13 Friday Dec 2019
Posted in New books, Odd scratchings
It’s Friday the 13th so… a post on science and cats. Because, what could possibly go wrong with such a combination?
The book Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics is finally published, from Yale University Press. A history of the cat’s role in scientific revelation. Specifically the study of “cat-turning, the cat flip, and the cat twist”, as cats fall to land on their feet.
11 Wednesday Dec 2019
Posted in Housekeeping
Lovecraft news is getting very slow, as we head toward the Yule-tide. Last year I could fill the holiday schedule with catch-up items, but not this year. Thus I’ll be taking a break from daily posting until early in the New Year. This break will also help to give me time to work on books.
There may well be some posts here over the period, if I happen to spot worthy stuff in the feeds. But Tentaclii posts won’t be chugging along on a daily schedule for the next few weeks.
10 Tuesday Dec 2019
Posted in Unnamable
Robert B. Stroud’s C.S. Lewis Mere Inkling blog asks…
Where do all the satellites go when their utility ends? No, they don’t all just burn up on reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere as their orbits decay. Many are too large for that, and they must be escorted to a remote and desolate Spacecraft Cemetery. … And what better place than the dark depths of the ocean? Among the craft that have been scuttled at the spot are unmanned satellites . . . and, possibly most remarkably, the entire decommissioned Russian space station, Mir.
The isolated location of this unique graveyard is near the “oceanic pole of inaccessibility,” which marks the location on earth which lies the farthest from any land. The cemetery, which is already the final resting place for more than 260 spacecraft from Russia, Europe, Japan and the United States, lies on the deep seabed approximately 1,500 miles between Pitcairn Island, Easter Island, and Antarctica.
This remote locate is truly mysterious [but, so the author is informed] this “oceanic pole of inaccessibility” is virtually identical with the location of R’lyeh […] wherein Cthulhu awaits his terrible awakening.
Now there’s a cue for a Lovecraftian story, if ever I heard one. Lovecraft effectively ‘reached’ the zone some 50 years before the formal calculation of where it lay. So far as I recall, from my reading of S.T. Joshi’s book-length survey of Lovecraftian fiction, I don’t remember hearing of it being used before. Even by Stross, who apparently removed R’lyeh to the Baltic of all places.
09 Monday Dec 2019
Posted in Scholarly works
* S.P. Schultz, “An Integral Analysis of the Life and Works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937)”. (November 2019 Masters dissertation for University of Saskatchewan. Finds Lovecraft’s work to have been successful, in terms of evoking and integrating the challenges faced by those living through the turbulent 1917-1937 period).
* A. Molnar, A Review of Lovecraftian Proceedings 2, Americana: e-Journal of American Studies in Hungary, Spring 2018.
08 Sunday Dec 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A delightful 1922 poetry book cover from Eastern Europe, that could be re-purposed as a public-domain cover of a collection of Lovecraft’s earliest memories of his childhood. I’ve downloaded the hi-res scans, extracted the cover and cleaned. There’s space for an artist to carefully add a few small tentacles in the same style.
Very light cleaning and desaturation…
My clean cut-out in PNG with transparency and defringing…
07 Saturday Dec 2019
Posted in Scholarly works
A seemingly new and ongoing PhD at a prestigious university in the UK, “Eldritch Angles: H.P. Lovecraft’s Reception of the Classical World“.
06 Friday Dec 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Podcasts etc.
New to me and seemingly to Google, H.P. Lovecraft – The Collaborations in unabridged audiobook from the Historical Society…
The HPLHS is pleased to present the first original audiobook of Lovecraft’s collaborations and revisions, covering 32 stories and comprising more than twenty-three hours of professionally recorded audio. The stories are read by HPLHS founders and trained actors Sean Branney and Andrew Leman, from texts prepared by Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi. … Two years in the making… These are NOT dramatizations like our Dark Adventure Radio Theatre.
No Eddy collaborations, though…
The Eddy estate does not wish for any of C.M. Eddy’s stories to appear in any collections of Lovecraft collaboration tales.
The Web page is currently rather confusing, mentioning the “The Collected Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft Audiobook” and also having a link to the purchase page for that, rather than H.P. Lovecraft : The Collaborations.
Once at that page, what you have to do to solve this apparent conundrum is to spot the hidden drop-down of descending delight, and it will reveal the well-concealed eldritch wisdom within…
This then reveals the Collaborations as a £23 download for the UK.
05 Thursday Dec 2019
Posted in Censorship, Lovecraftian arts
More on trademark trolls, a nasty instance of which was recently covered here at Tentaclii. In the UK there’s been a ridiculous and expensive case against the 1960s band ‘The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’, over their own use of their own name no less. This stupid state of affairs has finally roused the ire of Parliament. Apparently, if a sensible British government is returned at next Thursday’s general election, such matters…
will be pursued further in Westminster with the assistance of some supportive MPs, so that other bands do not have to suffer the same nightmare.
… and hopefully any resulting legislation will also spill over to benefit many other indie creatives.
05 Thursday Dec 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
S. T. Joshi’s blog has updated…
French scholar Gilles Menegaldo, one of several figures whom I met during my trip to France in May, is now seeking funding for his planned documentary of Lovecraft (for which he has interviewed me), entitled Le Monde du Lovecraft (The World of Lovecraft). He is seeking to raise 30,000 euros [about $33,000 or £25,000] for this 60-minute film. I have high confidence in Gilles’s ability to produce a worthy product, so his project should certainly be generously supported. Here is a link to the crowdfunding site: https://www.ulule.com/le-monde-de-lovecraft/.
04 Wednesday Dec 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
More selected new items from DeviantArt…
He has a series of these.
Los Mitos de Cthulhu (cover illustration) by Nightserpent.
03 Tuesday Dec 2019
Posted in Scholarly works
“Synchronistic Worlds: Lovecraft and Borges” was written in 1980, and has been collected in An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H.P. Lovecraft, edited by David E. Schultz and S.T. Joshi. The digital version of the paper appears on The Garden of Forking Paths and Shipwreck Library courtesy of Barton Levi St. Armand and Hippocampus Press.
02 Monday Dec 2019
Posted in Odd scratchings
When looking for copies of Lovecraft’s Selected Letters, beware con-artists and their enablers on eBay, Amazon and elsewhere, selling a $40 paperback purporting to be a Selected Letters volume. The key tell-tale is that it’s a paperback, and the Selected Letters have never been in paperback. I assume these so-called ‘books’ must be robo-assembled compilations of Wikipedia articles, printed on-demand in large-print.
