Funny old Wright

04 Tuesday Oct 2022

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Once around the Bloch: an unauthorized autobiography of Lovecraft correspondent Robert Bloch, on Archive.org to borrow.

A couple of interesting points. In the earlier part of the 1920s, living in suburban Chicago…

Children’s books were not yet a major concern of the publishing industry: as a result of the cultural lag, libraries offered favorites of a previous generation. Tom Swift was still inventing, and G.A. Henry’s heroes were busily saving a vanishing British Empire. My father would introduce me to the dime-novel demi-gods of his own boyhood, buying reprints which detailed the exploits of Buffalo Bill, Nick Carter and Frank Merriwell.

This would seem to somewhat contradict Whitehead’s statement that many American boys were no longer aware of the Sherlock Holmes stories, although admittedly Holmes had by then gone off the boil and is not mentioned by Bloch. Lovecraft’s friend and fellow-writer Whitehead, a close observer of American boy-culture in evening clubs and summer-camps, had remarked in a 1922 essay on the…

fact that there is just now growing up a generation of readers for whom the Doyle of ‘Sherlock Holmes’ is an obsolescent figure.

But perhaps there were regional and urban/rural differences in consumption at that time, and urban Chicago was not the same as semi-rural Florida in term of boyhood reading tastes or availability. Possible also a difference between summer-camp boys and those who had to work through the summer.

The teen Bloch later visited the Weird Tales offices. On editor Farnsworth Wright and his business manager at Weird Tales…

Both men had a rare sense of humor, which is probably why they tolerated a teenage interloper like myself.

We don’t tend to think of Wright as having “a rare sense of humor”, but apparently he did in person.

The Hobbit, unabridged and full-cast

03 Monday Oct 2022

Posted by in Podcasts etc.

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Here’s something which may brighten a dull Monday. I’ve been pleased to discover a new free ten-hour unabridged audio version of Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Full-cast (one man, young, British) + audio FX + music.

The Hobbit (Audiobook) by Bluefax is not quite up to the vocal standards of master-mimic Phil Dragash, who had earlier accomplished the same thing with an unabridged The Lord of the Rings. But the voicework is very good, it’s a great listen and is overall a fine audiowork and precursor to hearing Dragash’s LoTR.

My understand is that to legally download this you need to first own the retail book and the retail audiobook. Also the soundtrack album for the disappointing and overblown The Hobbit movies. Which is where the music comes from, but be warned that the Hobbit movies are otherwise the worst possible introduction to Middle-earth.

With a good unabridged audiobook to hand for repeated listening, I may now expand my The Cracks of Doom book to a third edition. To encompass the ‘untold tales’ to be found in the cracks of The Hobbit as well as The Lord of the Rings.

There’s a certain amount of horror to be found here, and indeed children’s book reviewers warned of it on publication. I don’t refer to that strange anti-Tolkien phobia, which seems to involve a horror of encountering fey singing elves. Yes, there are singing elves a-plenty. But the central chapters on Mirkwood and its spiders may have some reaching for their Lovecraft, for light relief.

The text used by Bluefax is the modern edition, which subtly aligns the 1937 original of the Gollum sequence with the plot of the 1950s The Lord of the Rings, and also makes other small changes. Such as not having Bilbo briefly note some itinerant hobbits when he and Thorin make their way out of the Shire via Breeland (though the existence of roving hobbits who choose to be itinerant is later revealed in LoTR, when Merry inserts his brief history of Breeland… “Some, doubtless, were no better than tramps, ready to dig a hole in any bank and stay only as long as it suited them.”). Also, in the early drafts of LoTR, ‘Trotter’ (later Strider) was to have been one of these roving hobbits.

September on Tentaclii

02 Sunday Oct 2022

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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September departs. The leaves are still on the trees around Tentaclii Towers, and hardly any autumnal colours are yet to be seen in the vast sweep of treetops. But the northerly gales are blowing through, and it can’t be long before the leaves turn and fall in abundance as we head toward Halloween. Not that many will be keen to lightheartedly celebrate Halloween this year, being beset by a multitude of real horrors.

Despite intermittent pain (hopefully temporary) I’m hard at work on the first bumper $5 issue of the monthly Digital Art Live magazine, which should be released by the end of next week. Anything you can do to publicise this October issue, after it becomes available, will be most welcome. Yet I’m still finding the time to keep Tentaclii rolling on a relatively daily basis, albeit with the temporary suspension of the long ‘Picture Postcards’ posts on Fridays due to time constraints.

As for the blog in general, I’m pleased to say that after six months Google Search appears to be treating the moved Tentaclii normally again. Though there’s still a lack of deep Google indexing of older posts.

Here at Tentaclii my historical delving was rather light. But I posted my second long post with notes on my reading of “Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei”. I also found another primary article on the museum run by Lovecraft’s friend James F. Morton. Morton himself describes his Paterson Museum in 1933, adding a little more detail to what we know about it from geological journals and suchlike. With all the various data available, it may now be possible to fairly faithfully reconstruct the museum as the setting for a Mythos tale or RPG scenario.

In September I finally finished and released my big scholarly Tolkien book, Tree & Star: Tolkien and the quest for Earendel. 200,000 words and over six years of detailed work. As usual lots of new discoveries and footnotes. I could have spent another day finessing the large index, and a further day in yet another round of proof-reading, but the index is quite functional and the book is public at last. It is available now to buy on Gumroad, as a .PDF ebook.

I’ve now cracked, to my own satisfaction, three of the biggest mysteries in fantastic literature. The source for the Time Traveller in The Time Machine (see my Wells book); the likely identity and location of the Gawain-poet (or at least his patron, see my Gawain book); and now the fateful word “earendel” from which sprang Tolkien’s legendarium. All have close connections to my part of England, as it happens.

Kipling may be next on the bucket-list, and he even has a very slim connection (via his dad) to North Staffordshire. Though there the only unsolved mystery appears to be why he has been airbrushed out of the history of early science-fiction. Following my late-August annotation of “With the Night Mail”, I posted a few follow-on blog posts in September which dug down into why Kipling was… “the first modern science fiction writer”, and found quotes from leading sci-fi authors of the 20th century to back this up. More such quotes are welcome, if you know of any, especially from Heinlein who was a great admirer. Following these posts I made a new Tentaclii blog-post tag for my Kipling posts, and another for my few posts about Conan Doyle.

This month I also took a look at Lovecraft biographer de Camp’s non-fiction science writing. Active in the era of Asimov and Sagan, it seems he was something of a stalwart flanker of these great men — and at a critical time when the line needed to be held against a rising tide of 1970s irrationality and mumbo-jumbo. In looking at this side of de Camp, I inadvertently discovered another “Lovecraft as character” tale new to me — de Camp’s “Balsamo’s Mirror” (1978).

Only one substantial ‘Postcards’ post at Tentaclii, this month. I took a look at ‘Purgatory’ and ‘Paradise’ in Newport, one of Lovecraft’s favourite places and local summer excursions. I also fixed up the picture-loading on the old blog posts that had featured the same place.

Only one interesting new Lovecraft-related book of note this month, in English. The forthcoming revised and expanded Eyes of the God: Selected Writings of R. H. Barlow. Tangentially related to Lovecraft, I also spotted and posted about the new historical survey books Radio Psychics: Mind Reading and Fortune Telling in American Broadcasting, 1920–1940 (partly relevant to “Nyarlathotep”?); and a book on the curious overlaps of The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain (i.e. 1870s-1930s).

S.T. Joshi’s annual scholarly megajournal Penumbra is forthcoming and has released its TOC for 2022. I’m in the 2022 issue, so I should hopefully be getting a copy in due course. I haven’t had the Lovecraft Annual arrive yet either.

In overseas book and journal news: the large and handsome new issue of the Italian Linus magazine devotes itself to Lovecraft; the French magazine Actuality: The Universe of Books brought news that leading French prestige publisher La Pleiade has a major Lovecraft edition in the works; the German Lovecraftians reported a successful annual summer gathering; the Italian journal Studi Lovecraftiani No. 21 appeared, and I dug up and translated the TOCs for Tentaclii readers. An up-away over in Russia, Russian readers had the first volume of a I Am Providence translation in hardback.

The cover of the forthcoming Lovecraft in Holland emerged as a preview, and it appears the book will be in English rather than Dutch — the title is in English and I assume even the writer of the foreword Robert M. Price can’t quite stretch his immense range to talents to encompass fluent Dutch. Also forthcoming, presumably in 2023, is an un-titled book on Lovecraft and New York City in the 1920s.

In podcasts this month, Henrik Moller’s 150th podcast interviewed members of the “Providence Pals”, pioneering early Lovecraft scholars. Voluminous at NecronomiCon delved into the local newspaper astrology debate which the young Lovecraft engaged in, with live readings of the letters. Various new story readings were linked to, at Librivox and elsewhere.

In comics the Spanish now have Alan Moore’s major work Providence as a translated one-volume omnibus book; in France A Bestiary of the Twilight (‘Le Bestiaire du Crepuscule’) is a major and well-reviewed new French graphic novel that has Lovecraft as the lead character. Only in French at present. The new YouTube “H.P. Lovecraft – an animated biography” also used toony artwork.

2023 event news is starting to emerge, with Howard Days 2023 naming their dates and theme. The 3rd London Lovecraft Festival has dates in February 2023.

Also in September, I took a deep dive into “fixed layout” .ePub files, in pursuit of the feasibility of an animated magazine format (now that .PDFs are effectively bjorked in that regard). The simple and lightweight looping animation format is there (.aPNG), also the simple code* to control to prevent the manic appearance of such. What is not really there yet is the desktop Windows .ePub reader. The only really viable ereader choice for that is Thorium, which supports both fixed-layout and .aPNGs images. It’s free and open source, but Thorium would not be ideal. One would have to say to readers: “Erm… you have to use this particular reader. It’s sort-of OK, and… it’s the only choice for the Windows desktop”.

Ok, that’s it for the summary of September 2022. As always, please consider becoming my Patron on Patreon, or increasing your monthly patronage there. You can also donate directly via PayPal, or buy my books or other sold items. You can also help with a free link or two from your own blog, or on social media. It really helps me out in these increasingly difficult times, thanks.

* simple code

Simple working and multi-browser tested HTML code to control an .aPNG. You’re welcome.


Animated demo:


Click here to replay

Some monsters

30 Friday Sep 2022

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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No postcards, this Friday. I sometimes feel that visitors coming hoping for monsters may be a little disappointed to find me chuntering about the places Lovecraft knew/visited. So here’s a selection of full-blown monsters, as if from some unfinished and long-lost 1980s Dreamlands book made under the influence of Brian Froud…

Hopgob

Ambler

Poogmush

Waplee

Gobrot

Made with AI and some Photoshop-ing, of course. I’ve discovered the trick of getting an art-gen AI to consistently produce an isolated figure on a plain backdrop. It’s my understanding that raw AI generated art can’t be in copyright, unless then manually reconfigured (e.g. with significant manual over-painting, or the art used for comic-book panels that are then overlaid with text). So, despite my Photoshop fixes and tweaks on the above, all the above five pictures are here placed under full Creative Commons Attribution. Feel free to use them in your RPG etc. If you need better names, Murray Ewing has a new Lovecraftian Title Generator.

Elsewhere this week, Noah Pinion asks “Is AI a Lovecraftian intelligence?”.

Forthcoming: book on Lovecraft and NYC in the 1920s

28 Wednesday Sep 2022

Posted by in Scholarly works

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Great news from Another Town on the Hudson…

Last month, I submitted my book manuscript, a biography of H.P. Lovecraft and his New York City period, to my publisher, capping nearly two years of imaginative immersion and intensive writing.

Also…

In October [2022], I’ll be talking about Lovecraft and New York at the King Manor Museum in Jamaica, Queens.

The location is about six miles east of Brooklyn, New York City.

Coining it

25 Sunday Sep 2022

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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The Republic of Palau, the Pacific island-chain nation, has issued a new pure-silver 20 dollar coin commemorating H.P. Lovecraft. I assume it’s real currency that might buy you ⅔’s of a ginger-beer on one of their beautiful atoll beaches.

But isn’t little Palau supposed to be beneath the rising waves by now, like R’lyeh? Nope. Despite many claims heard in the media, none of the Pacific atoll islands with people on them are shrinking.

Incidentally, looking up the spelling of R’lyeh via search shows that Google doesn’t know what it is when slightly mis-spelled. Bing / DuckDuckGo (the Duck is Bing) does, suggesting Microsoft may now have a wider semantic lookup than Google Search.

The Paterson Museum

23 Friday Sep 2022

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Lovecraft’s friend James F. Morton here describes his Paterson Museum, for the April 1933 issue of Hobbies: the Magazine for Collectors.

There’s nothing here about his collection of glow-in-the-dark minerals, known about from other sources. Though we do learn here, for the first time, that “cave minerals” had a special display. And we get a general feel for that the place was like in size and scope, after some five years under his care.