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Tentaclii

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

Tentaclii

Monthly Archives: August 2022

August on Tentaclii

31 Wednesday Aug 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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The nice summer weather continues here, for now.

However, I find I am increasingly likely to be in need of a regular $300+ income a month, and within the next two months. If anyone can use my talents in a reliably paid way, please contact me. I’m very accomplished in information — discovering, evaluating, comparing, and packaging it into a readable form. Along with suitably sourced pictures. Elsewhere I’m currently a part-time magazine editor-writer. If you’ve always wanted a monthly magazine or substantial newsletter for your own special niche interest, or you need a researcher for a historical book or project, then now’s the time to shout. Please also mention me to others, such as editors, who might have some regular paid home-work to offer.

In August Tentaclii did not have a great deal of activity, because I was off the ‘daily posting’ schedule. But I did manage the first part of my “Notes on the Wandrei letters”. For which I found and colorised two good vintage photos of the Roman sculpture gallery at the New York Met, a place so enjoyed by Lovecraft and Loveman. Lovecraft’s comment on this place also seemed to indicate he was aware of Loveman’s homosexuality, which was quite a find. Also found in these letters were new names for Lovecraft’s favoured Providence book shops, “Gregory’s, Tyson’s”.

In scholarship, I released my copiously annotated and corrected edition of Kipling’s seminal science-fiction story “With The Night Mail”. Also a PDF with the Letters of E. Hoffman Price to H.P. Lovecraft, for HPL’s Birthday — though the latter was far more about simple image-processing and assemblage than scholarship. I also looked into an interesting question from my Patreon patron, “Did HPL read Sherlock Holmes?” and assembled the relevant facts for him here at Tentaclii.

My ‘Open Lovecraft’ page had a little updating this month, linking to open-access scholarship. I reviewed The Lovecraft Annual 2021 at length, and along the way made many new discoveries about Lovecraft’s Red Hook house-mate (I almost typed mouse-mate) Alexander D. Messayeh. I discovered he hailed from Babylon, and made a living dealing in the rarest antiquities of the ancient world. Make of that what you will, Mythos writers.

Two big summer conventions, the Pulpfest and NecronomiCon, came and went. In journals, the annual Pulpster #31 journal was released at Pulpfest. Possibly the Lovecraft Annual also shipped in time for the Armitage Symposium wing of the NecronomiCon to discuss over breakfast. But I’m not yet aware of any convention report from that side of NecronomiCon which might mention that. If I’d been there you’d have a 15,000-word report by now.

New books this month included H.P. Lovecraft: An Introduction to His Life and Writings; and Pulp Power: The Shadow, Doc Savage, and the Art of the Street & Smith Universe. I was pleased to find I can now access the Hippocampus Press website from the UK, without needing a VPN.

In Lovecraftian arts, I was delighted to feature the incredible “Welcome to Arkham — the (HO) Model City”, a labour-of-love in miniature. There is also much Lovecraftian art activity over in the red-hot new ‘industry’ of art-generating AIs.

In screen media, S.T. Joshi’s blog brought news of a forthcoming Dunsany documentary, being made in Providence no less. Guillermo del Toro’s forthcoming horror TV show Cabinet of Curiosities revealed which Lovecraft tales had been filmed. In 3D, I gave a makeover to the old Meshbox 3D HPL figure, which is used in the Poser software. There was the usual level of activity in videogames and RPGs, but those are rarely noted on Tentaclii.

Elsewhere, a “Battle” issue of Digital Art Live magazine has been finished, which should appeal to the Conan crowd when it appears in a few days. And yes, I noted the calls at Howard Days, to help promote the new Image Books Conan (now that Marvel are done with him).

I also updated my book of a few years ago, on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and North Staffordshire, and released it as a temporary holiday-reading freebie (until 28th August).

That’s it for August. As always, please consider becoming my Patreon patron if you’re not already. Even a dollar or two helps in the current precarious circumstances.

‘Neil Gaiman on the Power of Fantasy’

31 Wednesday Aug 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.

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The New Yorker Radio Hour, “Neil Gaiman on the Power of Fantasy in our Lives”. 18 minute podcast, link also has direct .MP3 download link. Starts at 2:10, and there are then ads about a third of the way through the interview.

Hippocampus Pressed

30 Tuesday Aug 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

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I’m pleased to find that I can now access the Hippocampus Press website from the UK, without first needing to turn on a VPN and thus pretend to be in America.

Forthcoming Dunsany documentary

29 Monday Aug 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. He’s been doing a lot of travelling, and eventually reached Providence where he reports that in a studio there…

Christopher Nightingale, a young Englishman is working on what promises to be a superb documentary on Lord Dunsany

S.T. spent three hours there being interviewed on Dunsany. If this is the same “Christopher Nightingale”, the award-winning “Composer, Orchestrator & Musical Supervisor”, then the film’s music should be a treat.

New book: Copiously annotated and corrected edition of “With The Night Mail”

28 Sunday Aug 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Kipling, New books, New discoveries, Scholarly works

≈ 3 Comments

Newly published, my labour-of-love “With the Night Mail”, annotated edition. Available now as a .PDF file. $2 on Gumroad, but the first 30 Tentaclii readers can get it free by using coupon-code tentaclii at the checkout. Or if you’ve feeling generous, you can pay the $2 and skip the coupon. I’m hoping that this Gumroad ‘formula’ may eventually start to produce a much-needed bit of extra income.

Blurb:

This is the best version of Kipling’s famous “With The Night Mail” (1905), the first ‘hard’ science-fiction story. Still a fabulous steampunk read, today.

Here newly and fully annotated with 4,600 words of precise scholarly annotations. Several important new discoveries are made, including the identity of “little Ada” — she was a real pilot! All four earliest versions have been checked and cross-referenced, and the modern corrupted text has been carefully cleaned. Differences between editions are noted in the footnotes.

There are 145 footnotes, explaining the technology, lingo, and places. One footnote even discovers a long ‘new’ section of dialogue about the risk of plague, unseen since the first publications in 1905 — and never reprinted until now!

This .PDF is thus as close as we will get to a definitive version of the seminal story that launched the entire genre of hard science-fiction, and which opened the highly influential Gollancz yellow-jacket survey anthology One Hundred Years of Science Fiction (1969).

As a bonus, there are four new full-page colour illustrations including one of “George”. This labour-of-love e-book is 28 pages in total, delivered to you as a .PDF file. It may interest RPG gamers, as well as scholars and readers.

As you can tell, I’ve at last been able to see all four of the earliest editions. And my gosh… many differences! And with errors in places, in some modern editions, even including a handful in the free version on the site of The Kipling Society. Anyway, regular Tentaclii readers know my approach… copious attention to detail, deep historical research, resulting in many fascinating footnotes. Enjoy.

In Salem

27 Saturday Aug 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

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Possibly of interest, someone newly offering a Lovecraft walking tour for Salem than Providence. No dates, and it looks like one of those things where you have to assemble a party first, and then engage the guide/tutor. So far as I know there’s no printed ‘guide to what Lovecraft saw and explored in Salem’. Perhaps there should be?

Notes on the Wandrei letters – part one

26 Friday Aug 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Picture postals

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These are my notes of interesting points found in the first third of the book Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei (2019).

The year is 1927. All quoted letters are from Lovecraft unless otherwise stated. This part of the book also gives letters from Wandrei.


p. 26: Among critics of the time, “Their idea of fantasy is the sophisticated snickering of James Branch Cabell”.

p. 29. He gives a short list of the “Utopian things” that he read when young. One of these is named as “Wells’ “The Time Machine””. This is interesting as, according to Letters to Family, The Time Machine was only read by Lovecraft in November 1924. We know now that this 1924 edition was a library copy, borrowed for Lovecraft by Long, and thus did not come from the Wandrei collection of early science fiction. So, did Lovecraft actually read this seminal work when young, forget it, and then re-encounter it afresh much later in 1924? It sound like it.

p. 29. Also on the list of “Utopian things” read when young is “Parry’s “The Scarlet Empire””. This was a satirical novel published 1906. A young socialist tries to commit suicide at Coney Island, but is rescued from the water by Atlantean socialists who secretly dwell offshore. He is quickly shocked into awareness that their socialist city requires a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, severely limiting free speech and also persecuting love as ‘reactionary individualism’. A love interest occurs. Escape from tyranny, and destruction of the underwater city by submarine torpedo. The latter point recalling the fate of the reef off Innsmouth.

p. 32. “The Black Cat used to have some excellent fragments of the macabre”. This national news-stand story magazine was the predecessor of Weird Tales, though it seems Lovecraft did not read it all the way up to the crossover date. A footnote give a line from the letters to Barlow. He “began to notice it” about 1904 [approx age 14] and then would “buy that reg’lar like”. So the period to look for such tales from The Black Cat, would be 1904 onward. The cessation date of his reading is is unknown.

p. 54. “My love of the weird dates from fairy-tale days, my curve of taste running [first] through Grimm…”

p. 63. “To my mind, the only really beautiful life which the decaying world can hope to know in the years to come is that of the small, aloof nations with primitive simplicity and strong nationalist self-consciousness; insular centres of ancient, intensively individual & tenaciously vital cultural impulses like Iceland or Ireland. These places are still alive, enjoying unbroken communion with the creative forces behind them…”

p. 65. Among a wider world ‘if only I had the funds’ travel itinerary, he notes various places in northern Europe which he would especially like to visit. “Old England [of course, but also] Nuremberg [in Bavaria], Ratsibon [old name for Regensburg, in eastern Bavaria and with a Slavic culture], Mount Saint Michel, Chartres [both big ancient religious sites in northern France].” Why Bavaria? His recently written Dexter Ward has Baron Ferenczy’s castle, of course, though the location there is “dark wooded mountains” near Klausenburg (a nod to Stoker’s Dracula). But that’s Transylvania. The likely Bavarian interest surely comes rather from the Voss book The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter which Lovecraft found, though “not weird”, … “makes the wild Bavarian hills and deep woods and hellish lakes quiver with a malign and poignant vitality. … The man who dreamed this scene knew Bavaria from the bottom up.”

p. 67. In 1926 he had acquired the book The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain by John H. Ingram.

p. 77-78. “But still the little ancient lanes lead off down the precipice to the west; spectral in their many-peaked archaism, & dipping to a riot of iridescent decay where the wicked old [Providence] waterfront recalls its proud East India days […] sometimes I venture down into this maelstrom of tottering houses, broken transoms, tumbling steps, twisted balustrades, swarthy faces and nameless odours, winding from South Main to South Water, searching out the docks where the bay and sound steamers [i.e. the ‘Newport boat’ from “Call of Cthulhu” etc] still touch […] the dreaming wharves where Providence Indiamen [i.e. large sailing-ships] used to ride at anchor. Just this week there is a genuine old-time sailing ship in port — a rare occurrence now — and I love the sight of its antique masts above the centuried warehouse roofs.” See also page 98.

Heavy cargo, coal and oil docks on the left. Passenger docks and ‘non-messy’ freight on the right. Here we only see half the waterfront, since it ran on until it reached Fox Point which was where the New York boats docked.

p. 100. Charles “Fort is a close personal friend of Weird Tales author Edmond Hamilton, to whom he has suggested several story plots appearing in the magazine.”

p. 126. There is a marvellous extended description of his first visions of the ‘dream New York’. In Prospect Park at dusk… “the bronze lions crouch cryptic beside the marble quays of templed lakelets”. These were western-type lions, not Asian ones. He also gave Wandrei an extended two-page itinerary of things and place to see on a first visit to New York City, including Harlem. “Also walk across the High Bridge, which Poe loved”.

p. 131. He lists the used book shops then in Providence. “You will part with many a shilling at Eddy’s, The Old Corner, Gregory’s, Tyson’s, and so on.” Wandrei eventually spent $50 at such shops, then a large sum, and had to hitch-hike home. This develops into quite a hobo travelogue for Lovecraft from Wandrei, and there is a fine passage describing Wandrei’s entrance into Chicago on a powerful motorbike. Wearing goggles and mistaken for plain-clothes police, they were waved through all the city’s grids and jams.

Wandrei appears to have something of a spending problem at this point, as he later purchases two Clark Ashton Smith paintings, which apparently cleaned him out for the next year.

p. 132. At the Metropolitan Museum, Lovecraft recalled he “revelled in the new Wing K — the Roman garden with the statues. A certain austere head of a tight-lipped old Republican Roman is as much a favourite of mine as that effeminately pretty Antinous-type Hellenic head in the corridor is a favourite of Loveman’s.” Wandrei was then in New York with Loveman, and this seems a fairly clear ‘tip off’ to the lad about Loveman’s amorous inclinations.

The Met has pictures of “the Roman garden with the statues”, made in 1925…

p. 141. Confirmation by one who had visited, that Dwyer did indeed live on the lapping edge of a newly-created reservoir [re: “Colour out of Space”]. Wandrei described to Lovecraft… “a little farmhouse near the edge of the Ashokan reservoir which gives New York City its water.”

p. 147. I’ve just read [Wells’] “War of the Worlds” for the first time, in Amazing Stories. … the best thing of H.G.’s which I’ve ever seen”. This is 9th August 1927, and would be Lovecraft’s first encounter with the Wellsian idea of the ‘creeping red weed’.

p. 146, 150-51. Possible relevant to Lovecraft’s “Plan of Foxfield — for possible fictional use”, though never used. Lovecraft plans to visit “the ancient Deerfield region” with an architecture unlike that found elsewhere. He visited circa 19th-23rd August 1927, when he called it “The summit of my earthly ambition — I’ve gone broke on postcards”. Cook added a note that HPL had spent the then-handsome sum of $5 on Deerfield postcards. See: Will Murray’s “Where Was Foxfield?” in Lovecraft Studies No. 33 (1995). I’m uncertain if this suggests a link with Deerfield.

Deerfield Burying Ground, with olde style carved face on gravestone.

p. 156. Lovecraft suffered a night in the primitive YMCA at crumbling Newburyport, at the end of August 1927. This confirmed all of Wandrei’s prejudices about YMCAs, and sounds like a precursor to the overnight room in Innsmouth.

pp. 162 and 167. Lovecraft returns to Jake’s on the Providence waterfront, and discovered there was a “Jake”…

Talman enlightened me concerning the identity on “Jake”. It seems there is a real person by this name — Adam Jacques — who actually pronounces his patronymick Jakes. This is the big boss — and you may be able to recall him as the somewhat thick-set man with the moustache. … Domingo, however, is the life of the place.

Jake’s appeared in the Providence Journal, 10th September 1927. Lovecraft sent a cutting. The letter was 11th September 1927, but the letter and cutting are not in the Brown repository. But apparently the newspaper archives for this date have survived.

Incidentally, I read that Lovecraft later had some criticism of Donald Wandrei, to others. But that was surely later than 1927. In 1927 he’s obviously very pleased to have newly discovered the “new Galpin” and to have successfully introduced him to the Circle.

Stable Diffusion released in a Web version

25 Thursday Aug 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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The open-source AI-powered art-generator ‘Stable Diffusion’ is now available on the Web, as DreamStudio. Not to be confused with the existing Dream by WOMBO.

Working and tested. Log in, generate pictures by typing text with a couple of names or descriptive concepts. You get about 100 goes, before the paywall come up. Then it’s $12 for 1,000 prompts.

H.P. Lovecraft views a fiery sunset in the city of Providence…

The new DreamStudio AI also gave me this, among many mis-fires. Too much of a “Buster Keaton blend”, but not bad all the same. It would probably fool those who had no idea who Buster Keaton was.

Such AI’s tend to have great problems with human hands, feet, and to an extent hair. Often one leg or arm is missing or far longer than the other. Eyes often don’t match. As you can see above, one eye is bulging more than the other. There’s also often a general tell-tale “gloopiness”, and circles are often distorted.

Serials and cereals

25 Thursday Aug 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

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The Silver Key blog feels “A bookish nostalgia”…

Life was moving slowly, but it was great.

A blog post well worth reading, I’d say.

I’d only add that there was a lot more piffle back then which we’ve forgotten, dire pre-Internet stuff that you took or watched because you couldn’t get anything better in that line. Some of it still has a certain charm and wobbly interest, but much of it was just… commercial piffle (see any issue of SFX for the re-treads). Now, search skills + speed-of-access + watching-the-right people means we can vector onto the good stuff with relative ease. The excitement and anticipation for it is perhaps less, admittedly. By the time we discover it, the item tends to be already available. And available in quantity. So there’s a further personal discipline that’s then needed for focus, both in “what worthy stuff do I spend time on” and “how do I make the time needed for it”. Since the quantity is also often increased, e.g. omnibus doorstop editions of Savage Sword of Conan etc, massive TV series, long videogames. Then there’s the question of attention span, with The Silver Key finding…

sustained reading is much harder today than it used to be

Might be a good idea to do it over and just after breakfast? That gives you at least an hour a day of sustained book reading from paper. Audiobooks + wireless wi-fi headphones (not the infernal bluetooth type, proper wi-fi) can also help cover the ground on books and stories, at other times.

Audiobook: The Last Galley

24 Wednesday Aug 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Doyle, Podcasts etc.

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New on Librivox, Conan Doyle’s book The Last Galley, Impressions and Tales (1911). This is from before Doyle’s marked turn to spiritualism.

Doyle writes in his introduction…

The first half is made up of a series of pictures of the past … there is a region between actual story and actual history which has never been adequately exploited. I could imagine, for example, a work dealing with some great historical epoch, and finding its interest not in the happenings to particular individuals, their adventures and their loves, but in the fascination of the actual facts of history themselves. These facts might be coloured with the glamour which the writer of fiction can give…

The Academy remarked, in a review of the book on publication in 1911, that the evocations of the first section would make an excellent accompaniment to a tiresome journey…

The classical section, consisting of some 124 pages, is extremely well done and transports us into the atmosphere of the period in which the tales are told.

In the Librivox reading this historical section runs for three and a half hours.

In the eight stories that then make up the second half of the book, we end with “The Terror of Blue John Gap”. This is a upland monster-horror set in and beneath the Peak District of England, where the Midlands rises to meet the rocky North. The specific location it was based on would likely be Treak Cliff Cavern near Castleton, a Peak mine since Ancient Roman times and a source for ‘Blue John’ rock which the story title alludes to. The cave played a key role in the discovery of the principle of evolution by Erasmus Darwin.

New book: The Illustrated History of Warren Comics

23 Tuesday Aug 2022

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

≈ 3 Comments

Illustrators Quarterly Special #14: The Illustrated History of Warren Comics. 144 pages.

A searcher for “Illustrators Quarterly” special would get results indicating that Amazon UK doesn’t carry the “Special” versions, other than #1. But it is there, awkwardly titled as “The Illustrated History of Warren Magazines: illustrators Special 14″. On Amazon the Specials go under the title of “illustrators Special” for some reason.

What a wonder a Euro companion volume might be: The Illustrated History of the Toutain Magazines, though obviously far more difficult to research.

Meshbox HPL makover

21 Sunday Aug 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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This is about as good as I can get the Meshbox 3D HPL for Poser, with some SSS on the skin and quite a bit of Photoshop. I’m not a skin expert in such matters. I’ve gone for the paler skin look, rather than shrimp-pink n’ healthy. The skin shader is my tweak of the generic Ghostship SSS, rather than EZskin 3 which lacks a profile. Rendered in Poser’s SuperFly (aka Blender’s Cycles, same thing).

After some retro-i-fication…

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