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Tentaclii

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

Tentaclii

Monthly Archives: September 2022

Some monsters

30 Friday Sep 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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No postcards, this Friday. I sometimes feel that visitors coming hoping for monsters may be a little disappointed to find me chuntering about the places Lovecraft knew/visited. So here’s a selection of full-blown monsters, as if from some unfinished and long-lost 1980s Dreamlands book made under the influence of Brian Froud…

Hopgob

Ambler

Poogmush

Waplee

Gobrot

Made with AI and some Photoshop-ing, of course. I’ve discovered the trick of getting an art-gen AI to consistently produce an isolated figure on a plain backdrop. It’s my understanding that raw AI generated art can’t be in copyright, unless then manually reconfigured (e.g. with significant manual over-painting, or the art used for comic-book panels that are then overlaid with text). So, despite my Photoshop fixes and tweaks on the above, all the above five pictures are here placed under full Creative Commons Attribution. Feel free to use them in your RPG etc. If you need better names, Murray Ewing has a new Lovecraftian Title Generator.

Elsewhere this week, Noah Pinion asks “Is AI a Lovecraftian intelligence?”.

Forthcoming: book on Lovecraft and NYC in the 1920s

28 Wednesday Sep 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Scholarly works

≈ 1 Comment

Great news from Another Town on the Hudson…

Last month, I submitted my book manuscript, a biography of H.P. Lovecraft and his New York City period, to my publisher, capping nearly two years of imaginative immersion and intensive writing.

Also…

In October [2022], I’ll be talking about Lovecraft and New York at the King Manor Museum in Jamaica, Queens.

The location is about six miles east of Brooklyn, New York City.

New on Librivox

27 Tuesday Sep 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Podcasts etc.

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New on Librivox, public domain readings Dreams Collection 3 – Stories and Poems. Includes Lovecraft’s friend Henry S. Whitehead’s Weird Tales story “The Wonderful Thing” (1925) in a 27 minute reading, and two from Poe.

The new Short Ghost and Horror Collection 062 also has “He” by Lovecraft, and again has Poe.

Fantasy Goes to Hell

26 Monday Sep 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Scholarly works

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News of the Mythopoeic Society’s “Fantasy Goes to Hell – Online Midwinter Seminar”, set for 27th-28th January 2023. Deadline for papers is 15th November 2022. The requirement is for discussions of Hell as found in “modern fantasy work”, which here can include Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. So I guess the organisers can go back as far as the 1940s/50s if needed.

Coining it

25 Sunday Sep 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

≈ 1 Comment

The Republic of Palau, the Pacific island-chain nation, has issued a new pure-silver 20 dollar coin commemorating H.P. Lovecraft. I assume it’s real currency that might buy you ⅔’s of a ginger-beer on one of their beautiful atoll beaches.

But isn’t little Palau supposed to be beneath the rising waves by now, like R’lyeh? Nope. Despite many claims heard in the media, none of the Pacific atoll islands with people on them are shrinking.

Incidentally, looking up the spelling of R’lyeh via search shows that Google doesn’t know what it is when slightly mis-spelled. Bing / DuckDuckGo (the Duck is Bing) does, suggesting Microsoft may now have a wider semantic lookup than Google Search.

Arkham House guide

24 Saturday Sep 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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New on Archive.org to borrow, Horrors and unpleasantries : a bibliographical history & collectors’ price guide to Arkham House (1982). Probably superseded now, as a price-guide, but other aspects of it may interest some.

The Paterson Museum

23 Friday Sep 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Picture postals

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Lovecraft’s friend James F. Morton here describes his Paterson Museum, for the April 1933 issue of Hobbies: the Magazine for Collectors.

There’s nothing here about his collection of glow-in-the-dark minerals, known about from other sources. Though we do learn here, for the first time, that “cave minerals” had a special display. And we get a general feel for that the place was like in size and scope, after some five years under his care.

New book: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain

22 Thursday Sep 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works

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An open-access review of Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain. “Modern” here meaning early modernity, from the 1870s through to the 1930s…

On the whole we cannot see the turn to psychical research as a momentary lapse of reason on the part of late Victorian physicists. [And] we should not be embarrassed or surprised by the interest that leading physicists had in the occult.

Studi Lovecraftiani No. 21

21 Wednesday Sep 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books, Scholarly works

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A new issue of the Italian language Lovecraft journal Studi Lovecraftiani No. 21 (Autumn 2022) is now available. Contents in Italian include…

* A long and detailed article titled “Collecting Lovecraft”, a guide for connoisseurs and collectors looking for the rarest and most sought-after editions, as well as those more difficult to find.

* An articulate essay on the role played by music in HPL’s works.

* An essay on the pseudobiblia of Sutter Cane. [Cane being the fictional novelist in John Carpenter’s movie In The Mouth of Madness.]

* An in-depth study of Jean Robin’s book, H.P. Lovecraft et le secret des adorateurs du Serpent (2017). [Robin appears to be a stylish writer who is well known in French occult circles, in the tradition of Rene Guenon. Title translates as ‘H.P. Lovecraft and the Secret of the Serpent Worshipers’, which appears to claim to be non-fiction.]

* The second and last part of an essay on the “abstraction of corporeality” in the fiction of HPL.

* Unpublished works by the master, newly in Italian. Notes on “Medusa’s Coil” with Zelia Bishop, and the poem [known in Italian as] “A Pan”.

* A detailed review of Joshi’s HPL biography I Am Providence, recently available in Italian.

* News of the latest releases at the international level.

* Two new Lovecraftian stories by contemporary writers.

Cover art by Pietro Rotelli.

Podcast: Providence pals interviewed

21 Wednesday Sep 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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Thanks to Gregory for letting me know about a new podcast. For Henrik Moller’s 150th podcast last week, he interviewed (in English) living members of the ‘Providence pals’…

The first wave of serious Lovecraft scholars started out in the 1970s. [In the U.S.] They called themselves ‘The Providence pals’. This is the story of how they helped Lovecraft to become recognised as a serious literary author [at a crucial time].

PayPal now plugged into Gumroad

20 Tuesday Sep 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Housekeeping

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My PayPal is now plugged into Gumroad. I’m new to Gumroad, and I hadn’t realised that…

If you have not connected PayPal Connect, your customers will not be able to pay via PayPal.

So you should now be able to use PayPal when buying, or when kindly bumping up a price from a free “$0”. There’s not much there that’s paid, at present, but there will be.

Incidentally, if you signed up to Gumroad with a different email than you used for PayPal, be very careful to ensure you plug in the PayPal address. Don’t ever add a second different email address to your PayPal account, as it can lead to instant non-appealable account termination.

Another Lovecraft-as-character story

20 Tuesday Sep 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in de Camp, Lovecraft as character

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While searching for an audio reading of de Camp’s 1938 non-fiction “Language for Time Travelers” (there doesn’t appear to be one), I discovered another Lovecraft-as-character story. In the 2005 collection Years in the Making: The Time-Travel Stories of L. Sprague de Camp, there is the story “Balsamo’s Mirror” (1976), which has Lovecraft as a very recognisable though un-named character.

In this 1930s tale an MIT university undergraduate named Willy and his friend Lovecraft wax lyrical about the virtues of the 18th century.

He [Lovecraft] wanted America to rejoin the British Empire; I was for splendid isolation. We argued history. He was devoted to the eighteenth century; I thought that men wearing wigs over good heads of hair looked silly.

They get lost in some dark back-alleys along Providence’s waterfront and thereby encounter the curious storefront of a Madame Nosi, mystic. The impoverished Lovecraft is reluctant to enter, but the affluent Willy offers to pay whatever her fee is. For a hefty $20 she offers a trip into what is claimed to be ‘the mirror of Nostradamus’, which apparently allowed the old seer to travel in time and actually see the future. The pair use it to visit the eighteenth-century, but unfortunately they find themselves in the form of humble rural yeomen (farm workers), rather than writers and wits in the London coffee-houses. Adventure ensues.

It’s not Nabakov, but it tells an amusing tale and must have been written interestingly close to the date of de Camp’s Lovecraft biography. It can be found in the Archive.org scan of Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, June 1976.

As for his “Language for Time Travelers”, I’ve also discovered that Willy Ley produced a similar essay titled “Geography for Time-travellers”, just a year later. Apparently this takes a high level view, in terms of what the Earth would have looked like to space-visitors in orbit during past ages and aeons. C.M. Korbluth followed in similar vein with his essay “Time Travel and the Law”. All three essays can be found collected in good book form in the Martin Greenberg edited collection Coming Attractions (1957), which unfortunately is not on Archive.org. Though all the articles collected had first appeared in the pulps, and so the additional two can probably be found there with a little sleuthing.

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