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Tentaclii

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

Tentaclii

Monthly Archives: December 2020

A Christmas break

13 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Housekeeping

≈ 1 Comment

I’ll be taking a break from Tentaclii over Christmas and New Year. I hope you’ve enjoyed the years of daily postings, until now. There may be occasional postings popping up here, if someone important keels over after too many mince-pies. But otherwise Tentaclii should return to normal daily service on Sunday 3rd January 2021. Indeed, there’s already a ‘Picture Postals’ post cued up for the Friday of that week.

In the meantime, you may consider perusing the vast Tentaclii archives of 3,500+ posts.

“Lovecraft in Brooklyn”

12 Saturday Dec 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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New at YouTube and official, “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” from the Jordan Lake Sessions. Originally found in more polished and mellow form on the Heretic Pride album of the band The Mountain Goats, but I think the rawer-voiced form of the Jordan Lake Sessions suits it better. Curiously, in the age of over-zealous WikiPolice, this track is allowed to have its own page at Wikipedia.

Friday ‘picture postals’ from Lovecraft: gone, but not forgotten…

11 Friday Dec 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Picture postals

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This week on ‘Picture Postals’, a fine early-1970s modernist-gothic view. It shows the site of what had been H.P. Lovecraft’s home at 66 College Street, Providence, R.I. His house would have been seen in the left of the picture, had it still been standing there, about where the large elevated box extrusion is.

Richard Corben (1940-2020)

11 Friday Dec 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, REH

≈ Leave a comment

The major comics artist and creator Richard Corben has passed away.

He came of age as an aspiring young artist in Sunflower, Kansas, and worked for a decade in making animations for business and industrial training purposes. But comics were his love, and from 1970 he produced many horror and science-fiction shorts for Eerie and Creepy magazine (now collected as Creepy Presents Richard Corben) and underground comix titles, including short b&w adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft tales. His black-and-white adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s “The Valley of the Worm” (1934) was perhaps the culmination of this period. This was the still highly-regarded Bloodstar (1976), published as a single volume inspired by the French BD format, and was the first to describe itself as a “graphic novel” in the modern sense.

Corben worked for a while as the colourist on Will Eisner’s Spirit magazine, and his own style flowered into full colour. This found a home in Metal Hurlant and Heavy Metal magazine, and such mass-market pulp-inspired work was also able to take full advantage of the uninhibited and anti-censorship mood of the 1973-1986 period. His finely painted and sensual airbrushed style became a well-known feature in the early Heavy Metal magazine, and other titles as they introduced colour sections. But his signature colour style found an even larger audience when he created the classic album cover for Meatloaf’s best-selling rock album Bat out of Hell (1977). As the times changed, from 1986–1994 Corben ran his own Fantagor Press to publish his work.

His colour and strong composition gained him a cult following over the years, but his black-and-white work is what most Lovecraftians will cherish him for. This is exemplified by his collected Haunt of Horror: Lovecraft (2008), containing his short masterly adaptations done in fine black-and-white and printed on paper able to reproduce subtle gradations and shades.

Added to Open Lovecraft

10 Thursday Dec 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

Added to the ‘Open Lovecraft’ page on this blog…

* Y. Hashimoto, “Spectacular Tentacular: Transmedial Tentacles and Their Hegemonic Struggles in Cthulhu and Godzilla”, Between: Journal of the Italian Association for the Theory and Comparative History of Literature, Vol. 10, No. 20, November 2020.

* J. Olivia, “Lovecraft’s Fear of the Unknown and Unimaginable” (Undergraduate dissertation for Charles University in Prague, 2020).

* E. Taxier, “Two Ambiguities in Object-Oriented Aesthetic Interpretation”, Open Philosophy, Vol. 3, Issue 1, 2020. (Sees two ambiguities forming a problem to aesthetic commentary arising from Graham Harman’s discussions of Lovecraft).

The Spoor of Cthulhu

09 Wednesday Dec 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Astronomy, Odd scratchings

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On its journey to the Kuiper belt, the New Horizon spacecraft passed by Pluto, delivering stunning images of the Cthulhu region. The high-altitude mountain chains in its eastern part resemble the snow-covered alpine summits, but instead of water, this frost contains methane. However, how these icy patches were deposited remained unclear…

Lovecraft would, I imagine, be delighted at both the mystery and the naming.

Lovecraft: I gatti di Ulthar

08 Tuesday Dec 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts

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A new collection of Lovecraft comics adaptations, in Italian. H.P. Lovecraft: I gatti di Ulthar e altri racconti (2020).

A dragon of RISD

07 Monday Dec 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

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Here is yet another possible, though rather vague, candidate for being the inspiration for the famous “squatting Cthulhu statuette”. If acquired by the Museum early enough, then it would have been seen by Lovecraft in the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

“Crypt-city of the Deathless One”

07 Monday Dec 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Podcasts etc.

≈ Leave a comment

Here’s an unusual one. There’s a new two-hour Librivox recording of Henry Kuttner’s story “Crypt-city of the Deathless One” (Planet Stories, Winter 1943). It appears to be throwaway pulp, a late lost-race jungle-story that’s been pepped up by being transplanted to the science-lite “hell-forests” of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede.

Also new on Librivox as a free audiobook, another curiosity. Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright’s “An Adventure In The Fourth Dimension” (October 1923)…

an uproarious skit on the four-dimensional theories of the mathematicians, and inter-planetary stories in general.

Joseph Altairac (1957-2020)

06 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

S.T. Joshi’s Blog has updated. He notes the passing of Joseph Altairac (1957-2020)…

a leading French scholar and publisher devoted to Lovecraft. He was the editor of Études Lovecraftiennes, a fine small-press journal that published many trenchant articles on Lovecraft from both French and American critics.

I’ve looked online, but there appears to be no way to get the TOCs for this French Lovecraft Studies equivalent and thus craft a translated English summary of these after the first two issues (which had offered selected Lovecraft Studies translations). Possibly an English obituary of Altairac, likely destined for the Lovecraft Annual of late summer 2021, could be followed by an itemisation of the journal’s contents in English? Note that his Études Lovecraftiennes is not to be confused with the later and similarly named Cahiers Études Lovecraftiennes which it appears were more of a series of bookshop-quality monographs. You can see the difference here…

In other Lovecraft-related news from S.T. Joshi, there is a two hour talk on YouTube between S.T. Joshi and leading Brazilian scholar Emilio S. Ribeiro.

“Yrs. for easy shipping methods…”

05 Saturday Dec 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

≈ Leave a comment

Newly arrived at Abe, Lovecraft’s Selected Letters as a VG set, $550.

Friday ‘picture postals’ from Lovecraft: the Strand, Providence

04 Friday Dec 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Picture postals

≈ Leave a comment

Last week’s ‘Picture Postal’ post on the Providence Art Club incidentally had Lovecraft mentioning that, on returning home to Providence from what he called ‘the pest zone’ of New York City, he visited the Art Club and…

In the evening a cinema show at the good old Strand in Washington Street completed a memorable and well-rounded day.” (Selected Letters II).

Here is a fine picture of the “good old Strand”, which I’ve lightly colorised…

Actually it was not so “old”, even by American standards. It had opened in summer 1915 as a dedicated movie theatre, with variety-theatre stage facilities that were also used for public talks (the Rhode Island National Guard gave a talk at the Strand Theatre in the early days of the war). Lovecraft had patronised it much in its first few years, enjoying the early silent films shown there. The house guaranteed that, once inside, its patrons would find a… “wonderful, big, beautiful place – and the shows presented will be fine always.” This was in an era of hand-cranking and movies were often shown at too great a speed, were jerky or the film mangled in the projector and bits had to be cut out. One could even find that the film was simply not the one that had been paid for. There were also the common problems of ventilation and heating. The Strand presumably did not tolerate such lapses.

What might Lovecraft have seen playing? The visit appears to have been on the very evening of his return to Providence. That was Saturday the 17th of April 1926.

One imagines that, after escaping the ‘pest zone’ of New York City, the Italian movie The Last Days of Pompeii might have been deemed suitable if a little heavy. Another possible foreign candidate is Lotte Reiniger’s debut The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the world’s first animated feature and made in silhouette animation. But neither had yet been released in America.

Several more 1926 movies likely to appeal to Lovecraft had not yet been released, such as Mary Pickford’s major swamp-horror Sparrows, Faust, The Sorrows of Satan, and the horror The Magician. Similarly the New England historical movie The Scarlet Letter was not released until August, and the grand failure Old Ironsides not until December.

There was no Chaplin movie that year, though The Gold Rush (June 1925) could still have been playing if fronted with a more recent comedy short.

Most likely are The Sea Beast (a Moby-dick adaptation) which had been an enormous hit in January and February, along with the lavish Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, but if either was still playing in a large main house several months later must be debatable. However, spring-summer 1926 seems an especially sparse time in terms of quality movies and my guess is that these two might have become a “double-bill” aiming to keep seats filled. The other possibility is the Douglas Fairbanks pirate-adventure vehicle The Black Pirate, released in early March, which de Camp later suggested as a R.E. Howard inspiration. This seems to me the most likely movie seen by Lovecraft, as he may have seen the other two while in New York City. Brisk and engaging, it’s now thought of as one of the most watchable surviving swashbucklers of the 1920s and can be had in a restored technicolour version as originally shown. The strong ‘love angle’ would also have had an appeal for his aunts.


Incidentally, search for this post revealed the supposedly mighty Google Search doing the dumbest word-substitution…

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