21 Wednesday Aug 2019
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
Some readers of Tentaclii may be interested in a detailed scholarly paper on Iram of the Pillars, from the journal Arabica, 60, 2013. Free on Archive.org. Iram or Irem is, of course, the mysterious and lost desert city evoked a number of times in stories by Lovecraft.
21 Wednesday Aug 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A Lovecraftian sculptor of the 1960s and early 1970s, the Frenchman Henri Etienne-Martin.
Etienne-Martin’s entry in Dictionary of Modern Sculpture, 1960. Note the outdoor “Homage to Lovecraft”, and he also seems to have made smaller variations of this stair/throne-like sculpture.
From a 1965 exhibition catalogue in French…
From recent auction sales of his work…
“Art et mythe – La cosmogonie d’Etienne-Martin, point de depart des “Mythologies individuelles”” (open access book chapter in French).
20 Tuesday Aug 2019
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts
Celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s interest in our fascinating felines.
This week’s “Kittee Tuesday” post is the full-res artwork which fronts my new annotated “The Cats of Ulthar”.
20 Tuesday Aug 2019
Posted in Odd scratchings
Lovecraft’s Birthday, the 2019 round-up:
It’s the 129th!
* Released on H.P. Lovecraft’s birthday, from Hippocampus, An Imp of Aether. 279 pages of the late Wilum Pugmire’s writing in an affordable Kindle ebook.
* Lovecraft’s Letters to Wilfred B. Talman is said by Amazon to be shipping today.
* My own extensively annotated “The Cats of Ulthar”, new and free online. I think this ended up around 8,000 words. At 20 pages it should be printable as a five-sheet booklet.
* Revised and expanded 2019 edition of my big map of Lovecraft’s Providence. 5mb, printable. Added: Eddy’s Bookshop; Twin Islands (boyhood adventures); Fox Point (where he met and saw off visitors on the New York boat); St. John’s churchyard (a regular stop on ‘the tour’ for visitors).
* InnFest 2019. 20th-27th August 2019, “celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s 129th birthday. Visitors [to the famous Second Life ‘virtual world’] will enjoy shopping [for Lovecraftian ‘virtual crafts and fashions’] and experience a week of exploration, events and entertainment featuring a fine calendar of music and stage shows at the theatre and other [digital 3D recreations of] locations in Lovecraft Country.” Not sure about the knick-knacks, but the location-builds can be quite something. Especially now that Second Life has VR.
* Dark Adventure Radio Theatre have their new Mad Science old-time radio serial adaptations of Lovecraft ready to go, and when last heard planned to release the collection… “on or about Lovecraft’s birthday, 20th August 2019”.
* In Mexico, the state of Veracruz and the writer Miguel Angel Vartak have “organized an exhibition of Lovecraft books and stories, a reading of Lovecraft’s poetry, live music and several lectures”.
* I also spotted a special ‘H.P Lovecraft Birthday’ Guided Tour of Brooklyn.
Various other stuff that’s just too cynically spammy to mention, to do with offering marginal discounts on Lovecraft-labelled beer and modern RPGs and suchlike. Try harder next year.
And finally, not quite on the birthday, but on the closest weekend… the many-tentacled NecronomiCon Providence 2019 rises from the depths again on 22nd-25th August 2019. I seem to recall that the new Selected Essays and Selected Poems Lovecraft books are due for release to coincide with this?
The R.I. Historical Society had their usual annual H.P. Lovecraft: A Literary Life walk on the 17th August, rather than the 20th. If you missed it then they have a H.P. Lovecraft Literary Walking Tour in October: “October 19, 20, 26 & 27, 2019”.
20 Tuesday Aug 2019
As mentioned here a few weeks ago, here is H.P. Lovecraft’s story “The Cats of Ulthar” (1920) with my full annotations. This is being issued for the first time today, to celebrate Lovecraft’s birthday.
“The Cats of Ulthar” annotated as a 20-page PDF.
The Adobe Caslon Pro and Garamond fonts have been embedded in the PDF, so you should have no problems with font substitution. For those who like print, simply use any imposition-capable printer driver to print this as a 5-sheet fold-ready booklet. Fold up, then slip it between card covers… and ideally have your resident kitty make a paw-print on the card cover in the blood of a Zoog.
19 Monday Aug 2019
Posted in Historical context
I’ve discovered a curious ‘country fair’ story, “Air” by Myrta Alice Little. Her story was published a few months after she had two long visits from H.P. Lovecraft in summer 1921, when there was a faint prospect of marriage in the air. “Air” has an interesting if slight resemblance to Lovecraft’s later “Cool Air” (March 1926).
At this late date it’s somewhat difficult for a modern reader to parse the story while reading it, but here’s a plain plot summary which may help make more sense of it the first time around…
A wife visiting a summer State Fair as a competitor requires a room with four windows. She feels she’d die without ’em, due to the lack of cool air in the night. (This was before the era of air conditioning units). The head of the Fair has a Committee to allocate rooms efficiently to visitors, and the head of this committee reluctantly finds the wife and her husband such a rare thing. Especially rare in the hot and crowded summer season. On then finally going to bed the wife demands the husband open all the windows, but he finds them all sealed tightly shut by some mysterious force. In desperation to please his wife he smashes the glass bookcases in the dark of the night. As a result the wife is convinced that cool air must be circulating, and she dozes off blissfully ‘like a contented cat’. Only the next day does she discover that the windows had all remained sealed. The Room Committee chairman had let them have his sealed house which had four windows, his family having departed for the summer and thus tightly shut up the house (presumably nailing the windows, which one could do in those days of sturdy wood frames). The wife is suitably chastened by the experience, and the husband is glad to pay for the damages.
19 Monday Aug 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
The Colour Out of Space, from Cadabra Records. A very limited edition vinyl L.P. pressing with sleeve art, fold-out poster, and liner-notes by S.T. Joshi. Appears to be pre-ordering now, with 33 copies remaining. It’s on, naturally enough, coloured vinyl.
18 Sunday Aug 2019
Posted in Odd scratchings
Congratulations to Providence Public Library. They’ve just bagged $250,000 from the National Digital Newspaper Program, for the…
Digitization of 50,000 pages of Rhode Island newspapers published before 1923.
Presumably online and open to the world, rather than locked down for library visitors only. In which case some previously unknown Lovecraft-iness might perhaps be found in the new material.
18 Sunday Aug 2019
Posted in Odd scratchings
Submissions wanted: Arkham Gazette #6 (Arkham and Beyond). Includes a request for…
* Miskatonic University Expeditions, a list.
There is a short section in Miskatonic University listing a number of international expeditions and research projects sponsored by Arkham’s institute of higher learning. I don’t think anyone as ever dug through all of the vast corpus of scenarios to try to make a comprehensive list of all the expeditions assigned to the auspices of this august if ill-starred academy. Are you the person to brave such horror?
17 Saturday Aug 2019
Posted in Odd scratchings
Arkham Gazette #7 – Dunwich invites submissions. The call is dated 5th August 2019.
The editor seems to have some non-fiction articles already lined up, on “Caves and caverns of New England” and “Alchemists of New England”, and invites other bits and pieces which may or may not spin out into hokum and confabulation.
Ideas that caught my eye:
* The Sermons of Abijah Hoadley.
* August Derleth’s Dunwich, and how it differs from the HPL original.
* Annotated scenario list for Dunwich (by which I think RPG games is implied).
17 Saturday Aug 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Amazon now has a shipping date for Lovecraft’s Letters to Wilfred B. Talman and Helen V. and Genevieve Sully in a 578 page paperback from Hippocampus. Shipping on 20th August 2019 according to Amazon, Lovecraft’s birthday. In addition to the usual Schultz and Joshi annotations and index, the Talman book also has…
“a 6,000-word synopsis for a story, “The Pool”, that Talman never wrote; [Lovecraft’s advice-] synopsis is here presented in an appendix”
A story was later written up from these revision suggestions by Donald R. Burleson, appearing in Crypt of Cthulhu 47, Roodmas 1987. With a cover illustration for the story by Jason Eckhardt.
16 Friday Aug 2019
Posted in Odd scratchings
The R.I. Historical Society have their usual annual Lovecraft’s birthday walk “H.P. Lovecraft: A Literary Life” on 17th August this year, rather than the actual birthday date of the 20th. I assume there may be a few tickets left.
They also have a H.P. Lovecraft Literary Walking Tour in October, in the run-up to Halloween: “October 19, 20, 26 & 27, 2019”, when I guess it may be cooler and less humid for hill-walking in Providence.
