The U.S. entertainment trade-journal Variety, 1905-2017 is being loaded onto Archive.org from microfilm. This resource should make it somewhat easier to discover more about the entertainment H.P. Lovecraft saw and heard during his lifetime. Including theatre and radio.

September 1929

Tentaclii Towers displayed itself in many moods this month, as the changeable weather of a typical English June settled in. Sometimes the walls were mist shrouded, sometimes basking in sun as if the Towers were a Mediterranean chateau. Inside the hoary Towers I relaxed my daily posting schedule. The vast Library of Ye Olde Postcards has also been locked up for the summer, to make time for other matters.

But in June my last few regular Friday ‘Picture Postals’ posts offered a view across “Night in Providence, 1933”, newly colorised; walked on “a hot day under the Brooklyn Elevated”; and I also spotted the man himself via a pleasing Dessin Jullia postcard portrait from France. Then, just as I thought the time-consuming ‘Postcard’ posts were in abeyance for a while, up pop some eBay pictures that appear to show Lovecraft’s childhood ‘ground zero’. The Seekonk near York Pond, before the extensive road-grading work. These pictures will appear enlarged and colourised and geo-checked in due course.

In scholarly work, a number of links to scholarly items were added to my Open Lovecraft page at Tentaclii. I noted a call for papers for the German book H.P. Lovecraft and Germany: Cultural Reflections, and offered some additional topic suggestions. I reviewed The Lovecraft Annual for 2020 at some length. I began the reading of Lovecraft’s Letters to Family, Vol. II, and I’ll be posting sets of notes here as I go.

In books I noticed that Lovecraft’s poetry is now in a Swedish translation, and that there’s a Dream Quest semi-artbook from the same publisher. I tracked down exactly who was interviewed in the way out-of-print book Speaking of Science Fiction, and along the way discovered there are now three volumes of Darrell Schweitzer’s Speaking of the Fantastic interviews with authors and editors. Wormwoodania brought news that there is a weighty Robert Aickman biography forthcoming, and I rescued and colourised a bad scan of a fine Ida Kar portrait of him to accompany my post on this news.

I’m always pleased when people record audio readings of Lovecraft’s more interesting poems, and this month it was Lovecraft’s early anti-booze poem, “The Power Of Wine” (1916) from SFFAudio. Which was not without macabre interest. In other audio I linked to several items from the successful Robert E. Howard Days 2021, and I noticed the most recent Voluminous podcast which surveyed the Long letters newly acquired by Brown University.

A passing notice here of a Lovecraft mention in the memoir Literary Lamas of New York led to me noticing the same author’s Evangelical Cockroach book of stories. This was later reprinted by Richard A. Lupoff and, in a lengthy trailer post for the reprint, I found that Lupoff had slipped in another comment on George Sylvester Viereck… “Woodford also published a late fantasy novel by the controversial German-American poet-journalist-propagandist George Sylvester Viereck”. See my earlier post on Tentaclii on Lupoff and his claims re: Viereck and Lovecraft.

In the visual arts I spotted the new 64-page comic, Nightmares of Providence #1 which is a stretch-goal anthology as part of an Alan Moore fundraiser and as such has major talent in it. I found several new items for the ‘Lovecraft as character’ category of posts, one of these also being a recent comic. Also on Tentaclii this month, more of my surveys of DeviantArt. Another such is to come in a few days.

There appears to be a lot of activity going on in the Lovecraftian games market, as usual, way too much for me to cover. But I have a soft spot for the Elder Scrolls series (Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim etc) and so was pleased to note the substantial DLC/mod “Here There Be Monsters” – The Call Of Cthulhu for Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. I believe there’s also a well-made Lovecraftian indie movie out and called The Deep Ones, though as yet I’ve not looked at reviews.

I’m pleased to also say I have a new ‘draw on the screen’ pen monitor, a £500 XP-Pen Artist 22 (2nd Gen, 2021). The 16-page technical review that earned me this beauty is to be found in the latest issue of Digital Art Live magazine, if you were thinking of getting one too. My ‘old’ PC is also back up and running, and nothing was lost from the hard-drive failure on the now-defunct ‘new’ one. Nothing except time, as it’s taken a solid two weeks of work, on and off, to get back to something like normal. The situation is still not ideal, but I don’t have the price of a new £1,000 PC that would be reasonable future-proof. My thanks to my Pateons, whose June Patreon donations helped be put a good 500Gb SSD drive in the ‘old’ PC. It’s fast enough that it should get me back the two lost weeks of time, before Christmas.

That’s it for June. Please consider becoming my patron on Patreon, or upping your regular donation. It really helps me out. One-off PayPal donations are also welcome via the sidebar link on the blog, to help buy new books of Lovecraft letters. I still have about eight of those to get.

A final thought: how will you mark Lovecraft’s birthday later in 2021?