Category Archives: Podcasts etc.

Tales of the Long Bow (1925)

15 Saturday May 2021

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G.K. Chesterton’s Tales of the Long Bow (1925), now newly on Librivox as a free public-domain reading. Not, as you might think from the title, romping tales of the English greenwood from the times of Ivanhoe and Robin Hood. Rather, “impossible” tall tales, humorously mind-bending moustache-twiddling ‘club’ tales, more ably indicated by the titles of the stories themselves…

The Unpresentable Appearance of Colonel Crane.
The Improbable Success of Mr. Owen Hood Kingsnake.
The Unobtrusive Traffic of Captain Pierce.
The Elusive Companion of Parson White.
The Exclusive Luxury of Enoch Oates.
The Unthinkable Theory of Professor Green.
The Unprecedented Architecture of Commander Blair.
The Ultimate Ultimatum of the League of the Long Bow.

“Curious” rather than weird tales, and perhaps of interest to some Tentaclii readers.

The book is also on Archive.org in open PDF, from the Digital Library of India. Here is the dustjacket cover of the 1962 British reprint…

The picture apparently relates to a plan to parachute ‘flying pigs’ across the English countryside, to show that ‘pigs can fly’.

Flying down to Chile

27 Saturday Mar 2021

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Lovecraft in Chile. A new 70 minute video talk which appears to be a broad survey on Lovecraft in Chile (a nation formed from the provinces that run all down the Pacific coast of South America). Sergio Fritz…

… reviews how Lovecraft and his literature arrived in Chile, how he has influenced certain national authors, musicians, filmmakers, illustrators … Chilean bands that have taken Lovecraftian elements, such as: Dorso, Atomic Aggressor, Demonic Rage, Miskatonic Union, Nyarlathotep, Arkham, Disembowel, Inanna, Inhumano, Cryptic Cult, Unnaussprechilchen Kulten, Lluvia Acida, etc. Writers like Hugo Correa, Sergio Meier, Patricio Alfonso and myself. Magazines like Yermo Frio and Vientos de Irem. Movies like Chilean Gothic … Juan Vasquez in comics … my essay on Lovecraft, the texts of Hugo Correa, the anthology Chile del Terror, Visiones Lovecraftianas.

Since YouTube has the automatic transcripts, you could likely learn more by running the transcription through a translator-bot.

“Creepily insistent rhythms…”

25 Thursday Mar 2021

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The Swamp In June and The Frog Pond. Both field recordings from Rhode Island, once issued in vinyl form by the Droll Yankees label and now on Archive.org — since they appear to have been abandoned by whoever may have inherited the rights in the 1970s.

“… there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs.” — “The Dunwich Horror”.

Droll Yankees was a two-man enthusiast record-label devoted in the 1960s to collecting and releasing “the sounds of New England” before they vanished. There was also a seaport series, including “steamboat leaving Newport on a foggy morning”. There’s probably potential here for a new compilation of the most Lovecraftian of the recordings, perhaps interwoven with some of Lovecraft’s topographical weird poems of New England and travel letters.

The Wanderings of Alhazred – now in audiobook

24 Wednesday Feb 2021

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New from Tantor Necronomicon: The Wanderings of Alhazred as a nine-hour audiobook. It’s a big literary ‘life of’ Lovecraft’s fictional madman. I recall reviews that suggest it gets quite gory in places, as Alhazred goes through various lengthy torments. It appears to have been developed into a series of further books by the author, so perhaps more audiobooks will follow.

“Abdul Alhazred” by Katharsisdrill.

Cthulhupunk

18 Thursday Feb 2021

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From Germany, a new “Cthulhupunk” (i.e. ‘steampunk Lovecraft’) story anthology Necrosteam with illustrations for each tale.

GM Factory is also hard at work turning public-domain stories into free German-language audiobooks, from H.P. Lovecraft, R.E. Howard, and C.A. Smith.

Also from Germany, a trailer for a promised new screen adaptation of “The Haunter of the Dark”.

Songs from Lovecraft and Others

09 Tuesday Feb 2021

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S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. Among the news there are details of his own forthcoming…

Songs from Lovecraft and Others — a volume of my recent musical compositions, in which I have set poems by Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and others to music. I am now fine-tuning my scores (adding dynamic markings, breath marks, and other details). We will have an accompanying CD that features a computer-generated rendition of the compositions. My music notation software (MuseScore3) is capable of producing sound files that (in the case of choral works) can sing the notes (with a kind of “Ah” sound) but cannot articulate the words. But that seems good enough for our purposes.

Wonderful. I hope he also releases the source files under Creative Commons, so others can push the MuseScore3 files through different instrument and voice modules — and so get new sonics on the same pattern.

He also notes a curious resemblance of the actor playing Prince Philip (husband of our glorious Queen) in The Crown, to H.P. Lovecraft. Just in case you were seeking to cast an actor for an HPL bio-pic.

On Xuchotl

09 Tuesday Feb 2021

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A new deep-dive by a R.E. Howard scholar into the question: “Red Nails”: Did Howard Create the City of Xuchotl From a Real-Life Inspiration? The case is unproven one way or the other, but it’s an interesting and well-illustrated investigation, and touches on a comment he made to H.P. Lovecraft.

LibriVox has a free audiobook of the long tale, at around 3.5 hours depending on how you nudge the playback speed. See also my R.E. Howard audio books for Conan in story-world order, to see where this story fits in the Conan timeline.

Ornaments in Jade

30 Saturday Jan 2021

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New to me, Ornaments in Jade by Arthur Machen. Now on Librivox as a free 100-minute audiobook read by Chuck Williamson.

Ornaments in Jade is a collection of short narrative experiments from Arthur Machen, ten dreamlike tales that are in equal parts enigmatic, sumptuous, and phantasmagoric…

Interesting. Issued in 1924 by Alfred A. Knopf of New York, in a 1000-copy limited edition. Turn-of-the-century literary decadence was coming back into view at that time, as the taint of the trial of Oscar Wilde faded. With this trend and Knopf’s publicists behind it, one imagines that the bookmen of New York City were at least aware of this edition when Lovecraft first arrived in the city. Lovecraft first discovered Machen’s work in the summer of 1923, so he may well have discovered news of it by himself.

If he was then able to see a copy of Jade must remain debatable. Yet, according to Joshi, he likely learned of Machen through Frank Belknap Long and a letter reveals he was “rereading” Long’s Machen collection in 1926. Long would have had both the savvy and contacts to be aware of the limited-edition being issued on his doorstep in 1924, and would also have had the funds to purchase it. Thus is seems reasonable to suppose that Lovecraft at least perused the book in 1926, if not soon after publication in 1924. It could also have become available for reading circa 1925, in the reading-rooms of the larger libraries in the city. This leads to the possibility that aspects of it may have inspired or influenced his own Dream Quest.

Centipede Press nicely reprinted the book a few years ago, and S.T. Joshi had his copy up for bags at $30 in 2018.