Mythcon 51

01 Monday Jun 2020

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Mythcon 51: The Mythopoeic Society conference will be in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Re-scheduled dates have been announced as 30th July – 2nd August 2021. The theme is very wide, but with a bit of a swerve toward ‘Area 51’-type UFO lore… “The Mythic, the Fantastic, and the Alien”. The call for papers was being pushed in a 19th May blog post, even though the call currently still carries a date of 15th May. Which implies there might be a chance the call is still effectively open, given the transfer to the new date in 2021.

May on Tentaclii

31 Sunday May 2020

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The virus abates, for now, as I had expected it to at the end of May. I’m glad to say that I haven’t yet keeled over and been wheeled away. I was almost blown away by a terrific three-day wind-storm, but the mighty-walled Tentaclii Towers withstood the buffeting. As I type only a faint breeze riffles the tops of the verdant May-time greenwood that is inner-city Stoke-on-Trent, and the merest grunting can be heard from within the curiously conical burrows that cluster beneath the boughs.

I’m pleased to see that no Lovecraftians have yet trimmed me from their Patreon list, in the face of a lockdown downturn in their finances. In fact, My Patreon has edged up a bit and now stands at an encouraging $64 a month. Anything you can do to nudge it closer to the magic ‘$100’ will be most welcome, please.

Here at Tentaclii I found various items relating to Lovecraft the man and his environs. I posted a link to the amusing 1940s memoir-cum-horoscope “Lovecraft and the Stars”. I similarly located a substantial and previously unconsidered cat book that influenced the boy Lovecraft, The Fireside Sphinx: A Cultural History of Cats (1901). The book Corners and characters of Rhode Island (1924) is also now at Archive.org, and it seems another key Lovecraft book but for a different reason — it’s now a handy visual reference book for the various Providence houses mentioned in Lovecraft’s stories and letters. Various new pictures from Lovecraft’s era and city were found, as seen in my regular ‘Picture Postals’ series of posts. The ‘Kittee Tuesday’ feature also continued this month, though future kittee posts depend on the availability of items. I’ve made a start on reading the volume of letters to Bloch and others, and hopefully this will help me locate many suitable posts over the summer.

As for Lovecraft scholarship, about another eight items were added to my Open Lovecraft page. I also posted a long review of the Lovecraft Annual 2019, and along the way made a few new discoveries about Red Hook and the Red Hook poem “The Cats”. The seminal long essay “New England Decadent” has also turned up for free at the French open-access journals service Persee, and it was linked here. My Patreon patrons now have access to my new 10,000-word near-final draft PDF discussing three possible newly-recognised sources for Lovecraft’s “The Shadow out of Time”…

… and yes, I took account of the letter to Clark Ashton Smith, which appears to prefigure the idea of the ‘captive minds from across time’.

Here at Tentaclii I comprehensively surveyed the weird and wonderful goodies entering the public domain at the start of 2021 in nations which follow “the 70 year rule”, the author having died in 1950. A slightly less rich vein of plot-sources can now be found in my “Consult Mr. Lovecraft” page, which has returned to operation after a hiatus of several years.

In media, the excellent Lovecraftian 1940s fantasy-detective movie Cast a Deadly Spell (1991) is said to have fairly recently landed on Amazon Prime, and I had a signposting post on it and its past incarnations and sequel. I discovered the existence of Jason Eckhardt’s “Map of Lovecraft’s Providence” posted (sold out), which I had not been aware of before. My post “Fragments from the Dreamlands” surveyed 1970s Lovecraft book cover illustrator Gervasio Gallardo. I also undertook another of my monthly surveys of new items on DeviantArt. I noted a call for the world to take curated VR tours of Lovecraft’s Providence.

This month I elsewhere produced Digital Art Live #49, a substantial issue of the magazine. The suitably lockdown-subdued theme is “Mono” (silhouette art, b&w, lineart), and it includes an in-depth interview with occasional Lovecraftian comics maker and adapter Matt Timson. Also, I hope that the next issue of sister title VisNews, a monthly publication for comics makers, will feature a long interview with Mockman (the Dream Quest graphic novel, wall-map of the Dreamlands, and more).

And lastly, I didn’t forget Robert E. Howard this month. I undertook what appears to be the first online survey of the various Conan encyclopaedias and gazetteers, even digging some of them out of The Wayback Machine. Also noted here were facsimile reprints of the Weird Tales sister title Oriental Stories / Magic Carpet, now available for purchase.

That’s it for May, onward into the summertime!

Cast a Deadly Spell (1991)

30 Saturday May 2020

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Looking for a Saturday-night movie, tonight? The movie Cast a Deadly Spell (1991) has reportedly arrived on Amazon Prime in the USA, and this week Film School Rejects has a short appreciation (warning: plot spoilers!) of this ambitious and successful attempt to create a fun mix of H.P. Lovecraft and 1940s gumshoe film noir…

Cast a Deadly Spell is pure fun, first and foremost. That said, the movie is also a prime example of how great storytelling and imagination are two of the most magical ingredients in any film. This movie has those qualities in abundance, and it deserves to be appreciated by a wider audience.

When it first appeared, Darrell Schweitzer noted in a fanzine that the original title was to have been H.P. Lovecraft: Private Eye. The central character is indeed named Lovecraft, and the actor has a mild facial resemblance, but otherwise he’s a typical 1940s Private Investigator. Schweitzer also compared the movie to Disney’s equally retro The Rocketeer (1991), but with more overt humour and (I would add) the budget put into FX and hand-made monster-puppets rather than big shiny stunt-planes and jet-packs.

It even has the coveted Stamp Of Approval from S.T. Joshi, who knows his gumshoe detectives as well as his Lovecraft…

it ingeniously combines the Mythos with hard-boiled detection in its portrayal of a tough private eye, H. Phil Lovecraft … While not directly based on a specific Lovecraft story, it captures the essence of the Cthulhu Mythos surprisingly well.

In I Am Providence Joshi singled it out as a “striking performance” … “highly effective”. Although he calls it a “two hour” film, so it’s possible he saw a naughty convention screening of a print made before the editor trimmed it back for cable TV running times? Just my guess. The stated running-time is actually one hour and 36 minutes. I don’t seen any mention of some 14 minutes or so of out-takes being available elsewhere, on YouTube or the laser-disc version.

It appears that Cast a Deadly Spell was a cable-only U.S.-only show for many decades, with an old VHS tape being just-about obtainable and a laser-disc being almost unobtainable… but no DVD was allowed lest it interfere with cable showings. However, my UK version of Amazon now offers a £10 Spanish import DVD with multi-language including English. In terms of current streaming, nothing is visible on the UK Prime — at least to a UK Amazon user who shuns Prime. Such are the stupidities of the region-system. The UK is a big profitable market, with buyers who would spring instantly for a £3.99 streaming version. Yet instead we have to risk an import DVD, or dodge among the dodgy torrents, or peer at a 480px VHS-rip on YouTube.

Fangoria magazine #106 (1991) had a long article on the movie and many spoiler-pictures of the various monsters, as part of their ‘Lovecraft special’ issue. This same issue also has a long article from Will Murray in which he surveys Lovecraft adaptations to 1990…

Note that an early 1990s scan of Fangoria magazine is probably not ‘safe for work’ in 2020.

Beware also that there was a Cast a Deadly Spell sequel in 1994 with a different star and different cast, less charm and humour, and the Lovecraftian lore was cut. But those were the years of the virulent ‘satanic panic’ hysteria, so we’re probably lucky that either movie was made and then reached a mass mainstream American audience.

Picture postals: Providence Express

29 Friday May 2020

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A Providence ‘trolley-car’. When Lovecraft refers in letters or a story to a ‘trolley’ or a ‘car’ this is the sort of public passenger vehicle he means. According to local transport buffs, they were green-and-cream in Providence until 1928, so I’ve colourised accordingly.

A Lovecraft dream of November 1927 involved a ‘trolley’…

“… under a grey autumn sky … lit up by a faint moonlight which had replac’d the expiring orb of day. Casting my eyes about, I beheld no living object; but was sensible of a very peculiar stirring far below me, amongst the whispering rushes of the pestilential swamp I had lately quitted. After walking for some distance, I encoun­ter’d the rusty tracks of a street-railway, & the worm-eaten poles which still held the limp & sagging trolley wire. Following this line, I soon came upon a yellow, vestibuled car numbered 1852 … It was untenanted, but evidently ready to start; the trolley being on the wire & the air-brake pump now & then throbbing beneath the floor. I boarded it & looked vainly about for the light switch — noting as I did so the absence of controller handle which implied the brief absence of the motorman. Then I sat down in one of the cross seats toward the middle, awaiting the ar­rival of the crew & the starting of the vehicle.

Presently I heard a swishing in the sparse grass toward the left, & saw the dark forms of two men looming up in the moonlight. They had the regulation caps of a railway company, & I could not doubt but that they were the conductor & motorman. Then one of them sniffed with singular sharpness, & raised his face to howl to the moon. The other dropped on all fours to run toward the car. I leaped up at once & raced madly out of that car & away across endless leagues of plateau till exhaustion waked me — doing this not because the conductor had dropped on all fours, but because the face of the motorman was a mere white cone tapering to one blood-red tentacle….”

Sexing up Lovecraft

28 Thursday May 2020

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Here’s the cover for The Colour Out of Space edition (Penguin Science Fiction) due in August 2020, ready for what would have been the ‘I got my student-grant!’ season. At first glance it seems a prime example of how marketeers think that slow cerebral science-fiction can’t be sold to the masses — except by misleadingly implying ‘there’s steamy sex inside!’ Eager readers hoping for ‘hot romps in the hay-loft’ may be disappointed.

Penguin may claim it’s actually a mutant seed-grain, if you sort-of squint hard at it. But that’s obviously not how potential readers are intended to see it on the shelves of the bookstore. Still, I suppose we and the designer should be grateful — at least there’s no Stephen King quote spoiling the cover. And the penguin trademark is actually kind of Lovecraftian, if you recall the giant-penguins in At The Mountains of Madness.

Lovecraft and the Stars

27 Wednesday May 2020

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“Lovecraft and the Stars” by E. Hoffmann Price, in The Arkham Sampler #6, Spring 1949. In which Price indulges in some humorous astrological flummery and boondoggling as he makes up notes for Lovecraft’s astrological birth-chart. But he also slides in quite a few biographical angles, from one who had known Lovecraft in person and by correspondence.

According to Joshi’s Bibliography, it was never reprinted, though there is the later “Astrological Analysis” by Price in the 1970s HPL zine.

Amateur Correspondent, May-June 1937 has E. Hoffmann Price’s “The Sage of College Street”, not reprinted in Lovecraft Remembered but now collected in the new Ave atque Vale.

Librivox’s new full-cast readings

26 Tuesday May 2020

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I’m glad to see that Librivox is branching out into full-cast unabridged readings. Their second volume of such has just been released. Since most stage actors and live musicians are likely to be unemployed for a while now, I’d expect to see the appearance of many more full-cast unabridged readings, ideally with music and FX. They seem the obvious route to converting talent to income, and can be done while working together online via home studios. The exemplar here is Phil Dragash’s The Lord of the Rings.

These, however, are free…

Vol. 1 offers Sherlock Holmes. Vol. 2 also offers another Sherlock Holmes, “The Purloined Letter” by Edgar Allan Poe, and “The Stolen Bacillus” by H. G. Wells. Some are rather rough, and lack sound balancing and a producer’s touch.

The Fireside Sphinx

26 Tuesday May 2020

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In 1932 Lovecraft wrote to his friend Moe, recalling once again the lost-lost days of 1900 when he had been ten years old. One of the items recalled in his stream-of-consciousness flow was… “the new cat book by Agnes Rapplier”.

Rapplier was a conservative Catholic essayist and reviewer, who also wrote popular books. The “new cat book” must be her The Fireside Sphinx: A Cultural History of Cats which appeared in 1901. Thus Lovecraft mis-placed it a little amid the tumble of memories, as a book of 1900.

It is just the sort of erudite yet breezy book that would have delighted a precocious lad who doted on cats, with chapters on Egypt, Dark Ages hysteria, and cats in his beloved British Isles. It is full of little stories and brisk histories. The book is simply footnoted as The Fireside Sphinx (without its subtitle indicating its non-fiction nature) in the Moe letters, and does not appear in my edition of Joshi’s Lovecraft’s Library. But, as a formative childhood book, it should probably be listed in a future edition of the Library.

Being out-of-copyright it could also make the basis of various new media productions, trimmed down a bit, from dramatized audiobook to graphic novel. Although note that archaeology is starting to dramatically change the story of ancient domestic cats in Europe — that bit would need to be added/updated.

When did Lovecraft have it and read it? A quick search suggests The Fireside Sphinx was probably issued October 1901 with an eye to the Christmas market. Thus it was perhaps a family gift, possibly to his mother or more likely to the young Lovecraft himself at Christmas 1901 when he was aged 11. By my calculations Lovecraft would then have been a doting cat-owner for several years and the kitten Trigger-ban, that had been presented to him as a “tiny black handful” at about age seven, would have fully grown into an adult pet cat by Christmas 1901.

Lovecraft’s Opera

25 Monday May 2020

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Lovecraft’s L’Opera Completa, due in Italian translation in May 2020. Sadly not an actual opera, with a Lovecraft a-like wailing among the screeching shoggoths and a mad orchestra pummelling the audience at full blast. It’s the Complete Works and appears to be from a reputable publisher.