Lovecraft in the Argentine

Michel Houellebecq’s early Lovecraft essay is now available in translation in Argentina, and this triggers a local newspaper to note that a copy of the Necronomicon once resided at the University of Buenos Aires, and that the nation’s favourite son Jorge Luis Borges was influenced by Lovecraft. The translation gets colloquially fuzzy from that point on, but seems to imply that Borges once faked and placed a library card for the Necronomicon in the national library card catalogue (libraries used to be indexed with long wooden boxes of paper-cards, kids). What follows then appears to be an amusingly scattergun Borgesian attempt to link Lovecraft with the apparently well-known local pop-singer Gustavo Cerati, so perhaps the article is not quite to be taken at face value.

Save the Ancient Ones

SASA Masterclass

The Save Ancient Studies Association will be hosting a discussion with a leading Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, who will explore how the ancient world inspired the work of horror author H.P. Lovecraft.” 30th October 2021.

Sounds good. Hopefully they’ll post a recording on their YouTube channel.

Also, Save Ancient Studies seems a very worthy cause, and worth supporting and promoting if it’s within your orbit.

Miskatonic Missives

Miskatonic Missives, a spin-out paper publication from the Voluminous podcast…

each issue of Miskatonic Missives serves as an ideal companion guide for exploring one of H.P. Lovecraft’s most fascinating letters. Every issue includes a reproduction of the full text of the letter in question, supported by a variety of relevant reference material, including contemporary and modern fiction, academic writing, poetry, and artwork.

Hmmm, “contemporary and modern fiction”? I presume that must be new unpublished work then?

Inktober 2021

Inktober 2021 is here. I’d completely forgotten about it, what with the global Internet melting into a puddle from 1st October onward (better now, including a vital local SSL root certificate Windows/Opera fix, here at Tentaclii).

Obviously potential for Lovecraftian doodling and dwiddling. It’s often assumed that some hand-ground oak-gall inks and hand-plucked swan-quills are required for Inktober, but there’s no reason you can’t join in with more affordable digital tools.

“A textbook of botany hints at monstrous fungi and blasphemous thallophytes”

The Finnish journal Research in Arts and Education plans a special issue on ‘Fungi in Contemporary Art and Research’…

articles or visual essays dealing with artistic research, art practice or theoretical and critical viewpoints on contemporary art with plants, lichen, bryophytes, and fungi.

Sadly the deadline has gone, but the issue is set to appear in February 2022. The journal appears to be open access.

A creepy future eco-‘shroom building.

‘To De Land and a little sunshine…’

The Voluminous podcast returns with “The Wind That Is in the Grass”, at 90 minutes. In which Lovecraft prepares for his epic bus journey down to Florida, to meet the fifteen year-old Robert H. Barlow for the first time. Lovecraft…

offers travel tips, thoughts on mental health, and a robust breakdown of the latest issue of Weird Tales in preparation for his trip to visit his young friend.

Judging by postcards, the commercial and traffic centre and the first view that travellers would have encountered on stepping down from the bus. Note the end of a long bus seen parked on the left, seeming to indicate a bus terminus. The picture looks like the mid/late 1930s and near enough in time to the 2nd May 1934 point when Barlow and Lovecraft first met. Lovecraft calls the place “De Land” in letters, but the 1920s newspaper title DeLand Sun News suggests it was DeLand locally. Here the picture is newly and imperfectly colourised, due to laying an older colorised postcard over the 1930s b&w, and blending for colour.

Here is the view looking in the other direction (note the same Drugs and Coca-Cola sign) in the 1940s, and the large clock again suggests a terminus.

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