I see that Sapentia had a thoughtful NecronomiCon 2022 review, “The Odd, the Free, and the Dissenting”.

Also been and gone, a more local event which celebrated Lovecraft and a member of the Circle. Such things, though small, are always interesting to note. “Cthulhu Comes to Quincy: The Curious Friendship of H.P. Lovecraft & Edward H. Cole” happened back in February 2023.

Edward Cole was a teacher at the Chauncy Hall School in Boston, and a charter member of the Harvard Club in Quincy. However, it was his hobby of amateur journalism that put him in contact with Lovecraft. The friendship became close enough that Lovecraft ventured to Quincy a number of times to visit, despite his deep dislike of leaving his hometown of Providence. Cole and his wife were also some of the very few to attend Lovecraft’s funeral in 1937. This program will discuss the unlikely friendship between these two men, and the excursions they took that may have had an influence on Lovecraft’s fiction.

Also over in Paris, I see that the Helene Berr Media Library had a special Lovecraft evening in January 2023, with lectures and screenings.

New on the Arxiv.org open repository of academic papers, “Simulating H.P. Lovecraft horror literature with the ChatGPT large language model”. Using the current…

GPT-4 architecture [and] advanced prompt engineering methods. [texts were generated and undergraduates asked to “distinguish between genuine Lovecraft works and those generated by our model. … the participants were unable to reliably differentiate between the two

The sample was 301 students. But I’m always sceptical of studies involving a group of adolescents many of whom are likely to be sleep-deprived, malnourished, hungover or perhaps all at the same time. One would have hoped that, due to the ongoing questioning of Psychology as a respectable discipline, such student survey-experiments would have been consigned to the dustbin of history.

Admittedly, these students appear (it’s not stated) to be from the Universidad Pontificia Comillas, a private Catholic university in Madrid said to be run on Jesuit lines. So, they were perhaps not as hungover as in other universities.

But the authors of the paper might at least have addressed one other obvious concern. That these religious students, on being openly told that the comparison text was from Lovecraft, might have had some animosity toward him. Due to things they recalled about the author (an ‘occultist’ etc). Putting 2 + 2 together, many might have realised that this was a Lovecraft vs. ChatGPT test, and thus been inclined to deliberately find the ChatGPT extracts indistinguishable from the “140-word excerpt from “The Call of Cthulhu”” (which was the comparison text).

As a youth Lovecraft read every issue of Railroad Men’s Magazine (1906-). I had no end-date for the title, and had thus idly assumed it was a defunct title by the time he wistfully recalled it. But no. Rolling around the tracks on Archive.org comes a new scan of Railroad Man’s Magazine, still puffing along in August 1930. Perhaps a revival of the old title, though, under a slightly different name?

It’s then amusing to think that this could have been a market Lovecraft might have entered, and that (in an alt. timeline) all we might now have from him would be a series of railroad ghost stories c. 1910-1925 set on the fog-bound coastlines of New England. Or perhaps fantastical Lost Race tales of railroads being pioneered through the Arctic wastes, across unexplored mountains, or deep under the earth.

What goodies do we seem to have entering the public domain in January 2024?

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70 years:

For nations under ‘the 70 year rule’, the author must have died in 1953. At the current Wikipedia list of such, the major names are the poet Dylan Thomas (Under Milk Wood, though not the LP recording) and Hilaire Belloc (Cautionary Tales for Children and much more). Also the screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (writer on The Enchanted Cottage).

With a little digging I find, for 1953 deaths…

* Gordon MacCreagh, the horror, adventure and travel writer, real-life adventurer and U.S. navy pilot. His White Waters and Black (1926), a book on an expedition up the River Amazon is said to be… “regarded by many as one of the great travel books”. Author of at least five horror stories, a contributor of stirring tales to Adventure and Argosy, and he appears to have produced well over 150 stories in all. There seems potential for a ‘best of’ book, if such does not already exist.

* Sir Arnold Bax. Master of the King’s Musick during the Second World War. Known for the romantic Celtic tone poem “Tintagel” and others. But I find he also… “wrote poetry and short stories set in Ireland under the name of Dermot O’Byrne”. The tales were described at the time as… “studies of romantic life in the West of Ireland to-day”.

* T.F. Powys. One of the Powys brothers, he wrote Christian fantasy stories and novels. Now very obscure, even to Christians. But he attracted a healthy amount of academic and critical interest in the 20th century.

* George Manning-Sanders. British story writer, novelist and playwright. Had a widely acclaimed first novel, Drum and Monkey, but is now forgotten. Drum was “a novel about a dealer in second-hand oddments, and his ambitions for his young son.” His stories were published in the daily press, and seem likely to be human ‘real life’ stories of Britain in the 1930s.

Also of possible interest…

* Charles R. Knight, a major dinosaur artist and painter of prehistoric man in his environment. Inspired Harryhausen. “First published in 1946, Charles R. Knight’s Life Through the Ages” is apparently a major artistic study of humans in the Stone Age.

* “Gordon Jennings, who died in 1953, was a master of special effects” for the movies “who almost single-handedly elevated the art from its primitive beginnings”. The War of the Worlds, When Worlds Collide and many others. He doesn’t appear to have published anything on the craft of special effects, but some readers of Tentaclii may know different.

* H.J. Massingham. British nature writer. Died 1952, thought some say 1953. Any uncertainly on the date will be cleared by 2024.

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The U.S.A.

All the films, books and other works published in 1928. Below are some of my picks. Some of these titles here may already be public domain, due to the author’s death date.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Master Mind of Mars (Barsoom series), and Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle (book version).

S. Fowler Wright, Deluge. His huge best-seller. Influenced John Wyndham and John Christopher.

E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, The Skylark of Space (serial version).

Weird Tales and other pulps for 1928. Of possible interest in WT are Wandrei’s “Sonnets of the Midnight Hours” series, re: a new illustrated edition. Munn’s tale “The Werewolf’s Daughter” also enters the public domain via WT, thus completing the release of his three linked ‘Werewolf’ novels (the first two being Werewolf of Ponkert, and Return of the Master).

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Ethel Owen, Hallowe’en Tales & Games. Games to play and tales to tell, for children in middle childhood. Wife of Frank Owen (“The Wind that Tramps the World”), the Weird Tales contributor.

Wild Animal Interviews and wild opinions of us. Sounds like a potential source for a new graphic novel or children’s picture-book.

The Giraffe in History and Art. Unusual.

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And finally, I noticed some 1928 books that H.P. Lovecraft might have read, or at least browsed in the public library:

H.B. Drake, The Shadowy Thing. A novel praised by Lovecraft.

Virginia Woolf, Orlando: a biography. He must have read reviews, at least.

The Polar Regions in the twentieth century.

The Book of Polar Exploration.

G.B. Harrison, England in Shakespeare’s day. By a Cambridge lecturer. Published in New York.

The Story of the Spectator 1828-1928.

Hare, London in bygone days.

Boys and Girls of Colonial Times.

The Roman World. Knoph edition, New York.

The Rise of American Civilization: Volumes One and Two.

The History of British Civilization.

Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West: Volume Two. In English. I seem to recall he had only ever read Vol. 1, but he would have seen reviews of Vol. 2.

Vathek. John Day Co. edition, New York. With Introduction, and fine illustrations.

The Day After To-morrow: What is going to happen to the world? A good brisk survey of Lovecraft’s possible future-world, as it would have seemed at 1927-28. Published by Doubleday, so not a crank book. Note the focus on glands, suggesting Lovecraft was not alone in his interest.

On Archive.org as The Day After Tomorrow. Note that the contents-page’s page-numbers are awry.

Ice Cream (the first manual and handbook)

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50 years:

In the few nations that follow the 50 year rule, J.R.R. Tolkien. The only notable nation there is New Zealand. But it was reported a while back that NZ bureaucrats have done some shifty shifting about, inside a trade treaty, so as to make it 70 years from 2024. Thus Tolkien may well not be going into the public domain there.

Well it’s 1st May, and our Great and Glorious Charlie III has still unaccountably failed to send me an invite to his Coronation bash in London. Oh well. I’m just glad to say that Tentaclii has survived another bout with Covid and another Stoke-on-Trent winter, and that with the heater off for all but a few days of the coldest weather. I always knew there was a good use for that tin-foil hat. It keeps the heat in, as well as warding off the emanations from R’lyeh.

This month my ‘Pictures Postal’ posts looked at: the Moses Brown School in Providence which briefly features in Lovecraft’s Dexter Ward; Lovecraft’s own gravestone (and along the way I found a new vintage view of his bit of the Seekonk River); then a sale listing for a 1975 “MinnConn” paper flyer led me to the sea-cliffs of Magnolia and a newly-expanded picture of Lovecraft; and to the John Carter Brown Library, where I was rather pleased to find Cthulhu lurking on the doorstep. There you are, you see… even the most apparently mundane ‘Picture Postals’ posts can sometimes discover monsters.

Talking of monsters, in an out-of-band ‘picture post’ I was also pleased to find that Lovecraft’s dad’s Gorham Co. silver factory produced stylised silver toads. Indeed, an item which would not look out of place in an Innsmouth museum. Really. This find was due to my perusing the online holdings of the Smithsonian, a rich resource now standing at 4.5 million images. More such Smithsonian finds are coming next week on Tentaclii.

Adding to my own scholarly musings, I posted another of my occasional “Notes on The Conservative” series. In which I combed through Lovecraft’s issue for October 1915. It was interesting to note how closely the world of a 1915 Conservative issue maps onto today’s world. So far as I know I’m the first to translate the heading quotations used in The Conservative. In other scholarly work, I’m about to start reading the Lovecraft Annual 2022 for a summer 2023 review.

I was pleased to find that Lovecraft was correct in surmising there were giant above-ground fungi in the Palaeozoic (“The Shadow out of Time”), as has now been proven by the latest science. The ‘Vikings in North America’ debate, which stretches back to Lovecraft’s time, has also finally been put to rest with an apparently incontrovertible new wood-source analysis. The Vikings were there, and the ‘cranks’ were right. Although, probably not right about Vikings being present so far south as Lovecraft’s own coastal stomping grounds. The climate was a lot warmer back then, and there was no need for them to venture that far south for timber.

Talking of dead trees, it was a ‘no show’ month for new Lovecraft books or journals this month. But a new hardback edition of The Spirit of Revision: Lovecraft’s Letters to Zealia Brown Reed Bishop is due later in May. In new book formats, I spotted that Ken Faig’s Lovecraftian People and Places (April 2022) now has a Kindle ebook edition. In journal articles I noted an interesting new French study of the various posthumous diagnoses Lovecraft had received from armchair psychoanalysts. Sadly it’s behind a paywall.

Another book Lovecraft enjoyed has turned up on Archive.org, The Story of Saxon and Norman Britain Told in Pictures (1935). Intellectual Vagabondage (1925) is also a fascinating and brisk layman’s survey of Lovecraft’s intellectual hinterland, sans Lovecraft himself. It’s also new and free on Archive.org.

Talking of bargain books, I see all the great Amazon Warehouse sub-£10 deals have dried up for books of Lovecraft’s letters. I’m guessing that Lightning Source, the POD printer for these books, has switched to a new post-Covid printer. One that is more efficient, and thus makes no ‘slightly damaged’ books. The volumes of Letters I want are all up around £30+ these days. There’s still no sign of the new Long letters arriving on the public-facing Brown University repository.

In crowdfunders, congratulations to both the Lovecraft Arts & Sciences and to the team for the new REH / HPL letters translation into French. They both struck gold this month with their funding calls.

Nothing much in audio this month, but I was pleased to find a 70-minute public-domain audio reading of “The Call from Beyond” by Clifford D. Simak. This being Simak’s SF sort-of tribute to Lovecraft. Not a great tale, but interesting to see one master creatively responding to the ideas of another.

In music, there was just the release of Music from the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast – Volume Three (2023).

On the big screen, news of a new Lovecraft movie A Suitable Flesh seems to be getting horror-movie fans excited. This will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2023. Based on Lovecraft’s “The Thing on The Doorstep”, according to the up-and-coming director. Over on the theatre stage, the stage-play “Lovecraft, mon amour” had another three new performances in France.

Nothing in comics, but the concluding issue of the big Kadath adaptation is imminent if not already released. The collected trade-paperback volume lands in a few weeks, as Unknown Kadath. Ignore the “Volume One” label on this. It’s just an annoying comics-trade naming convention, one that is very off-putting to readers who just want a competed tale in one volume.

In the visual arts, I’ve been playing around with AI art and text generators. Only the free ones, since I can’t afford monthly subscriptions. And I’m not showing too many of the results here, as I know it annoys some people. But it’s important to keep up with such things, as they’re here to stay now and AI will only get better and faster. We may even resurrect Lovecraft via AI, in a few years. I’ve suggested a panel discussion on that for the next NecronomiCon convention…

Should we resurrect Lovecraft? H.P. Lovecraft as the ideal candidate for a near-complete AI-powered personality and memory resurrection.

On the back of this new interest Tentaclii had a new “AI” post tag, to collect any AI-related posts in one place. This even includes my own ‘AI Lovecraft’ story from way back in 2011. If you want more on accessible and free AI image-making, go here. Yes, all the artists in the new-on-Archive.org Science Fiction And Fantasy Artists Of The Twentieth Century: A Biographical Dictionary would surely frown and tut, I know. But like I said, it’s in the wild and here to stay — whatever the EU says. We may as well roll with it.

I still hope to release a new voluntary-work issue of Digital Art Live for the community by the high summer, though it will necessarily have a new name. It will probably be somewhat AI focused. Suggestions for email interviews are welcomed, as are books and other products you’d like to see blurbed in the ‘Imaginarium’ section.

Over in the land of the Tolkien scholars, I released the third issue of my free Tolkien Gleanings PDF ‘zine. The fourth is now well underway and it’s looking like another 48-pages. The reviews slot is currently empty. Surprisingly I don’t actually have a lot left that I want to read and haven’t yet read. Tolkien Dogmatics; The Road Goes Ever On and On; and The Gallant Edith Bratt (still languishing in a £10 paperback) and that’s about it… other than various ‘unobtainable’ old journal articles and the last two paywalled “The Year’s Work in Tolkien” articles in the journal Tolkien Studies. The nice things about Tolkien studies is there are no swathes of expensively out-of-reach volumes, and only one volume of the Letters.

That’s it for this month. As always, Patreon donations, Amazon vouchers, and offers of regular paid work are always welcome please.

A “MinnConn” paper flyer, said to be from Minneapolis in 1975. The picture is from a new Abe sale listing (now sold). “MinnConn” was presumably fannish, but nothing can be discovered about it under that name. Possibly a mis-typing for Minicon (Minneapolis)?

Ah yes, here we go… it must have been for the Minicon 10 (Minneapolis) fan convention held in April 1975. There was no autumn fall-con in Minneapolis in 1975, so that must be it. Sadly Archive.org only has the convention booklet and not the initial PR flyers.

The photo is of Lovecraft somewhere out in the wilds, standing on a spur of rock. Possibly a coastal rock-cleft. He looks to be a chunky young fellow (no ‘reducing’ diet, yet), and may be wearing glasses. Honeymoon?

Do any Tentaclii readers know, offhand, where a larger version of this picture might be found?

Update: It’s August 1922 at Magnolia, Mass., though the online version that gives the date/location is still small and also cropped. Is there a bigger print version somewhere?

I see that the Lovecraft Arts & Sciences 2023 Winter Fundraiser is nearly at their $20k crowdfunder goal…

A Covid-like two-week cold, still persisting even now as an annoying cough, prevented Tentaclii from operating as full tilt this month. But a lot was done, even so. The regular ‘Picture Postals’ post was the main item to get a bit lacklustre. I tracked down some of the 1940s/50s Rhode Island drawings of James Francis Murray, and found three or four that were evocative of Innsmouth. I newly found some fine old picture of places I had previously considered, such as the Providence Library steps, the Handicraft Club on College Street (Lovecraft’s aunt lived there for a while), and Pascoag and Chepachet (“The Horror at Red Hook”).

I began an occasional series looking at Lovecraft’s publication The Conservative, and in March I tracked through his first two issues. Among other things I discovered what the “Wet Hen” was, and more about the Lovecraft-admired writer and macabre poet John Henry Fowler (1861-1932).

Also in biography I did initial research on who the early Lovecraftian and Weird Tales story writer David H. Keller was, since he’s now all but forgotten even by Lovecraftians. I linked to his available weird/fantasy collections and more, and was pleased to find had had a series of historical-fantasy tales set in Cornwall, England. Elsewhere Deep Cuts had a long article on “Hart Crane, Loveman and Lovecraft”, and I linked this and added three additional relevant quotes on Loveman.

In new books, S.T. Joshi reported the arrival of Robert Barlow’s greatly expanded collection Eyes of the God. The German Fungi von Yuggoth edition proved to be a handsome volume and also earned the coveted Joshi stamp-of-approval. The team now move on to translating Lovecraft’s essays into German. In France, the huge multi-volume new French translation from Mnemos completed and shipped.

The journal Dead Reckonings No. 32 (Fall/Autumn 2022) has also shipped, again according to S.T. Joshi. On Archive.org, I noted a partial run of Reader and Collector, the worthy fanzine of H.C. Koenig. Some other curiosities popped up on Archive.org, such as the one-off Necronomicon Ilustrado and a timely cutting on Lovecraft from the Chicago Daily Tribune, April 1945. Sadly the big publishers won the first round their law-suit against Archive.org on “books to borrow”, but the initial ruling is being appealed and I guess it may even go all the way to the Supreme Court.

Various audio readings and podcasts were noted. Sadly it looks like Voluminous, which beautifully reads Lovecraft’s letters, has finished its long run.

The well-reviewed 1930s Lovecraftian mystery-puzzler videogame Call of the Sea (2020) was released for free. Not covered by Tentaclii, the usual tidal-wave of Lovecraftian games were released, both videogames and RPGs. The ocean-going Dredge is a Lovecraftian game now being heavily promoted.

In free or low-cost software, I was pleased to find that the unique $47 desktop writing assistant CQuill Writer has a free sci-fi module trained “on 1950s sci-fi authors”. Also of note was OpenChatKit, the first of what will hopefully be many open and genuinely free AI text services. In image generating AI, Dream by Wombo just keeps getting better and can now do hands with reasonable fidelity. Now if only Wombo would provide any kind of ‘landscape’ as a well as their one-size ‘portrait’ output. In the meantime, Playground AI is has a range of output sizes and also genuinely free.

In comics, Dark Horse has finally dated Gou Tanabe’s mammoth adaptation “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” in English. Why Japanese graphic-novels and French BDs can’t be translated into English more quickly is beyond me. You’d think there would be a small industry in quick translation and sales by now, pushing books through to the large and lucrative English market simultaneously with their release in French, Italian or Japanese. Instead, English translations can take years to arrive, if ever.

Over in Tolkien-land, I released my third and probably final edition of the ebook for The Cracks of Doom: Untold Tales in Middle-earth, which now also covers the events of The Hobbit. The third issue of my free occasional PDF ‘zine for Tolkien scholars, Tolkien Gleanings, is also progressing nicely and should be available soon.

That’s it for March. My thanks to my Patreon patrons for sticking with me during this difficult time. And don’t forget… if anyone also wants a substantial monthly PDF magazine produced on their favourite topic, then it would only cost $700 a month to make that happen with myself as Editor.