17 Monday May 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Currently and newly for sale, the originals of Armel Gaulme’s fine pencil drawings for Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls”. There are also many more than those shown below.
16 Sunday May 2021
Posted in Scholarly works
Another scholarly fantasy journal found. The Catholic St. Austin Review (StAR) has a range of themed issues, with the current one returning to “Tolkien”. Sadly not open access, though one essay per issue is free.
Also several others on C.S. Lewis and his circle.
16 Sunday May 2021
Posted in Odd scratchings, REH
SFFaudio has a new haul of public domain PDFs, or at least public domain in the USA or Canada.
“after an extensive search of copyright records, all [these are] public domain”
These are presumably now available for audio reading, and YouTube’s bots won’t freak out at the upload. Here are some recent ones in PDF, which are deemed public domain…
The Other Tiger by Arthur C. Clarke.
On Mind And Matter by Arthur C. Clarke.
The Fence by Clifford D. Simak.
If You Don’t Watch Out by Frank Belknap Long.
The Lichen Of Eros by Frank Belknap Long.
The Plague From Tomorrow by Frank Belknap Long.
The Timeless Man by Frank Belknap Long.
Black Demons Dance by Frank Belknap Long.
The Treasures Of Tartary by Robert E. Howard. [Kirby O’Donnell]
Spawn Of The Green Abyss by C. Hall Thompson.
Goblin Feet by J.R.R. Tolkien. [1915 fantasy poem published when an undergraduate at Oxford, a lively example of the Edwardian fairy tradition of the time] [PDF scan has already been deleted but Tolkien Gateway has it transcribed.]
The Power Of Wine by H.P. Lovecraft. [1916 poem, must be out-of-copyright already, but nice to have as a PDF scan from Tryout.]
16 Sunday May 2021
Posted in Podcasts etc.
LibriVox’s Short Ghost and Horror Collection #51 has a reading of “The Ocean Leech” (1924, in Weird Tales January 1925) by Frank Belknap Long.
15 Saturday May 2021
Posted in Scholarly works
Another item for the Open Lovecraft page, found while searching for interesting new Tolkien items. Mallorn has a rolling paywall, and the locks on the 2018 issue have only just popped.
D. Nelson, “The Lovecraft Circle and the Inklings: The “Mythopoeic Gift” of H.P. Lovecraft”, Mallorn, 2018.
The Inklings were the circle around Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.
15 Saturday May 2021
Posted in Scholarly works
I see that it was Christmas 2020 when I last posted here, re: my Open Lovecraft page. The page has since had about 16 additions, and its 2021 section is filling up nicely. Some recent public and free scholarly items in English include:
* Anglo-Saxons: Stoddard and Lovecraft & Counter-Revolution.
* Fear of the Known: Evoking Narrative Elements in Lovecraftian Futurist Sound Composition.
* Searchers After Horror: Understanding H.P. Lovecraft and His Fiction.
* Just like Henry James (Except with Cannibalism): The International Weird in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls”.
* Ghostly presences in H.P. Lovecraft’s “Cool Air” and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
15 Saturday May 2021
Posted in Odd scratchings
Lovecraft’s beloved Georgian era is hot right now…
15 Saturday May 2021
Posted in Podcasts etc.
G.K. Chesterton’s Tales of the Long Bow (1925), now newly on Librivox as a free public-domain reading. Not, as you might think from the title, romping tales of the English greenwood from the times of Ivanhoe and Robin Hood. Rather, “impossible” tall tales, humorously mind-bending moustache-twiddling ‘club’ tales, more ably indicated by the titles of the stories themselves…
The Unpresentable Appearance of Colonel Crane.
The Improbable Success of Mr. Owen Hood Kingsnake.
The Unobtrusive Traffic of Captain Pierce.
The Elusive Companion of Parson White.
The Exclusive Luxury of Enoch Oates.
The Unthinkable Theory of Professor Green.
The Unprecedented Architecture of Commander Blair.
The Ultimate Ultimatum of the League of the Long Bow.
“Curious” rather than weird tales, and perhaps of interest to some Tentaclii readers.
The book is also on Archive.org in open PDF, from the Digital Library of India. Here is the dustjacket cover of the 1962 British reprint…
The picture apparently relates to a plan to parachute ‘flying pigs’ across the English countryside, to show that ‘pigs can fly’.
14 Friday May 2021
Posted in Picture postals
Lovecraft’s near-obsession with discovering colonial doorways during his travels was not at all unusual for his era, and the appreciation was shared by many others. As tourism grew the interest also became understood, if perhaps not shared, by many more who lived in old colonial sections. The interest was normal and part of New England’s set of established antiquarian interests in material culture, along with covered-bridges, sailing ships, old lanterns, almanacs and so on.
Today we, and especially those outside the East Coast of America, might tend to think vaguely of the neatly painted-up and slightly chintzy re-creations of such doorways — and thus rather wonder at the attraction.
At best, people might picture the quieter doors of the type that could be seen in abundance on Lovecraft’s College Hill (as here) and which had never needed to be gentrified.
But as one can seen below, in 1920s pictures, some of the oldest original doors could be hoary and sinister with age… and thus most suited to a horror writer.
Lookout Court, Marblehead.
The Short House, Newbury.
13 Thursday May 2021
Posted in Scholarly works
Neal Monks has a new and long review of Robert H. Waugh’s collection A Monster Of Voices: Speaking for H.P. Lovecraft.
Initially, he argues, there’s something to be said for Lovecraft as a surrealist, but Waugh observes that his writing style is closer to that of Tolkien. In particular, where [C.S.] Lewis [Narnia books] was very precise in his language, favouring short, clear sentences and convincing arguments, Lovecraft, like Tolkien, always has more to say.
Yes, there is a similarity. Tolkien uses a lapidary method that I call “Tolkien’s tantalizing teasing” where he carefully inlays a sub-story across a half-dozen tantalising slivers (e.g. the story/journey of Boromir from Osgiliath to Rivendell) often made up of asides, offhand remarks, small fragments of fact. The same is done to gradually build up character back-story without actually giving an info-dump (e.g. Sam and his family). The reader must, if he is a good attentive reader, join the slivers together in memory and then add his own imagination. It’s a potent method, for the right kind of reader. Lovecraft has a similarly tantalising approach to revealing back-story, which also assumes a closely attentive reader who is not skimming the text or barely able to comprehend what is going on (e.g.: the baffled letter-writers to Weird Tales or Astounding). While attentive close readers could once be counted on to exist in reasonable numbers, they have today become a relatively rare sub-species when compared to the vast size of the thundering herd.
12 Wednesday May 2021
Posted in Scholarly works
I don’t think I’ve ever read a word of The Shadow‘s 339 pulp novels, but many Tentaclii readers may be interested to learn of Steve Donoso’s Kickstarter for the pulp fanzine The Shadowed Circle: The Foremost Fanzine about The Shadow. The campaign is live now, with a month to go, and already rising nicely. It will be “non-fiction” with art. And not just a one-man venture, being run by…
three Shadow fans with backgrounds in writing, editing, art, and graphic design
The first issue is due in July 2021, and there’s what appears to be a very rough front-cover mock-up on the Kickstarter page.
12 Wednesday May 2021
Posted in Historical context
Spanish blog Hijos de Cthulhu digs up a memoir by Javier Marias, remembering Juan Lopez-Morillas. Lopez-Morillas had lived in Lovecraft’s 66 College St. house after Lovecraft’s death. In translation…
A Spanish professor who lived in the city of Providence told me that, during his early years at Brown University, he had lived in what had been the home of the master of horror literature H.P. Lovecraft … When I asked if the teacher or his wife had ever noticed any strange presence in the middle of the night, he replied that luckily no creature of uncertain fishy descent or physique had ever appeared to them. But that there was a strange surliness in that house, a kind of forced silence that any sound revealed. As if the walls, accustomed for too long to Lovecraft’s taciturnity, were not willing to accept a raised voice or some crooning. And when they found out who had preceded them, within weeks of settling in, they had decided to give away the goldfish they had arrived with. Just in case.