HPLinks #1

20 Tuesday Aug 2024

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HPLinks #1

Tentaclii is back, after a summer break. Rather than trailing out itty-bitty daily posts of link-based items, I’ve decided to experiment with a chunkier weekly news-digest format. At least for a while. Tuesday or Wednesday seem like the best weekdays for a weekly posting-day, though I’ll see how that notion settles down over time. There may also be other posts, such as ‘breaking news’ or longer research-based posts, but only as-and-when.

Thus here, on Lovecraft’s birthday, is my HPLinks #1…

* Druillet – Lovecraft. Due for publication 18th Oct 2024, as a 288-page hardcover. Likely to sell out in a micro-second, so you may want to pre-order quickly when that option is available.

This work brings together in a single volume everything that Druillet produced around [Lovecraft and his mythos]: the complete reissue of Demons et Merveilles published by Opta in 1976, now legendary; its pages from the Necronomicon; the covers he created for H.P. Lovecraft’s novels published by J’ai lu; and finally rare or unpublished paintings and sketches. A major meeting in the field of fantastic arts!

Note that Galerie Barbier, Paris, is… “launching a pre-order campaign on Ulule [French crowd-funding site] on 26th August 2024. Numerous goodies and exclusive rewards will be offered during this campaign.” The book appears to follow the gallery’s brief one-month Paris exhibition of the originals, in June-July 2024.

* The German Lovecraftians now have their own online shop. They also report that their annual magazine The Lovecrafter is on track to issue number 13 in paper in August. German writers should note that the rolling Web version, Lovecrafter Online, requires a new editor.

* A polished and long-running ‘Lovecraft as character’ webcomic set in 1926. The free Lovecraft is Missing was by Larry Latham of Oklahoma, whose day-jobs were Disney animator and animation teacher. Archive.org now newly has the collected pages for arcs that ran 2008-2014, packaged as handy .CBZ files for your comic-book reader software.

Larry sadly passed away in 2014 and Lovecraft is Missing .com site has long vanished. There were hopes that the concluding story arc(s) and any loose ends could be covered by collaboration with other artists, shortly before he passed away. But the story was very complex and it seems that these hopes could not come to fruition. Though note that ArtStation has pencilled pages from that possible collaboration, hinting at what might have been. Ten years after his passing, it appears unlikely there’ll now be a collected book and a rounded-out finish.

* Newly posted, a scan and transcription of a Postcard from H.P. Lovecraft to R.E. Howard, postmarked 13th November 1932. The front shows the gardens Lovecraft revelled in at Maymont, and the back discusses the prevalence of blond “Scandinavian types” he had seen on the streets. Note that… “The owner of the postcard, Mitch Kirsner is contemplating selling it. It has been in his possession for several years.”

* New on YouTube, “The Thing on the Doorstep” read by Wayne June (78 minutes). Joshi states of this later and lesser tale that… “This tale was written frenetically in a matter of four days, 21st–24th August 1933, in a scribbled pencil draft” that was almost illegible, presumably at the new address of 66 College St. Lovecraft was at this time “disgusted at much of my older work”, and thus “Thing” has the cosmicism of earlier tales only as a relatively thin veneer.

* New on Archive.org, a downloadable .PDF for the anthology Creeps By Night (1944). Featuring Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zann”, along with Wandrei’s “The Red Brain” and Frank Belknap Long’s “A Visitor from Egypt”.

* A table-of-contents for The Robert E. Howard Foundation Newsletter for Spring 2024 (mailed July 2024). “Contains the first known typescript of Worms of the Earth”, as well as a Lovecraft letter.

* “Lovecraft’s Murder Mystery: Revisit Poe’s Haunted House” (2024), being a new paper which offers… “a comparison and contrast of Lovecraft’s murder stories and those of Poe”.

* Anime News Network, “Visualizing Lovecraft: An Interview with Manga Creator Gou Tanabe”, along with his translator and publisher. Tanabe’s 288-page Call of Cthulhu is to be released in English in mid October 2024, by which time his Dunwich book should also be shipping in French and German. Possibly this interview is actually a transcript of a recent panel that I recall he was on, at some large U.S. comics convention? On visualising the 1920s in America, he says…

“When it comes to Lovecraft, one thing that’s pivotal to making manga is that you draw daily life as being extremely ordinary as possible. It’s a period piece set in the ’20s, so I tried to use movies as examples.”

* Francois Baranger’s illustrated “The Shadow over Innsmouth” in its French edition, titled L’ombre sur Innsmouth: Illustre, due in mid October 2024 according to an early listing on Amazon UK.

* Set for mid November, Les Archives Lovecraft, a 324-page compilation of the Carnets Lovecraft books published in French by Bragelonne from 2019 to 2022. Together… “with new illustrations, a complementary illustrated short story (‘Pickman’s Model’), and numerous bonuses.”

* The Lin Carter papers at Duke University Libraries. Found while looking for Crypt of Cthulhu #70 (1990) which has all… ” the Lin Carter Necronomicon as survives in his notes.” This is out-of-print, unavailable in .PDF and not on Archive.org, as it turns out.

* A large new Public Work mega-repository of public-domain re-usable images, all ingested from the wealth of university and museum repositories now online. Slickly and speedily presented, and with a choice selection of results for the search-word “Lovecraft”. No actual Lovecraft images in the results, you understand, but all Lovecraft-adjacent and worth browsing…

* Call for Submissions: A Bestiary of New England’s Creatures, Creepers, and Cryptids and an accompanying online Bibliography. Both dated August 2024.

* And finally, should you wish to emulate a Lovecraftian binge at some rural ice-cream slurperie… there’s a new map showing a 100-place “ice cream trail” in Massachusetts, New England.

See you later, in August…

28 Sunday Jul 2024

Posted by in Housekeeping

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As usual I’ll now be taking a few weeks of late-summer break from Tentaclii, and from my usual daily blogging. I hope to be back with my readers towards the end of August, barring some urgent news that needs to be conveyed. And there may perhaps be something for Lovecraft’s 134th birthday on 20th August 2024.

In the meanwhile I’ve added a WordPress plugin that gives you a link to a random older blog post. It used to be the case that one could append ?random to a WordPress URL and that would do the job. No more, it seems.

So here is the new plugin-powered random post link, and those new to Tentaclii should be prepared to see some broken images on older posts. This was caused by a domain move, some years ago.

The Dreaming Stone (1996)

27 Saturday Jul 2024

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New to me, and now new on Archive.org, another Dreamlands RPG book. This one is Call of Cthulhu Dreamlands – The Dreaming Stone (1997). 66 pages, out-of-print and offered for silly prices on Amazon in paper. It begins…

The Dreaming Stone [RPG] is intended as an introduction to H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, as put forth in Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu supplement, The Complete Dreamlands. Even if the investigators have already experienced the Dreamlands, The Dreaming Stone still offers a considerable challenge. Though ostensibly written for the 1920s, the adventure can be transferred to the Gaslight or Cthulhu Now settings with relative ease. Any Dreamlands. Even if the investigators have already experienced the Dreamlands, The Dreaming Stone still offers a considerable challenge. Though ostensibly written for the 1920s, the adventure can be transferred to the Gaslight or Cthulhu Now settings with relative ease. Any number of investigators can participate, though groups of at least four to six are recommended. If there are fewer, the keeper may wish to tone down the number of encounters or foes, or let the investigators roll additional Dreamlands-residing characters to bolster their ranks. Investigators are assumed to have a few adventures under their belts before playing this scenario, as their reputations and an already-established rivalry draw them into the action. If you are planning to run [as] an investigator [i.e. player] in The Dreaming Stone, read no further. The remainder of this book is intended for the keeper’s [i.e. game master’s] eyes only.

Reviews note that this is… “The only ever adventure book for H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands”, and that it is a “skeleton” on which to build rather than a mighty Table-Trembling Tome of Total Tale-telling.

“that Canton madhouse”

26 Friday Jul 2024

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In Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, he writes of the “sanitarium at Canton” and going to “… that Canton madhouse, and [then] together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth.” Canton, Massachusetts, is about twelve miles south of the city of Boston. And about two-thirds of the way from Providence to Boston. At circa 1900 there was, however, no madhouse or even a disease sanatorium there.

But the presence of Canton Junction on the Providence – Boston train line suggests Lovecraft knew it, at least from the train windows. There is a large viaduct which carries the train, and Lovecraft would have enjoyed sweeping views across the Canton topography. He must have been across it many times.

Longest and tallest railway viaduct in the world, when built in 1835.

Interestingly Canton is about two miles east of Walpole, and of course Walpole is also the name of the father of the gothic novel. There was however no asylum at Walpole, Mass. Looking at the list of train stations on the line, and the map, Lovecraft may have been able to see East Walpole in the distance, across the marshland, from the Canton Viaduct.

There was however a large and real asylum at Foxborough (aka Foxboro) (opened 1893, closed 1976), originally the state’s treatment asylum for chronic alcoholics. Foxborough was two train stops before Canton, on the Providence to Boston line. It’s thus not impossible Lovecraft knew that asylum from the train window, as it was likely within sight as the train passed.

Train line passing alongside the asylum site, Foxboro station just a quarter mile south. (With thanks to the ghost-hunter who identified the laundry building of the site, and thus gave me my bearings).

A blogger who has investigated it talks of a road approach through marshlands made of “cranberry bogs [that] looked like blood pools”. He also usefully notes… “After 1905, the Massachusetts Hospital for Dipsomaniacs and Inebriates went through a gradual transition to a psychiatric institution”, which another source states was due to the alcoholic inmates constantly escaping in search of drink. Thus by the time Lovecraft came to write “Innsmouth”, it was indeed a general “madhouse”.

What of “my poor little cousin” in “Innsmouth”? I assume he was loosely modelled after Lovecraft’s beloved-and-lost cousin, Phillips Gamwell. Thus Gamwell’s home in Cambridge, Mass., might be the place to look. But I can find no asylum or sanitorium there.

There was also the large official Massachusetts State Hospital for the Insane, at Worcester, which may have formed a mental model for Lovecraft. It certainly looks like the sort of place many readers will have in mind.

What of Canton, Ohio? No madhouse there. The nearest was Massillon which is eight miles away, and also the main Ohio state asylum at Columbus some 130 miles from Canton…

But my feeling is the Foxborough asylum was the inspiration for the Lovecraft called the “Canton madhouse”, knowing that readers in his circle who knew the Boston – Providence railway line would make the connection with Foxboro madhouse (four miles south, on the train track, from Canton).

Lovecraftians will also recall Lovecraft’s planned but never written ‘Foxfield’ stories. See: Will Murray’s “Where Was Foxfield?” in Lovecraft Studies No. 33 (1995). Also to be found in Dissecting Cthulhu: Essays on the Cthulhu Mythos. For those unable to pay the prices now asked for either of these, The Lovecraft Encyclopedia usefully summarises the essay… “it indicates that Foxfield is east of Aylesbury and Dunwich and northwest of Arkham.”

Three new LORAs

25 Thursday Jul 2024

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My pick of three recent free Lovecraft-adjacent ‘style plugins’ (LORAs), for use with the free AI image-generator Stable Diffusion 1.5…

Style of Edward Gorey LORA.

Neon Pop Haeckel LORA, Haeckel being an influence on Lovecraft. Though for laying out a “sane” non-religious view of the universe, rather than his deep-sea expedition imagery. Joshi calls him a… “central influence on [Lovecraft’s] metaphysical thought of the time”.

Pulpy Comics Style Inkifier LORA, for a neo-pulp modern comic-book style.

Call from Washington / The Nameless City

23 Tuesday Jul 2024

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A review of a recent attempt to put a 75-minute “The Call of Cthulhu” on the theatre stage, in Washington DC.

For a more positive vibe see a review of the new “The Nameless City”, a successful low-poly indie videogame…

It marries the oppressive and mystical atmosphere of Lovecraftian fiction with gameplay elements that both add variety and serve a narrative purpose as well, then caps it all off with an ominous ending that felt just right for a game in this particular genre. I personally found its PSX-style graphics charming

Ah, Wilderness! (1935)

21 Sunday Jul 2024

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I’ve at last been able to see the U.S. movie Ah, Wilderness!, 1935’s gentle celebration of the small-town world of America as it was in 1906. Lovecraft saw it late in life (circa Christmas 1935/36) and revelled in its lavish layers of thirty-years-ago nostalgia. Similar to a movie of today being nostalgic for 1994, or one of the 2010s being nostalgic for 1980.

saw “Ah, Wilderness”, which made me home-sick for the vanish’d world of 1906!

“… revelled in it. Yuggoth, but it made me homesick for 1906! [it] gives all sorts of typical 1906 glimpses, including an old street-car, a primitive steam automobile, &c. It was photographed in Grafton, Mass. […] where the passing years have left little visible toll.

“At times I could well believe that the past had come back, & that the last 3 decades were a bad dream. [the world it depicted] having many a value which might well have been preserved had social evolution been less violently accelerated by the war.”

I recall that Lovecraft also remarked that the family sitting room was almost a double for the one he had known as a boy. Also the hallway.

He also seems to imply that the rural newspaper office which published his astronomy articles, was in appearance similar to the office briefly seen in the movie (the young hero’s father owns the town newspaper).

the articles landed, & I also landed others with a rural weekly …. (this was the Ah, Wilderness year of ’06)

Ah, Wilderness! is very well-made and acted, with lavish costumes and scenes. Worth seeing simply for the very satisfying scene of a steam-car ‘scaring the horses’. But (unless I’m missing something, being British) it is perhaps not the all-time classic that some had claimed. Though, as the 1933 play, it does appear to have become a staple of American repertory theatre.

The film usefully gives one a better feel for Lovecraft’s formative environment and sensibilities. Many of us have been subtly trained by agitprop to casually think of the Victorian and Edwardian periods in bleak b&w Dickensian terms, all grimy urchins, grim school-masters, and grinding urban poverty. The movie is a useful corrective. As with the 1930s, the view of which has been similarly be-grimed for political purposes, most people were actually ‘getting on with getting on’, and rather enjoying the novelty of becoming middle-class.

The cynical young hero is somewhat Lovecraft-like, at least in the early scenes. The concerns of creeping socialism and chronic alcoholism, though treated lightly, are the same ones which permeated young Lovecraft’s world. The hero (Eric Linden), at first a ‘going to Yale’ stiff of a teenager, is perhaps the weakest part of the film and perhaps a little too ‘1930s movie star’ in appearance — this makes it harder for the viewer to suspend disbelief. His youngest brother is the firecracker Mickey Rooney. But the young Rooney’s usual gurning and capering is thankfully kept on a very tight leash, in what must be one of his first film appearances.

Even having seen Ah, Wilderness!, I’m still as a loss as to why the strange title was chosen. No-one gets to look at a sweeping vista and proclaim the words, unless I missed something. I would have called it “Bang goes the Fourth!”, since it’s set on the 4th July.

For another Hollywood view of 1906, this time from the post-war 1940s, I’ve found Ah, Wilderness! also inspired the glossy musical adaptation Summer Holiday (1948).

“On thin ice again…”

20 Saturday Jul 2024

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I find that Stable Diffusion 2.1 768 knows about Conan, if you use the right model. Pure prompt, no Img2Img or ControlNet.

Conan’s body slipped and crashed down the icy ravine, his simple ice-pick useless to slow his slide, until suddenly he was halted. One foot has stuck through an ice sheet, where the high sun had partly melted it. It was that faint warmth which brought a musty smell to his flaring nostrils. He was suddenly alert to something behind him…

Moon maps

20 Saturday Jul 2024

Posted by in Astronomy, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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Lovecraft the astronomer and Moon-gazer would no doubt be pleased to learn that “Brown University Researchers Develop More Accurate Moon Maps”. A new…

technique is used to create detailed models of lunar terrain, outlining craters, ridges, slopes and other surface hazards. By analyzing the way light hits different surfaces of the Moon, it allows researchers to estimate the three-dimensional shape of an object or surface from composites of two-dimensional images. … advanced computer algorithms can be used to automate much of the process and significantly heighten the resolution of the models.

Poe conference

20 Saturday Jul 2024

Posted by in Scholarly works

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A call for papers for a two-day academic conference ‘Celebrating 215 years of Edgar Allan Poe’. To be held in California. Note also… “This conference will be held online at no charge. The Zoom link will be sent out the week prior.”

“215” apparently refers to the years since his “deathday” anniversary, but the organisers have that wrong. 2024 marks 215 years since his birth in 1809. It’s 175 years since he died.

Deadline for 200 word submissions: 13th September 2024.