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.

Why it’s no longer wise for scholars / bloggers to trust DuckDuckGo / Bing snippets in search…

1. The Guardian newspaper says something silly about Tolkien (to be expected)…

2. But, on clicking through to the source, The Guardian’s actual story says something different. It’s talking about Chaffey…

An AI at Bing has presumably re-written the snippet, possibly for extra click-throughs(?). I’d heard about AI search-result snippet re-writing, but this is the first time I’ve seen it in action.

The UK has seen the usual February wobbling between promising signs of early springtime and raw blasts of chilly weather. This seems to have influenced my ‘Picture Postals’ posts. My ‘Return to Copps Hill’ post revisited Lovecraft’s snowy visit to Boston’s Copp’s Hill Burying Ground. My Photoshopped ‘Vint-o-Vision’ picture had Lovecraft shivering at the controls of the Ladd Observatory telescope, Providence. More authentically I found two choice pictures of College Hill (under snow) and Angell Street (in the earliest spring). To thaw out shivering Tentaclii readers (I hear it’s still bitterly cold in much of the USA) there was then a visit to and inside the hothouses of the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, leading into some choice quotes which establish ‘gardens’ as a key interest for Lovecraft in his imagination, dreams and reality. Sadly he never lived to fully explore the theme, although some in his circle took the idea and ran off with it in the direction of pulpy ‘sci-fi horror plants’.

Very little in new research or discoveries this month on Tentaclii, but I was pleased to find and recover a new ‘lost’ backwoods yarn by Lovecraft’s friend Everett McNeil. He certainly could spin a yarn, and I still wonder (despite having written his life) where he had the experience to write such tales. I suspect either during his walking to New York, or during his stint in the armed forces.

In books the action was overseas this month. Lovecraft’s letters appeared in Spanish for the first time. The French have the new volume Selection de lettres (1927-1929). The Germans published their handsome new book of the translated poetry, based around Lovecraft’s “Fungi from Yuggoth”, and this book earned the coveted Joshi ‘stamp of approval’ some weeks later.

There was however advance notice of some 2023 books in English, including: Lovecraft’s Letters to Hyman Bradofsky and Others, an untitled “book on Arkham House ephemera from the Classic Years”; a Miskatonic University Monograph: “The Discovery of Fragments of Kitab al-Azif at Harran”; an untitled book of letters from the Lovecraft Circle but not sent to Lovecraft; and the academic William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird: Possibilities of the Dark. Looking further ahead, NecronomiCon Providence announced the 2024 dates.

In scholarly work, I linked a couple of journals with interesting new items on sea-monsters seen in the light of contemporary academic theory. Which is the more scary, I wonder? Some Deleuze Seminars were dug up, containing his 1975-1976 thoughts on Lovecraft. The German annual Lovecrafter Nr. 3, a “50 years of Lovecraft in Germany” special-issue, became available in PDF and thus is now potentially machine-translatable.

Posts on artwork were wide-ranging this month, from August Derleth’s “cinderella’ stamp” to the latest Ian Miller artwork. Miller is still making masterpieces like this at age 70+, which is an encouragement to us all. There was also a link to a new article on the huge and sustained success of the Call of Cthulhu RPG in the Far East. Who knew?

In comics, Unknown Kadath had a trade paperback release date in May 2023. I linked to a new Dark Worlds Quarterly surveying vintage Lovecraft comics adaptations published in black & white.

In audio, lots of relevant items are still appearing on Librivox. Lovecraft’s friend Henry S. Whitehead is obviously getting some deserved and noticeably regular attention, here and there. We even had “The Fantasy Fan: The Complete Writings of Clark Ashton Smith” this month.

From the archives, some 1981 issues of Cultural Correspondence popped up on “Lovecraft, Surrealism”, with contributions from an elderly Frank Belknap Long. I also noted some choice Ray Bradbury items appearing, and then came the mammoth Collected Fiction of Henry Kuttner (an influence on Bradbury) and to celebrate I found and tweaked/colorised a picture of the young Kuttner. I also tracked down the three fannish/scholarly texts on Kuttner’s work.

As for me… still no joy on the job front. It appears there comes a certain birthday after which no-one wants to interview you for a monthly-paid job, regardless of how impressive your C.V. or wide-ranging your skill-set is. Three months of looking and applying, and not a single interview. Except one as a night-shift warehouse picker / pallet-stacker in Stoke-on-Trent, which was arranged via a special jobs fair… which meant they didn’t need to see my C.V. Despite having done 18 months of such manual work, many decades ago, I didn’t even get that job. The UK’s supposed talent shortage and ‘huge demand for over 50s’ appears to be a figment of the government’s imagination, so far as I can see. If such demand was really there, a 1990s first-class graduate like myself would by now have had a dozen or more interviews. What’s really needed seems to be guaranteed “double your dole money” jobs for over 50s who want to work. I’d be perfectly happy to pick the local litter (US: ‘trash’) for three days each week, for £700 a month. That’s all I need. And the city of Stoke-on-Trent certainly needs such an all-year army of litter-pickers, I can tell you.

Anyway, that’s it for the shortest month. Onward to March and warmth!

Currently on eBay, no bids. Low starting prices, and he ships from the UK. The condition looks less than astounding, but some may be interested.

New at the HPLHS Store, Miskatonic University Monograph: “The Discovery of Fragments of Kitab al-Azif at Harran”. In the years before 1920…

Scholars from Cambridge and Miskatonic universities collaborated on a series of archeological digs in what is now southern Turkey. Excavations at the site of Harran made several unusual discoveries, chief amongst them is a fragmentary medieval document in Arabic. Professor Henry Armitage correlated the translated fragments with a passage in Miskatonic’s incredibly rare occult tome: the Necronomicon.

Said to be shipping at the start of March 2023.

Physics-defying ‘dwarf planet’ Quaoar, discovered at the edge of our Solar System.

… the nameless vortices of never-dreamed-of strangeness, where form and symmetry, light and heat, even matter and energy themselves, may be unthinkably metamorphosed or totally wanting.