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Strange sounds from Germany…

06 Thursday Jul 2023

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Some of the news from the German Lovecraftians, this month.

1) They have posted a new interview with author Gary Hill…

In 2006, Gary Hill wrote The Strange Sound of Cthulhu, an extensive study of Cthuloid and Lovecraft-inspired music. Fellow cultist Dennis questioned Gary about his book project and related topics.

In German, but easily auto-translated.

2) Also…

The scholarly non-fiction anthology H.P. Lovecraft and Germany is on the home stretch: the manuscript has been completed and is now going to our publisher, the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. There the book is first laid out and then checked by our editorial team – once this has happened, nothing stands in the way of printing.

Free book – Victorian Alchemy: Science, magic and ancient Egypt

05 Wednesday Jul 2023

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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Another book of possible interest to Tentaclii readers, and like yesterday’s book also in open access. The book Victorian Alchemy: Science, magic and ancient Egypt (2022) has a substantial chapter surveying “Weird physics: visible light, invisible forces and the electromagnetic spectrum” in the Victorian and Edwardian period and in relation to Egyptomania. This builds on some thirty or so years of scholarly interest in and around the topic, but is here angled towards the fervent interest in Ancient Egypt during the period. It can’t not mention Lovecraft’s “Nyarlathotep” (1920), but that’s obviously outside the time frame and thus the mention is very brief.

The book has a “Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial” licence.

Lovecraft was right: part 844

03 Monday Jul 2023

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The new DreamDiffusion, being a working ‘brainwaves to AI generated pictures’ headset.

Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method as a significant step towards portable and low-cost ‘thoughts-to-image’

Suddenly, Lovecraft’s early “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (1919) seems rather prescient…

[I] place[d] upon his head and mine the two ends of my cosmic “radio”; hoping against hope for a first and last message from the dream-world in the brief time remaining. […] As I gazed, I perceived that my own brain held the key to these enchanting metamorphoses; for each vista which appeared to me, was the one my changing mind most wished to behold.

Though he never thought of hooking up a dreaming octopus. Oh, wait… actually he kind-of did do that, with Cthulhu’s worldwide emanation of dream-visions into the minds of men…

There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration.

Occult detective work in Cincinnati

02 Sunday Jul 2023

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As well as announcing the forthcoming The Weird Cat anthology, S.T. Joshi’s latest blog post also trails a new book by leading Lovecraft scholar Ken Faig Jr. This being a…

second volume of Ken’s essays on ‘Lovecraftian People and Places’ … scheduled for release next year [2024]

He also notes that Ken Faig, Jr.’s Seven Hills has also just been published, being a book of lesbian-detective tales set in Cincinnati. This gets the Joshi seal-of-approval, being… “rollicking good fun”. Amazon reveals it as Seven Hills: Cincinnati and Other Midwestern Cases, weighing in at 520 pages and with an affordable $5 ebook version. The blurb also reveals that the heroine is more of an ‘occult detective’, specialising…

in the probing of ghostly or supernatural phenomena, using psychics, seances, and other paranormal means to solve the mystery

Weather Influences

01 Saturday Jul 2023

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New on LibriVox, an audiobook of Weather Influences (1904) by Edwin Grant Dexter of the University of Illinois. Being “An empirical study of the mental and physiological effects of definite meteorological conditions” published for the general reader by the reputable MacMillan publishing company. Thus this is relevant to Lovecraft, in terms of the effects that weather had on his very special physiology and biochemistry.

The book opens with a look at time-worn weather proverbs, animal weather lore, and “Weather Influences in Literature”. It may also interest those interested in the effects of the weather on mental states. The book is also of possible interest to those whose professional interests involve deciding the most receptive time to release new information.

Also online as a ebook in a good Wellcome Library scan. There was a review in the journal Nature in June 1905.

A more contemporary judgement is given in a 2015 article on Dexter, “Edwin Grant Dexter: an early researcher in human behavioral biometeorology”, which states that…

Dexter’s Weather influences, while demonstrating an exemplary approach to weather, health, and behavior relationships, came at the end of a long era of such studies, as health, social, and meteorological sciences were turning to different paradigms to advance their fields. For these reasons, Dexter’s approach and contributions may not have been fully recognized at the time and are, consequently, worthy of consideration by contemporary biometeorologists.

A place Lovecraft never went?

30 Friday Jun 2023

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New on honest Abe’s site, five issues of Driftwind as produced by Walter J. Coates. All with Lovecraft contributions.

Looking quickly through my resources, I’m not sure that Lovecraft ever actually visited Montpelier in Vermont, to see Coates and his Press ‘at home’. They met, but Coates had to travel some hundred or so miles to talk with Lovecraft. Cook at least once made the trip to Montpelier, but quite possibly Lovecraft never made it?

Lovecraft commented on Coates being present at an amateur meeting… “Coates, [who has travelled] all the vast way down from the Montpelier region”. In another letter he has… “the indefatigable Walter J. Coates of Montpelier (editor of Driftwind) came down nearly a hundred miles to mingle in the throng.”

Which suggests Montpelier was rather inaccessible. Postcards from Cook were postmarked ‘North Montpelier’, and presumably so were letters to Lovecraft. Which might lead one to think that Coates was in the hills somewhere at the back of the town, as seen here…

However, Google Maps has North Montpelier / East Montpelier closely abutted together, a small narrow river-valley settlement located about five winding miles east of the main town. So perhaps there’s just a postmark / postbox confusion here. Possibly Coates used the Post Office at North Montpelier because it was the nearest, but where was he really?

I have however managed to get and colourise a card of “North Montpelier” itself, which suggests a rather sleepy place. Possibly we see here the main ‘one man and a dog’ stores and Post Office.

The place was on the often flooded Winooski River, and of that I found an evocative postcard which may interest Mythos RPG makers in need of photo-props for a 1920s ‘Whisperer in Darkness’ type adventure…

Update: The East Montpelier Historical Society has online a detailed historical essay on the Coates little magazine and its editor, including several photographs. Thanks to a prompt from a reader I’ve now been able to re-find this (the link had been broken) and it reveals the Coates / Driftwind location…

In November 1922, he and Nettie purchased the George Pray store in North Montpelier, and the Coateses and son John continued as the storekeepers.

Thus the store seen in the above picture would soon become the Coates store, as one can see the “Pray” signboard.

Beyond The Gate Of Dream – and others new on Archive.org

28 Wednesday Jun 2023

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Lin Carter’s Beyond The Gate Of Dream, a yellowing paperback, which has an extended and poignant introduction in which Carter recalls his boyhood among the pulps and comics-strips. Available on Archive.org to borrow.

Also new on Archive.org to borrow, Black Sabbath and the Rise of Heavy Metal Music (2010); Frontier Gothic: terror and wonder at the frontier in American literature (1993); New England’s Gothic Literature: history and folklore of the supernatural from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries (1995).

Forthcoming: ‘The Weird Cat’ anthology

27 Tuesday Jun 2023

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S.T. Joshi announces a new anthology, The Weird Cat. Nope, not 1960s groovy hep-cat hippies in San Francisco. It’s the furry variety…

that this [anthology] has some features not present in other such volumes — notably its wide chronological range and its inclusion of fiction, poetry, essays, and even a letter (by Lovecraft, of course).

He gives the contents list. Shorter items only, by the look of it, so “Beware the Cat!” (1561) is not present.

While you’re waiting for the book, a new H.P. Lovecraft’s poem “Cats” (AI assisted short film) is new on YouTube. It’s amazing that AI knows how to craft a cat (an amazingly multi-formed creature, in terms of posture and silhouette) in a few seconds, let alone can put many of them on video at once.

Broadswords and Blasters

26 Monday Jun 2023

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A review by DMR tipped me off to to Broadswords and Blasters, a modern indie pulp magazine which first appeared in 2017. I may have overlooked it because the dark and muddy covers have been far from appealing until now. But DMR assures that the latest “Futures That Never Were” special is worth a look. It’s a 500-page whopper of an issue (with a new style cover), and two tales are especially noted…

“Hawks over Reolis” by H.R. Laurence is definitely a success. Hester Craven is a spunky and resourceful protagonist. She will not be daunted or denied. Great steampunk fun. I would eagerly welcome more stories of her exploits. Finally the story that completely exceeded expectation was the gonzo ride that is “The Vengeance of the Silvern Hand” by Ethan Sabatella. I do not want to give anything away, but you should really read this story. It is certainly everything I love about pulp stories. Not to be missed!