Weary winter winds wizzle their way around Tentaclii Towers, offering spitterings of sleet. Lines of geese honk through the grey skies, newly back from the warm south and eager to shiver and hiss on perilous nests along the inner-city canals. Tentaclii’s own nest has been well-feathered in February, as daily or even twice-daily posting has continued. Although the fabled ‘golden egg’ has yet to be laid, as my Patreon total remains at $57, having lost $4 + $1 and gained a new $5 patron. If you are a potential patron and can afford even $1 a month, then it would be very encouraging. Being able to purchase a few more ginger beers might even help me ward off a virus or three. Apparently the virus has just arrived yesterday in the Tentaclii Towers hinterlands, via holiday-makers returning from the Canary Islands and Italy.

Two quality journals new to me were discovered this month: Fantasy Art and Studies; and Gramarye: The Journal of the Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction. A new issue of the German Lovecrafter No.6, December 2019, was also noted. There were a number of calls and opportunities posted here, such as The Miskatonic Scholarship, and calls for The Pulpster and others. I noted that The Dark Man appears to need a publicist, and perhaps also a cover-artist, for each issue.

The month was light on new books but one was noted, Clark Ashton Smith: A Comprehensive Bibliography; and I was pleased to hear of a recent Spanish volume translating Lovecraft’s best poetry. I was also pleased to find The House of the Worm in ebook, and the comments on that post usefully got some of the publication history straightened out with the help of the author himself. A few more scholarly items were added to the Open Lovecraft page.

Various new pictures of Lovecraft’s Providence were found, including an aspect of the art of the Brown campus that I’d not previously known about. I also took a quick pictorial dive into what Lovecraft’s Quebec might have looked like. Various bits of Lovecraftian art were posted, and some tangentially related art / science exhibitions noted. Some passing attention was also paid to Lovecraftian videogames, and for film-makers there was a call for the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival 2020. Here in the UK interest in Lovecraftian theatre continues to build — there’s a substantial theatre tour of Lovecraft’s work in 2020, from a noted performer.

For Leap Day, what better than a small selection of Lovecraft on the topics of “leaping” and “leaps”…

* “Leaping, floating, flying down those endless stairs…” — “Erich Zann”.

* “Occasionally the things were shewn leaping through open windows at night…” — said of creatures depicted in paintings, in “Pickman’s Model”.

* “The urge to walk was gradually changing to an urge to leap mystically into space, and suddenly he realised just where the source of the pull lay. It was in the sky. A definite point among the stars had a claim on him and was calling him.” — “Dreams in the Witch House”.

* “… little specks of light leaping out one by one till the expanded sea of roofs is one titanic constellation” — Lovecraft describing watching a vista of Providence, slowly sliding from sunset into night.

* “The leap of the cats through space was very swift” — the Cats of Ulthar return from the Moon to the Dreamlands, in “Dream Quest”.

* “And on summer evenings in the twilight he [a kitten] would prove his kinship to the elfin things of shadow by racing across the lawn on nameless errands, darting into the blackness of the shrubbery now & then, & occasionally leaping at me from ambush & then bounding away again into invisibility before I could catch him.” — Lovecraft recalling his beloved childhood cat.

* “art has no parallel for the bewitching grace of the cat’s slightest motion. … whilst the unerring accuracy of his leaping and springing, running and hunting, has an art-value just as high in a more spirited way” — “Cats and Dogs”.

Opening 6th June 2020, Enchanted: A History of Fantasy Illustration at the Norman Rockwell Museum in the USA.

Until 7th March 2020 in Maryland, USA: “Robots, Rayguns, and Alternate Views of Reality: Experiencing Art Through the Sci-Fi Paperback Collection in the SMCM Archives”.

And ending 29th March 2020 over in Oklahoma, the exhibition “Cosmic Culture: Intersections of Art and Outer Space”. The Olklahoman has an excellent long interview and gallery from the show.

eBay sellers of books etc may be encountering problems that appear to have been ongoing for several weeks now. Customers may be contacting you telling you they can’t pay, with far more silently abandoning their cart. Specifically, the problem is that eBay Checkout never passes the customer over to PayPal, as the log-on popup hangs forever at the ‘spinning disc’. If that’s the case, then tell them to add the following URLs to their ad-blocker whitelist…

That solved the problem for me. It appears that recent updates to Web browers adblockers, the popular UBlock Origin specifically, means that these URLs have to be whitelisted afresh. pay.ebay also looks new to me, and may be the real stumbling block. Your customer’s native Web browser ‘tracking protection’ / adblocker / pop-up blocking may need to be turned off, as well as secondary adblocking add-ons such as Fair AdBlocker. The generic ‘accept cookies’ pop-up may also need to be accepted, over at PayPal.