Black Friday

24 Thursday Nov 2022

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A few Black Friday sale items I’ve noticed, of possible interest to Tentaclii readers. All rather modest savings so far. No ‘80% off’ door-busters, as yet.

Blambot has 30% off of their comic-book lettering fonts, by using coupon-code CYBERWEEK at the checkout. Expires 4th December 2022. Some horror fonts and vintage 1950s EC comics type fonts. They also have vintage ad fonts, suitable for recreating old ads and poster for RPGs.

25% off a one-time perpetual licence for the QuarkXpress DTP desktop software. Don’t judge it by the bad reputation it had back in 2002. It’s now worth considering if you need a full DTP desktop software, and (unlike Adobe’s InDesign) it doesn’t require an expensive plugin to export to HTML5.

A modest 25% off Gigapixel AI, the best desktop image up-scaler. Apparently still available as a standalone, for now. They had announced that it would only be available in a bundle with their other AI software.

Modest discounts on DxO ViewPoint 4. If you visit places and make or have a lot of pictures of buildings or rooms, this ‘partly automatic’ desktop software straightens the curved/wonky verticals and horizontals. Used to be very cheap, a couple of years ago. Now more expensive.

No discounts yet on PDF Index Generator, DocFetcher Pro, JitBit Macro Recorder, Scrivener 3, Booksorber. CQuill Writer is 30% off all year round, so doesn’t really count.

As with all software, try before you buy, to check your OS can run it and if you like the user interface. Some software, such as Serif’s Affinity Publisher DTP software, have squinty deal-breaker UIs. Others won’t run on old OSs. AI software may require a certain grade of graphics card.

Caerdroia

23 Wednesday Nov 2022

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Wormwoodiana looks at ‘Mazes and Labyrinths’…

There may well still be lost turf maze sites still to be discovered, using detailed place-name evidence or possibly local traditions: I came across one by chance a while ago in a church guide.

… and there’s the potential for newly-created ones, I imagine. One can of course make a temporary ‘summer maze’ of simple mown grass, which may better suit the hand-wringing nay-sayers on the Parish Council. But a more permanent turf-sod maze can’t be too difficult to make once you have a few tons of thick sods delivered to the land. Some drainage pipes too. Since, as Shakespeare pointed out, anything built as channels-in-turf is liable to gather muddy water in our British climate…

The nine-men’s-morris is filled up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,
For lack of tread, are undistinguishable.

The Wormwoodiana article usefully makes me aware of the Caerdroia journal, a long-running scholarly journal dedicated to the topic of mazes and their cultural uses. Possibly a home for your prospective article discussing notable pulp / early-SF mazes, such as the Lovecraft/Sterling story “In the Walls of Eryx”?

The Caerdroia Archive has a range of free public PDFs. Such as “Arthur Machen and the Maze Theme” (1991), which may interest some Tentaclii readers. Also out-of-print 2003-17 back-issues as free .PDFs. I’ve added the indexing URL to JURN and the .PDFs can now be found via my JURN search-engine.

Twitty fun

23 Wednesday Nov 2022

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Surprisingly true. All-but useless for news / opportunities gathering, but fun to scroll really fast through for 30 minutes a day on a desktop PC, with images blocked. That assumes, of course, you know how to ‘follow’ someone while also blocking their daily tidal-wave of re-tweets. And that your feed has settled down, discarding the stupid mini-feeds ‘suggested topic’ (Soccer, Wrestling, Boxing and other manly grunt-fests). Why are suggestion-bots so dumb? All of them, all the time. Fix that, Elon and you’ll be a rich man. Oh, wait…

Brooklyn and the world (1983)

21 Monday Nov 2022

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Here’s a curiosity, newly on Archive.org, Brooklyn and the world (1983). An anthology with literary autobiography and memoirs about Brooklyn, and at the back a comprehensive annotated bibliography including film. Though the short stories set in Brooklyn are not annotated, and nor do we get a list of them by first date of publication. Lovecraft is thus consigned to “1965” via an Arkham House edition, though I’m fairly sure that Lovecraft was the first to enshrine Red Hook in memorable fiction.

Lovecraft in Estonian

20 Sunday Nov 2022

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Lovecraft now available in Estonian…

The Viking publishing house published the “The Call of Cthulhu” and other stories in Estonian five years ago, in an award-winning translation. This newest [Nov 2022] translated collection builds on that and continues readers’ journeys through Lovecraft’s landscapes, principally in and around the fictional Massachusetts town of Arkham and the Miskatonic river. Though also taking the reader on trips to other worlds, alien dimensions and distant planets.

Lovecraft was right, part 459

19 Saturday Nov 2022

Posted by in Historical context

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There’s a small error on a point of economic history, found in the most recent episode of the podcast Voluminous. This is re: Lovecraft’s 1930 forecast that…

The workman’s place in this ultimate order [i.e. he seems to imply the emerging form of advanced technological capitalism] will not be at all bad, and may conceivably be so good — with so much leisure — that it will help to solve the problem of the impecunious man of cultivation.”

In the podcast this is said to be wrong. Based on the assumption, presumably, that nothing much has changed for a “workman” since Marx first peered through the grimy windows of an early Lancastrian cotton-mill.

Yet, as usual, Lovecraft was right. In the year he was born, the average U.S. adult worked a week of 61 hours. For a factory worker or farm-hand it could often be 100 hours. By 2021 the average U.S. full-time working week was down to 38.7 hours. The well-documented post-war boom in leisure-time happened, just as Lovecraft predicted. For adults the reduced hours were largely the result of employers competing for skilled labour, allied with their capital investment in machines and better productivity.

Lovecraft’s “problem of the impecunious man of cultivation” has also been somewhat solved, at least for cheese-paring bachelors, by another relatively new phenomenon. The rise of part-time but regular jobs — giving earnings on which it is possible to live something of a writer’s life. Many labour-saving devices (fast-boil kettles, etc) services (food delivery, fast-food etc) and tools (word-processors, Internet research etc) make such a life more viable by freeing up a few more hours. Not only do we have more leisure hours to spare, but we can do more with them (so long as we choose not to waste 24 hours a week being zombified by TV). We also have far more choice.

Such 20th century change looks even better if you work out the ‘disposable percentage of a lifetime’ spent at work, given that our lifespans have greatly increased since the time of Lovecraft’s parents. We now spend only around 10-20 percent of our entire waking lives at work, depending on how you calculate such things (amount of time spent in education, % of each day spent in the workplace, actual life-span, age of retirement etc). One can also add that for most people the age 67-82 (15 years) period of retirement is now a far more healthy and active part of one’s life than it was in Lovecraft’s time. 75% of those aged 65-74 in the U.S. have no disabilities at all.

“Industry, highly mechanised, demanded but little time from each citizen; and the abundant leisure was filled with intellectual and aesthetic activities of various sorts” (The Shadow out of Time)

Lovecraft may yet be proved right twice over. Once we get through the current bumpiness then the world will be at least 350-450% richer by 2099, according to the best U.N. forecasts. With a consequent rise in leisure time and opportunities. That may even entail the rise of a sort of ‘aristocracy of the cultured’ that Lovecraft envisaged for a future leisure society.

Voluminous: ‘Long and Love-Kraft’

19 Saturday Nov 2022

Posted by in Historical context, Podcasts etc.

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A new 90 minute Voluminous: ‘Long and Love-Kraft’. This letter features a long discussion of the fave Lovecraft nibble… cheese! See also 2020’s Voluminous: Cats, Cheese and Hawaiians episode for more nibbles at the topic.

From another letter on the topic…

A decade ago I was greatly interested in tracking down some of the idioms I encountered in New York. For example – the phrase “store cheese” – which my palate preferences caused me to run up against continually. In southern New England the expression is – or at least was in 1924 – unknown. Our principal cheeses are the large traditional sort – about a foot thick and two feet in diameter – and the modern tinfoil package or process cheeses run second. Thus the word “cheese” without any trimmings suggests to our mind one of the large ordinary old-fashioned sort. When we allude to the new sort we usually say “process cheese”, “package cheese”, or (in the case of the long tinfoiled loaf) “loaf cheese”. Well – in New York it is just the other way around. The word “cheese” in itself suggests to New Yorkers the modern tin-foil brands, and if you ask for “a pound of mild white cheese” a Manhattan grocer will begin to chop you off a section of a Kraft tin-foiled loaf. These process cheeses (they are artificially cured and not aged) are the principal kinds used in the metropolis, and in many shops no others are obtainable. And where they do keep the standard old-fashioned sort, they call them “store cheeses”. Thus when I was in Brooklyn I used to have to ask for “medium white store cheese” if expected to get my usual kind.

And this was probably a Tom & Jerry-style ‘mousetrap’ wedge, cut from a wheel with a wire and wrapped in grease-proof paper, rather than the rectangular and vacuum-packed plastic block of today…

large wheels of cheddar cheese — often called simply “store cheese” — were kept under glass and sliced into one- or two- pound wedges for customers.” (New England)

Lovecraft’s friend Vrest Orton built an enduring mini-industry in Vermont around such things, which was perhaps even partly inspired by Lovecraft’s antiquarianism and tastes…

I wanted to revive an authentic, old-fashioned, rural operating store [‘The Vermont Country Store’, with] the same merchandise: New England foods, store cheese and crackers, bolts of calico cloth, kitchen knives and cooking forks

Orton even kept alive a certain old British traditions in cheese, something Lovecraft would surely have approved of…

one of the better sage cheeses I have eaten is sold by Vrest Orton, a Vermonter famous for his efforts to preserve the verities of his native state. Mr. Orton does not hesitate to tell his customers that the shipments he makes are “simply our good aged Cheddar with leaves of real sage for flavor.” Among British food lovers for hundreds of years this kind of sage cheese has been a traditional part of the Christmas celebration all over England.” (The World of Cheese)

In the Voluminous letter “York State Medium” is stated as being Lovecraft’s favoured cheese-board staple in 1930. This can be found in recipes as “York State cheese” into the 1970s, a full-fat cheese. But perhaps he was abbreviating for ‘New York State Cheese’, in which case it turns out there’s a complete book on the topic…

The Voluminous letter, as read, was previously abridged in Selected Letters III. This episode of Voluminous also gives an account of the process of acquisition of the Long letters for Brown.

The podcast has a small factual error, which I’ve corrected in my post Lovecraft was right, part 459.

Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard / Dark Man journal

19 Saturday Nov 2022

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WARNING: A printing problem has been discovered, and the publisher now advises… “Please do not purchase the book until the problem is investigated and fixed.”

The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, Volume 3 (1932-1936). According to Amazon this is now published. Which means the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press is to be heartily congratulated, as it now has all three volumes published as affordable paperbacks.

I see there was also a new issue of The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies (12.2), dated December 2021 and available March 2022 on Amazon. Among other items, an article on “Howard and Strange Tales” and a review of the expanded book The Weird Tales Story.

Views of Providence

18 Friday Nov 2022

Posted by in Picture postals

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This week in ‘Picture Postals’, part of The Beth Murray collection of Providence photographs. My thanks to the Providence Public Library, which has large scans of the screened postcard version of these Providence postcards, postcards once issued as sets by the city’s Book Shop. I’ve selected the views and places more relevant to Lovecraft.

Benefit Street, Providence.

Thomas Street, Providence. Appears in “The Call of Cthulhu”.

The view from the garden of the Shakespeare’s Head.

“John Carter … His old shop & office, the Sign of Shakespeare’s Head, in Gaol-Lane” (Lovecraft, speaking of Providence)

The John Carter house on Benefit Street.

Along the River Seekonk, Providence. On the way to one of Lovecraft’s favourite places, the wooded bluff above York Pond. The spot is around the corner in the distance. The young Lovecraft used to row on this river, most likely hiring a boat from the boat-house rather than Red Bridge, and would land on the Twin Islands in the river’s stream.

George Street, Providence. City centre and the then-new Industrial Trust building in the distance.

Looking up College Hill toward’s Lovecraft’s last home. The olde left side swept away for new RSID buildings, though somewhat sympathetically done with an old courtyard archway retained.

The Handicraft Club half-way up College Hill. Lovecraft’s aunt lived here for a while.

Another view of the Handicraft Club half-way up College Hill.

One of the entrances to the covered shopping Arcade, Providence. A favourite childhood haunt of the young Lovecraft.

View across to the new State House.

Another State House view.

Street market in the Italian quarter, Federal Hill. Setting of the late story “The Haunter of the Dark”.

The Baptist church, where Lovecraft tried to play “Yes, We Have No Bananas” on the organ.

I haven’t tried to foist colourising on them, since most of them are too contrasty (which doesn’t take colour well). There are more pictures to be found at the Library’s website and even more if you root around and hang around on eBay. Usually noted there as a “Book Shop” card…

I’ve found that Murray (1913-?) also issued a 34-page photobook for Lovecraft’s favourite local day-tip location, This is Newport: A book of photographs (1948).

Therefore she was also photographing in the mid-late 1940s. Interestingly she also issued the presumably similar title This is Providence: Photographs (1947). These dates suggest the dates of her pictures may well be earlier than the circa 1960 dates of the Book Shop’s postcard-set. We may be looking at Providence circa the mid 1940s, less than a decade after Lovecraft died. This earlier date would explain the somewhat rough ‘immediate post-war’ feel re: the b&w quality of the prints. At that time she would have been limited in materials and camera, and was likely printing them up for cheap reproduction in her books rather than as big art-prints.

There is no trace of either of her books on Archive.org. It’s possible there may be better quality / more pictures in the books, and possibly even some biography. There appears to be no institutional archive with her negatives, from which better prints might now be made.