Another month gone, and Christmas on the horizon. It feels a strange time for the ‘every four-years’ soccer World Cup to be happening, though I guess Qatar would have been too hot at other times of the year. Sadly I can’t reciprocate the waves of desert heat (the only football I ever watch is recordings of the World Cup matches, every four years), since it’s another winter when my heater has to stay off due to the cost. Thankfully it’s been relatively mild so far, here at Tentaclii Towers.

This month in my Friday ‘Picture Postals’ posts I looked up the side of College Street; down the Seekonk River; tapped the wheels of Lovecraft’s changing railway travel experience; and peered into the Providence pictures of Beth Murray. The latter caused me to discover the existence of her This is Providence: Photographs (1947), and its companion for Newport.

On the L.W. Currey site this month, three new pen-drawings of Providence, inked into a letter by Lovecraft. Apparently there are four more pictures, also new to the world, as yet unseen. You only get to see them if you buy the letter from Currey. Perhaps if someone were to create a book of all of Lovecraft’s drawings, for sale, that could raise enough to get the letter?

I concluded my “Notes on Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei”, with my fourth and final such posting.

New books noted this month included Miscellaneous Letters and Letters to Woodburn Harris and Others, two new volumes of Lovecraft letters. Also noted were Mist and Mystery: Recovered Stories and Essays by Arthur Machen; a new volume of Lovecraft in Estonian; The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, Volume 3 (1932-1936) (but apparently there is a printing problem, so check before you buy); and the French had the fifth volume of their sumptuous new Mnemos edition/translation of Lovecraft. Also, the forthcoming Two Hearts That Beat as One: an Autobiography by Sonia H. Davis book was successfully funded via a crowd-funder.

In journals, the Wormwoodiana blog alerted me to the existence of the mostly-free Caerdroia journal on mazes and their cultural manifestations. I also discovered the open-access Messengers From The Stars: On Science Fiction and Fantasy, and the open-access Kaiak: A Philosophical Journey (latest issue themed as “Weird”). I overhauled and updated my JURN search-engine this month, fixing 404s on the directories, and plugging the above journals and more into the index. Though a full URL re-check awaits.

The Pulpster #32 journal called for 2023 contributions, and the German Lovecrafter annual likewise called for new assistants and contributors for 2023. Nearer to home, the worthy SF Crowsnest is now recruiting unpaid reviewers and is Lovecraft-friendly.

Items popping up to borrow on Archive.org included the important and very out-of-print Lovecraft Circle item So Many Lovely Days: the Greenwich Village Years. Also The Twentieth Century British Supernatural Novel (1958); Four Centuries of Cat Books: a bibliography, 1570-1970 (1972); Brooklyn and the world (1983) inc. a comprehensive annotated bibliography including film; and Cross Plains universe: Texans celebrate Robert E. Howard (2006).

In podcasts, the new ‘Long and Love-Kraft’ episode of Voluminous caused me to look at the master’s tastes in cheese, and more importantly also his views on the ‘leisure society’ in terms of its prospects for the future and eventual actual outcomes.

There was very little new activity this month in the Lovecraftian arts, though a new AI Time Machine service let you DIY such things. I was pleased to find the archive of old-school Lovecraft art made by Steve Lines, and the archive of Pietro Rotelli who makes the covers for the Italian Studi Lovecraftiani journal. Gou Tanabe’s 2020 Innsmouth 480-page graphic novel was released, though only in Italian. Elsewhere, the usual tidal-wave of videogames and RPGs of course, and indie films, but those are not covered at Tentaclii.

In audio, the vintage story anthology Weird Tales Presents: Mad Science! was released free on Librivox, and I was pleased to find The Literary Catcast, a podcast about cats in literature. There was a call for applications to undertake a Ph.D. in Music and Multimedia Composition at Brown University, which has obvious Lovecraftian possibilities.

I noted a few Black Friday items likely to appeal to Tentaclii readers. Also noted was that the budget DTP software Affinity Publisher v.2.0 has added footnotes. Though I discovered that it has a fixed un-scalable user-interface, and is thus more than a bit squinty for older eyes.

Over on the shores of Middle-earth I started a new occasional Tolkien Gleanings ‘tracking’ news-posting. This is currently filling up with low-hanging fruit from 2021/22, though it will slow down as these are used up and it may even become a small monthly thing. No-one else was tracking the more traditionalist work on Tolkien, other than the first-edition book collectors looking for prime baggables. So I guess I had better do it, now I’m also a Tolkien scholar. Though the Gleanings won’t be comprehensive. Don’t expect any coverage of arcane Elvish linguistics or the deep-history intricacies of The Silmarillion. Someone else more suited to such things will have to do that.

In a strange cosmic feedback-loop involving cats, my Tolkien researches led me to make a major discovery about why Lovecraft might have chosen to use the name ‘Grandpa Theobald’.