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Tentaclii

~ News and scholarship on H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937)

Tentaclii

Monthly Archives: August 2019

August at Tentaclii

31 Saturday Aug 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

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Well, that’s August gone. Tentaclii Towers sailed serenely on through the shimmering August blue and the increasingly chill nights of late summer, avoiding power-cuts or flash-flooding. My daily blogging continued, although my Patreon remains stubbornly stuck at $59 a month.

This month the password-protected posts for my Patreon patrons were:

* “A Century Less a Dream, new for $4”. (Effectively the ‘best of Lovecraft Studies’ as a nice hardback. I got one, but one was also left available at $4 for someone else to bag).

* “Friday ‘picture postals’ from Lovecraft: Finding Bolton”. (My new discovery on the mysterious Bolton, a place featured in several Lovecraft stories).

* “Moving Lovecraft’s House” (an eyewitness account of the event and a photo).

* “Knowing Derleth” (Derleth on the gay scene within early science-fiction fandom, and more).

Just $1 a month or more (ideally more) gives you access to protected posts at Tentaclii.

In the arts, another ‘Lovecraft as a character’ appearance was discovered in the graphic novel Atomic Robo and The Shadow from Beyond Time, and this discovery led to issue #42 of Digital Art Live magazine having a superb and long lead interview with the Atomic Robo guys. Tentaclii also featured: a brief first look at the new Colour Out of Space movie, with my musings on why it might have been time-shifted; an unearthing of a lost French Lovecraftian sculptor Henri Etienne-Martin with good pictures; an update on the Blaschka’s ocean invertebrate glass-models, including news of restorations and a new book; the Lovecraft Birthday ‘InnFest’ festival in the Second Life virtual world (now with 90 minute ‘best of’ video; and a couple of other Lovecraftian arts items.

New books were noted, such as: Lovecraft’s Letters to Wilfred B. Talman and Helen V. and Genevieve Sully; Lovecraft’s ‘autobiography in letters’ Lord of a Visible World (as a second revised edition). In fiction, new affordable and properly edited ebooks of The Averoigne Archives (Clark Ashton Smith) and the best of Wilum Pugmire; plus Arthur Machen: Collected Fiction. I noted that the French can expect a “Fully Upholstered Luxury Lovecraft” set in early 2020. I was also pleased to find the Lovecraft Lexicon encyclopedia in affordable ebook, and I read through it cover-to-cover during August.

August was a light month for new journals, but the new Lovecraft Annual #13 and Pulpster #28 were both major releases and also packed with independent scholars who Know Their Stuff. I also noted two calls for non-fiction material from future editions of the Arkham Gazette fanzine.

Useful freebies were linked to here, as usual. These included: concise synopses of Lovecraft’s revision works, totalling 13,000 words; Krazy Kat 1916-22 free online (incidentally, I also found that Lovecraft made a probable passing reference to Krazy’s mouse “Ignatz”, so maybe he did come to know this famously surreal kittee strip after all); The Fantasy Fan’s 1933-34 issues were found and linked on Gutenberg; I found 15 pages of Breccia adapting “The Whisperer in Darkness”; and a French website called Cthulhu & Co. was found, this being a fine online catalogue of Lovecraftian zines and journals. Of course August and Lovecraft’s birthday brought my own freebies: Lovecraft’s “The Cats of Ulthar” with 8,000 words of scholarly annotations; and my new revised high-res map of “Lovecraft’s Providence”.

In my biographical posts, ‘Lovecraft on a bicycle’ offered my detailed timeline of Lovecraft’s bicycling, done in order to rebut a recent tendentious (and now, proven false) claim about Lovecraft. Several of my regular “Picture Postals” posts at Tentaclii were biographical, with one of these including the full run of Frank Belknap Long’s ‘comic strip by postcards’ featuring Lovecraft as a character; “HPL in an aquarium”; and an unusual night-view photograph of College St. very near to Lovecraft’s final home.

I feel I had a breakthrough in the post “On that elbow”, by tallying story-interpretation against historical context. I similarly looked into the real Sydney Bulletin, of “Call of Cthulhu” fame — I’ve long suspected that Lovecraft had several unknown Australian correspondents, and though this post wasn’t on his correspondents it served to further confirm my hunch.

My big discovery this month came in the post “Eddy bookstore on Weybosset St”. I found a seemingly previously-unknown 1948 memoir of Lovecraft, by one who knew him well. This led me to the equally un-noticed uncle Eddy, Providence’s used bookseller. Just a few streets over from the Public Library, Lovecraft had access to a large (20,000 volumes?) used bookstore, whose friendly proprietor would open up especially for him and who was also the uncle of his best friend in the city. Who knew?

Due to the tribble-like expansion of volumes of Lovecraft’s letters, I wrote a quick post suggesting the need for a public ‘mega-index’ of these and I suggested how this might be speedily created. I also noted that Rhode Island newspapers before 1923 should be online soon, after news of a $250,000 funding grant for scanning and digitisation. One wonders if the Library might offer some sort of ‘hunt the Lovecraft’ prize, once that database is online and public. Talking of Providence, I thought I might get a blog post by rounding up all the reports from NeconomiCon Providence 2019. But after extensive searching I can only find one… and curiously that doesn’t even mention Lovecraft.

Scholarly links this month included a free detailed paper on the history of the lost Arabian desert city of Irem/Iram, plus a number of new additions (inc. one thesis) to my Open Lovecraft page. I also noted that the call for “Tolkien’s Legendarium and the Arts” included explicit openness to Lovecraft; and that there’s a call for general horror scholarship from the UK’s Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference 2020.

For my own puny shelf I bagged the book A Century Less a Dream: Selected Criticism on H.P. Lovecraft, new in hardback for a mere $4, via a fire-sale book direct from Amazon USA. It was just $11 even with shipping to the UK, which was irresistible. It was fine on arrival, the only slight mar being a bar-code sticker firmly affixed to the back cover. I’ve also been able to bag a copy of the Lovecraft Annual for 2015 at a low price, and this should be arriving here shortly.


That was August. Please help me to continue the Tentaclii blog by pledging $1 a month or more via Patreon. It would be nice to get to $100 a month by the late Autumn/Fall, a year after re-starting Tentaclii. If you made new contacts at summer conventions and conferences then please let them know about the blog and my need for patrons.

Fully Upholstered Luxury Lovecraft

31 Saturday Aug 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books, Scholarly works

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Les editions Mnemos: Luxury Lovecraft.

7 handsome volumes of the stories and poetry, illustrated. Essays by S.T. Joshi, Patrice Louinet and others, the Commonplace Book, selections from the letters. All in French, though.

Apparently “Delivery is scheduled for the first quarter of 2020”, according to editions Mnemos. The project raised £362,516 ($442,142) on the French equivalent of the Kickstarter site.

New books: Breccia

31 Saturday Aug 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works

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Two new books on Breccia are due soon:

Breccia : Conversations avec Juan Sasturain is transcribed previously-unpublished tape interviews in French translation, plus a detailed chronology and newly published art. 460 pages in French. Amazon says October, the publisher says November 2019.

Alberto Breccia, le Maitre Argentin Insoumis. A book by the curator of recent exhibitions in France on Breccia, who is currently preparing a forthcoming… “major retrospective on Breccia, to be held in the Argentine capital Buenos Aires under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture”. 128 pages, in French but it seems to be well illustrated, and is apparently limited to 800 copies. Both the publisher and Amazon say October 2019.

If you want a taster of his Lovecraft comics art, see Revista El Pendulo No. 1 (1979) which has recently arrived on Archive.org due to an Argentine historical journals digitisation project. This issue has a 15-page Breccia comics adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness”. In Spanish, but still worth seeing for the masterly art alone…

The comic is followed by a Lovecraft article by Mosig, again in Spanish. This was graced by a Moebius panel depicting Lovecraft. The article was a Spanish translation of Mosig’s essay “Poet of the Unconscious”, which had first appeared in The Platte Valley Review, Vol. 6, No. 1, April 1978.

The next issue Revista El Pendulo No. 2 (1979) had a short interview with Breccia in Spanish.

Revista El Pendulo seems to have been a brief attempt at publishing an Argentine equivalent of Toutain’s 1984 and its various licensees and imitators, and as such Pendulo’s issues are not ‘safe for work’ today.

The Mosig essay led me to discover that his Mosig at Last (1997) book of collected Lovecraft essays is still available at $7.95 from Necronomicon Press, which means that Lovecraftians and academics can bypass the Cthulhu-sized prices asked for it on Amazon and eBay.

Friday ‘picture postals’ from Lovecraft: the lane-end at night

30 Friday Aug 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, New discoveries, Night in Providence, Picture postals

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As we slip over into the seasons of mists… a vintage picture of the Van Wickle Gates on a misty night, Providence. My thanks to Brown University for digitising this, and I’ve used Photoshop to subtly rectify some of the damage and fuzzyness of the picture (but you can still see a section of peel-up on right). I can add to their record the name of the photographer: Prof. Walter H. Snell, and that it was made in the early 1930s.

The John Hay Library frontage is seen behind, with main entrance-steps seen on the far right of the picture. This orientation confirms that we’re looking down College Street.

From this vantage point in the shadows a lucky observer in 1933-37 might have glimpsed H.P. Lovecraft about to set off on a long night-walk in his city. A tall gaunt figure would have stepped out from the end of the short lane which came up from his house. After pausing a moment to scout the quiet street and garden-walls for any suitably conversational cats, he would have turned to walk briskly away down the hill — while being framed for an instant in the gate-entrance seen on the far left of this picture. Or, if one was lucky, he would have headed toward the gate and the camera, so as to walk through the grounds of Brown University. I assume that the grounds were not sealed-off at night, in those days.

Map:

Below we see the lane-end (far left, lower corner) in daytime, viewed from the other side of the gates…


Incidentally I now realise that I was mistaken in an earlier ‘postcard’ post here, one made late last year. I had though that a bit of a house glimpsed past the John Hay Library might have been that of Lovecraft. It wasn’t so, and that post has now been deleted. I now realise that any picture which shows the frontage alone can’t show the relevant house(s). Only side views, like those above, are of possible interest and even then will likely only indicate the line of the lane that came up from his house at the back of the Library.


New week on ‘Picture postals’: continuing the theme, with a detailed look at Lovecraft’s unique scientific understanding of the origin of clouds and mists.

Cadabra news

30 Friday Aug 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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From the latest Decibel magazine…

Legendary horror film composer Fabio Frizzi talks about helping to bring H.P. Lovecraft’s poetry to life on I Notturni Di Yuggoth.

Decibel also has an exclusive preview-track online. This new Cadabra album starts pre-orders today. Exclusively in heavy vinyl, with “a new liner essay by S. T. Joshi” plus sleeve art and fold-out poster insert.

For those without a vinyl record-player, note also the forthcoming Karamazid Art Portfolio from Cadabra Records. This is the art for the Cadabra albums to date, done as a set of sumptuous prints. 50 copies only, 14 still available as of today.

Tolkien’s Library

28 Wednesday Aug 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books, Scholarly works

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On YouTube, leading Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey giving a ten minute talk in August 2019 on the new book Tolkien’s Library. Tolkien scholars now have the equivalent of Joshi’s useful book Lovecraft’s Library, listing exactly what was known to be in the master’s library or ‘known to have been read’. It’s a hefty 466 pages and fully annotated.

Other interestingly bookish talks at the big Birmingham Tolkien event in 2019, now online: Wayne G. Hammond on “Tolkien and his Publishers” and the “Illustrating Tolkien” Panel from leading illustrators of Middle-earth.

Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference 2020

28 Wednesday Aug 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Scholarly works

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StokerCon 2020 (mid April 2020) is in the UK and has an academic off-shoot, the Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference. The abstract submission deadline is 31st October 2019, and “registration to StokerCon 2019 is required for to be accepted and to present”. No special theme other than “horror studies” in any media, but they expect papers to take an “interdisciplinary approach” and offer a list of academic disciplines to get inter- with. It sounds like it’s more for grad students rather than independent scholars, but I thought I’d mention it here anyway.

Added to Open Lovecraft

28 Wednesday Aug 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Scholarly works

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* J. Newell, “The daemonology of unplumbed space: weird fiction, disgust, and the aesthetics of the unthinkable”, PhD thesis for The University of British Columbia, 2017. (The fourth and final section is on Lovecraft, following surveys of the uses of disgust in the fiction of Poe, Machen and Blackwood).

* A. Peedumae, “A corpus-based study of names in Lovecraft’s fiction”, 2019. (Undergraduate dissertation for the University of Tartu, “an analysis of character names with the use of collocations, etymology and semantic prosodies” in Lovecraft).

* M. Sulmicki, Studies In Madness: Reality and Subjectivity in Alan Moore’s Providence, Ambrose Bierce’s “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” and Robert W. Chambers’ “The Repairer of Reputations”, Zeszyty Naukowe Uczelni Vistula / Vistula University Working Papers, Vol.65, No.2, 2019. (In English).

Kittee Tuesday: The Devil Cat

27 Tuesday Aug 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Kittee Tuesday

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Celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s interest in our fascinating felines.

Chapter heading from The Book of Cats, 1868.

The “first comprehensive checklist of Arkham House ephemera”

26 Monday Aug 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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Don Herron has news that Derleth scholar John D. Haefele has…

the first comprehensive checklist of Arkham House ephemera, Modern Era, ever published [in the] September/October 2019 issue of Firsts: The Book Collectors Magazine.

Ah, but this is only the prelude. “Now You’ll Need Two Issues” added Don a few days later. September/October carries the introductory essay, with the actual list in the following issue.

Protected: Knowing Derleth

26 Monday Aug 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts

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Cthulhu & Co.

25 Sunday Aug 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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New to me, a fanzines catalogue ‘Cthulhu & Co.’, by Adam Joffrain. This French site appears to have scanned covers for all Lovecraft ‘zines and journals to about 2015, with most at size where you can see what’s going on. All neatly ordered by title and date, and easily navigated.

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