Category Archives: Odd scratchings

July on Tentaclii

31 Sunday Jul 2022

Posted by in Housekeeping, Odd scratchings

≈ Leave a comment

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.

Jaunt

19 Tuesday Jul 2022

Posted by in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

The silly-season for news is here, and things are getting a bit slack while scholars are at the beach. So here’s an off-topic post that may still interest some Tentaclii readers, though I recognise that 1970s British TV sci-fi is an acquired taste. My mega-re-watch of the best of Doctor Who is ongoing, and as such I was interested to learn of a book-length guide to one of its competitor TV series called The Tomorrow People. I fondly but rather vaguely recall this from my youth, though haven’t seen it in many decades.

The book guide for the series is titled Jaunt: A Viewer’s Guide to The Tomorrow People. First issued in 2013, and now in July 2022 just re-issued in a new “revised and expanded edition” including detailed coverage of the original comic-strip adventures that were run in Look-In.

The cover is a faux emulation of a 1970s second-hand Penguin paperback.

I was also interested to hear of… “the return of the Tomorrow People in a lavish 1990s international co-production”, a TV reboot news of which had completely passed me by. There’s also said to be a modern third series, but it sounds both politically correct and radically changed, being set in a dystopian… “world far removed” from “the original series’ vision”.

Advance notice: Lovecraft’s birthday

10 Sunday Jul 2022

Posted by in Odd scratchings

≈ Leave a comment

Just a reminder that Lovecraft’s Birthday is coming up in just over five weeks, on 20th August 2022. There’s still time to prepare a ‘birthday gift’, lecture, gig or event of some sort. If you need a theme or a ‘hook’ then note that 2022 is the 100th anniversary of Lovecraft’s first visit to New York City. It’s also been 100 years since “Hypnos”.

More Doctor Who

09 Saturday Jul 2022

Posted by in Odd scratchings

≈ 1 Comment

The two Doctor Who technicolor movies have been restored to 4k “in a brand new restoration”, and are getting UK cinema screenings as well as a Blu-ray. The double-bill Blu-ray for Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks’ Invasion of Earth 2150 A.D. (1966) is out now.

Both of the widescreen cinema movies feature movie-star Peter Cushing as The Doctor (he never played the character on TV). They are not at all ‘canon’, in that they played very fast and loose with rather pointlessly ‘re-imagining’ key things in the series, much to the chagrin of the millions of fans of the weekly TV episodes. Still, the movies are likely to be enjoyable vintage British sci-fi for those otherwise unaware of Doctor Who.

The new releases are well timed for me, but even so I think I’ll skip them. Since — having now finished up a ‘lockdowns’ Baker and Davison “best of” re-watch of Doctor Who — I’m now embarking on a “best of” watch from the very first episodes. Namely those with Hartnell through to Troughton as The Doctor, and then into the Pertwee years up to his regeneration into Tom Baker. Which will brings things full-circle. Thus I have plenty of the real-thing to be going on with, without adding the rather jarring mid-1960s movies on top. There should be enough here to last me well into the next lockdown (which is increasingly likely, now that Boris has gone).

For what it’s worth, here’s my current selected watch-list for the vintage TV Doctor, in order. I’ll update the episodes with comments, when seen…

Hartnell:

* An Unearthly Child. WATCH. Excellent, surprisingly good for 1963. I was expecting something very creaky and blurry, and I was wrong.

* The Daleks. WATCH. The first Daleks. A little padded out for length (six episodes), but very watchable.

* The Edge of Destruction. SKIP. A bizarre attempt at a weird Pinter-esque stage drama in two parts. Everyone acts out of character and it doesn’t work.

* The Dalek Invasion of Earth. WATCH. A slow start for a six-parter, but it gets better and better. Excellent.

* The Rescue. SKIP. A weak two part story, slotted in at the last minute to quickly introduce a newly-cast companion. Just read up on the plot.

* The Space Museum. WATCH? An interesting environment and amusing enemies, but definitely not vital. Introduces the idea of the ‘time conundrum’, and also a device which is used in the next story.

* The Chase. WATCH. A long six-parter. Good in parts, and it definitely gets better as go into the second half. Companions depart at the end, so it has to be seen.

The Time Meddler.

The Daleks’ Master Plan. An epic 12-parter!

The Ark.

The War Machines.

Troughton:

Tenth Planet.

The Power of the Daleks.

The Moonbase.

The Evil of the Daleks.

The Tomb of the Cybermen.

The Abominable Snowmen.

The Web of Fear (first UNIT).

The Dominators.

The Mind Robber.

The Invasion.

The Seeds of Death.

The War Games.

Pertwee:

Spearhead from Space.

Terror of the Autons.

The Daemons.

The Sea Devils.

The Three Doctors.

Frontier in Space.

The Green Death.

The Time Warrior.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs.

Planet of the Spiders.

Many of the early episodes were destroyed or lost by the BBC, and so some stories from the Hartnell / Troughton years will have a partial reconstruction via animation / audio / script.

“New England Fallen”

18 Saturday Jun 2022

Posted by in New books, Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc.

≈ Leave a comment

Now online at Brown, a scan of the poem “New England Fallen” (1912). It’s not in the second edition of The Ancient Track, though the far longer and different poem of the same name is there. The text of this (presumably newly-found) shorter and more personal version is to be found in good form in the 2021 The Lovecraft Annual, given there without commentary.

No sign of the scans of the Belknap Long letters at the Brown online repository, as yet.

Over on YouTube, a new reading of Lovecraft’s poem from a few years later, “The Garden” (1917).

Notes on Selected Letters II – part two

09 Thursday Jun 2022

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraft as character, Odd scratchings

≈ Leave a comment

Over the summer I’m reading through Lovecraft’s Selected Letters. Here are my notes for Selected Letters II. With just one more post on Vol. II tomorrow, re: new discoveries about Lovecraft’s room at 169 Clinton Street on the edge of Red Hook.

* Page 221. Lovecraft’s family Bible, purchased 1889 by his parents, had in it a clumsy… “imitative engraving of Belshazzar’s Feast” by the Northumberland-born visionary artist John Martin (1789-1854). Lovecraft later recognized the picture “upon seeing a proper plate of the subject for the first time.”

* Page 222. 10th January 1928. Beirce’s translation of The Monk & the Hangman’s Daughter as a possible precursor to, or primer for, some of the feel of “The Dunwich Horror” (written August 1928)…

it is scarce two weeks since I read, for the first time … I shall not soon forget the general picture afforded of the wild Bavarian mountains, the sombre, ancient life of the salt mines, & the whispered, fearsome lore of the crag-fringed tarns & black hanging woods….

Around the spring of 1928 (page 331) Lovecraft also heard a public lecture — presumably at Brown — on modern Greek folklore… “I heard a highly illuminating lecture on the subject a year ago by Sir Rennell Rodd, a lifelong student of neo-Hellenic folklore.” This may also have fed into his fateful trip to Wilbraham and the birth of “The Dunwich Horror”. Rodd’s 1890s book on the topic is online, and he had presumably added to his knowledge since then.

* Page 296. By early 1929 he was weekly taking “the N.Y. Sunday Times and the sanely balanced and disillusioned news-weekly Time.” But a few years later he intimates to Long that he has limited his intake of national and international current affairs.

* Page 298. “I’d say that good art means the ability of any one man to pin down in some permanent and intelligible medium a sort of idea of what he sees in Nature, that nobody else sees. In other words, to make the other fellow grasp, through skilled selective care in interpretive reproduction or symbolism, some inkling of what only the artist himself could possibly see in the actual objective scene itself. … The picture can, if it be good art, give you something in the real scene which you couldn’t have gathered for yourself — which only the particular artist who painted the picture could ever have gathered preserved for other people to see. … We derive from this process a feeling of magnification in the cosmos — of having approached the universal a trifle more closely, and banished a little of our inevitable insignificance. Instead of being merely one person, we have become two persons — and as we assimilate more and more of art we become, in effect, more and more people all in one; till at length we have the sensation of a sort of identification with our whole civilisation.”

* Page 323. He reads The Silversmiths of Little Rest, by William Davis Miller. Because it related to his family-tree and “the Casey side av me” believed by his family research to be originally “the English Caseys of Gloucester”, England. The 50-page 18-plate book was produced in a limited edition of 150, seemingly for antiquarians in New England. Little Rest was a place, rather than a description of the work-habits of the smiths. “Full biographical and occupational information (markings, inscriptions) on the following key Little Rest (i.e., Kingston, RI) silversmiths: Samuel Casey, John Waite, Joseph Perkins, Nathaniel Helme, Gideon Casey and William Waite.”

* Page 324. March 1929. He alludes to something Talman is writing or has recently written. “By the way — it’s a good idea of yours to square us criminal Caseys with society by making an Howard Phillips a reg’lar deteckatiff” [regular detective]. Which hints that Talman had recently penned or planned to pen a crime-detective story featuring a “Howard Phillips”. I don’t yet have the volume of Talman letters, and I imagine I may find there some detail about this apparent ‘Lovecraft as character’ story. By January 1929 Talman had moved to Red Hook, and I would guess he was enamoured of “The Horror at Red Hook” with Detective Malone, and thus probably wanted to write something similar himself — perhaps a clever sequel featuring Lovecraft himself. But I shall have to wait for the book of Talman letters to find out if there are more details on this.

* Page 329-30. April 1929. He observes that the… “Famous ‘London Terrace’ in West 23d St. [New York City] — where a friend of mine has lived all his life — is to come down shortly to make room for a wretched apartment skyscraper.” Who was this friend? He may be footnoted in the Toldridge letters, but I don’t yet have that volume. But something can be gleaned from the building data. Historians now refer to the row as a… “development from the 1840s known as London Terrace, built to look like typical London [British] apartments at that time”. A local report of 1929 gives an alternative name, mourning the loss of… “a row of private dwellings of considerable age and great local interest, identified as London Row or London Terrace”. The book The City in Slang (1995) gives a folk-name and the location… “One of the earliest so-named Millionaires’ Rows in New York was a block on West 23rd Street, a development formally called London Terrace, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues.” So these data may help someone to pinpoint Lovecraft’s mysterious friend, who still lived there in 1929 and was likely either i) affluent and elderly or ii) a young lad of an affluent family.

* Page 353. Lovecraft tells Mrs Toldridge… “I pass in sight of the ancient Carter house every time I walk down town — & the neighbourhood is still much as he knew it in 1770 & thereabouts. Across the street an old brick schoolhouse built in 1769 is still serving its original purpose, whilst at the foot of the hill the old Quaker Meeting House ( 1745) still broods beside its deserted wagon­sheds. … John Carter, Providence’s colonial printer, & publisher of the Providence Gazette & Country-Journal before, during, & after the revolution. His old shop & office, the Sign of Shakespeare’s Head, in Gaol-Lane, is still standing in good condition notwithstanding the sinking of the neighbourhood to slumdom. It is a large square house on a steep hill, with fanlighted doorway & the double flight of railed steps so typical of colonial Providence.”

The John Carter house is at “21 Meeting Street”, an address which unlocks the Library of Congress. Here is the house as Lovecraft would have known it circa 1933-35. The Industrial Trust building can be seen behind on the left. Modern photos show a currently ‘restored’ colour that can range from neon-red to coconut-shell brown, so I’m not sure how to colour it. Here it’s sort of ‘faded creosote’, in keeping with its decrepit slum state.

Collected works in Japanese

08 Wednesday Jun 2022

Posted by in Odd scratchings

≈ Leave a comment

Lovecraft would surely have been chuffed to have his collected works in Japanese. This is what the set looks like, though apparently there was one further uniform volume produced after the boxed set. A bad blurred Abe picture, and the set anyway looks it’s spent some years in the hold of a Kushiro squid-jigger, so I’ve here filtered it a bit.

Peter Lamborn Wilson

06 Monday Jun 2022

Posted by in Odd scratchings

≈ Leave a comment

I hear that Peter Lamborn Wilson is now with the angels.

Doubtless some thumping great 650-page biography will, one day, proffer a paragraph that draws strange parallels between P.L. Wilson and H.P. Lovecraft. For instance, living as-if back in 1911, quitting New York City for the rural Hudson Valley, engaging playfully with the weird Fourier-ist backwoods of American history, dreaming of wandering mad Arab visionaries and Sufi dream-voyagers, seeking traces of lost Egyptian desert utopias, musing on the hermetic ‘will to power as disappearance’ in the service of eventual re-emergence and re-discovery in other places and at other times.

But for now I plant a few quick signposts-in-the-sand, following a quick catch-up survey of where his post-2001 work might be found.

His latest book appears to be Peacock Angel: The Esoteric Tradition of the Yezidis (2022). Which should help clear up any misconceptions gained about them in Lovecraft’s “Red Hook”. This follows on from his Cauda Pavonis: Esoteric Antinomianism in the Yezidi Tradition (2019).

His The Temple of Perseus at Panopolis is a 400-page table-trembler which imaginatively and poetically… “aims to give a thick impression of a single Egyptian city, Akhmim, called by the Greeks Panopolis or ‘city of Pan’. As a time-machine, this book will take the reader back to the 5th century AD, when the last champions of Paganism were battling against the coming triumph of Christianity.” Sounds interesting. A little later on his heavier book False Messiah: Crypto-Xtian Tracts and Fragments (2022) is said to prod at the various esoteric encrustations that have attached themselves to Christianity.

His fantastical fiction is to be found in Night Market Noodles & Other Tales (2017) and his collection of Borgesian and Nabokovian hoax-fictions False Documents (2015). I can’t find any other such collections. I’ve never read any of it, but it’s on the list now.

Riverpeople (2014) is his “epic” mixed poetry and prose text, which appears to be akin to Moon’s PrairyErth but shorter. It’s on the landscapes and people of his adopted home-place in the Hudson Valley, above New York City. The Esopus River, to be exact, which it appears Lovecraft knew in the form of his cherished “Esopus grist mills”. Riverpeople is flanked by a book of essays arising from his interest in early American weird-history, The American Revolution as a Gigantic Real Estate Scam: And Other Essays in Lost/Found History (2019). Another sentiment with which Lovecraft might have nodded in agreement, if not quite agreeing with the romantic anarchist politics (the ponderous and un-readable fellow anarchist Murray Bookchin frowned on Wilson too, which I consider to be a Good Sign). Wilson’s related essays, such as “Back to 1911: Temporal Autonomous Zones” and “Caliban’s Masque: Spiritual Anarchy and the Wild Man in Colonial America”, are to be found in the miscellaneous clear-out collection Anarchist Ephemera (2016). Which, since it’s Creative Commons, is on Archive.org as a PDF.

Like Lovecraft he was also a poet. I can find three chunky volumes of selected poems published in 2018, Lucky Shadows and Vanished Signs and Thibault or the Secrets of the Sea. Said by Autonomedia to have all been selected from his “1999–2014” poetry, and then split into books distributed among three different publishers. A note on Vanished Signs suggests a chunk of that volume is from his earlier Ec(o)logues (2011), which was apparently an evocation of “anarcho-surrealist” bucolic ruralism. Sounds like News from Nowhere for the Terrance McKenna generation. After that the poetry seems to swing a little darker with the final(?) School of Nite (2015) which was a 60-page photobook with sombre photos and poems.

His essay collection New Nihilism (2018) collected essays on comics-and-freedom (said to be excellent), evading the corporate media, and his enduring love of Celtic culture and history (not the cringe New Age gift-shoppe variety) among other topics. Sadly he does not appear to have ever engaged with Lovecraft in essay form. That would have been an interesting long essay. But it’s one that we shall now never have.