Agent Civil 1940-50

05 Monday Dec 2022

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More Lovecrafty 3D pose-able figures for free, suitable for 1930s-40s RPGs and more. I featured one back in July. Now comes a new set from the same creator, Agent Civil 1940-50, low poly II, with accessories, skins and more. You need a copy of Poser 11 ($52) plus the old Michael 3 base figure aka “M3”. You’ll also want some extra head character morphs (many are free), to get Michael 3 away from the default “showroom dummy head” look.

“Low-poly” mean they don’t put much demand in your PC, and so you can have many of theme in one crowd or office scene. They’re intended for background use in a large scene, not close-ups.

Once installed, found in the Poser Library under: Figures | !DieselPunkUniverse | Character Male | Agent. There are zillions of M3 poses available, once you go looking. M3 will also take standard .BVH motion-capture files. Poser also has b&w line-art and Sketch capabilities, so you’re not stuck with normal 3D rendering. Poser now incorporates the same renderer as Blender, so if you want photoreal then you’re also not stuck with the “1990s videogame look” seen here.

November on Tentaclii

04 Sunday Dec 2022

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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Another month gone, and Christmas on the horizon. It feels a strange time for the ‘every four-years’ soccer World Cup to be happening, though I guess Qatar would have been too hot at other times of the year. Sadly I can’t reciprocate the waves of desert heat (the only football I ever watch is recordings of the World Cup matches, every four years), since it’s another winter when my heater has to stay off due to the cost. Thankfully it’s been relatively mild so far, here at Tentaclii Towers.

This month in my Friday ‘Picture Postals’ posts I looked up the side of College Street; down the Seekonk River; tapped the wheels of Lovecraft’s changing railway travel experience; and peered into the Providence pictures of Beth Murray. The latter caused me to discover the existence of her This is Providence: Photographs (1947), and its companion for Newport.

On the L.W. Currey site this month, three new pen-drawings of Providence, inked into a letter by Lovecraft. Apparently there are four more pictures, also new to the world, as yet unseen. You only get to see them if you buy the letter from Currey. Perhaps if someone were to create a book of all of Lovecraft’s drawings, for sale, that could raise enough to get the letter?

I concluded my “Notes on Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei”, with my fourth and final such posting.

New books noted this month included Miscellaneous Letters and Letters to Woodburn Harris and Others, two new volumes of Lovecraft letters. Also noted were Mist and Mystery: Recovered Stories and Essays by Arthur Machen; a new volume of Lovecraft in Estonian; The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, Volume 3 (1932-1936) (but apparently there is a printing problem, so check before you buy); and the French had the fifth volume of their sumptuous new Mnemos edition/translation of Lovecraft. Also, the forthcoming Two Hearts That Beat as One: an Autobiography by Sonia H. Davis book was successfully funded via a crowd-funder.

In journals, the Wormwoodiana blog alerted me to the existence of the mostly-free Caerdroia journal on mazes and their cultural manifestations. I also discovered the open-access Messengers From The Stars: On Science Fiction and Fantasy, and the open-access Kaiak: A Philosophical Journey (latest issue themed as “Weird”). I overhauled and updated my JURN search-engine this month, fixing 404s on the directories, and plugging the above journals and more into the index. Though a full URL re-check awaits.

The Pulpster #32 journal called for 2023 contributions, and the German Lovecrafter annual likewise called for new assistants and contributors for 2023. Nearer to home, the worthy SF Crowsnest is now recruiting unpaid reviewers and is Lovecraft-friendly.

Items popping up to borrow on Archive.org included the important and very out-of-print Lovecraft Circle item So Many Lovely Days: the Greenwich Village Years. Also The Twentieth Century British Supernatural Novel (1958); Four Centuries of Cat Books: a bibliography, 1570-1970 (1972); Brooklyn and the world (1983) inc. a comprehensive annotated bibliography including film; and Cross Plains universe: Texans celebrate Robert E. Howard (2006).

In podcasts, the new ‘Long and Love-Kraft’ episode of Voluminous caused me to look at the master’s tastes in cheese, and more importantly also his views on the ‘leisure society’ in terms of its prospects for the future and eventual actual outcomes.

There was very little new activity this month in the Lovecraftian arts, though a new AI Time Machine service let you DIY such things. I was pleased to find the archive of old-school Lovecraft art made by Steve Lines, and the archive of Pietro Rotelli who makes the covers for the Italian Studi Lovecraftiani journal. Gou Tanabe’s 2020 Innsmouth 480-page graphic novel was released, though only in Italian. Elsewhere, the usual tidal-wave of videogames and RPGs of course, and indie films, but those are not covered at Tentaclii.

In audio, the vintage story anthology Weird Tales Presents: Mad Science! was released free on Librivox, and I was pleased to find The Literary Catcast, a podcast about cats in literature. There was a call for applications to undertake a Ph.D. in Music and Multimedia Composition at Brown University, which has obvious Lovecraftian possibilities.

I noted a few Black Friday items likely to appeal to Tentaclii readers. Also noted was that the budget DTP software Affinity Publisher v.2.0 has added footnotes. Though I discovered that it has a fixed un-scalable user-interface, and is thus more than a bit squinty for older eyes.

Over on the shores of Middle-earth I started a new occasional Tolkien Gleanings ‘tracking’ news-posting. This is currently filling up with low-hanging fruit from 2021/22, though it will slow down as these are used up and it may even become a small monthly thing. No-one else was tracking the more traditionalist work on Tolkien, other than the first-edition book collectors looking for prime baggables. So I guess I had better do it, now I’m also a Tolkien scholar. Though the Gleanings won’t be comprehensive. Don’t expect any coverage of arcane Elvish linguistics or the deep-history intricacies of The Silmarillion. Someone else more suited to such things will have to do that.

In a strange cosmic feedback-loop involving cats, my Tolkien researches led me to make a major discovery about why Lovecraft might have chosen to use the name ‘Grandpa Theobald’.

“… the Philharmonic Concerts were also well attended”

03 Saturday Dec 2022

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At the New York Philharmonic premiere of Connesson’s “Les cites de Lovecraft”… Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson impresses in his New York Philharmonic debut…

Connesson is one of the most widely performed French composers today. His ‘Les cites de Lovecraft’ was a co-commission of the Orchestre National de Lyon and the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, which premiered it in 2017. The work was inspired by the writings of American author H.P. Lovecraft … Deneve led the NY Philharmonic in a performance of this scintillating music that was stunning for its textural clarity and brilliance. Wave after wave of sound, ranging from brass fanfares to shimmering cascades from the harp and celesta, swept over the audience. It is music that is obviously close to Deneve’s heart, as he cradled the score in his arm and patted it when acknowledging the audience’s applause.

Lovecraft would no doubt have been rather amused to learn that symphonic paeans to his work would one day be rolling through a major New York concert hall.

Commonplace #10: ‘Dream of flying over city’

02 Friday Dec 2022

Posted by in Historical context, Picture postals

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Here are two U.S. Army Corps of Engineer record-pictures, part of a navigation improvement survey of the Seekonk in Providence. These pictures have inadvertently recorded two of Lovecraft’s places, albeit from a bird’s eye view. I’ve here colorised the pictures.

The first is from 1982 with College Hill on the right edge of the picture. It records the wooded bluff above York Pond, part of the long shoreline Blackstone Park. The bluff was where Lovecraft liked to sit in summer and write letters.

The boat-house can just about be seen. Around here were the sylvan faun-haunted woodland rides of his childhood, that ran down to the river’s edge. Here is a Whitman Bailey pen-sketch of one such, from 1916.

At the present moment I am seated on a wooded bluff above the shining river which my earliest gaze knew and loved. This part of my boyhood world is unchanged because it is a part of the local park system — may the gods be thanked for keeping inviolate the scenes which my infant imagination peopled with fauns and satyrs and dryads!

On a high wooded bluff above a broad river a mile west of my house — a spot unchanged since I haunted it in infancy.

Since I’ve long ago established that the bluff on one side of York Pond was heavily graded in the building of a better road, this can only leave the other side as being the untouched relic of his childhood years. In the 1930s it was likely not so heavily wooded as it was fifty years later in the 1980s, and a c. 1910 postcard and some 1930s WPA road-building pictures at the boathouse seem to confirm this.

The second U.S. Army record-picture is a few years later in 1986. It zooms into the first, and swings around a bit, to record the Twin Islands and the bridge above them…

I used to row considerably on the Seekonk … Often I would land on one or both of the Twin Islands — for islands (associated with remote secrets, pirate treasure, and all that) always fascinated me.” — Lovecraft in a letter to Rimel, April 1934.

The railway bridge seen here was not there when Lovecraft was rowing on the Seekonk. As, according to a blurb in the press, the bridge was only built in 1908 when Lovecraft was 18…

railroad drawbridge connecting the East Side of Providence to East Providence across the Seekonk River … built in 1908 to carry the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad line.

Interestingly, Lovecraft may have crossed the bridge as a passenger, since…

Until 1938, the bridge and tunnel were used regularly by passenger trains travelling from Providence to destinations including Bristol, Rhode Island and Fall River, Massachusetts.

Today the defunct bridge is scheduled to be removed, with demolition pencilled in for 2026-2027.

Below is another picture in which we look back the other way, at an earlier time. Perhaps the time of Lovecraft’s young childhood. Here one can see the Twin Islands on which the teenage Lovecraft would land, and one gets a better impression of the wide sweep of the Seekonk. The sweep of the water would have felt even wider from a low row-boat. In his landings in the sticky mud of the islands, amid the wide waters, there may well be the genesis of the later tale “Dagon” — and thus of the Mythos.

Bradofsky and Others

01 Thursday Dec 2022

Posted by in Scholarly works

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A new blog post from S. T. Joshi gives the title of… “the next volume in the Lovecraft letters series”. It’s to be Letters to Hyman Bradofsky and Others. The book’s text is evidently still in the process of being assembled and edited, though, at present.

Bradofsky was an amateur journalist active in the NAPA, a collector of amateur journalism, and editor of his accomplished amateur journal The Californian.

After that book of letters should come the two-volumes of Long letters, and then the mega-index.

New drawings by Lovecraft

29 Tuesday Nov 2022

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New discoveries

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A Lovecraft letter to Duane W. Rimel, now for sale from L.W. Currey.

10 pages on both sides of 5 sheets, closely written and incorporating 7 pen and ink drawings of old Providence architecture, dated 29th March 1934, signed “Yours most sincerely — H.P. Lovecraft.

The description makes no mention of Letters to F. Lee Baldwin et al. There the text of the letter appears to be published complete, and it matches the Currey description. But the “7 pen and ink drawings” are not shown with the letter in the book. Nor are the drawings found with the letter as partially published in Selected Letters IV.

Three of the pictures can be seen in the above Currey listing picture.

By Daylight Only

26 Saturday Nov 2022

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A peep at the British anthology By Daylight Only (1929). A new sale listing shows the original dust-jacket, which gives the colour. The paid repro ‘Facsimile Dust-jackets’ version has it as red, but here I’ve digitally recoloured to green…

Presumably a contributor copy would have arrived, circa December 1929, for Lovecraft. A tale by the master had appeared in the third volume, almost certainly issued in time for Halloween, and he received his copy in mid December. So we might imagine the same timing for this fifth book in the series. By Daylight Only featured his “Pickman’s Model”.

Perhaps it was first shipped in bulk to the Weird Tales office for further distribution to the American authors at their latest addresses. Since the British publishers dealt with Weird Tales London agent Charles Lovell, who picked the best published WT stories and passed them in good form to Selwyn & Blount for further selection and arrangement. I imagine he also passed back the contributor copies when ready. Ah, yes… I find that supposition is confirmed. In 1929 Lovecraft also wrote to Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright to thank him… “for the anthology which you forwarded”.