EconTalk: Harry Houdini

08 Wednesday Jan 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Podcasts etc.

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The excellent in-depth podcast EconTalk sprang a Christmas surprise. 90 minutes with Joe Posnanski on the Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini…

Journalist and author Joe Posnanski talks about his book, The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Posnanski explores the enduring fame of Houdini who remains an iconic cultural figure almost a century after his death. Topics discussed include the nature of celebrity, the nature of ambition, parenting, magic, and the use of public relations to create and sustain reputation and celebrity.

The Black Stone

07 Tuesday Jan 2020

Posted by in Kittee Tuesday, Odd scratchings, REH

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The Library of America selected a prime “R.E. Howard writes Lovecraft” story as their Free Story of the Week: “The Black Stone”. At the end of 2019 it proved to be at #5 in their end-of-year tally of their most popular stories.

Here it is in Weird Tales for November 1931.

The cover of this issue is also interesting. C.C. Senf provides a bristling black kittee that must have delighted the cat-loving Lovecraft when he saw the picture.

The Lovecraft Geek – episode 3

06 Monday Jan 2020

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Another item I missed in the Christmas ker-fluffle. Episode 3 of the new run of The Lovecraft Geek podcast with the venerable Robert M. Price, which he released just before Christmas 2019.

He refers to Lovecraft’s massive daily output of the written word as “graphomania”, a rare word I don’t think I’d encountered before and was thus pleased to learn. There’s also “typomania”, which I guess is the correct modern keyboarding form today, though it wouldn’t apply to Lovecraft since he deeply disliked typing. Also mentioned in the podcast is a relatively-soon re-publication of an old out-of-print Starmont critical book on the Lin Carter mythos and other works (Lin Carter: a Look Behind His Imaginary Worlds, Starmont Studies in Literary Criticism, No. 36), and the publication of the long-unpublished Annotated Lovecraft.

Public domain in 2020

02 Thursday Jan 2020

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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Wondering what’s in the public domain from 1924? The mainstream media seem to be doing a very poor job of covering the matter this year, but I had a post back in the summer that looked into it in depth for the USA and elsewhere. As for Lovecraft…

for Lovecraft, 1924 brought publication of […] the notorious Eddy necrophilia collaboration “The Loved Dead”; and the ghost-written Houdini tale “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”.

This raises the question of if the Eddy estate can any longer prevent “The Loved Dead” (Weird Tales, May/July 1924) from appearing in U.S. collections of Lovecraft’s ghost-writing collaborations.

I also imagine the tale would, with a few additions and some tweaking, provide someone with an over-the-top comics adaptation in 2020.

“Lovecraft is all you need… turn off your mind and float downstream…”

02 Thursday Jan 2020

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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I’m late in getting to the very trippy hippy-tastic poster for the release of the movie of Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space. The poster slipped out and got lost in the razzle-dazzle of the run-up to Christmas. The movie’s cinema release is on 24th January in the USA, so you should have about a month or so to catch it. Then the 4k Blu-ray and DVD is due a month later on 24th February 2020.

December on Tentaclii

01 Wednesday Jan 2020

Posted by in Housekeeping, Odd scratchings

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‘Tis the bleak midwinter, and in the grate the faint embers of the yule-log flicker and wither. My Patreon also withers, having lost two patrons since I departed from the daily posting schedule. If you can help out with just $1 or $2 a month, please, and so push it above the current $53… then then would be most encouraging for 2020. I still have hopes of $100 a month.

My thanks to my December patrons, though, who’ve enabled me to fortuitously acquire another two books. These being Lovecraft’s letters to Moe and to Bloch, bagged when I spotted them at £11-£12 Amazon “Warehouse Deals” inc. free shipping. So, half-price, basically. Slightly imperfect, with cover scuffs and slight bumping, but I don’t mind that. They’re perfectly intact otherwise. Thank you, also, to the Lightning Source print-machine maintenance elves… your scuffs have now saved me a bundle on three books! The Moe and Bloch books been added to the reading pile for early summer 2020.

I was able to hold back some snowy scenes from last summer’s very deep dive into Lovecraft’s College St… and these pictures became “Solstice special: College St. in the snow”. This proved to be a very popular post. I still have a few more such pictures, which may appear here when the the snows are chin-high this winter, plus another excellent no-snow picture that will appear here next May on the date that Lovecraft moved into No. 66 College St.

It was a quiet month at Tentaclii Towers. No new print books to notice, but scholarship noted here in December included the publication of the journal Dead Reckonings No. 26. I also made more additions to my “Open Lovecraft” page.

In games, I noted that “Open Cthulhu” is now online, which bodes well for the future of indie Lovecraftian RPGs.

It was good to see the release of Librivox’s audiobook anthology Lovecraft’s Influences and Favorites, and this collection provides a core around which a wider set of audio readings might be assembled.

Various bits of art were posted here, including a unique t-shirt ready .PNG for my Patreon patrons.

After the new(?) audiobook H.P. Lovecraft – The Collaborations from the HPLHS, the month’s big creative news was that the Game of Thrones writers are adapting the graphic novel Lovecraft (2003). It’s rumoured to be set to become a movie. I also undertook a quick survey of the big movies coming in 2020, and it seems set to be a far better screen-year than the lacklustre and disappointing 2019.