HPLinks #41.
A slightly smaller HPLinks this week, because I’m set to install Windows 11. Then there’s all the work that follows on from such a gigantic move to a new OS. Eeek! Don’t worry, though, it’s a ‘superlite’ version of the installer ISO with absolutely no bloat, junk, sign-in, apps, ads, privacy-invasion, forced updates, hardware requirements or other Microsoftie nonsense. Just the OS, and a fast stripped-down one at that. Being installed to a new SSD drive too. This seems the best way to go as Windows 10 dies and Windows 7 can no longer support local AI installs. I seriously considered the Linux OS for two weeks, but in the end… too much trouble to fathom/learn all its arcane ways, and also seemingly far too easy to break the OS just by trying out some new software. Thus I was pleased to discover the now-mature Windows 11 ‘lite’ and ‘superlite’ installers, in which the horror of 11 not just ‘suppressed a bit’ but actively ripped out. After install, my task will then be to make Windows 11 look as much like faithful ol’ Windows 7 as possible. I may be some time.
* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. He’s making available the out-of-print H.P. Lovecraft’s Favourite Horror Stories, Volume 1 under his own Sarnath POD and ebook imprint. He adds… “I will reprint volume 2 of this series in a month or so.” He also gives Derleth’s description of the people present at a September 1938 post-Lovecraft Kalem meeting, via Derleth’s newly transcribed journal for 1938. One example…
Arthur Leeds, an aging man betraying all the marks of faded gentility, with tired eyes, a well-trimmed moustache, iron grey hair standing out against his dark skin, an odd little old-fashioned wing collar contrasting his black coat, his neatly combed hair with the aspect of wetness and cleanliness.
It looks like this is the first time these descriptions have seen print. See Joshi’s post for more such vivid descriptions of the Kalems, in a long quote. Joshi adds, re: Lovecraft and Kalem mentions by Derleth… “I will eagerly await the examination of the journal of 1939 (which David E. Schultz has already transcribed)”.
* New at Project Gutenberg this week, Arkham House: The First 20 Years 1939-1959 in what appears to be plaintext free of OCR errors.
* From the HPLHS and new to me, their Mountains of Madness Sketch Replica…
* Currently on eBay, a catalogue for a 1979 ‘Lovecraft art’ exhibition in France.
* New in Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology (June 2025), “Cthulhu Anthropology: H.P. Lovecraft and the Discipline of Difference”. Freely available online. The first half of the article is largely a mix of academic obeisance and ‘Lovecraft for beginners’, but the second half (starting at “The Other as Danger? Lovecraft in Anthropology”) has some meat. Though the author is regrettably unaware of the specific non-Boas currents in anthropology which Lovecraft was tapping into, other than making one glancing and unelaborated mention of James Frazer…
Sir James Frazer’s ‘The Golden Bough’ plays a major role [in The Call of Cthulhu]
This may be news to S.T. Joshi, who states in his book on Lovecraft’s philosophical thinking and intellectual influences that…
I cannot see that Lovecraft was much influenced by Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’, for all the frequent citations of it in his stories” (H.P. Lovecraft, The Decline of the West, p. 24)
Here is Lovecraft stating the matter for himself…
I might say, with all proper modesty, that the subject of anthropology and folklore is by no means strange to me. I took a good deal of it at college, and am familiar with most of the standard authorities such as [Sir Edward Burnett] Tylor, [Sir John] Lubbock, [Sir James] Frazer, [Jean de] Quatrefages [de Breau], [Margaret] Murray, [Henry Fairfield] Osborn, [Sir Arthur] Keith, [Marcellin] Boule, [Grafton] G. Elliot Smith, and so on.” — Lovecraft, The Whisperer in Darkness.
All British, except for an American and two Frenchmen. The one American was a very prominent eugenicist who had studied at Cambridge University in England. One of the Frenchmen was a member of the Royal Society of London. The Anglophile Lovecraft was evidently looking largely to Britain for his reading on such matters, and the British despised the American anthropologists. In 1919 Lovecraft had also read deeply in the anthropology of religion, as the field then stood, and this evidently formed many of his enduring ideas. Jean de Quatrefages seems to have been essentially a biologist, and was the first to suggest that new races might be formed by inter-breeding. Marcellin Boule gave us the view of the ancient Neanderthal type as likely to have been brutish, hairy and ape-like.
* A new in-depth biography of another key American outsider creative, Robert Crumb, may be of interest to Tentaclii readers.
Also, note that some 170-pages of Crumb’s serious / biographical / historical comics are set to be newly collected as Existential Comics: Selected Stories 1979 – 2004. So far as I know, he never did anything related to Lovecraft, but I welcome being corrected on that point.
* In Amsterdam at the Black Cat Library on 21st June 2025, a Soiree Lovecraft event with lecture. Seemingly to launch a new novel, which at a guess may feature Lovecraft the man? Booking now.
* And finally, a video of “All the Lovecraftian references in Doom: The Dark Ages”. In Spanish, but YouTube now has AI auto-dubbing into English.
— End-quotes —
[As a creative writer] “I am a paradox anyway — for there have been periods when astronomy, geography, physics, chemistry, & anthropology meant more to me than any form of pure literature or aesthetics.” — Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, December 1929.
“An abridgement of Frazer’s Golden Bough is valuable as a compendium of odd folk-beliefs” — Lovecraft’s “Suggestions for a Reading Guide” (1936). With the faint implication that was all it was good for.
“I believe a Georgian doorway has more real significance for an ordinary American than an Inca masque or Italian primitive has. In order to make the Inca or Renaissance object of equal significance — equal relationship, that is, to the actual experience & tradition stream of the beholder — one would have to take exhaustive & specialised courses in Peruvian anthropology & cinquecento art & life. It is childish to imagine that the layman can have any real knowledge whatsoever of the life & feelings of the various cultures represented by museum objects, so that the illusion of reaching the heart of the past through such symbols is sheer moonshine. The little aesthete who raves over Etruscan vases & Minoan goldsmith work is really — apart from the element of abstract art appreciation — doing nothing more than playing around in the sand with pretty pebbles for which he invents vapid little stories. He is not half as close to a knowledge of the real thought & feeling of ancient Etruria or Crete as is the historian & archaeologist, whom he tends to despise as a dull, prosy old soul. [And in some more leftist-minded people such as Long,] certain theories of life & art [also] makes you dangerously liable to overlap into the zones of frivolous mock-under understanding & merely derivative experience, without your fully realising the transition.” — Lovecraft to F.B. Long, February 1931.
