{"id":48906,"date":"2021-08-01T03:26:36","date_gmt":"2021-08-01T00:26:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tentaclii.wordpress.com\/?p=48906"},"modified":"2021-08-01T03:26:36","modified_gmt":"2021-08-01T00:26:36","slug":"july-on-tentaclii-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2021\/08\/01\/july-on-tentaclii-2\/","title":{"rendered":"July on Tentaclii"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Great British Summer lasted all of a week here, as usual, with temperatures nicely nudging above 80 degrees each day &mdash; while our increasingly ridiculous Met Office sternly warned daily of &#8216;extreme&#8217; weather. Perfectly normal summer temperatures are not extreme. It&#8217;s all vanished now, of course. The mighty walls of Tentaclii Towers are once again bathed in cool rains.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks to my loyal <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/davehaden\">Patreons<\/a>, who this month helped me restore the Lovecraft Panther paperbacks I had as a lad. These were <em>almost<\/em> my first encounter with Lovecraft but were lost in 1990s. I&#8217;ve now bagged the three key books for a pittance, and yet they are also in excellent condition. It was &#8216;now or never&#8217;, given their increasing scarcity and silly prices. Drool-worthy macro photos are coming soon, possibly for my Patreons only.<\/p>\n<p>Not many new Lovecraft discoveries on <em>Tentaclii<\/em> this month, but I did find a picture of The Bijou on Westminster St., Providence, which seems to me the most likely candidate for Lovecraft&#8217;s cinema ticket-selling job. A new Arthur Leeds article was also found, on movie special effects, along with others newly arrived on Archive.org. Lovecraft&#8217;s friend Leeds had been a studio executive before the movie industry moved from New York City to California, a move which left him and McNeil, Dench and Houtain all high-and-dry.<\/p>\n<p>Talking of movies, <em>The Green Knight<\/em> is a long and fairly faithful adaptation of the supernatural classic. The movie is now widely available in the USA and is being well reviewed. If you&#8217;re curious about the background to it, then you want my book <em>Strange Country: Sir Gawain in the moorlands of North Staffordshire<\/em>. Sadly the movie has been pulled from cinemas here in the UK, where it was due to screen on 6th August.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.jurn.link\/tentaclii\/oldimages\/gawain.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.jurn.link\/tentaclii\/oldimages\/gawain.jpg?w=529\" alt=\"\" width=\"529\" height=\"319\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-48908\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>S.T. Joshi\u2019s blog brought the titles for the forthcoming final books containing Lovecraft&#8217;s letters, and also the welcome news that Mark Griffin is making a combined index to all the published letters. In new Lovecraft-related books, I noted the greatly expanded new edition of <em>Out of the Immortal Night: Selected Works of Samuel Loveman<\/em>, and <em>Born under Saturn: The Letters of Samuel Loveman and Clark Ashton Smith<\/em>, both of which appear to be set to ship relatively soon &mdash; September. Also noted was the hardback for <em>Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1<\/em>, shipping now.<\/p>\n<p><em>Tentaclii<\/em> did not feature a great deal of my research on Lovecraft this month, as I&#8217;m taking a bit of a break from that. But my &#8220;Notes on <em>Letters to Family<\/em>, Vol. II \u2013 part two&#8221; did appeared, and part three may be posted in a week or two. I also mused briefly on Lovecraft&#8217;s interest in glands.<\/p>\n<p>Several useful scholarly sources for movies were noted, including the movie-history search tool Lantern and a full searchable run of <em>Variety<\/em> 1905-2017. I also found the open journal <em>Victorian Popular Fictions<\/em>. The Tolkien journal <em>Mallorn<\/em> is also now open, though with a two-year paywall for members. These and others have been added to my <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jurn.link\/#gsc.tab=0\">JURN search-engine<\/a> for open-access arts &amp; humanities journals (and now much more). JURN has also had its usual midsummer overhaul and update on the back-end.<\/p>\n<p>Newly arrived on Archive.org I spotted Frank Gruber&#8217;s collectable pulp industry memoir <em>The Pulp Jungle<\/em>, and a readable copy of the Lovecraft-inspired <em>The Werewolf of Ponkert<\/em>. Also the uploading of a run of microfilmed <em>Popular Mechanics<\/em> 1902-2016, among which I found an interesting item on infra-red photography &mdash; perhaps a partial inspiration for &#8220;The Colour Out of Space&#8221;. Other new arrivals there were more scans of Derleth&#8217;s <em>Arkham Sampler<\/em>, <em>Popular Astronomy<\/em> for 1893-1951, and <em>Midwest Folklore<\/em> 1951-1964 which may interest R.E. Howard scholars.  I was pleased to see more issues of <em>Famous Monsters of Filmland<\/em> arrive there too, and it looks like Archive.org must now be nearing a complete set. Wilum Pugmire, who was once forced by his parents to burn his precious collection of <em>Famous Monsters<\/em>, must be smiling somewhere.<\/p>\n<p>Not much in podcasts and audio this month, and I imagine several people are holding items back and waiting for Lovecraft&#8217;s birthday in August. But I did link to &#8220;Howard Days 2021 \u2013 all audio recordings&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>In art, I made not one but two surveys of new and Lovecraft-y art on DeviantArt. By chance I found some nice old creepy woodcuts of Newport, a favourite haunt for Lovecraft. I showed these here and rectified\/upscaled one of them. I was also pleased to see several new stop-motion Lovecraftian animations, including &#8220;The Other Gods&#8221;. A ComicCraft sale was noted, and the horror fonts pointed out. <\/p>\n<p>Also in comics, this month I produced a bumper edition of <em>VisNews<\/em> with a long Kristian Donaldson (<em>The Dark<\/em>, <em>Supermarket<\/em>) interview, as well as a bumper &#8220;Oceans&#8221; issue of the free <em>Digital Art Live<\/em> magazine. Lovecraft did not make it to the final cut of the <em>DAL<\/em> Gallery, but he&#8217;ll be in the Halloween issue. The &#8220;Oceans&#8221; issue of <em>DAL<\/em> should be out in a few days, as I&#8217;m not the one who gets to press the &#8216;publish&#8217; button on it.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.jurn.link\/tentaclii\/oldimages\/donaldson.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.jurn.link\/tentaclii\/oldimages\/donaldson.jpg?w=231\" alt=\"\" width=\"231\" height=\"300\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-48910\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.jurn.link\/tentaclii\/oldimages\/cover-final.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.jurn.link\/tentaclii\/oldimages\/cover-final.jpg?w=231\" alt=\"\" width=\"231\" height=\"300\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-48911\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m pleased to say I&#8217;ve now effectively completed the rescue of my old failed PC and have worked through nearly all of the required software wrangling. I had been running the ancient Linkbot Pro link-checking software and the FeedDemon RSS reader software, but I find that SEO Spider and QuietRSS are fine replacements. The new SSD drive is proving very enjoyable in terms of speed, as is my XP-PEN Artist 22 (2021 2nd Gen, a magazine review-unit) draw-on-the-screen monitor. Thanks again to my Patreons for helping out at a difficult time and helping to fund this vital SSD purchase.<\/p>\n<p>If you can spare a few dollars a month <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/davehaden\">via Patreon<\/a>, please, it really does help me out. Many thanks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Great British Summer lasted all of a week here, as usual, with temperatures nicely nudging above 80 degrees each &hellip;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2021\/08\/01\/july-on-tentaclii-2\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-odd-scratchings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48906\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}