church where H.P. Lovecraft married Sonia H. Greene, 100 years ago this week on 3rd March 1924.

By Rachael Robinson Elmar.

Most pictures of the place were and still are made in verdant summer. But, as I’ve established with reference to the weather records, the leaves would have been off the trees for the Lovecraft marriage. At the most the newly married couple might have emerged to…

a few hints of the very earliest new leaves on the trees, a sparse first flush of new grass after winter, and perhaps a few early un-opened daffodils.

Inside these two pictures give the best overview I can find. In Lovecraft’s time it appears that a British and an American flag hung down like banners on either side. By the looks of it later these were removed and there was just an American flag, discreetly draped to one side. Today it appears all the flags are gone, and there are only festoons of greenery.

The walk to the altar…