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HPLinks #2 – Innsmouth Festival – London Festival – Metal Hurlant special – and more

26 Monday Aug 2024

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HPLinks #2.

A new book for August 2024, published a few days ago. H.P. Lovecraft, A Fine Friend — Wilson Shepherd Remembered, 1932–1938, by John Camack Shepherd. Published in hardback and as a $20 paperback, 290 pages…

In a rural Alabama town, during the 1930’s, a teenage boy had dreams of being a science fiction publisher. In a dirt floor cellar, using primitive, second-hand presses, he managed to publish several science fiction/weird fiction magazines. Along the way, he came into contact and developed a correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft, who became his ‘fine’ friend. He was nineteen years old when he wrote his first letter to Lovecraft.

The blurb mentions no discovery of new letters, and I assume that new material would have been mentioned. Shepherd was also the publisher of the History of the Necronomicon. I see Collected Essays V also has “Correspondence between R. H. Barlow and Wilson Shepherd of Oakman, Alabama Sept – Nov 1932”, but this was Lovecraft’s attempt “to unsnarl” a misunderstanding that had arisen between Barlow and Wilson. Joshi calls the farrago “unintentionally comical”.

* Tickets are still available for the Innsmouth Literary Festival here in the UK. The event appears to be a large and well-organised reunion convention, post lockdowns, for British mythos writers and their fans and publishers. On Saturday 28th September 2024 in the town of Bedford. On looking up the town on the map, I see it’s conveniently midway between Birmingham and London, and between Oxford and Cambridge. The map shows it has not one but two railway stations.

* Now published, Michael Bukowski’s H.P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book: Weirdly Illustrated (August 2024).

* Goeliminal has a long NecronomiCon 2024 convention report. As yet, I can find no other blogs reporting on NecronomiCon 2024. But, looking for such, I found a gushing new review of the novel I Am Providence by Nick Mamatas (2017)…

“a wonderfully-constructed mystery [which] follows the goings on at the annual Providence-based convention, the Summer Tentacular, where fans gather each year to share their love for all things Lovecraft.”

I see this is now also available as an audiobook.

* There is however one Armitage Symposium 2024 talk on YouTube, “The Shadow Over Lake Erie: Cleveland and H.P. Lovecraft”. Though regrettably, its very poor audio makes it un-listenable. Though I can just about hear something about Lovecraft’s New York friend Kirk hailing originally from Akron, Ohio.

* Dr. Edward Guimont will be giving a talk at the AstroAssembly 2024, “When the Stars are Right, H.P. Lovecraft and Astronomy”. The gathering takes place in early October 2024, at the Seagrave Memorial Observatory in Rhode Island.

* Now available, Metal Hurlant No. 12: H.P. Lovecraft. This is the current incarnation of the famous French comic-strip magazine, here publishing a new 272-page follow-up to the best-selling Lovecraft issue of 1979.

There’s also a Metal Hurlant ‘Special Lovecraft’ YouTube video, in French. No page previews, just interviews about the special.

* XRAY.fm produces a regular music podcast. For Lovecraft’s birthday in 2024, episode 551 was an hour of the best “Mythos In Metal” (August 2024).

* RPG blog Grognardia posts on “The War Against Lovecraft”. Comments arise from the ‘trigger warning’ found in the recent large-format artbook for The Dunwich Horror.

* Deepcuts has a long and detailed overview of what was staged at the 2023 London Lovecraft Festival, a theatre and dramatic-readings festival dedicated to Lovecraft adaptations.

* New on YouTube, a talk on The Metaphysics Of Lovecraft: “Dreams In The Witch House”.

* A new channel on YouTube, a side-project of HorrorBabble called ‘FantasyBabble’. The channel’s first offering is The Complete Hyperborean Cycle by Clark Ashton Smith as a YouTube playlist, six hours of readings in total. Possibly new readings(?), since the old HorrorBabble version of this cycle was 24 minutes longer.

* Reddit reports that film director Richard Stanley (The Color Out of Space) is once again working on The Dunwich Horror as a potential big-screen movie adaptation. Incidentally it appears that he should no longer be deemed ‘cancelled’ (see the bottom post in the Reddit thread). Although I suspect that may not make much difference to the ‘once accused, always guilty’ cancel cultists.

* CounterPunch writes “In Praise of the Weird”, commenting on recent spats occurring as part of the U.S. presidential election campaigning. To repeatedly refer… “to your opposition and their policies as ‘weird’ is to denigrate it as abnormal” [which can seem] a tad ironic coming from the party that preaches ‘diversity & inclusion’.”

* New at the Bowery Boys website, a mega-list of Every Bowery Boys History podcast in chronological order by subject. For free, a great many polished podcasts on the history of New York City. Many of which offer useful background for aspects of Lovecraft’s exploration of the city in the mid 1920s. Including: #274 Ghost Stories of Hell’s Kitchen; #114 Supernatural Stories of New York; and #172 Ghost Stories of Brooklyn.

* I see that the World Fantasy Convention (who knew?) is to be held in here in the UK, from 30th October to 2nd November 2025.

* And finally, 2,000 year old mosaic discovered at Virconium in England. An Ancient Roman site. One creature depicted, if you look at it from a certain angle, almost looks like one of the Old Ones.

More LORAs

22 Thursday Aug 2024

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Another pick of the recent free plugins for local/offline use with the free Stable Diffusion 1.5 AI image generator.

* Style of Milton Caniff LORA, able to do 1930s men’s suits and hairstyles in an illustration style. Of obvious relevance for anyone crafting 1930s Lovecraft-era artwork.

* VintageBW LORA for a vintage b&w photography look, and it could be combined with the also-new DarkLight – RimLight lighting LORA for noir rim lighting.

* DonM – Fossils LORA for generating fossils or polished stylised bas-reliefs.

* Mythicc Lands LORA, an unusual landscape generator that combines the landscape with a ‘geometric portal’ composition. Especially suitable for aiding attempts to emulate 1980s style sci-fi paperback cover-art, I’d suggest.

And an oldie, someone made an EMBEDDING (use like a LORA) for SD 1.5 which gave them a consistent Erich Zann face/head for a storytelling project. Still waiting for the consistent-character LORA for Lovecraft himself.

In the meanwhile, Centerflex model + the wasmoebius embedding has a fair idea of what Lovecraft looked like, though you may need to use negatives (Auden, Lincoln, Keaton) and stretch the resulting image up by 70 pixels to get the ‘long face’…

HPLinks #1

20 Tuesday Aug 2024

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HPLinks #1

Tentaclii is back, after a summer break. Rather than trailing out itty-bitty daily posts of link-based items, I’ve decided to experiment with a chunkier weekly news-digest format. At least for a while. Tuesday or Wednesday seem like the best weekdays for a weekly posting-day, though I’ll see how that notion settles down over time. There may also be other posts, such as ‘breaking news’ or longer research-based posts, but only as-and-when.

Thus here, on Lovecraft’s birthday, is my HPLinks #1…

* Druillet – Lovecraft. Due for publication 18th Oct 2024, as a 288-page hardcover. Likely to sell out in a micro-second, so you may want to pre-order quickly when that option is available.

This work brings together in a single volume everything that Druillet produced around [Lovecraft and his mythos]: the complete reissue of Demons et Merveilles published by Opta in 1976, now legendary; its pages from the Necronomicon; the covers he created for H.P. Lovecraft’s novels published by J’ai lu; and finally rare or unpublished paintings and sketches. A major meeting in the field of fantastic arts!

Note that Galerie Barbier, Paris, is… “launching a pre-order campaign on Ulule [French crowd-funding site] on 26th August 2024. Numerous goodies and exclusive rewards will be offered during this campaign.” The book appears to follow the gallery’s brief one-month Paris exhibition of the originals, in June-July 2024.

* The German Lovecraftians now have their own online shop. They also report that their annual magazine The Lovecrafter is on track to issue number 13 in paper in August. German writers should note that the rolling Web version, Lovecrafter Online, requires a new editor.

* A polished and long-running ‘Lovecraft as character’ webcomic set in 1926. The free Lovecraft is Missing was by Larry Latham of Oklahoma, whose day-jobs were Disney animator and animation teacher. Archive.org now newly has the collected pages for arcs that ran 2008-2014, packaged as handy .CBZ files for your comic-book reader software.

Larry sadly passed away in 2014 and Lovecraft is Missing .com site has long vanished. There were hopes that the concluding story arc(s) and any loose ends could be covered by collaboration with other artists, shortly before he passed away. But the story was very complex and it seems that these hopes could not come to fruition. Though note that ArtStation has pencilled pages from that possible collaboration, hinting at what might have been. Ten years after his passing, it appears unlikely there’ll now be a collected book and a rounded-out finish.

* Newly posted, a scan and transcription of a Postcard from H.P. Lovecraft to R.E. Howard, postmarked 13th November 1932. The front shows the gardens Lovecraft revelled in at Maymont, and the back discusses the prevalence of blond “Scandinavian types” he had seen on the streets. Note that… “The owner of the postcard, Mitch Kirsner is contemplating selling it. It has been in his possession for several years.”

* New on YouTube, “The Thing on the Doorstep” read by Wayne June (78 minutes). Joshi states of this later and lesser tale that… “This tale was written frenetically in a matter of four days, 21st–24th August 1933, in a scribbled pencil draft” that was almost illegible, presumably at the new address of 66 College St. Lovecraft was at this time “disgusted at much of my older work”, and thus “Thing” has the cosmicism of earlier tales only as a relatively thin veneer.

* New on Archive.org, a downloadable .PDF for the anthology Creeps By Night (1944). Featuring Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zann”, along with Wandrei’s “The Red Brain” and Frank Belknap Long’s “A Visitor from Egypt”.

* A table-of-contents for The Robert E. Howard Foundation Newsletter for Spring 2024 (mailed July 2024). “Contains the first known typescript of Worms of the Earth”, as well as a Lovecraft letter.

* “Lovecraft’s Murder Mystery: Revisit Poe’s Haunted House” (2024), being a new paper which offers… “a comparison and contrast of Lovecraft’s murder stories and those of Poe”.

* Anime News Network, “Visualizing Lovecraft: An Interview with Manga Creator Gou Tanabe”, along with his translator and publisher. Tanabe’s 288-page Call of Cthulhu is to be released in English in mid October 2024, by which time his Dunwich book should also be shipping in French and German. Possibly this interview is actually a transcript of a recent panel that I recall he was on, at some large U.S. comics convention? On visualising the 1920s in America, he says…

“When it comes to Lovecraft, one thing that’s pivotal to making manga is that you draw daily life as being extremely ordinary as possible. It’s a period piece set in the ’20s, so I tried to use movies as examples.”

* Francois Baranger’s illustrated “The Shadow over Innsmouth” in its French edition, titled L’ombre sur Innsmouth: Illustre, due in mid October 2024 according to an early listing on Amazon UK.

* Set for mid November, Les Archives Lovecraft, a 324-page compilation of the Carnets Lovecraft books published in French by Bragelonne from 2019 to 2022. Together… “with new illustrations, a complementary illustrated short story (‘Pickman’s Model’), and numerous bonuses.”

* The Lin Carter papers at Duke University Libraries. Found while looking for Crypt of Cthulhu #70 (1990) which has all… ” the Lin Carter Necronomicon as survives in his notes.” This is out-of-print, unavailable in .PDF and not on Archive.org, as it turns out.

* A large new Public Work mega-repository of public-domain re-usable images, all ingested from the wealth of university and museum repositories now online. Slickly and speedily presented, and with a choice selection of results for the search-word “Lovecraft”. No actual Lovecraft images in the results, you understand, but all Lovecraft-adjacent and worth browsing…

* Call for Submissions: A Bestiary of New England’s Creatures, Creepers, and Cryptids and an accompanying online Bibliography. Both dated August 2024.

* And finally, should you wish to emulate a Lovecraftian binge at some rural ice-cream slurperie… there’s a new map showing a 100-place “ice cream trail” in Massachusetts, New England.

See you later, in August…

28 Sunday Jul 2024

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As usual I’ll now be taking a few weeks of late-summer break from Tentaclii, and from my usual daily blogging. I hope to be back with my readers towards the end of August, barring some urgent news that needs to be conveyed. And there may perhaps be something for Lovecraft’s 134th birthday on 20th August 2024.

In the meanwhile I’ve added a WordPress plugin that gives you a link to a random older blog post. It used to be the case that one could append ?random to a WordPress URL and that would do the job. No more, it seems.

So here is the new plugin-powered random post link, and those new to Tentaclii should be prepared to see some broken images on older posts. This was caused by a domain move, some years ago.

The Dreaming Stone (1996)

27 Saturday Jul 2024

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New to me, and now new on Archive.org, another Dreamlands RPG book. This one is Call of Cthulhu Dreamlands – The Dreaming Stone (1997). 66 pages, out-of-print and offered for silly prices on Amazon in paper. It begins…

The Dreaming Stone [RPG] is intended as an introduction to H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, as put forth in Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu supplement, The Complete Dreamlands. Even if the investigators have already experienced the Dreamlands, The Dreaming Stone still offers a considerable challenge. Though ostensibly written for the 1920s, the adventure can be transferred to the Gaslight or Cthulhu Now settings with relative ease. Any Dreamlands. Even if the investigators have already experienced the Dreamlands, The Dreaming Stone still offers a considerable challenge. Though ostensibly written for the 1920s, the adventure can be transferred to the Gaslight or Cthulhu Now settings with relative ease. Any number of investigators can participate, though groups of at least four to six are recommended. If there are fewer, the keeper may wish to tone down the number of encounters or foes, or let the investigators roll additional Dreamlands-residing characters to bolster their ranks. Investigators are assumed to have a few adventures under their belts before playing this scenario, as their reputations and an already-established rivalry draw them into the action. If you are planning to run [as] an investigator [i.e. player] in The Dreaming Stone, read no further. The remainder of this book is intended for the keeper’s [i.e. game master’s] eyes only.

Reviews note that this is… “The only ever adventure book for H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands”, and that it is a “skeleton” on which to build rather than a mighty Table-Trembling Tome of Total Tale-telling.

“that Canton madhouse”

26 Friday Jul 2024

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In Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, he writes of the “sanitarium at Canton” and going to “… that Canton madhouse, and [then] together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth.” Canton, Massachusetts, is about twelve miles south of the city of Boston. And about two-thirds of the way from Providence to Boston. At circa 1900 there was, however, no madhouse or even a disease sanatorium there.

But the presence of Canton Junction on the Providence – Boston train line suggests Lovecraft knew it, at least from the train windows. There is a large viaduct which carries the train, and Lovecraft would have enjoyed sweeping views across the Canton topography. He must have been across it many times.

Longest and tallest railway viaduct in the world, when built in 1835.

Interestingly Canton is about two miles east of Walpole, and of course Walpole is also the name of the father of the gothic novel. There was however no asylum at Walpole, Mass. Looking at the list of train stations on the line, and the map, Lovecraft may have been able to see East Walpole in the distance, across the marshland, from the Canton Viaduct.

There was however a large and real asylum at Foxborough (aka Foxboro) (opened 1893, closed 1976), originally the state’s treatment asylum for chronic alcoholics. Foxborough was two train stops before Canton, on the Providence to Boston line. It’s thus not impossible Lovecraft knew that asylum from the train window, as it was likely within sight as the train passed.

Train line passing alongside the asylum site, Foxboro station just a quarter mile south. (With thanks to the ghost-hunter who identified the laundry building of the site, and thus gave me my bearings).

A blogger who has investigated it talks of a road approach through marshlands made of “cranberry bogs [that] looked like blood pools”. He also usefully notes… “After 1905, the Massachusetts Hospital for Dipsomaniacs and Inebriates went through a gradual transition to a psychiatric institution”, which another source states was due to the alcoholic inmates constantly escaping in search of drink. Thus by the time Lovecraft came to write “Innsmouth”, it was indeed a general “madhouse”.

What of “my poor little cousin” in “Innsmouth”? I assume he was loosely modelled after Lovecraft’s beloved-and-lost cousin, Phillips Gamwell. Thus Gamwell’s home in Cambridge, Mass., might be the place to look. But I can find no asylum or sanitorium there.

There was also the large official Massachusetts State Hospital for the Insane, at Worcester, which may have formed a mental model for Lovecraft. It certainly looks like the sort of place many readers will have in mind.

What of Canton, Ohio? No madhouse there. The nearest was Massillon which is eight miles away, and also the main Ohio state asylum at Columbus some 130 miles from Canton…

But my feeling is the Foxborough asylum was the inspiration for the Lovecraft called the “Canton madhouse”, knowing that readers in his circle who knew the Boston – Providence railway line would make the connection with Foxboro madhouse (four miles south, on the train track, from Canton).

Lovecraftians will also recall Lovecraft’s planned but never written ‘Foxfield’ stories. See: Will Murray’s “Where Was Foxfield?” in Lovecraft Studies No. 33 (1995). Also to be found in Dissecting Cthulhu: Essays on the Cthulhu Mythos. For those unable to pay the prices now asked for either of these, The Lovecraft Encyclopedia usefully summarises the essay… “it indicates that Foxfield is east of Aylesbury and Dunwich and northwest of Arkham.”

Three new LORAs

25 Thursday Jul 2024

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My pick of three recent free Lovecraft-adjacent ‘style plugins’ (LORAs), for use with the free AI image-generator Stable Diffusion 1.5…

Style of Edward Gorey LORA.

Neon Pop Haeckel LORA, Haeckel being an influence on Lovecraft. Though for laying out a “sane” non-religious view of the universe, rather than his deep-sea expedition imagery. Joshi calls him a… “central influence on [Lovecraft’s] metaphysical thought of the time”.

Pulpy Comics Style Inkifier LORA, for a neo-pulp modern comic-book style.

Call from Washington / The Nameless City

23 Tuesday Jul 2024

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A review of a recent attempt to put a 75-minute “The Call of Cthulhu” on the theatre stage, in Washington DC.

For a more positive vibe see a review of the new “The Nameless City”, a successful low-poly indie videogame…

It marries the oppressive and mystical atmosphere of Lovecraftian fiction with gameplay elements that both add variety and serve a narrative purpose as well, then caps it all off with an ominous ending that felt just right for a game in this particular genre. I personally found its PSX-style graphics charming

Ah, Wilderness! (1935)

21 Sunday Jul 2024

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I’ve at last been able to see the U.S. movie Ah, Wilderness!, 1935’s gentle celebration of the small-town world of America as it was in 1906. Lovecraft saw it late in life (circa Christmas 1935/36) and revelled in its lavish layers of thirty-years-ago nostalgia. Similar to a movie of today being nostalgic for 1994, or one of the 2010s being nostalgic for 1980.

saw “Ah, Wilderness”, which made me home-sick for the vanish’d world of 1906!

“… revelled in it. Yuggoth, but it made me homesick for 1906! [it] gives all sorts of typical 1906 glimpses, including an old street-car, a primitive steam automobile, &c. It was photographed in Grafton, Mass. […] where the passing years have left little visible toll.

“At times I could well believe that the past had come back, & that the last 3 decades were a bad dream. [the world it depicted] having many a value which might well have been preserved had social evolution been less violently accelerated by the war.”

I recall that Lovecraft also remarked that the family sitting room was almost a double for the one he had known as a boy. Also the hallway.

He also seems to imply that the rural newspaper office which published his astronomy articles, was in appearance similar to the office briefly seen in the movie (the young hero’s father owns the town newspaper).

the articles landed, & I also landed others with a rural weekly …. (this was the Ah, Wilderness year of ’06)

Ah, Wilderness! is very well-made and acted, with lavish costumes and scenes. Worth seeing simply for the very satisfying scene of a steam-car ‘scaring the horses’. But (unless I’m missing something, being British) it is perhaps not the all-time classic that some had claimed. Though, as the 1933 play, it does appear to have become a staple of American repertory theatre.

The film usefully gives one a better feel for Lovecraft’s formative environment and sensibilities. Many of us have been subtly trained by agitprop to casually think of the Victorian and Edwardian periods in bleak b&w Dickensian terms, all grimy urchins, grim school-masters, and grinding urban poverty. The movie is a useful corrective. As with the 1930s, the view of which has been similarly be-grimed for political purposes, most people were actually ‘getting on with getting on’, and rather enjoying the novelty of becoming middle-class.

The cynical young hero is somewhat Lovecraft-like, at least in the early scenes. The concerns of creeping socialism and chronic alcoholism, though treated lightly, are the same ones which permeated young Lovecraft’s world. The hero (Eric Linden), at first a ‘going to Yale’ stiff of a teenager, is perhaps the weakest part of the film and perhaps a little too ‘1930s movie star’ in appearance — this makes it harder for the viewer to suspend disbelief. His youngest brother is the firecracker Mickey Rooney. But the young Rooney’s usual gurning and capering is thankfully kept on a very tight leash, in what must be one of his first film appearances.

Even having seen Ah, Wilderness!, I’m still as a loss as to why the strange title was chosen. No-one gets to look at a sweeping vista and proclaim the words, unless I missed something. I would have called it “Bang goes the Fourth!”, since it’s set on the 4th July.

For another Hollywood view of 1906, this time from the post-war 1940s, I’ve found Ah, Wilderness! also inspired the glossy musical adaptation Summer Holiday (1948).

“On thin ice again…”

20 Saturday Jul 2024

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I find that Stable Diffusion 2.1 768 knows about Conan, if you use the right model. Pure prompt, no Img2Img or ControlNet.

Conan’s body slipped and crashed down the icy ravine, his simple ice-pick useless to slow his slide, until suddenly he was halted. One foot has stuck through an ice sheet, where the high sun had partly melted it. It was that faint warmth which brought a musty smell to his flaring nostrils. He was suddenly alert to something behind him…