Tentaclii Towers displayed itself in many moods this month, as the changeable weather of a typical English June settled in. Sometimes the walls were mist shrouded, sometimes basking in sun as if the Towers were a Mediterranean chateau. Inside the hoary Towers I relaxed my daily posting schedule. The vast Library of Ye Olde Postcards has also been locked up for the summer, to make time for other matters.<\/p>\n
But in June my last few regular Friday ‘Picture Postals’ posts offered a view across “Night in Providence, 1933”, newly colorised; walked on “a hot day under the Brooklyn Elevated”; and I also spotted the man himself via a pleasing Dessin Jullia postcard portrait from France. Then, just as I thought the time-consuming ‘Postcard’ posts were in abeyance for a while, up pop some eBay pictures that appear to show Lovecraft’s childhood ‘ground zero’. The Seekonk near York Pond, before the extensive road-grading work. These pictures will appear enlarged and colourised and geo-checked in due course.<\/p>\n
In scholarly work, a number of links to scholarly items were added to my Open Lovecraft page at Tentaclii<\/em>. I noted a call for papers for the German book H.P. Lovecraft and Germany: Cultural Reflections<\/em>, and offered some additional topic suggestions. I reviewed The Lovecraft Annual<\/em> for 2020 at some length. I began the reading of Lovecraft’s Letters to Family, Vol. II<\/em>, and I’ll be posting sets of notes here as I go.<\/p>\n In books I noticed that Lovecraft’s poetry is now in a Swedish translation, and that there’s a Dream Quest<\/em> semi-artbook from the same publisher. I tracked down exactly who was interviewed in the way out-of-print book Speaking of Science Fiction<\/em>, and along the way discovered there are now three volumes of Darrell Schweitzer’s Speaking of the Fantastic<\/em> interviews with authors and editors. Wormwoodania<\/em> brought news that there is a weighty Robert Aickman biography forthcoming, and I rescued and colourised a bad scan of a fine Ida Kar portrait of him to accompany my post on this news.<\/p>\n I’m always pleased when people record audio readings of Lovecraft’s more interesting poems, and this month it was Lovecraft\u2019s early anti-booze poem, \u201cThe Power Of Wine\u201d (1916) from SFFAudio<\/em>. Which was not without macabre interest. In other audio I linked to several items from the successful Robert E. Howard Days 2021, and I noticed the most recent Voluminous<\/em> podcast which surveyed the Long letters newly acquired by Brown University.<\/p>\n A passing notice here of a Lovecraft mention in the memoir Literary Lamas of New York<\/em> led to me noticing the same author’s Evangelical Cockroach<\/em> book of stories. This was later reprinted by Richard A. Lupoff and, in a lengthy trailer post for the reprint, I found that Lupoff had slipped in another comment on George Sylvester Viereck… “Woodford also published a late fantasy novel by the controversial German-American poet-journalist-propagandist George Sylvester Viereck\u201d. See my earlier post on Tentaclii<\/em> on Lupoff and his claims re: Viereck and Lovecraft.<\/p>\n In the visual arts I spotted the new 64-page comic, Nightmares of Providence<\/em> #1 which is a stretch-goal anthology as part of an Alan Moore fundraiser and as such has major talent in it. I found several new items for the ‘Lovecraft as character’ category of posts, one of these also being a recent comic. Also on Tentaclii<\/em> this month, more of my surveys of DeviantArt. Another such is to come in a few days. <\/p>\n There appears to be a lot of activity going on in the Lovecraftian games market, as usual, way too much for me to cover. But I have a soft spot for the Elder Scrolls<\/em> series (Morrowind<\/em>, Oblivion<\/em>, Skyrim<\/em> etc) and so was pleased to note the substantial DLC\/mod \u201cHere There Be Monsters\u201d \u2013 The Call Of Cthulhu for Elder Scrolls: Skyrim<\/em>. I believe there’s also a well-made Lovecraftian indie movie out and called The Deep Ones<\/em>, though as yet I’ve not looked at reviews.<\/p>\n I’m pleased to also say I have a new ‘draw on the screen’ pen monitor, a \u00a3500 XP-Pen Artist 22 (2nd Gen, 2021). The 16-page technical review that earned me this beauty is to be found in the latest issue of Digital Art Live<\/em> magazine, if you were thinking of getting one too. My ‘old’ PC is also back up and running, and nothing was lost from the hard-drive failure on the now-defunct ‘new’ one. Nothing except time, as it’s taken a solid two weeks of work, on and off, to get back to something like normal. The situation is still not ideal, but I don’t have the price of a new \u00a31,000 PC that would be reasonable future-proof. My thanks to my Pateons, whose June Patreon donations helped be put a good 500Gb SSD drive in the ‘old’ PC. It’s fast enough that it should get me back the two lost weeks of time, before Christmas.<\/p>\n That’s it for June. Please consider becoming my patron on Patreon<\/a>, or upping your regular donation. It really helps me out. One-off PayPal donations are also welcome via the sidebar link on the blog, to help buy new books of Lovecraft letters. I still have about eight of those to get.<\/p>\n A final thought: how will you mark Lovecraft’s birthday later in 2021?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tentaclii Towers displayed itself in many moods this month, as the changeable weather of a typical English June settled in. …<\/p>\n