02 Saturday Mar 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Here’s a glimpse of the style of the manga-style comics adaptation of The Shadow Out of Time adaptation, recently completed by Gou Tanabe in Japan. This book is apparently getting manga fans excited, and he’s said to have a cult following. Personally it’s not an art style I greatly appreciate, but it’s good to get a full-length adaptation of this major story.
02 Saturday Mar 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
Newly added to the Open Lovecraft page on this blog…
* K. Dodd, “Narrative Archaeology: Excavating Object Encounter in Lovecraftian Video Games”, Studies in Gothic Fiction, forthcoming 2019.
* V. Sirangelo, “Sulla natura lunare di Shub-Niggurath: dalla mythopoeia di Howard Phillips Lovecraft a The Moon-Lens di Ramsey Campbell”, Caietele Echinox, Volume 35, 2018. (Short article in French on Shub-Niggurath in Lovecraft and Ramsey Campbell. Part of a special issue on the Neo-Gothic).
Caietele Echinox‘s large archive of themed special issues also looks interesting, though articles need to be bunged through Google Translate unless you can work with English abstracts.
01 Friday Mar 2019
Posted in Picture postals
I imagine that people are making their hotel bookings about now for NecronomiCon. So here are two evocative postcards showing the main hotel which will host the NecronomiCon 2019 Lovecraft convention. One could almost imagine that the fellow in the drawing might be the Old Gent himself, perhaps taking a close look at the pigeons to check for signs of Yuggothian tendencies.
The hotel opened in 1922. While it may seem unlikely that Lovecraft or his friends ever lounged in the lobby here, one can imagine Frank Belknap Long’s affluent family staying there overnight. Though I know of no evidence that they did. A Spanish text I have suggests that when Barlow was travelling with his family they stayed in this level of hotel. But again, I know of no evidence they ever came with Barlow to Providence.
Possibly Lovecraft was more familiar with the park adjacent. It looks like the sort of place where one might have a pleasant wait away from the crowds, if a train was heavily delayed. Or could have served as a place to sit out with friends, while they recovered from their train journey enough to walk up the hill.
The hotel is briefly mentioned by Lovecraft in “Dexter Ward”, when Lovecraft evokes in fiction his own homecoming to Providence from New York…
“his head swam curiously as the vehicle rolled down to the terminal behind the Biltmore … It was twilight, and Charles Dexter Ward had come home.”
01 Friday Mar 2019
Posted in Housekeeping, Odd scratchings
All right, so… 1st March 2019. February is gone. Doesn’t time fly! The signs of early springtime are everywhere here in the UK, though the first leaves are not yet out and the nights are still shiver-ish.
Here at Tentaclii, February saw 10,000 words posted, even with the week’s holiday from daily posting at the end of the month. The most important post was one of the Friday ‘Picture Postals’, which became a lengthy and highly illustrated essay on an overlooked area of New York City during Lovecraft’s time there. Given that Sheepshead Bay and its environs was such an unusual and eerie terrain, it was rather surprising that other Lovecraftians had not already delved into the topic. The post now effectively serves as an additional chapter for my book on Lovecraft’s sojourn in New York in the 1920s, and will be added and footnoted if there’s ever a new edition. Those considering new fiction featuring Lovecraft in the 1920s might also take this unusual watery setting and run with it. The Dutch marshlands of New York at the turn of the century could also make an unusual ‘true-life setting’ for a non-scary children’s picture-book, though Gravity Falls-like elements might still be woven in.
I also found minor new supporting information about Lovecraft’s favourite coffee-house in New York. Numerous new books and comics collections were noted, including an important one on Lovecraft in Japan. Pictures that were new to me were were found, including three of the interior of the John Hay Library and a large new scan on the Brown archive of one Lovecraft’s boyhood publications. Five new scholarly items were found and added to the Open Lovecraft page. Various other useful things were spotted and linked, including the welcome return of The Lovecraft Geek podcast, and a series of in-depth insider posts on the state of the Lovecraftian RPG market in 2018. I also picture-researched and published a new game scenario “The Assemblage of Dr. Arnold Astrall”, and my Patreons have access to the pictorial .zip bundle for this with public-domain pictures.
As you can see, daily posting at Tentaclii has now started again, after a week’s break, and the blog is now Patreon-only.
My thanks to those who have decided to become or remain my patrons on Patreon. You have ongoing access to the Tentaclii blog, which now has nearly a decade’s worth of posts, consisting of around 2,500 back-posts. These contain millions if not tens of millions of words plus Web links, all searchable by keyword or phrase, thus providing you with a unique resource for your own Lovecraft studies and musings.
Please encourage others to access this unique resource — all it takes is $1 a month via Patreon.
01 Friday Mar 2019
Posted in New books
Two new books that may be of interest to readers, on the mysteries of the subterranean. Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet has just been published, front-loaded with so much lamestream media acclaim that I’m slightly suspicious. Apparently it uses a reportage style, focusses on human works, and packs it all into 288 pages.
The other book is said to take more of a science-writing approach, and came out this time last year. The Evolution Underground – Burrows, Bunkers, and the Marvelous Subterranean World Beneath our Feet weighs in 400 pages. For some reason Amazon UK highlights a pointless one-line 2-star review, and to add insult to injury claims there is only that one review for the book. On scrolling down the page one finds there are actually 12 reviews available, all reasonably positive.
Coming in October 2019, Underground Cities: Mapping the tunnels, transits and networks of our cities.
01 Friday Mar 2019
Posted in 3D, Lovecraftian arts
Stefano Ciarrocchi is making the first steps to modelling a 3D bust of H.P. Lovecraft using the Blender software. He obviously hasn’t quite got the period clothing yet, as he’s using a 1970s ‘Bill Gates’ collar and tie that Lovecraft would have run screaming from. But it’s an interesting try in 3D.
Masket Charro gets a lot closer, and avoids the ‘uncanny valley’ effect by going a little toony. Still let down by the collar and tie.
In a similar 3D format, the My neighbor Cthulhu scene. Ruined by the crappiest sort of sign lettering. But in this case one can buy and download the 3D model, in which case the lettering could presumably be removed. Although beware that it’s a .Blend file. Though Blender is free, navigating the infernal Blender interface (to cleanly extract a 3D mesh with aligned material zones) is usually a bit of a nightmare.
It helps if you know Miyazaki, to get the sweetly inter-twingled cultural reference in this scene.
If you want to do something similar then the Miyre Store has a good and affordable Lovecraft 3D figure for the Poser software, and there’s a free pack of face expressions for him.