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Tentaclii

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

Tentaclii

Monthly Archives: March 2021

Lovecraft Annual #14

31 Wednesday Mar 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Scholarly works

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Neale Monks reviews Lovecraft Annual #14, 2020 for Stephen Hunt’s SFcrowsnest.

Santiago Caruso interview

31 Wednesday Mar 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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A new short interview with the Lovecraft illustrator Santiago Caruso, in a journal under Creative Commons Attribution. Which means it might be translated for your small press journal or similar.

New book: Le guide Lovecraftien de Providence

30 Tuesday Mar 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books

≈ 1 Comment

French tourists to Providence now have a new guidebook, Le guide Lovecraftien de Providence (2021). So far as I know this is the first since Jean-Christophe Requette’s in 1993, which had b&w photos from the mid 1980s.

From a review in French…

… the first real book in French on the city of the Master. And this is not a guide to Providence, but a Lovecraftian guide to Providence, listing the sites surveyed by the writer or mentioned in his short stories. The book is beautifully presented, with colour photos and numerous quotes from his correspondence and fiction. Everything is soberly written, but with a personal tone that conveys all the passion felt by the editor during her journey. Well done, and and perhaps we will soon see a Lovecraftian Guide to New York City?

Another review specifies that there are…

… four routes carefully prepared by field research in 2018 and 2019, with maps and original photos, quotes, biographical insights, showing you the historical and topographical landmarks.

Which reminds me, now NecronomiCon 2022 is scheduled, that a suitable fundraiser for the convention would be an ebook of Henry Beckwith’s Lovecraft’s Providence & Adjacent Parts. In paper it’s now become a £70 ‘collectable’.

Clark Ashton Smith in Brazil

30 Tuesday Mar 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Kittee Tuesday, New books

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A new blog post from S.T. Joshi. Among other items of note, two volumes of Clark Ashton Smith are now available in Brazil in translation.

Talking of South America, new on Archive.org under Creative Commons is Les Historietas: Un Survol De La BD Argentine, being a sumptuously illustrated fannish history of Argentine comics and their creators. There are several pages on Breccia and Lovecraft.

Trans: “The tale you have told is terrifying, Malinche…”

New book: The Last Oblivion

30 Tuesday Mar 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, New books

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New to me, The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poems of Clark Ashton Smith, now in a second affordable paperback edition (January 2021) and with a handsome cover re-design. Also listed on Amazon.

Lovecraft, mon amour

29 Monday Mar 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts

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Martine Chifflot’s Lovecraft-Sonia stage play “Lovecraft, mon amour” will be staged in Burgundy, France, in September 2021…

It appears to have premiered(? on Zoom?) in March in Clermont-Ferrand, which is smack in the middle of France about 40 miles west of Lyon…

A fantastic theatrical and musical biopic, written for the centenary (1921-2021) of the meeting of H.P. Lovecraft and Sofia Greene Davis, his only wife. The play immerses the audience in American popular music from the years 1920-47. It opens in 1947 when Sonia learns of the passing of her husband H.P. Lovecraft, ten years after his death. This news upsets her and causes memories to flood back. But then a strange feeling grows — Howard is here [to speak to]. From recollections to confidences, these two people reconstruct the course of their thwarted love, so extraordinary and overwhelming. Will Sonia understand Howard [at last]? Is love stronger than death?

The book version of the play appeared in 2018, and was acclaimed by S.T. Joshi…

Update: Apparently there was a “Vichy” date also, now “postponed to 2022”. A first-try “movie of the play” is also being made and said to be “online soon”.

Ian Miller

28 Sunday Mar 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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Ian Miller, cover artist for the British Panther paperback Lovecraft editions, has a new original on sale, “Ghast, dissected” along with a variety of similar pen sketches including Poe illustrations.

Two of the Panther Lovecraft book covers can also be had as large fine-art prints.

The “Haunter” art had to be recreated and is not quite the same as the lost original…

There are also several collectable books…

Subways, street lights and superstitions

27 Saturday Mar 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context

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More brief notes on interesting items gleaned from Letters to Family…

* Lovecraft’s experience of New York City subway travel was likely not the same in 1922 as in 1924-26, due the carriage types. He appears to have been at the cusp of a changeover in the types, from old to modern. In 1922 he remarks on the very old hand-crafted and very large carriages. He preferred travelling on the largest and most palatial of these, and went out of his way to do so.

* Providence had good strong street-lighting at night by 1922, not always the case in comparable provincial cities. Relevant to the inclination to take Providence night-walks, with Eddy and alone.

* In spring 1924 Lovecraft researched and wrote three chapters of a book on “American superstitions”. This was prior to his work for Houdini, and his own Supernatural Literature. There is no footnote detailing the fate of this text, though possibly I’ll encounter more details on later pages. I’d suspect it was later rolled into the Houdini work.

Flying down to Chile

27 Saturday Mar 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Podcasts etc.

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Lovecraft in Chile. A new 70 minute video talk which appears to be a broad survey on Lovecraft in Chile (a nation formed from the provinces that run all down the Pacific coast of South America). Sergio Fritz…

… reviews how Lovecraft and his literature arrived in Chile, how he has influenced certain national authors, musicians, filmmakers, illustrators … Chilean bands that have taken Lovecraftian elements, such as: Dorso, Atomic Aggressor, Demonic Rage, Miskatonic Union, Nyarlathotep, Arkham, Disembowel, Inanna, Inhumano, Cryptic Cult, Unnaussprechilchen Kulten, Lluvia Acida, etc. Writers like Hugo Correa, Sergio Meier, Patricio Alfonso and myself. Magazines like Yermo Frio and Vientos de Irem. Movies like Chilean Gothic … Juan Vasquez in comics … my essay on Lovecraft, the texts of Hugo Correa, the anthology Chile del Terror, Visiones Lovecraftianas.

Since YouTube has the automatic transcripts, you could likely learn more by running the transcription through a translator-bot.

Long, hats, and the high bridge

26 Friday Mar 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context

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A few more insights gleaned from Letters to Family…

* It was Lovecraft who introduced Long to the second-hand bookshops of New York City, and not the other way around. Presumably Long had, until 1922, purchased purely from the ordinary bookshops and perhaps via the lists of mail-order dealers. Lovecraft notes that Long had never once entered the city’s many used bookstores. On learning that he could sell books fairly easily, Long lugged a suitcase full of unwanted books downtown and sold them for $4 credit.

* Sonia’s affluence and profligacy with money are a little better understood when one learns that she had private clients. For these she made exclusive hats, and was able to work from home to turn $20 of raw materials into a $60 designer hat. In today’s money that means she was making $600 profit per hat, and there was then a huge demand for fancy hats.

* In 1922 Lovecraft knew Poe’s High Bridge as “Highbridge”, and visited it and other Poe places in 1922.

‘Picture postals’ from Lovecraft: Museum of Natural History, Roger Williams Park

26 Friday Mar 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Astronomy, Historical context, Picture postals

≈ 1 Comment

Newly coloured, a huge picture of The Museum of Natural History, Roger Williams Park, Providence. 1906, Lovecraft was then aged 16 and deeply investigating astronomy — so much so that the following year Prof. Upton of Brown personally introduced the young Lovecraft to Percival Lowell.

Only when record-pictures are this size and glass-plate clarity can one see certain details. The lizard-creature atop the building, for instance…

Or the wry humour in placing an “I Speak Your Weight” machine next to a short bench which looks about wide enough to accommodate one very fat person.

On the opposite side of the entrance-steps is what appears to be a huge lump of concrete, but I would guess was more likely a very fossil-rich accretion full of fossils… and thus designed to attract the sort of children interested in fossil-hunting. Another small but interesting detail is the British-English use of the wording “rubbish” on what today would be a ‘trash’ bin.

Lovecraft may have become overly familiar with the Museum’s exhibits by 1906, but it appears to have had local and visiting exhibitions and these could have been a continuing draw. He surely returned to it in the Autumn of 1916, when the famous astronomer Prof. Percival Lowell (he of the ‘Martian canals’ theory) exhibited there…

a remarkable collection of astronomical photographs … in the form of glass transparencies, exhibited in a darkened room, and illuminated from behind, so that they stand out with vivid clearness

There were 150 of these and they formed a “blockbuster” show, attracting over 1,300 visitors on the first day in Providence…

Currier of Brown University was at the museum all afternoon answering questions with regard to the 150 transparencies

I was uncertain of the 1916 date for this show, before, but Popular Astronomy for 1916 confirms it. The journal reprinted a newspaper report from Providence…

Lovecraft claimed lack of belief of Lowell’s ‘canal’ theories (“I never had, have not, & never will have the slightest belief in Lowell’s speculations” he wrote in 1916), though his surviving articles show more ambivalence. But he surely cannot have been sniffy enough about the theories to have missed this major local show of the Lowell Collection, in his favourite local park and running from circa 9th-23rd October 1916. Many of the pictures by Lowell and his highly skilled assistants were not again equalled in topographical detail until the 1960s. Also, Lovecraft would have been aware that by 1915 Lowell had theorized and had begun the search for “Planet X” (Pluto)…

in a manner not wholly dissimilar to that advised by Lovecraft himself in his letter to the Scientific American of July 1906. (S.T. Joshi, Primal Sources)

Rather amazingly the Lowell Collection of planetary photographs does not seem to have been digitized for modern public use. Perhaps there is a worry that they might still be mis-used re: the ‘Martian canals’? Nor are there even any pictures of what the Lowell exhibition looked like to the visitor of 1916.

Lowell died unexpectedly in November 1916, and Lovecraft penned a short poetic ‘elegy’ so turgid that it could even be intended to be read as some sort of sardonic snub in a coded 18th century manner. It ends by imagining Lowell ascending to the heavens and becoming a star, adding… “a new brilliance to the Southern Cross!” Could this be Lovecraft’s snippy allusion to the criss-cross of Lowell’s ‘canals’ theory, and also that Lowell had things ‘upside down’? Because the simple four-star Southern Cross is only visible ‘down under’ in places such as Australia. Apparently all Australians know that an observer can draw ‘imaginary lines’ out from the cross, to find the direction south at night.

How to find your posts list at WordPress.com

26 Friday Mar 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Housekeeping

≈ 1 Comment

Why do UI designers have to constantly make things worse? WordPress.com has had a back-end makeover, and the dates have vanished from the back-end’s listed posts. Only after seven days do you start to see dates, and then without the year. Only after the current year to you start to see the year-date. Scheduled posts are now on a separate page from the normal posts, and have no dates listed against them. It’s hardly ideal.

Thankfully, bits of the sensible old UI are usually left working in WordPress.com, but you just have to find them. In this case the link to the former format — dates and times all visible at a glance, all posts inc. scheduled listed on one page and in order — can now be found thus…

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