26 Saturday Jun 2021
Posted in Odd scratchings
A new and tentacular Edward Lear poem has been discovered, “Lays of the Octapods” (1882), a companion to his known short poem “The Octopods and Reptiles”. It begins…
When the leaves were turning brown
Five hundred thousand Octopods
All painfully came down
And on the back of every one
A Pofflikopp held fast …
These appear, judging by the rest of the nonsense poem, to have been air-octopii that fell to earth because they had died of indigestion.
24 Thursday Jun 2021
Posted in Podcasts etc.
From Howard Days 2021 The Cromcast now has the keynote speech by Roy Thomas in audio.
Those interested in comics as they are in 2021 will also find much interest in an outstandingly interesting podcast interview with Kristian Donaldson (Supermarket, The Dark), including an account of a month-long road-trip that ping-ponged between military sites such as Area 51 and hippy communes in the South-West. He’s getting a new self-funded digitally-created graphic novel out of the curious tensions he felt between those communities. The interview is very long, but downloading and then playing it at 1.2 or 1.3 speed and deepening pitch works nicely (the AIMP player can do that with ease). The .MP3 download hides here…
23 Wednesday Jun 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A new 64 page comic, Nightmares of Providence #1. It appears to be a one-shot connected with a Kickstarter stretch-goal, part of a campaign for a deluxe collected edition of Alan Moore’s Providence comics. But Nightmares is by other artists/writers. Amazon UK knows nothing, but it should be shipping any day now… if the comics-trade catalogue Previews is to be believed.
21 Monday Jun 2021
Posted in Historical context, New discoveries
At £18 each can’t afford either of these antique stereo cards, but this is highly likely to be Lovecraft’s childhood ravine, adjacent to the road before the road grading. The photographer is from Providence.
And presumably the ravine adjacent to the same road.
A comparison with a winter picture from a lower elevation, known to show the results of the extensive and earth-moving and road-grading work that swept away much of Lovecraft’s favourite haunt of middle-childhood. As I wrote of this in my essay on the Seekonk site in Lovecraft in Historical Context #4…
The [Blackstone Park, Seekonk] shorefront road now runs as a barrier between the pond and the river, to join up the River Rd with Irving Avenue. Above is an undated photo of this corner, looking south-east, after the grading of the Irving Avenue extension and the connection of the two roads (possibly circa 1900). One can still see road surveying stakes in the foreground. My feeling is that the height of the bluffs on the north side of York Pond were lowered by earth-moving at this time.
I have the eBay pictures ready be posted as colourised up-res versions in due course. But some may want to own the original stereo card pictures.
18 Friday Jun 2021
Posted in Housekeeping, Picture postals
A hot day under the Brooklyn Elevated railway, 1933, or the ‘El’ as Lovecraft’s letters often called the city’s elevated train service.
The trains would periodically thunder noisily above the walker, as seen in the picture. In a letter Lovecraft once reported that his friend Frank Belknap Long had to ‘hike for the El’, meaning Long had to walk a long distance on the sidewalk under the high rails. With the aim of reaching the wooden stairs leading up to an elevated platform, and a rail line heading in the desired direction.
17 Thursday Jun 2021
Posted in Housekeeping
As the summer (and much reading and writing) beckons, I’m taking Tentaclii off the daily posting schedule from tomorrow. There should still be several posts a week here, but don’t expect the usual regular daily posts for a while. Daily posting will return in due course.
17 Thursday Jun 2021
Posted in Podcasts etc., REH
Adventures Fantastic brings the first report on the 2021 Robert E. Howard Days event in Texas, and has pictures. The delayed event managed to go ahead, complete with veteran comics writer Roy Thomas as guest of honour.
There’s a Robert E. Howard Days 2021: Cimmeria reading video on YouTube, the Cromcast has a full recording of the “R.E.H. in Comics” panel, and doubtless other recordings will be online soon.
16 Wednesday Jun 2021
Posted in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts
H.P. Lovecraft appears as the ‘big reveal’ at the end of the recently-released serial comic Die #16, and now makes a sustained as-character appearance in the current issue #17. Die is based on a popular RPG game, it seems.
In the comic he is deemed to have died in 1919, after blinding himself because of the horrors he was seeing and learning about. He is here the blind ‘Master of Dreams’ who serves as brief ‘realm-guide and info-dump’ for the super-hero-like RPG team. I say brief, but he appears for 14 pages, which all look superb and are kind of fun. Lovecraft is then rewarded by the team by being easily killed with a single head-bash, because he is “no longer needed” (no… I couldn’t figure that bit out, either…). His death (again) unleashes his hordes of nightmare creature-dreams on his dream-realm and thus on the team. Moral: ‘Don’t kill the Master, because it will unleash his horrors’, I guess.
But then the team just teleport away from the monsters (erm… Wellsian centipedes?) and the brained Lovecraft. Which was rather lame, I thought. Die has superb art and interesting fantasy-horror concepts going on, but possibly some too-easy get-outs. But perhaps that’s the way it is in the table-top RPG version of Die. Don’t like a NPC character? Just kill him off… In trouble? Just teleport away…
I guess now we wait for the trade-paperback for this Die story-arc to see how it all plays out and if it makes sense when read in full. The trade is due early November as Die, Volume 4: Bleed, with 168 pages.
15 Tuesday Jun 2021
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts
Another few picks from the new or recent Lovecraft art.
The Music of Erich Zann by Rabbitstein.
Howard Lovecraft-Process by Red-Rus. And the final finished version.
H.P. Lovecraft, Prophet of the Great Old Ones by Airen90. Adapted from one of the several ‘stage magician’ movies, I’m guessing.
Lovecraft by YlarchC. Imagining Cage playing Lovecraft himself, in a TV movie.
Cthulhu Rises by Silberius. (Lovecraft and Sonia in New York City, 1925 at the genesis of “Cthulhu”).
The Cats of Ulthar (BW) by UnworthyReturn.
Alhazred Encounter 10: The Temple of Ong by Tillinghast23. There’s a large series of these, depicting the many quests of Alhazred. Also a similar Fungi from Yuggoth set from a few years ago, and an Ashton Smith set.
Egypt 04 by Blik1976.
Abdul Alhazred by Mgenccinar.
Also noticed was Solomon Kane in the Ruins by ArtofReza.
14 Monday Jun 2021
Posted in New books, Podcasts etc.
The journal Wormwoodiana No. 36 will ship shortly, and now has a table-of-contents. The same post has news that an estate-approved biography of acclaimed British supernatural/weird writer Robert Aickman is…
essentially finished, and we now need to explore the best way of seeing it published
Aickman was also a key leader in the post-war restoration of the extensive but neglected British system of inland canals. The restoration was a magnificent success, and now offers a vast network for off-road walking and cycling in leafy surroundings. The system also supports a thriving narrowboat hire industry, especially in the Midlands, bringing affluent tourists and their cash to all sorts of out-of-the-way rural places. Lovecraft the-conservationist-and-walker would be been very pleased that his beloved British Isles had seen such a remarkable and suitable transformation, and that it had been led by a weird author whom he would have deeply admired.
Portrait of Robert Aickman by Ida Kar, National Portrait Gallery. Here newly shadow-lifted and colourised. The painted step and can on the shelf above are traditional painted British canal-ware.
If you can’t wait for the biography, there are said to be two published auto-biographical books, The Attempted Rescue (1966) and the posthumous The River Runs Uphill: A Story of Success and Failure (1986). But how much they have to say about the writer rather than the conservationist, I don’t know.
For those who want a quicker overview and a clear focus on the weird writing, the recent 30-minute audio documentary / appreciation “The Unsettled Dust: The Strange Stories of Robert Aickman” (2017) is available at Archive.org.
Incidentally, perhaps some Aickman specialist can tell me this: what exactly was his connection with the English West Midlands? Certain small certain factors I’ve casually noticed in the past suggest he had some sort of connection with the Wolverhampton -to- Burton-on-Trent arc of Staffordshire, just above Birmingham on the map.
13 Sunday Jun 2021
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
You’re likely to need a tongue like an eel, to do justice to reading aloud Lovecraft’s poetry translated into Swedish. But it’s good to know such a book exists.
Kosmofobi : Dikter om varldar bortom was new from Aleph Bokforlag in 2020, with 176 pages and 10 illustrations…
The book collects all the author’s surviving horror and fantasy poems. These are published in the original side-by-side with Swedish interpretations in free verse. There is also an essay by the prominent Lovecraft expert Robert M. Price, written especially for this Swedish edition.
Also from the same publisher, Jens Heimdahl’s illustrated “Dream Quest”, Soekandet efter det droemda Kadath (2020, 2nd edition). According to the publisher…
Something of an art book, solidly illustrated by Jens Heimdahl, who also has a section on the author and analyzes the story.
They’ve saddled it with a cover with poor ‘shovelware’ typography, but here are some samples of the art…
12 Saturday Jun 2021
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
Speaking of Science Fiction is a chunky collection of 31 interviews with primarily science fiction authors, and some interviewees were also known as editors and anthologists. The interviews were done by Paul Walker via letter and took place 1969-74, first appearing in print in the New Jersey journal Luna between 1972 and 1976 (or between 1970 and 1976, depending on source). The book was published in paperback by Luna in 1978 with illustrations of each author by Dave Ludwig, and there was also a hardback edition with dust-jacket.
For the sake of future searchers, here are the TOCs for the 425 pages, via a sales listing …
I looked into the book because a long-ago zine had mentioned a Frank Belknap Long interview and, as it also had portrait illustrations depicting each author, there was the double-promise of interesting Long/Lovecraft content. But the TOCs show no Long, only Bloch. And since there was never a reprint, additional interviews cannot have been added later.
The book is not currently on Archive.org and there are only a few Luna Monthly titles there. In which the only pulp-era writer interview is Edmond Hamilton, the resident rocketeer at Weird Tales. But there is also also “A Day with Ray Bradbury” by different interviewers, and the young Bradbury counts as a pulp writer. I assume that the interviews mostly appeared in the premium Luna Prime journal, of which Archive.org currently only has a 1970 edition with no interviews in it.
While looking for the title I found a similar title from the period, Speaking of the Fantastic, with interviews conducted by Darrell Schweitzer. This became a series of books, which can currently be had as affordable print-on-demand paperbacks via Amazon.
