Monthly Archives: October 2023

“the purring friendliness was unabated”

10 Tuesday Oct 2023

Posted by in Kittee Tuesday, New books

≈ Leave a comment

It’s 2023 and how and why cats purr is still a scientific mystery. They’re channelling cosmic star-winds from the Dreamlands, is my guess.

Meanwhile, a new article in the Catalan newspaper Vila on “Lovecraft pentinant gats”, partly spurred by the fact that…

the text of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Cats and Dogs” is now published by Males Herbes in Catalan, with a translation and short introduction by Javier Calvo.

I assume this is new, and the translation doesn’t seem to have been linked before on Tentaclii.

Rare Books School

09 Monday Oct 2023

Posted by in Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

Sounding like something from Harry Potter, the U.S. state of Virginia has a Rare Book School. Their Scholarship and Fellowship applications are now open. Deadline: 1st November 2023.

I’m not sure they’d be interested in a Necronomicon hunter. But they might be curious about someone interested in the genuine rarities in the field of modern SF / fantasy / horror books, a topic which might also touch on rare books in relation to bibliophiles and collectors, fandom and fannish lore/memory.

Some tips for using AIMP for audiobooks

07 Saturday Oct 2023

Posted by in Podcasts etc.

≈ Leave a comment

A few tips for audiobook playlists and bookmarking with newer version of the free AIMP audio player. A great player, but the UI is somewhat convoluted for most people — and post-2021 changes made it even more convoluted in key places.

1. Add the playlist files by drag-and-drop, and save the playlist, as you would in any audio player. Saving a playlist is done in AIMP by right-clicking in the sidebar and then “Send to other playlist” | “To New playlist”. Clunky and roundabout, but it works.

2. Many audiobooks then need a pause added between .MP3 tracks, if the tracks are chapterised. Otherwise the end of one chapter gabbles straight into the start of another without any pause. This pause can be manually set in the AIMP settings. Here’s how it’s done…

3000ms = a 3 second pause, added between each .MP3 track.

3. Bookmarking. Since the 2021 changes this is impossible for a newbie to find in the UI, and it’s almost impossible to discover how to do it from the official site/forum. Few users would think to right-click in the waveform itself as it’s playing, but that’s how it’s now done in newer versions of AIMP…

Easy, but only if you know how. The added bookmark will then show up in the list on the Bookmarks tab. Double-clicking the bookmark only starts the track at the beginning. Right-clicking and “Play selected files” starts it at the actual bookmark timestamp.

4. Finally, a security tip. If you already installed libwebp.dll in the AIMP program folder (C:\Program Files\AIMP), so as to get WebP image format support for cover artwork, then Google’s recent massive WebP security car-crash means you’ll need to replace the old .dll with the new safe libwebp.dll 1.3.2.

Into Battle!

07 Saturday Oct 2023

Posted by in Odd scratchings

≈ Leave a comment

Regular readers will know I enjoy the occasional copy of Commando, and comic art in general. So I was pleased to hear about the exhibition Into Battle! The Art of British War Comics. Open now and running until 30th April 2024, at the Soldiers Museum near Oxford in the UK. The location is about seven miles north of Oxford, a town which is well served by train services.

The history of British war comics through the archives of classic comic titles such as War Picture Library and Battle Action. These men’s comics have been publishing continuously in Britain for over 130 years.

They remain a viable popular ‘pocket-money priced’ genre, even in the face of piracy and a multitude of other entertainment time-sinks such as videogames and sprawling TV series. As evidenced by the ongoing Commando series.

The exhibition has original art and appears to be free entry. It could be combined with another free museum in Oxford itself. Though 30 minutes of searching reveals an unappealing bunch of possible combinatory options in the town for autumn / fall 2023. Unless perhaps an exhibition on ‘colour in the Victorian period’ interests. However, note that right next door to the museum is Blenheim Palace which has a “blockbuster” Icons of British Fashion exhibition opening on 23rd March 2024. There’s a month’s overlap there with Into Battle!. If you also had an overnight stay, then the Into Battle! / Icons of British Fashion combo could be combined with ‘doing the Ashmolean’ the next day and perhaps also an evening peep at some of the Tolkien sites. However, that would be springtime, so you’d need to book things well in advance and also anticipate the likely pre-election ramping up of the train strikes.

Meanwhile, in New York City, a “small” exhibition titled ‘The Museum and Laboratory of the Jewish Comics Experience’ opens 9th October 2023 and runs until the end of 2023. The Center for Jewish History in Manhattan survey the history of Jewish comics and the Jewish creators of many of the most iconic American comic-book characters like Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four and more. Along with comics-creation workshops and a cosplay booth, which sound like they’re aimed at under-16s.

Unpublished cover for the famous Amazing Fantasy #15 (first Spider-Man)…

At No. 169

06 Friday Oct 2023

Posted by in Picture postals

≈ Leave a comment

This week on ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’, newly colourised views of 169 Clinton Street in 1935. These are two of the Sperr pictures, via the NYPL. 169 is the end residential building in the short row.

The building on the far right of the pictures had served as the New York Court of Special Sessions (of the Second Division, meaning Brooklyn, Queens and Richmond) since 1902… “The Second Division the Court of Special Sessions is now held at the corner of Atlantic avenue and Clinton street” at “171 Atlantic avenue”. The Court’s lease was renewed in 1922. This was the court for the trying of petty crimes. Meaning crime that merited either a fine, or some days in jail or in a youth reformatory. The presence of this court must have greatly increased the number of delinquent youths and low-life in the immediate vicinity of Lovecraft’s room, and on the sidewalks on the way to his nearby grocery store on the corner of Clinton and Atlantic.

One can just make out the “Tailor” sign, which may have been the Syrian tailor he mentioned and patronised. However, there was also a tailoring sign on might be small rentable units that ran down the side of the court building, so perhaps we can’t be quite sure. They may have been two tailors here, or one tailor with a shopfront and also a sign a bit further down the street.

The vacant and cleared lot was the site of the once lavish but later seedily decayed ‘Fouguera’ building, which was standing when Lovecraft lived at No. 169. 1934 was when the ‘slum clearance’ demolition boards went up on the ‘Fouguera’ building, as noted by the Brooklyn Eagle. Thus, walking down Clinton Street would have been a more canyon-like experience than the open sun-washed 1935 view above implies. Nevertheless, on a bright January day in 1925, it might not have looked too dark and gloomy…

Evidently in 1935 the roof had been changed and raised since 1926, to add the couple of attic rooms whose low windows we see in 1935.

AI “Nyarlathotep”

05 Thursday Oct 2023

Posted by in Podcasts etc.

≈ Leave a comment

A new AI-voiced AI Lovecraft: Nyalarthotep on YouTube. One of the better voices, kind of like a somewhat harsh and staccato Gordon Gould (expert reader of Lovecraft for ‘Books for the Blind’, back in the day). But then, what can one expect… it is a robot. But such things might be fixed by downloading and then using a good desktop PC audio player (such as AIMP) to adjust speed, pitch etc.

I found the following to work well with AIMP and proper headphones:

Speed: 0.97

Pitch: -1.66 st

And this graphic equaliser setting…

Then it just needs the maker to do a re-recording of the few seconds where the AI stumbles over Lovecraft’s 18th century diction (TTS voices can usually handle a special in-text markup, which can help correct such things, or you can just ‘tweek du spellhing’). Plus a few spaces, added where the transition between sections is too abrupt.

David McCallum’s Lovecraft

04 Wednesday Oct 2023

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

≈ 1 Comment

1970s TV star David McCallum has passed away.

A formative but almost-forgotten part of my youth. I remember him in the TV show Sapphire and Steel (time-travelling super-agents, ‘gothic horror meets TV sci-fi’) and in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. spy-thriller movies as shown on TV.

Sapphire and Steel is a British sci-fi show which I (and most others) had forgotten, but I vaguely recall enjoying it a lot… and I may well revisit it now.

Anyway, David McCallum also recorded vinyl L.P. records of Lovecraft tales, for the Caedmon label. As you might expect, these are now on Archive.org…

“The Rats in the Walls”
“The Dunwich Horror”
“The Haunter of the Dark”

Some theses

03 Tuesday Oct 2023

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

The results of a quick bit of thesis hunting.

New to me, the PhD thesis ‘Determined To Be Weird’: British weird fiction before Weird Tales. Or perhaps I had looked at it, but then it was embargoed for years to come? Anyway its record page was modified a few days ago, and it’s now freely available as a PDF.

The author presents an “examination of the earlier weird fiction that fed into and resulted in Lovecraft’s work”, and also surveys the grudging changes in sentiment that occurred over time among elite critics. Ironically one might argue that by the time the elite critics had changed their minds on such things, only blurb-hunting publishers cared much about their opinions.

Another PhD I found is still embargoed for another three years, titled The Palimpsests of Cosmic Horror: space, mythicity, and rituality in the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and his Spanish successors. There’s an abstract, but it’s “Restricted until September 2026”.

Another, with a current embargo but no release date, is Predestination, textuality, and cosmic horror in the works of H.P. Lovecraft and their comics adaptations.

Lovecraft in Fabletown?

02 Monday Oct 2023

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

Regular readers of Tentaclii will know I’ve been reading through the 22 trade paperback collection of the acclaimed series Fables. I was pleased to spot a clear Lovecraft reference, late on. Young Splinter is exploring her new home for the first time, a giant castle magically concealed in the midst of New York City. The exiled fables are moving in too, and so is the Library. There Splinter is drawn to a copy of the Necronomicon…

It’s in a short 20-page side-story which fronts the final three volumes, and the art is not by the regular artist. It also introduces ‘the rats in the walls’ (possibly another Lovecraftian nod?) who are then never encountered again. Looks to me like this ‘short’ is setting up a whole other story-arc, beyond the final volumes. And possibly one with Lovecraftian monsters? Well, now Fables has been sent into the public domain I guess that story can be written… if anyone cares to do it…

King Kulled

02 Monday Oct 2023

Posted by in REH

≈ Leave a comment

New this week, a look at “Stephen King on Robert E. Howard”. Not just REH. Back in the day, the article finds that…

King chose to manufacture a sensationalized version of events to present H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard as “mutilated personalities.

The end of the article also praises the new book of essays Beyond the Black Stranger and Others: New Essays on Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft (2023). These being essays by Charles Hoffman, which I linked here last week.

Comet madness

02 Monday Oct 2023

Posted by in Astronomy, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

Freely online at the Library of Congress, the popular science/history book Comet madness : how the 1910 return of Halley’s comet (almost) destroyed civilization (2023).

Hairy Stars: Fear and Loathing in the Heavens
From Astrology to Astronomy
Whither the Comet?
The Fabulous Flammarion
A Dangerous Tail
The Unexpected Visitor
Cyanogen Gas!
From Science to Science Fiction
Aetna and the Wheel of Anxiety
Apocalypse Now
The Death of Kings
Rationality Won’t Keep Out The Rain
Up on a Roof
Cosmic Death Ray
Hysteria’s Highwater Mark
Syzygy
The Case of the Missing Tail
And We (Mostly) Lived Happily Ever After.

Amazon UK will happily take your £17 for the ebook, but the LoC officially has it free.

Lovecraft made a substantial scientific entry on the comet, for 26th May 1910, but seems to make no reference in the letters I have access too. Other than…

I saw Halley’s in 1910 — but missed the bright one earlier in that year by being flat in bed with a hellish case of measles!

Tolkien had an interest in astronomical phenomena, but I am told that his diary does not note Halley’s Comet of 1910. To be fair, he was only a schoolboy at the time and swotting hard for vital exams in central Birmingham, a big industrial city not then noted for its pristine ‘dark’ night skies and star-gazing.