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New on Tentaclii in April 2022

04 Wednesday May 2022

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Well, what a month. One of those months where you do a lot of work… and it feels like you’re mostly just back where you started.

Not much in terms of new journals this month, though I noted that Hippocampus has listed the ’emerging scholars’ journal Lovecraftian Proceedings #4 (February 2022) in paper. The ebook of this for #4 has yet to appear on Amazon. Elsewhere I spotted that The Journal of Dracula Studies returned (it had vanished into the mists earlier, with a swirl of its cape). Various new scholarly online items were found and added to my Open Lovecraft page. Joshi confirmed I’ll have items in both his Penumbra journal and the Lovecraft Annual, in due course.

In new books, the paperback edition of the Joshi-edited anthology His Own Most Fantastic Creation: Stories about H.P. Lovecraft appeared. Also Joshi’s 1920s Lovecraft-as-detective novel Honeymoon in Jail. Ken Faig Jr.’s new book of research essays Lovecraftian People and Places appeared on Amazon and seems to be shipping now.

Various reviews and musings were noted and linked here, as well as relevant news from the German and Hungarian Lovecraftians. I also briefly caught up with Robert E. Howard material and events, ahead of the fast-approaching Howard Days in Texas.

On the Letters, I posted my final notes on reading the Galpin book of Lovecraft letters and some addresses in this led me to do some detective work in Cleveland… and I was pleased to newly discover the location of the cafe that Lovecraft and the rest of the crowd frequented during that fateful Cleveland visit. I also posted my notes on reading Selected Letters I, preliminary to tackling a re-read of the rest of the Selected Letters over the summer. From this I discovered the exact location and fabric and destruction-date of the ‘observatory’ tower on Nentaconhant Hill, via Selected Letters and some detective work. So far as I know these data points are also a new discovery. I also un-puzzled some of the puzzling aspects of the ending of Lovecraft’s war-story “The Temple”.

In my ‘Picture Postals’ posts I looked yet again at the foot of College Street, and found not one but two good pictures. Which just goes to show that, even when you think a particular place has been exhausted of old pictures, there may yet be more to be found. One of the two new pictures was a magnificent one showing the looming Industrial Trust building under construction, and I newly colourised this. While writing a post for a Patreon patron on the Brooklyn Museum, I realised that there are now pictures of Lovecraft’s adjacent beloved ‘Hill and Pool’ Japanese garden. Not great pictures, from scans of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record journal (1912-1944), but they are from the correct period. This led me to Part One of a look at the gardens in the form of their adjacent exotic hothouses.

In other ‘Picture Postals’ post I managed to find a good picture from inside the Providence Opera House and of the actual stage on which the young Lovecraft once strutted and slung slabs of Shakespeare at the audience. Judging by other online collections of such pictures I am the first to alight on a picture of the actual stage. Ken Faig also kindly pointed me to a cine home-movie showing the Market Place fruit-market site on the waterfront in November/December 1934, and a Lovecraft-alike man shopping for a Christmas tree (as Lovecraft did, for his new home at No. 66). Incidentally, through dipping at random into another volume of the Letters I learned that Lovecraft’s previous home at Barnes seems to have lacked furnace-heating for much of the time he was there. He seems to have only had piped heating there in the last two years?

Looking ahead in time I itemised some Lovecraft anniversaries for 2023, including the 50th anniversary of Lovecraft’s breakthrough into a mass market readership in America and the UK in 1973. I also looked at authors entering the public domain in 2023, with an eye to the more unusual or re-workable items. I suppose we will never be able now to confirm the Arthur Leeds death-date (he would have been entering the public domain in 2023) and thus will have to rely on the slipping years to gradually make all his tales public domain in the USA.

Tentaclii has of course returned. The old website host was, I think, trying to get rid of the legacy web-hosting sites it inherited many many takeovers ago, of which I was one. I paid them, but their unreachable ‘support’ meant that there was no way to find out why jurn.org was no longer responsive. I gave up on them and on the money paid, and just decided to move the backups to a wholly new domain on a new paid host, and to forget about the old address. It seemed the only option. The old site still hasn’t come back, so I now feel justified in the move. So, as you can see, Tentaclii is now located at https://www.jurn.link/tentaclii/ and though there was some initial hassle with getting the ‘domain verification’ email that problem is now sorted. As such the blog should now stay online for years, and is also now a lot faster and more responsive. It’s on a large service that only does hosting and does it well, and is also unlikely to get bought-out by some uncaring conglomeration that also does 100 other things and doesn’t much care about its websites. As such the blog and URL should hopefully stay online for a good few years now (sound of frantic tapping-on-wood…).

The site move was sadly not without cost, in money as well as a week of my time and frustration, and I really welcome PayPal donations from a generous benefactor to help cover the cost. The other way that readers can help is simply to link the new address in their own blog posts, and to spread the word on social media to those who might have lost track of where Tentaclii is. Many thanks. As usual, becoming a Patreon patron is also very much encouraged and encouraging.

Elsewhere in April, I completed a large ‘Carl Sagan’ special for the free Digital Art Live monthly magazine, and even managed to do a chunk of work on my forthcoming Tolkien mega-book.

The Dark Pool

03 Tuesday May 2022

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.

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In the latest short-poetry collection from Libivox, a public-domain reading of the poem “The Dark Pool” by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, published as by ‘Francis Hard’ in the April 1925 edition — along with the Lovecraft/Eddy collaboration “Deaf, Dumb and Blind” and “The Wind That Tramps The World”.

Did the editor pop other poems in, when there was a page to fill? No. This seems to be his only one during the Lovecraft years. But he did have two in the magazine in early 1923, before his editorship…

* “The Closing Hand” in Weird Tales (March 1923).

* “The Snake Fiend” in Weird Tales (April 1923).

“The Dark Pool” runs to two minutes in a fine and well-paced reading.

Meanwhile, over in Canada… Lovecraft’s “At The Mountains of Madness” in an hour, on stage.

Honeymoon in Jail

02 Monday May 2022

Posted by in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, New books

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S.T. Joshi’s blog announces that his new Lovecraft-as-character novel has been published. This is…

my detective novel Honeymoon in Jail, with Lovecraft and Sonia as the detectives … set in the spring of 1928, when HPL came to Brooklyn (unwillingly) to help Sonia set up a new hat shop.

Sounds fun. Available now in ebook and paper at 196 pages. The ebook is £3 in the UK. Possibly just the thing for a wet May ‘Bank Holiday’ Monday, as we often have here in the UK.

Also noted by Joshi is an amusing 1951 Jean Cocteau drawing of one of Lovecraft’s Deep Ones, currently for sale…

Marvel Tales, Spring 1935

01 Sunday May 2022

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Lovecraft would have had this slipping into his capacious mail-box in Spring 1935, the latest Marvel Tales. This is what it looked like…

Currently for sale on Abe at $100. Curious to think of Lovecraft being printed alongside John Wyndham (‘Harris’) and Clifford Simak, who I associate with the 1950s and early 60s. Lovecraft produced a short biography for the editor, but it never appeared. However, the much longer full text was kept and became “Some Notes on a Nonentity”.

In the public domain in 2023

30 Saturday Apr 2022

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A quick look at what’s coming in 1923 in terms of the public domain. Not a great year, but there are items that may interest. Some of the non-fiction could become the basis for graphic novels, and some of the fiction could be plot-lifted into new science-fiction etc.

Published 1927 in the U.S.:

William Delbert Gann, The Tunnel Thru the Air (air war in the future, amazing inventions).

Presumably Weird Tales for 1927, if it isn’t already.

Films of 1927:

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (early Hitchcock).

The Unknown (cult horror).

Various comedy shorts, and some say early Laurel & Hardy.

Author who died in 1952:

Arthur Leeds, Lovecraft’s friend and writer, with S.T. Joshi having “1952?”. Death date somewhat uncertain.

Eric Taylor, American crime writer for the 1930s pulps, later a screenwriter.

Fulton Oursler, popular British murder-mystery writer, father of writer Will Oursler.

John Morgan Walsh, prolific mystery novelist.

Bertram Atkey, British mystery-thrillers, recurring rascally gent character Smiler Bunn.

Laurence Dwight Smith, 1930s G-Men crime novels, also Cryptography: The Science Of Secret Writing, and Counterfeiting: Crime Against The People.

Jeffrey Farnol, prolific writer of mystery novels and more. The Loring Mystery was filmed in 1964.

Marjorie Bowen, very prolific British historical-romantic novelist. Some supernatural ‘twilight tales’ among her vast output. Some royal histories, and a 1936 non-fiction book on William Hogarth and Hogarthian London. Edited two horror anthologies?

Major General John Hay Beith, leading Edwardian playwright as ‘Ian Hay’, later worked with Hitchcock on films. Some mystery novels, some farcical comedy. The Great Wall of India is a travel book, across India in the late 1920s/early 30s. Also The King’s Service: History Of The British Infantry Soldier, and The British Infantryman: An Informal History.

John Vinycomb, Fictitious And Symbolic Creatures In Art.

Norman Douglas, Birds & Beasts Of The Greek Anthology, The Norman Douglas Limerick Book.

Jimmy Bancks, Australian cartoonist and nonsense poet.

Margaret Wise Brown, prolific writer of nursery books for young children. Mostly animal stories.

Charles Stuart Baybe, Exploring England: An Introduction To Nature-Craft.

Sven Hedin, explorer and writer, Riddles Of The Gobi Desert, The Silkroad, and many others.

Arthur Shearly Cripps, various South African novels and stories. Possible ‘big country’ adventure novels.

Edwin L. Sabin, a historian of the American West, wrote short stories and novels for boys about the American West (e.g. With George Washington Into The Wilderness). At least one story in Weird Tales. 1902 book of stories about golf, including one fantasy of a “golf ball which reacts to the emotions of players”.

Alexander Hamilton Thompson, wrote a biography of Bede.

Samuel Ogden Andrew, trans. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 1929.

Harold John Massingham, Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum: The Giants In England.

Sir George MacMunn, Rudyard Kipling, Craftsman.

Henry Winram Dickinson, many biographies of men of the early Industrial Revolution.

Major Desmond Chapman-Huston, Bavarian Fantasy: The Story Of Ludwig II (mad king), among others.

George Parker Winship, Odd Lot Of New England Puritan Personalities.

E.H.W. Meyerstein. British writer. Poetry, a book titled Wade’s Boat (indicating an interest in ancient British tales), some short stories, a life of Chatterton (1930), and a queer London novel published after his death.

Joseph Francis Rinn, American magician most active in the early decades of the 20th century, author of Sixty Years of Psychical Research. Met Lovecraft once.

Sam Henry, “Ulster folklorist and writer”.

Roger Vitrac, “French surrealist playwright and poet”.

Paul Eluard, French poet and author.

Santayana, the philosopher admired by Lovecraft.

Knut Hamsun, Norwegian writer, Nobel Prize for Literature 1920.

Edward Conor Marshall O’Brien, Sea-Boats, Oars and Sails. Still an “excellent book for the knowledgeable boater to better understand the world of design, building and boat operating”.

And finally, the Sherlock Holmes canon is said to be set to fall completely into the public domain as of January 2023. Apparently copyright claims had been holding up a few of the stories.

‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: Brooklyn Botanical Gardens – part one

29 Friday Apr 2022

Posted by in Historical context, Picture postals

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This week on ‘Picture Postals’, part one of a look at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. The Japanese Gardens alongside the Brooklyn Museum became one of H.P. Lovecraft’s favourite places in New York City, his…

favourite Japanese garden beside the Brooklyn Museum

One can see the arrangement here. The Museum building is seen at the top of the picture, the run of conservatories are below, and the Japanese ‘hill and pond’ garden sits between them.

Sadly, as you can see, the quality of these pictures is not great. The Museum does have some of its public domain glass-plate pictures online (at rather pointless sizes), but those are only some of the pictures to be seen in old books and journals. But you get the idea from the pictures below.

Inside would be exotic steam-heat, which Lovecraft enjoyed, and which he might have especially welcomed if he had visited on a chilly Christmas / New Year visit. Also to be seen would be strange plants and sinister pods.

Interestingly in the mid 1920s there were film shows there that might have entertained him. This example is from 1923…

So far as I’m aware, however, he does not mention visiting the hothouse after the Japanese Gardens. But it would seem unusual if he had never set foot in the place, when he made many visits to its next-door neighbours. It’s also known that he enjoyed other hothouses on his various antiquarian trips. I’d welcome any references to where he might mention the Brooklyn hothouses.

If they didn’t influence Lovecraft, it seems difficult to imagine them not influencing his good friend and Brooklyn native Frank Belknap Long. In the war years of the 1940s Long produced a series of pulp stories of exotic alien plants which go under the general title of John Carstairs, Curator of the Interplanetary Botanical Gardens.

“I felt obliged to drop a line to the mighty Conan…”

28 Thursday Apr 2022

Posted by in New books, REH, Scholarly works

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Tentaclii has gone a bit quiet on Robert E. Howard and Conan et al. It’s not because I’ve lost interested, but because the material isn’t there to note. There seems to have been a lack of suitable items recently, other than the new cash-in comics and foreign translations and suchlike so ably tracked by Messages from Crom.

But now the Robert E. Howard Days (aka Howard Days) in Cross Plains, Texas, are just over six weeks away. It may be that various scholarly and thoughtful publications are being timed to appear for that.

In the meantime I see that Exploring the Worlds of REH Omnibus collects Fred Blosser’s themed ebooks (Howard’s Weird Texas, etc) into a single paperback. Along with eight new articles. I see he also has the survey ebooks Sons of Ringo: The Great Spaghetti Western Heroes and More Sons of Ringo.

One item I thought might be of note was Conan the Barbarian Epic Collection: The Original Marvel Years – Queen of the Black Coast. This was a chunky Marvel 1970s Buscema/Thomas reprint volume released last Christmas. But be warned that the cover and title is misleading. On reading the details you find this is only the run-up to his meeting Belit the ‘Queen of the Black Coast’ (issues #43-59). Conan meets her in #58 and then #59-to-#100 or thereabouts is the rest of the Belit run, as ably collected in Dark Horse’s earlier reprint book Chronicles of Conan, Volumes 8-12. So, be warned that you’re not getting the run that the new ‘Original Marvel Years’ cover seems to promise.

I took a look to see if I had missed anything else in the last year or so, and noted “Der Barbar aus dem Norden: Nordenbilder in Robert E. Howards Conan-Erzahlungen”, in the journal NORDEUROPAforum, 2020. On ‘images of the ancient North as they appear in R.E. Howard’s Conan’. It may interest some readers here, especially because it’s under full Creative Commons Attribution and is thus available to be translated from the German.

Also there’s now a new and mighty-thewed blog-post category here at Tentaclii, REH. I’ve gone back and retrospectively tagged as many posts as I can find.

Dipping into the tidal-wave…

27 Wednesday Apr 2022

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Eurogamer magazine has a new interview with the maker of one of the best games of 2020, the acclaimed and strongly Lovecraftian Call of the Sea, “Lovecraft, new studios, and the legacy of Myst”…

“It was one of my favourite games of last year. And you’ve just been nominated for a BAFTA…” [British version of the Oscars, which includes games and TV]

There is of course a constant weekly tidal-wave of Lovecraftian games, comics, metal albums, table-top RPGs and suchlike, and Tentaclii can only briefly note the best here. Of which…

* The Sinking City (2019), the big Lovecraftian Innsmouth-alike videogame of 2019, is now said to be back on the retail shelves after a legal dispute.

* Gou Tanabe’s eagerly awaited manga graphic-novel of “The Dunwich Horror” is taking a break from serial publication in Japanese and will be back in July, which will likely put the English edition back by four months or so.

“a mighty slab of stone rests on the forest floor”

26 Tuesday Apr 2022

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This faint similarity may interest some…

The vast oaks grew thicker as he pushed on beyond the village, and he looked sharply for a certain spot where they would thin somewhat, standing quite dead or dying among the unnaturally dense fungi and the rotting mould and mushy logs of their fallen brothers. There he would turn sharply aside, for at that spot a mighty slab of stone rests on the forest floor; and those who have dared approach it say that it bears an iron ring three feet wide.

Some anniversaries for 2023

25 Monday Apr 2022

Posted by in Historical context

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Advance notice on some anniversaries for 2023…

50 years (1973):

(The year Lovecraft broke through to a mass audience)

“Over a million paperback [Ballantine] editions of Lovecraft’s work had apparently been sold in the USA by June 1973” (Joshi, Time magazine).

In the UK, the Panther paperbacks of Lovecraft (Dagon, The Lurking Fear, Lurker at the Threshold).

Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature (as a popular cheap paperback Dover edition, 1973).

First hoax Necronomicon.

Esoteric Order of Dagon… “an amateur press organization formed by a group of Lovecraft devotees in 1973”.

Dirk W. Mosig begins writing on Lovecraft.

Wilfred B. Talman, “The Normal Lovecraft” (1973).

The Revised H.P. Lovecraft Bibliography (1973).

80 years (1943):

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath published (1943, Arkham House, in Beyond the Wall of Sleep).

The Commonplace Book published (1943, Arkham House, in Beyond the Wall of Sleep).

Publication of “the first bibliography of HPL, by Francis T. Laney and William H. Evans (1943)” (Joshi).

100 years (1923):

Lovecraft completes his run of his amateur journal The Conservative.

Publishes “The Lurking Fear” shocker serial in Home Brew.

Weird Tales founded.

Lovecraft’s first appearance in a pulp magazine (Weird Tales).

“The Rats in the Walls”, “The Festival”.

120 years (1903):

The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy.

Vaudeville at Keith’s, March 1908

25 Monday Apr 2022

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A sample of the vaudeville programme at Keith’s theatre, March 1908.

Lovecraft fondly recalled, in a letter to Moe, “Keith’s Continuous Vaudeville” and the “new biograph travel films to chase the audiences out of Keith’s at six-o’clock”. He was recalling the years 1900-02 when he was ten to twelve years old. He is known to have visited “the old Keith’s Theatre” c. 1905 to see Houdini. The 1908 date of the above programme may be a bit late, as he would then have been around 17 years old, but the sort of vaudeville programme at Keith’s would not have changed much.