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Tentaclii

~ News and scholarship on H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937)

Tentaclii

Category Archives: Housekeeping

HPLinks #41 – Derleth’s portraits of the Kalems, Madness sketch, Ethnos article, Crumb, and more Doom…

10 Tuesday Jun 2025

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Housekeeping, HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #41.

A slightly smaller HPLinks this week, because I’m set to install Windows 11. Then there’s all the work that follows on from such a gigantic move to a new OS. Eeek! Don’t worry, though, it’s a ‘superlite’ version of the installer ISO with absolutely no bloat, junk, sign-in, apps, ads, privacy-invasion, forced updates, hardware requirements or other Microsoftie nonsense. Just the OS, and a fast stripped-down one at that. Being installed to a new SSD drive too. This seems the best way to go as Windows 10 dies and Windows 7 can no longer support local AI installs. I seriously considered the Linux OS for two weeks, but in the end… too much trouble to fathom/learn all its arcane ways, and also seemingly far too easy to break the OS just by trying out some new software. Thus I was pleased to discover the now-mature Windows 11 ‘lite’ and ‘superlite’ installers, in which the horror of 11 not just ‘suppressed a bit’ but actively ripped out. After install, my task will then be to make Windows 11 look as much like faithful ol’ Windows 7 as possible. I may be some time.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. He’s making available the out-of-print H.P. Lovecraft’s Favourite Horror Stories, Volume 1 under his own Sarnath POD and ebook imprint. He adds… “I will reprint volume 2 of this series in a month or so.” He also gives Derleth’s description of the people present at a September 1938 post-Lovecraft Kalem meeting, via Derleth’s newly transcribed journal for 1938. One example…

Arthur Leeds, an aging man betraying all the marks of faded gentility, with tired eyes, a well-trimmed moustache, iron grey hair standing out against his dark skin, an odd little old-fashioned wing collar contrasting his black coat, his neatly combed hair with the aspect of wetness and cleanliness.

It looks like this is the first time these descriptions have seen print. See Joshi’s post for more such vivid descriptions of the Kalems, in a long quote. Joshi adds, re: Lovecraft and Kalem mentions by Derleth… “I will eagerly await the examination of the journal of 1939 (which David E. Schultz has already transcribed)”.

* New at Project Gutenberg this week, Arkham House: The First 20 Years 1939-1959 in what appears to be plaintext free of OCR errors.

* From the HPLHS and new to me, their Mountains of Madness Sketch Replica…

* Currently on eBay, a catalogue for a 1979 ‘Lovecraft art’ exhibition in France.

* New in Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology (June 2025), “Cthulhu Anthropology: H.P. Lovecraft and the Discipline of Difference”. Freely available online. The first half of the article is largely a mix of academic obeisance and ‘Lovecraft for beginners’, but the second half (starting at “The Other as Danger? Lovecraft in Anthropology”) has some meat. Though the author is regrettably unaware of the specific non-Boas currents in anthropology which Lovecraft was tapping into, other than making one glancing and unelaborated mention of James Frazer…

Sir James Frazer’s ‘The Golden Bough’ plays a major role [in The Call of Cthulhu]

This may be news to S.T. Joshi, who states in his book on Lovecraft’s philosophical thinking and intellectual influences that…

I cannot see that Lovecraft was much influenced by Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’, for all the frequent citations of it in his stories” (H.P. Lovecraft, The Decline of the West, p. 24)

Here is Lovecraft stating the matter for himself…

I might say, with all proper modesty, that the subject of anthropology and folklore is by no means strange to me. I took a good deal of it at college, and am familiar with most of the standard authorities such as [Sir Edward Burnett] Tylor, [Sir John] Lubbock, [Sir James] Frazer, [Jean de] Quatrefages [de Breau], [Margaret] Murray, [Henry Fairfield] Osborn, [Sir Arthur] Keith, [Marcellin] Boule, [Grafton] G. Elliot Smith, and so on.” — Lovecraft, The Whisperer in Darkness.

All British, except for an American and two Frenchmen. The one American was a very prominent eugenicist who had studied at Cambridge University in England. One of the Frenchmen was a member of the Royal Society of London. The Anglophile Lovecraft was evidently looking largely to Britain for his reading on such matters, and the British despised the American anthropologists. In 1919 Lovecraft had also read deeply in the anthropology of religion, as the field then stood, and this evidently formed many of his enduring ideas. Jean de Quatrefages seems to have been essentially a biologist, and was the first to suggest that new races might be formed by inter-breeding. Marcellin Boule gave us the view of the ancient Neanderthal type as likely to have been brutish, hairy and ape-like.

* A new in-depth biography of another key American outsider creative, Robert Crumb, may be of interest to Tentaclii readers.

Also, note that some 170-pages of Crumb’s serious / biographical / historical comics are set to be newly collected as Existential Comics: Selected Stories 1979 – 2004. So far as I know, he never did anything related to Lovecraft, but I welcome being corrected on that point.

* In Amsterdam at the Black Cat Library on 21st June 2025, a Soiree Lovecraft event with lecture. Seemingly to launch a new novel, which at a guess may feature Lovecraft the man? Booking now.

* And finally, a video of “All the Lovecraftian references in Doom: The Dark Ages”. In Spanish, but YouTube now has AI auto-dubbing into English.


— End-quotes —

[As a creative writer] “I am a paradox anyway — for there have been periods when astronomy, geography, physics, chemistry, & anthropology meant more to me than any form of pure literature or aesthetics.” — Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, December 1929.

“An abridgement of Frazer’s Golden Bough is valuable as a compendium of odd folk-beliefs” — Lovecraft’s “Suggestions for a Reading Guide” (1936). With the faint implication that was all it was good for.

“I believe a Georgian doorway has more real significance for an ordinary American than an Inca masque or Italian primitive has. In order to make the Inca or Renaissance object of equal significance — equal relationship, that is, to the actual experience & tradition stream of the beholder — one would have to take exhaustive & specialised courses in Peruvian anthropology & cinquecento art & life. It is childish to imagine that the layman can have any real knowledge whatsoever of the life & feelings of the various cultures represented by museum objects, so that the illusion of reaching the heart of the past through such symbols is sheer moonshine. The little aesthete who raves over Etruscan vases & Minoan goldsmith work is really — apart from the element of abstract art appreciation — doing nothing more than playing around in the sand with pretty pebbles for which he invents vapid little stories. He is not half as close to a knowledge of the real thought & feeling of ancient Etruria or Crete as is the historian & archaeologist, whom he tends to despise as a dull, prosy old soul. [And in some more leftist-minded people such as Long,] certain theories of life & art [also] makes you dangerously liable to overlap into the zones of frivolous mock-under understanding & merely derivative experience, without your fully realising the transition.” — Lovecraft to F.B. Long, February 1931.

PayPal available again on Gumroad

22 Saturday Feb 2025

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I had no idea that, for some reason, PayPal had been removed from all Gumroad accounts. Not just mine, apparently. I was wondering why my sales and donations had collapsed there, for months now. But an email from them at the end of January 2025 says it’s back…

We’re thrilled to announce that PayPal is back on Gumroad! Our teams have worked together to restore both payment and payout functionality. You can count on PayPal being available on Gumroad moving forward. If you had a PayPal account set up before, everything has been restored and there’s no action you need to take. You may have already seen some PayPal sales come through!

If you also sell on Gumroad, you might also want to mention this to potential buyers.

See you later, in August…

28 Sunday Jul 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Housekeeping

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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.

Surfaced at last

22 Saturday Jun 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Housekeeping

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No post today, as I’ve been wrangling a bargain mid-range (i5 CPU) £90 Microsoft Surface Pro 3. For use mainly as an ebook and entertainment touchscreen tablet.

This was Microsoft’s flagship 12″ product from nine years ago and accordingly built like a tank (though considerably lighter). I had it in nice condition from a reputable UK refurbisher, and on arrival it turned out to be almost un-used. Nice. Just 222 charge cycles on the battery and only 2Tb written to the Samsung SSD (they only need replacing around 125Tb). That’s ‘little old lady user’ good, though various clues make me think it was lightly used in a U.S. school’s IT lab for a few years, before being part-exchanged back to Microsoft. Probably been in a warehouse ever since.

So… many thanks to my Patreon patrons, since your regular PayPal has eased this fine upgrade to my armchair reading.

Hours of wrangling it into shape today, not least due to chopping off the manic tentacles of the eldritch Windows 10, with only an unfamiliar touchscreen (a bit like tackling Cthulhu with a machine-gun). But it’s done now, and thus I’ve broken free from the increasingly annoying and flaky Amazon Kindle 10″ tablet (2017, when they were subsidised and thus dirt cheap) for a better 12″ tablet with far better colour and far more user control — since it’s running the full Windows desktop OS. Though I can still see/read my purchased Kindle books via read.amazon.com. The online Kindle reader is vastly better than their dire Windows desktop app, and I’m pleased to find it can also even do ‘guided view’ for purchased comics.

I might still put Winux 7 (Linux Mint that looks and feels like Windows 7) on the new SP3, but it’s too early yet to say. I also need a suitable pen (and perhaps a keyboard-cover called a ‘type cover’), in order to write notes on the screen. But I do like to get bargains, so I’ll wait until I can find a cheap one.

Indent a quote with blockquote

26 Sunday May 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Housekeeping

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How to indent a quote, without the ‘blockquote’ CSS styling taking over, in a WordPress.com free blog and also in a self-hosted WordPress blog…

Add it to a right-click snippet pasting add-on in your browser. Write your post in the HTML editor, not that other thing.

Of course, with a self-hosted WordPress blog, you can also add quote-styling plugins.

5,001 posts

24 Saturday Feb 2024

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See you after Christmas…

23 Saturday Dec 2023

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Right, I think that’s all until after Christmas. I hope you’ve enjoyed your daily Tentaclii during 2023. My blog will return perhaps on Tuesday the 2nd of January or thereabouts, though there may perhaps be a ‘2023 in Lovecraft’ annual post before that. Have a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

Twit

19 Saturday Nov 2022

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I’m now a twit at twitter.com/In_a_whit/

PayPal now plugged into Gumroad

20 Tuesday Sep 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Housekeeping

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My PayPal is now plugged into Gumroad. I’m new to Gumroad, and I hadn’t realised that…

If you have not connected PayPal Connect, your customers will not be able to pay via PayPal.

So you should now be able to use PayPal when buying, or when kindly bumping up a price from a free “$0”. There’s not much there that’s paid, at present, but there will be.

Incidentally, if you signed up to Gumroad with a different email than you used for PayPal, be very careful to ensure you plug in the PayPal address. Don’t ever add a second different email address to your PayPal account, as it can lead to instant non-appealable account termination.

New categories for the blog

15 Thursday Sep 2022

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Alongside my “REH” (R.E. Howard / Conan) blog-post category, I’ve now also added two more.

1) I’ve collected my Kipling / “Night Mail” related posts under a new Kipling posts category. As with the “REH” one, I’ve gone back and retrospectively tagged older posts.

2) I also did the same for my few Conan Doyle posts.

July on Tentaclii

31 Sunday Jul 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Housekeeping, Odd scratchings

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Time for a July round-up post. It’s been a slow month, and not because of summer heat. Which barely lasted two days for me, on one of which I didn’t even need the air-conditioner turned on. I’m not sure which was worse, the brief 95-degree heat or the hysteria. As a boy who lived through ten weeks of non-stop scorching summer in 1976, I was not impressed by the nation’s wimpy behaviour. Now Tentaclii Towers once again languishes in what has overall been a rather cool summer, only it’s now rather damper than previously. I can feel the early autumn approaching already, and it won’t be surprising if I soon start to spot strange fungi around the Towers.

This month in ‘Picture Postals’ I looked at Columbia Heights, and specifically the “faery” view of the city towers from 110 Columbia Heights which so enchanted Lovecraft when he first arrived in New York City. I found several pictures which should help other researchers to go on to discover 1920s views from more or less the same photogenic spot. It features the Brooklyn Bridge, so a good picture-researcher with access to U.S. and New York archives could probably get an impressive dusk view from 1922 and almost the same spot. Staying in New York City, another ‘Postals’ post identified the mysterious “Chatham” that Lovecraft fondly recalled as one of three “quaint familiar landmarks” of his 1922 visit to the city. So far as I know I’m the first Lovecraftian to identify this. I then found several fine and evocative period photos of the place. Moving back to Providence I also restored and showed a panorama view of Lovecraft’s cherished Prospect Terrace, a view that I’d never seen before.

I completed my mammoth re-read of all five volumes of the Selected Letters, this time making notes. My post “Notes on the Selected Letters of H.P. Lovecraft, Volume V.” appeared in July. Remarkable finds in this post: later in his life Lovecraft thought there was life on Mars; he did read The Black Cat as a youth (“I used to buy that reg’lar-like”); at the end of this life he finally saw a movie he really liked, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935); and I found a photo of the “well-known ‘bohemian’ restaurant called Julius’s” where Lovecraft once stayed for two weeks. It became known, after the war, as one of the most famous gay bars in history. I’m now reading and making notes on the 2021 Lovecraft Annual, which will become a review before the 2022 edition appears.

A mention on Don Herron’s blog, of two Derleth “Lovecraft as character” tales, led me to take a look them. Not so impressive as tales, as it turns out, but in the research I also stumbled on mention of a Ray Bradbury depiction of Lovecraft as a character in The Martian Chronicles. This was actually his Martian story “The Exiles” (1950 version, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Winter/Spring 1950), which though a Mars story did not get into The Martian Chronicles. This led me to the further discovery that there are another two books-worth of Martian stories by Bradbury, beyond those selected for The Martian Chronicles.

For Lovecraftian researchers, I made the one-stop “SALTES, a custom search-engine for Lovecraftian researchers” based on Google Search. Though it still needs to be complemented by a further search on Tentaclii, since Google Search has still not yet properly indexed my blog at the new URL.

There were recordings from Howard Days 2022, and the Glenn Lord Symposium 2022, freely placed online in July. The latter had an especially illuminating discussion of the first phase of topics under discussion in the R.E. Howard / Lovecraft letters. I still can’t afford the HPL-Howard volumes of letters. They’re on the list, but several Ken Faig books and the Letters to E. Hoffmann Price and Richard F. Searight must come first.

Various useful reviews were noted and linked in blog and journals. The latest Spectral Realms poetry journal was listed on Hippocampus, and on inspection the contents list was found to include one non-fiction article on Barlow. The semi-annual Lovecraftian ‘zine The Blasphemous Tome released a new issue after a long gap.

In podcasts the new Voluminous (“Elizabeth and the New York Boys”) very usefully reminded me of emotional context for the writing of “The Shunned House”, and thus for my musing about the depiction of the final and otherwise rather incongruous “elbow” in the tale. This context confirms my earlier supposition that the glutinous “elbow” might well be read as a censorship-avoiding stand-in for some other less mentionable body part.

In open archival materials, I was kindly informed that HPL ‘zine (1972-74) is now free and public on Fanac.org, and I had a quick look through and pulled out or noted biographical materials for Tentaclii. I’ll have to get around to reading it more fully at some point, and I suspect that the Hoffmann Price item differs from that published elsewhere. Yes, it’s Price doing Lovecraft’s astrological chart, but the chart’s interpretation contains perceptive biographical insights on Lovecraft by one who knew him. New on Archive.org are Who’s Who in Horror and Fantasy Fiction (1978) and The Pulps: fifty years of American pop culture (1976).

The original Finlay art for the memorable dust-jacket of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Outsider (1939) came up for sale, and I snagged the preview scan.

In the comic and toon arts, Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is now a current ongoing comic-book series, in the stores now as a #1. I’ve little idea what it’s like, but the covers and character-designs certainly intrigue. In royalty-free 3D I noted a “Patrick base mesh”, new on ArtStation and likely to be a very useful starting point for crafting a H.P. Lovecraft 3D toon figure. Also a new free very low-poly 3D figure for Poser, likely to interest noir / crime-pulp and Lovecraftian RPG artists and comics creators.

In the AI arts, I tinkered with a creative writing AI titled ‘Story Machines’, and as an experiment used it to expand a real H.P. Lovecraft dream paragraph. This became, via the AI, a new and much longer story fragment.

Nothing much in books this month, but in the musical arts S.T. Joshi released his Songs from Lovecraft and Others, as a book of sheet music with audio download-code.

Conventions started to become active again, with the RPG focused CarcosaCon 2023 booking and the Armitage Symposium once again arriving in Providence via NecronomiCon 2022. I suspect all such things will be smaller than before, partly due to reluctance to travel because of [insert: disease-of-the-week] and travel restrictions, and partly simply because most people can no longer afford to travel far.

For those interested in early British TV sci-fi (an acquired taste, I know) I also updated by Doctor Who view/watch list for the Tom Baker and Davison years, having now completed the viewings. The Davison stuff tails off badly, and apparently the several Doctors after that were dire. So very appropriately I’ve now gone back in time from Baker… and made a new list for the Hartnell (first Doctor) / Troughton / Pertwee years. Which I’ll view and updated with comments over the coming months. I was also pleased to find there’s a new 2022 second-edition of a complete viewer’s guide book to a rival TV channel’s ‘Doctor Who beater’ series, Jaunt: A Viewer’s Guide to The Tomorrow People, which suggests a follow-on British sci-fi series that I might also revisit.

The next Digital Art Live magazine is to be themed “Battle”, so please let me know ASAP if you’re an R.E. Howard artist or other artist who uses digital tools to make multi-character historical battle scenes. Ideally from a pre-gunpowder era, though I won’t say no to Solomon Kane in-battle art with flintlocks and the like.

That’s it for July 2022. Things will be even slower in August, as Tentaclii is now off the daily-posting schedule for a while. As always, please do seriously consider becoming my patron on Patreon or perhaps boosting your monthly patronage by another $ or two. Every dollar encourages, and I still have hopes of reaching $100 a month in total. Also welcome are simple PayPal donations, or just an inbound Web link to Tentaclii on your blog or a mention in your journal or podcast. You can also buy one of my various books.

‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: To The Beach!

29 Friday Jul 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Housekeeping, Picture postals

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I’ll be having a bit of a rest during August, starting now. Blog posts will still happen here sporadically, as and when juicy news pops up. For instance, there will likely be news of the release of the 2022 Lovecraft Annual contents-list, Lovecraft’s Birthday releases, NecronomiCon Providence reports, etc. But my daily posting schedule will be in abeyance until the end of August. Thanks for your patience. There are, of course, a great many back-posts to browse and read while you’re waiting for a new post.

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