The Spoor of Cthulhu

09 Wednesday Dec 2020

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On its journey to the Kuiper belt, the New Horizon spacecraft passed by Pluto, delivering stunning images of the Cthulhu region. The high-altitude mountain chains in its eastern part resemble the snow-covered alpine summits, but instead of water, this frost contains methane. However, how these icy patches were deposited remained unclear…

Lovecraft would, I imagine, be delighted at both the mystery and the naming.

“Crypt-city of the Deathless One”

07 Monday Dec 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Podcasts etc.

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Here’s an unusual one. There’s a new two-hour Librivox recording of Henry Kuttner’s story “Crypt-city of the Deathless One” (Planet Stories, Winter 1943). It appears to be throwaway pulp, a late lost-race jungle-story that’s been pepped up by being transplanted to the science-lite “hell-forests” of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede.

Also new on Librivox as a free audiobook, another curiosity. Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright’s “An Adventure In The Fourth Dimension” (October 1923)…

an uproarious skit on the four-dimensional theories of the mathematicians, and inter-planetary stories in general.

Joseph Altairac (1957-2020)

06 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by in Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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S.T. Joshi’s Blog has updated. He notes the passing of Joseph Altairac (1957-2020)…

a leading French scholar and publisher devoted to Lovecraft. He was the editor of Études Lovecraftiennes, a fine small-press journal that published many trenchant articles on Lovecraft from both French and American critics.

I’ve looked online, but there appears to be no way to get the TOCs for this French Lovecraft Studies equivalent and thus craft a translated English summary of these after the first two issues (which had offered selected Lovecraft Studies translations). Possibly an English obituary of Altairac, likely destined for the Lovecraft Annual of late summer 2021, could be followed by an itemisation of the journal’s contents in English? Note that his Études Lovecraftiennes is not to be confused with the later and similarly named Cahiers Études Lovecraftiennes which it appears were more of a series of bookshop-quality monographs. You can see the difference here…

In other Lovecraft-related news from S.T. Joshi, there is a two hour talk on YouTube between S.T. Joshi and leading Brazilian scholar Emilio S. Ribeiro.

Friday ‘picture postals’ from Lovecraft: the Strand, Providence

04 Friday Dec 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Picture postals

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Last week’s ‘Picture Postal’ post on the Providence Art Club incidentally had Lovecraft mentioning that, on returning home to Providence from what he called ‘the pest zone’ of New York City, he visited the Art Club and…

In the evening a cinema show at the good old Strand in Washington Street completed a memorable and well-rounded day.” (Selected Letters II).

Here is a fine picture of the “good old Strand”, which I’ve lightly colorised…

Actually it was not so “old”, even by American standards. It had opened in summer 1915 as a dedicated movie theatre, with variety-theatre stage facilities that were also used for public talks (the Rhode Island National Guard gave a talk at the Strand Theatre in the early days of the war). Lovecraft had patronised it much in its first few years, enjoying the early silent films shown there. The house guaranteed that, once inside, its patrons would find a… “wonderful, big, beautiful place – and the shows presented will be fine always.” This was in an era of hand-cranking and movies were often shown at too great a speed, were jerky or the film mangled in the projector and bits had to be cut out. One could even find that the film was simply not the one that had been paid for. There were also the common problems of ventilation and heating. The Strand presumably did not tolerate such lapses.

What might Lovecraft have seen playing? The visit appears to have been on the very evening of his return to Providence. That was Saturday the 17th of April 1926.

One imagines that, after escaping the ‘pest zone’ of New York City, the Italian movie The Last Days of Pompeii might have been deemed suitable if a little heavy. Another possible foreign candidate is Lotte Reiniger’s debut The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the world’s first animated feature and made in silhouette animation. But neither had yet been released in America.

Several more 1926 movies likely to appeal to Lovecraft had not yet been released, such as Mary Pickford’s major swamp-horror Sparrows, Faust, The Sorrows of Satan, and the horror The Magician. Similarly the New England historical movie The Scarlet Letter was not released until August, and the grand failure Old Ironsides not until December.

There was no Chaplin movie that year, though The Gold Rush (June 1925) could still have been playing if fronted with a more recent comedy short.

Most likely are The Sea Beast (a Moby-dick adaptation) which had been an enormous hit in January and February, along with the lavish Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, but if either was still playing in a large main house several months later must be debatable. However, spring-summer 1926 seems an especially sparse time in terms of quality movies and my guess is that these two might have become a “double-bill” aiming to keep seats filled. The other possibility is the Douglas Fairbanks pirate-adventure vehicle The Black Pirate, released in early March, which de Camp later suggested as a R.E. Howard inspiration. This seems to me the most likely movie seen by Lovecraft, as he may have seen the other two while in New York City. Brisk and engaging, it’s now thought of as one of the most watchable surviving swashbucklers of the 1920s and can be had in a restored technicolour version as originally shown. The strong ‘love angle’ would also have had an appeal for his aunts.

Incidentally, search for this post revealed the supposedly mighty Google Search doing the dumbest word-substitution…

November on Tentaclii

02 Wednesday Dec 2020

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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As Britain morphs into the old East Germany, a matching iron-grey curtain of mist and December drizzle descends. But indoors it’s at least a more cheery picture, amid the piled-high Black Friday goodies and the soft glow of screens. Possibly the power cuts and food shortages will arrive in due course, but until then I’m personally quite pleased with my small baggings in terms of discounted software and 3D models. These were not Lovecraftian except in one case, as there were no book bargains or Amazon Warehouse deals on the Letters to be had this month. But some of the products of the software may show up here soon. I did keep an eye out for software of interest to Tentaclii readers, but neither PDF Index Generator or JitBit Macro Recorder offered a discount this year, and the Topaz GigaPixel AI discount was gone before I could mention it.

This month’s new research essays at Tentaclii took a look at “H.P. Lovecraft at Christmas”, and “Lovecraft and Havelock Ellis”, the early sexologist; and also “the Newport boat” which is an item of Providence scenery that appears briefly by implication in “The Call of Cthulhu”. This last post discovered a new picture of the very dock and this also doubled as one of my regular Postcards posts. In a lesser and related boat post I hopped onboard with Lovecraft as he took a steamer across the Mississippi in the 1930s. There was also an in-depth look at the Providence Art Club and specifically the old alley which was the haunt of the cat “Old Man”.

An actual new Lovecraft postcard was elsewhere put up for sale. This didn’t have new data, but the sign-off to C.A. Smith of “Yrs for the Eternal Infra-red Flame” at least gives Mythos writers a new “it came from Lovecraft” concept for tales. Someone should really collect all such sign-offs and salutations together, and date them, thus forming a sort of companion to the Commonplace Book. Sadly it won’t be me, as I don’t have the funds to order an immediate complete set of the published letters. Also relevant to Lovecraft-the-man was my quick summary post of “Some anniversaries for 2021”, of which the 100th anniversaries of “The Outsider” and “The Music of Erich Zann” seem the most notable.

Of new-found scholarly work, my Open Lovecraft had three more links added; and I was pleased to hear of a new Masters dissertation, “Providence Lost: Natural and Urban Landscapes in H. P. Lovecraft’s Fiction”, though this is not yet online.

A clutch of new journals popped out after Halloween, and with non-fiction too. These included Wormwood #35; the Italian Lovecraft journal Providence Tales; Bare Bones #3, and Skelos #4. Prompted again about Skelos I tracked back through their previous issues and filleted the non-fiction Lovecraft titles for your perusal. I also have a soft spot for Doc Savage, so noted here was the new The Bronze Gazette #84. This month the latest Lovecraft Annual No. 14, 2020 arrived in digital form on JSTOR for subscribing universities.

In open access and on archive.org, the microfilm journal The Art Digest arrived for free, covering the Lovecraft years of 1926-1937; and CLIJ: Cuadernos de Literatura Infantil y Juvenil is available for free from 1988-2009.

New books noted here included the greatly expanded H.P. Lovecraft: Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner and Others; Ideology and Scientific Thought in H.P. Lovecraft; the Annotated Guide to Robert E. Howard’s Weird Fantasy; and I also dug out a preview of the TOC for the forthcoming Renegades and Rogues: The Life and Legacy of Robert E. Howard. S.T. Joshi noted his Lovecraft biography I Am Providence is set for a 2021 Russian translation. Also noted here as forthcoming, but several years away yet, was the book Lovecraft & New York. This sounds like another welcome addition to the writing on Lovecraft and his topographies and topophilias.

Not much in the visual arts this month, other than archive diggings, but some will want to note that digital 3D Lovecraftiana can be had for bargain prices at present. The DAZ Store and Renderosity both have substantial Black Friday sales still on for a day or so. “Dead Pool” at the DAZ Store is basically Innsmouth for (currently) $15, and Renderosity has Lovecraft’s typewriter for $6. There’s also a modest 10% off Sixus1’s Aquarians Bundle which lets you populate Innsmouth. To run such 3D, Poser 11 Pro is currently a mere $80 at NeoWin Deals. They also have a… “Use code CMSAVE20 for an additional 20% off site-wide.” Which, if it works, would get you Poser 11 at an absolute bargain price of $64. Don’t delay, as Poser 12 is coming out any day now and will sweep away the deals.

My podcast notes at Tentaclii included one in which I was pleased to find Robert M. Price looking very hale and hearty at his new slot on the MythVision podcast, which I noted included a couple of new Lovecraft episodes; the discovery of A Scottish Podcast, this being a comedy Lovecraft podcast that seems well-regarded and worth noting; and a 50-minute “Lovecraft in the Merrimack Valley” talk from a local museum (time-bombed for 15th November, so it’s gone now).

In more substantial audio, Dark Adventure Radio Theatre released their new The Curse of Yig adaptation this month; Cadabra Records has a sumptuous new vinyl LP presentation of Lovecraft’s festive story “The Festival”; I linked a free recording of a world premiere of a song cycle All The Wild Worlds by Nicholas Ryan Kelly, which culminated in a Lovecraft poem set to music; and I found Clark Ashton Smith’s City of the Singing Flame and its sequel in free audiobook. I still haven’t got around to listening to this yet, but it’s cued up for Christmas. So many goodies, so little time…

I’m trying to find time to ease back into Tolkien and the post “Of cat-demons, Tolkien and Lovecraft” was a nice cross-over that resulted from this.

If you enjoy reading Tentaclii, please consider dropping me $1 a month or more via my Patreon please. Your Patreon giving has actually dropped slightly this month from $70 to $69, as one $1 patron has dropped out. So it would be encouraging to see a few more monthly dollars arrive over Christmas. Thanks!

“The Festival” on vinyl

30 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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Need a suitable Yuletide spinner to enliven the hipsters at a dour Xmas party? Cadabra Records has a new vinyl LP presentation of Lovecraft’s festive “The Festival”, read By Andrew Leman to a score by Fabio Frizzi and with art by Jesse Jacobi.

Not quite on the store yet, with a page for pre-orders that’s not yet live. The record will ship 18th December 2020.

Cadabra Records on SoundCloud has a free sample.