Monthly Archives: May 2019

The Seekonk: Lovecraft afloat on the Seekonk

17 Friday May 2019

Posted by in Historical context, Maps

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H. P. Lovecraft was once something of a waterman on the Seekonk River, seen above in a Whitman Bailey drawing made on the Poe-haunted west shore at Blackstone Park…

“I used to row considerably on the Seekonk … Often I would land on one or both of the Twin Islands — for islands (associated with remote secrets, pirate treasure, and all that) always fascinated me.” — Lovecraft letter to Rimel, April 1934.

The islands are locally known as Cupcake Island and Pancake Island, indicating their respective shapes. Though these may be modern post-1945 names. There appears to be no vintage photograph, sketch or postcard of them, available online. But one can see them on this map…

They can also be seen on some of the earliest maps of Providence, c. 1650…

From where and how would the young Lovecraft row? One imagines that, once old and strong enough to row alone on a large river, he might have been allowed to take out a row-boat from the Boat Club boathouse (opened c. 1884). The name of his grandfather probably still had some sway with Club, and he might have avoided the sort of hire-fee he could have had to pay at Red Bridge. The boathouse can be seen here…

The residential house seen through the trees is one in Angell St., so that indicates Lovecraft’s proximity to the boathouse. The boathouse had an interesting gothic look from a certain angle…

Lovecraft must have been no puny stripling at this time, for the Seekonk could be a dangerous river and the city Report noted that a rescue crew patrolled the river on Sundays and holidays circa 1912. Today the Brown University men’s rowing team notes that…

The Seekonk is known for its difficult rowing conditions, particularly heavy wind and waves, as well as a strong current.

Thus perhaps we can assume a Lovecraft who was aged 14 or 15, circa 1904 or 1905? Lovecraft might not have encountered the Brown rowing team’s twice-daily training (they apparently had another boat-house nearby). As evidenced by the statement… “The Brown Alumni Monthly has been for years in favor of the resumption of rowing at Brown” (1915), implying that the team might have been moribund for a number of years prior to 1915.

In his row-boat experience, and the island encounters amid the shifting sediments, do we glimpse the personal roots of his famous story “Dagon” (July 1917)? His nightmare of the Seekonk River draining away to reveal primal ooze was recounted in a letter of May 1920 (“the river-bed was fully exposed — only the deep channel filled with water like a serpentine stream of death flowing through a pestilential plain in Tartarus”), but Lovecraft called this a “typical dream” — thus there may have been similar pre-“Dagon” dreams. Indeed we know there were, as he later wrote of “Dagon” that… “I dreamed that whole hideous crawl, and can yet feel the ooze sucking me down!” If this latter dream was of the drained Seekonk or not, must now remain unknown. But the likelihood is that it was.

The flow of the river was probably faster then, because its main flow was in a far narrower and shallower navigation channel of 12 feet, this being “the deep channel” referred to by Lovecraft. Only in 1927 did a U.S military dredging project dredge a longer and deeper… “3.4-mile-long channel, 16 feet deep” all the way from East Providence to Pawtucket. “The channel is 150 feet wide from the Red Bridge to an area opposite Goose Point where it widens further to 230 feet.” (U.S. Army, Seekonk River Navigation Project).

His ‘considerable’ rowing experience on the Seekonk may also help explain his extreme delight in the header illustration he had in Weird Tales, for “Dagon”, since he would then see in it not only an illustration of the story, but also a reflection of his own experience of rowing on the Seekonk…

Presumably such things were cast off along with his bicycle, which he ceased using altogether in the summer of 1913, long past the point when he was expected by local convention to shed such boyish activities. As his family descended into poverty, he may anyway have lacked the hire-fee for such a boat.

See also: the mysterious river island in “Dreams in the Witch House”…

She had told Judge Hathorne of lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and had implied that such lines and curves were frequently used at certain midnight meetings in the dark valley of the white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on the unpeopled island in the river. […] He [later] rowed out twice to the ill-regarded island in the river, and made a sketch of the singular angles described by the moss-grown rows of grey standing stones whose origin was so obscure and immemorial.

New book: The Lovecraftian Poe

16 Thursday May 2019

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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Dated by Amazon for a 1st June 2019 release, in a somewhat affordable £30 paperback, is The Lovecraftian Poe: Essays on Influence, Reception, Interpretation, and Transformation. Although the expensive hardback, aimed at university libraries, appeared back in 2017.

There are only two reviews I can find, the first being from John Tresch in the journal Poe Studies…

The book… “capitalizes on the Lovecraft revival to make clear the profound debts Lovecraft and his followers owed to Poe.” […] “it is the first to concentrate on the relation between these two enormously influential authors”. The book’s Introduction points out that… “Lovecraft became a conduit through which Poe passed into the modern genres of horror, science fiction, fantasy, and weird fiction”.

“Slawomir Studniarz undertakes what he describes as a ‘new, unprejudiced look at Lovecraft’s poems’ and reveals their allegiance to Poe’s poetics” […] “Studniarz concludes that Lovecraft is a better, or at least a more Poe-like, poet than critics have realized.”

Michael Cisco shows that the comic horror of both authors derives from depicting… “the inability to distinguish between inner and outer, psychology and physics”. Yet the cosmic… “unholy, essentially unstable quasi-matters” are tackled empirically by… “detectives, scientists, and amateur scholars seeking explanations for troubling facts”.

“Dan Clinton’s outstanding essay “The Call of Ligeia” traces links between the cosmic vision of each author and the historically specific fields of science with which they engaged.”

“Ben Woodard’s essay “The Killing Crowd” connects Poe’s urban quasi-mystery “The Man of the Crowd” to Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook,” both of which offer lurid views of a city’s nightlife — London for Poe, and a hellish South Brooklyn for Lovecraft” [where these tales] “present the modern city as a medium, a site in which technologies of organization, knowledge, and visibility attempt to contain yet in fact expose and magnify ungovernable forms of monstrosity while burying the hidden truth of ‘deep crime’, the secret which in Poe’s tale cannot be read.”

The second review is from Travis Montgomery in the Edgar Allan Poe Review…

The book is… “an important step toward filling a critical gap”.

“In Chapter 4, Michael Cisco deems Kant, not Burke, the purveyor of the sublimity associated with the ‘cosmic horror’ that fascinated Poe and Lovecraft as storytellers, but the essay is thin on commentary that would help readers appreciate that Kantian influence.”

“Chapter 6 contains Waugh’s meandering yet intriguing interpretations of that [cat / staring eyes ] imagery. Especially fascinating is his suggestion that feline images in “The Black Cat” and “The Rats in the Walls” signal the narrators’ aristocratic aspirations, desires that underline class themes in the tales.”

[Despite some fuzziness and mis-steps] “Clinton’s investigation of the ways that Poe and his American successor ‘trace literary effects to enduring features of human perception’ is arresting in its originality”.

“Conspicuous [typo] errors appear in the text […] Such things should not surface in a book so expensive.”

The Providence art of Whitman Bailey (1884-1954)

16 Thursday May 2019

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts

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Whitman Bailey (1884-1954) was the son of the Providence naturalist William Whitman Bailey (1843-1914) of Brown University. The younger Whitman grew up in Providence and then attended the art school of Howard Pyle in Delaware. Presumably the same Pyle who famously did pirate and medieval adventure-story illustrations. From there he went to work as a jobbing portraitist on the streets of Brooklyn, and took a one-year finishing course at the Pratt Institute.

He returned to Providence in 1914 and spent nine years working as an illustrator for Rhode Island newspapers and magazines. The selection presented in the ebook below is drawn from the 1914-1919 war years and a single magazine, and as such the pictures probably represent only a small part of his Rhode Island output. Nevertheless, those familiar with the life and places of H.P. Lovecraft will recognise many scenes.

He moved away in 1924 and the bulk of his life’s work was dedicated instead to depicting Stamford, where he submitted weekly drawings to the local newspaper for some thirty years.

It is to be hoped that this small insight into his Providence work, created because he depicted many scenes and places known by H.P. Lovecraft, may help to spur local historians to seek out and properly publish more of his work. His Stamford pictures are now held as an archive by the Marcus Research Library at Stamford. From which some of the above biographical details were found. It’s not known if the Providence pictures might also be in that same archive.

Download the .PDF ebook.

Lovecraft portraits in 1970s zines

16 Thursday May 2019

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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Popping up on eBay, pictures of two portraits of Lovecraft from the fan publications of the 1970s.

The now-superseded Bibliotheca H. P. Lovecraft has this very fine portrait in stipple and line by B.J. Frost.

No sign of this on Archive.org yet, from which a better and bigger scan might be extracted. Who was B. J. Frost, I wonder? In 1976 he produced Book of the Werewolf for Sphere paperbacks. He went on to produce a series of overview books for the University of Wisconsin Press, The Monster with a Thousand Faces: Guises of the Vampire in Myth and Literature, The Essential Guide to Werewolf Literature, and The Essential Guide to Mummy Literature. But I can’t find more about his art, other than that he once did a tribute portrait of Virgil Finlay.

The World of H.P. Lovecraft has a different but equally pleasing use of pen and ink, to devise a clever use of Lovecraft’s silhouette which combines it with “The Outsider”.

Doctor Who: a viewing guide for ‘the David Tennant years’.

14 Tuesday May 2019

Posted by in Films & trailers

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Doctor Who: a viewing guide for ‘the David Tennant years‘:

This text has been hanging around since Christmas, and I’ve only now had time to polish it up a bit. Not very Lovecraftian, but plenty of sci-fi monsters!

Following a completed and complete re-viewing, here is my suggested “watch-list” for the 47 episodes of Doctor Who in which David Tennant was the Doctor. Tennant is generally regarded as the finest in a long line of Doctors. I don’t dissent from that opinion, but he was certainly given a few clunkers — by which I mean occasional poor episodes. Also some very mediocre series-padders, and three really dire episodes.

In all I’d suggest that six episodes and one Christmas Special can be skipped with no loss, thus saving about a day or two evenings of viewing time.

So… for what it’s worth here’s my concise “skip or watch” guide to the Tennant years. Spoilers are avoided.

Viewers completely new to Doctor Who should be aware that at the end of each episode there’s usually a trailer for the next episode, shown before the credits run. These can often act as spoilers, and as such you may want to have the means to hand to speedily zap these trailers when they start to run. Doing this also serves as a time-saver, since along with the credits you’re cutting two minutes or so off each episode. Over three series that adds up to about an hour saved!

The Core:

If you’re new to Doctor Who, and just want a day of ‘taster’ episodes, then try the unified plot thread in the Tennant series that stretches across:

“The End of the World”.
“New Earth”.
“The Runaway Bride”.
“Gridlock”.

The first of these enables you to understand the backstory for the next three, all three of which are all outstanding. Together these four will get you up to speed to view the following two episodes in Series 4 – which are some of the finest science fiction ever put on TV:

“Silence in the Library” (Part one).
“Forest of the Dead” (Part two).

These possibly inspired by Lovecraft (“There were awed sessions in libraries amongst the massed lore of ten thousand worlds”).

The Full Watch/Skip List:

We’re still in the non-Tennant Series 1 here…

WATCH. Series 1: “The End of the World” (2005). An excellent early episode in the series. This introduces two characters who will later appear in Tennant’s first proper episode, and who will make a lot more sense then. Being episode two of Series One, this is a good general introduction to the basic idea of ‘who The Doctor is’, and also his companion Rose. You’ll also get a good look at the style of the Doctor which Tennant replaced, Christopher Eccleston.

WATCH. Series 1: “The Parting of the Ways” (2005). The final episode of the Eccleston series. This will introduce you to two continuing characters, and has the old Doctor Who (Eccleston) regenerating into the new (David Tennant). One of the continuing characters will only make sense much, much later in the Tennant run.

SKIP! Christmas Special – “The Christmas Invasion” (Xmas 2005). Dire. You should avoid this one entirely. Especially in terms of it being a potential starter for watching the Tennant years. I fear that those unfamiliar with Doctor Who would start by watching this first… but then just not bother watching the other three series — assuming that it would be more of the same cringe-inducing low-grade TV.

Series 2 (2006).

WATCH. 1. “New Earth”. Outstanding. A great sci-fi ‘opening episode’ for Tennant, and a marvellous recovery from the 2005 Christmas Special disaster. Best seen after a viewing of “The End of the World” (2005) (see above), as it has two continuing secondary characters from that episode.

WATCH (optional). 2. “Tooth and Claw”. A good historical/horror episode. It’s not vital, but there’s no reason to skip it. For newcomers to Doctor Who it’s as good an introduction as any to this episode type. Though the genre-shift may be a little jarring for some, coming straight after the space sci-fi of “The End of the World” + “New Earth”.

WATCH. 3. “School Reunion”. A modern-day Earth episode, and as such it’s again likely to be a startling genre-shift for newcomers to Doctor Who. It looks slightly cheaper then the previous episode, but is terrific fun throughout. Also introduces a key new (old) character to the series.

* SKIP. 4. “The Girl in the Fireplace”. An unwieldy mash-up between historical-drama and spaceship setting. Mildly watchable and it has two good jokes, but is not at all vital. It also pushes the Doctor slightly out-of-character.

WATCH. 5. “Rise of the Cybermen” (part 1). The first of a Cybermen two-parter, the Cybermen being one of the Doctor’s main ‘enemy’ races. Very mediocre, yet it is fairly brisk and effectively told. It also sets up the arc for two future characters, so you will need to see it.

WATCH. 6. “The Age of Steel” (part 2). ”

* SKIP. 7. “The Idiot’s Lantern”. A minor filler episode. Quite well done, as a costume-historical episode set on Earth… but has a very conventional second half. Definitely skippable.

WATCH. 8. “The Impossible Planet” (part 1). An effective space-based two-parter, that also sets up a race who will appear many times.

WATCH. 9. “The Satan Pit” (part 2). ”

WATCH! 10. “Love and Monsters”. An unusual Earth-set episode of Doctor Who, but one of the most memorable.

WATCH! 11. “Fear Her”. Another Earth-set episode. Excellent, of its kind.

WATCH. 12. “Army of Ghosts” (Finale, part one). Enjoyable, but not a wholly satisfying finale because… it’s all ‘too easy’ at the end. It does however wrap up threads from earlier in the series.

WATCH. 13. “Doomsday” (Finale, part two). Briefly introduces a key new character.

Series 3 (2007).

WATCH!! Christmas Special – “The Runaway Bride” (Xmas 2006). After last Christmas’s dud episode, this one is a classic. 1,000% better than the previous Christmas. Also introduces a very key new character.

WATCH. 1. “Smith and Jones”. A mediocre enemy and setting, but the episode has to be watched since it introduces yet another key character.

* SKIP. 2. “The Shakespeare Code”. A rather straightforward historical costume-drama horror episode, with a creaky plot.

WATCH! 3. “Gridlock”. Outstanding far-future sci-fi, done well. One of the most memorable of the Tennant episodes. Continues to introduce a race and characters from the previous series.

* SKIP. 4. “Daleks in Manhattan” (part one). Another costume-historical episode set on Earth, which are always a bit hit-and-miss. In this case it’s very creaky, and also often blatantly padded out to add length. The histrionic dialogue doesn’t help at all, and there is some woefully over-acting in response to the bad writing. Even the fearsome Daleks are made to be ridiculous, and the budget was obviously low. A big fat waste of time.

* SKIP. 5. “Evolution of the Daleks” (part two). ”

WATCH. 6. “The Lazarus Experiment”. Quite well done, and it sets up a key plot thread for the end of the series.

* SKIP 7. “42”. Pure filler, except for a tiny cut-away bit at the end… which gets amply recapped in another episode.

WATCH! 8. “Human Nature” (part one). A costume-drama two-parter, but this time it’s an outstandingly good one. It also serves as a great lead-in to the concluding episodes of the series.

WATCH! 9. “Family of Blood” (part two). ”

WATCH! 10. “Blink”. A highly effective and memorable ‘horror’ episode, with lots of time-travel twisty-turny-bits. Sets up a new enemy race.

WATCH. 11. “Utopia.” (part one). The first of a grand finale three-parter. Excellent, and links with through from the earlier episodes 8 and 9. Pace yourself, to savour it all, rather than risk getting binge-fatigue at the end of the series.

WATCH. 12. “The Sound of Drums”. (part two).

WATCH. 13. “The Last of the Time Lords”. (part three).

Series 4 (2008).

WATCH. Christmas Special – “Voyage of the Damned” (Xmas 2007). Entertaining, yet not especially memorable. Worth seeing, but it could be skipped if you’re short of time.

WATCH. 1. “Partners in Crime”. A very mediocre central plot, but… with lots of interesting side-plots and some vital ongoing new characters packed around it.

WATCH 2. “The Fires of Pompeii”. The usual second-episode costume drama, but this one is well-paced and very good.

WATCH. 3. “Planet of the Ood”. A strong episode which develops a previously introduced race.

WATCH. 4. “The Sontaran Stratagem”. (Part one). Creaky and hackneyed to start off with, but by the time it enters the second part of the two-parter it’s suddenly much better. Introduces a continuing new race which becomes important for ‘the next Doctor’, but the episode could be skipped by those short on time.

WATCH. 5. “The Poison Sky”. (Part two). ”

* SKIP. 6. “The Doctor’s Daughter”. Production values are somewhat high, but it’s all very forgettable and in the end rather pointless. Seems to have only been made so the BBC could make a spin-off comic-book, but that failed too.

* SKIP. 7. “The Unicorn and the Wasp”. A mid-series period costume-drama, rather more well-made than usual – but very forgettable and also rather silly throughout.

WATCH!!! 8. “Silence in the Library”. (Part one). Now this is great. One of the best Doctor Who episodes ever filmed, the first of a two-parter. Must watch, and also some of the most excellent science-fiction shown on TV!

WATCH!!! 9. “Forest of the Dead”. (Part two). ” It helps the flow if you skip the trailer at the end of episode one, and the recap at the start of episode two.

SKIP. 10. “Midnight”. A strange departure from the usual formula. A claustrophobic shouting-match, which soon becomes very boring indeed. The episode is a big comedown after the sublime script of the last two episodes. Skip unless you like confined-space psychological drama, with lots of screaming matches.

WATCH. 11. “Turn Left”. (Part one). Series finale, with very high production values. Tries to tie up about 50 different plot threads. A good intro to the final episodes.

WATCH. 12. “The Stolen Earth”. (Part two). ”

WATCH. 13. “Journey’s End”. (Part three). ”

Series 4 ends here. There were then five Tennant “specials” that linked Series 4 and Series 5, and helped to fill the long 2008–2010 gap between full series, while a new Doctor was found.

SKIP. 14. “The Next Doctor”. A Christmas Special. A Victorian costume-drama for Christmas. Definitely skip this.

WATCH. 15. “Planet of the Dead”. An Easter Special.

WATCH. 16. “The Waters of Mars”. An award-winning episode.

WATCH. 17. “The End of Time”, Part One.

WATCH. 18. “The End of Time”, Part Two. Regeneration from Tennant to a new Doctor.

Series 5 (2010).

This opened with a new non-Tennant Doctor, Matt Smith. Smith was also an excellent Doctor, and it’s well worth considering a re-watch of his series too.

There’s more! The Big Finish full-cast audio adventures, known as The Tenth Doctor Adventures, now have two series in which Tennant reprises his role as the Doctor alongside Donna.

The Tenth Doctor Adventures 1 and The Tenth Doctor Adventures 2. These are audio-only, but are full-cast and have all the production polish of the TV series.

A third series, The Tenth Doctor Chronicles, is out in June 2019, though the cover art makes it look as though Tennant takes a back seat? Anyway, together these three audio series will effectively represent a whole new TV series in terms of length and quality.

New book: Post Oaks and Sand Roughs

14 Tuesday May 2019

Posted by in Historical context, New books, REH, Scholarly works

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The Robert E. Howard Foundation has a new book due to ship. Post Oaks and Sand Roughs collects the most autobiographical material from Howard’s work. Shipping in June 2019. It has a selection of Costigan tales, where relevant, and…

“also contains other items that reveal details about the people and places in Howard’s life, including the “Lost Plains” stories, items from The Junto, personal essays, and more, all restored to the original text, where available.”

There’s a full contents-list and it looks fascinating. Sadly it’s only 200 numbered copies, in print, and would thus cost me a whopping $100 to get to the UK. Hopefully there will be a $10 Kindle ebook, in due course, but that’s just my guess.

It could be interesting to do something similar for H.P. Lovecraft. A life-story collection of the most pertinent fiction and poetry that is also firmly autobiographical, with explications of exactly what aspect or event in his life each extract draws on or depicts.

The New England Mind

12 Sunday May 2019

Posted by in Historical context

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The books linked below are possibly useful for Lovecraft scholars interested in the ‘deep local’ intellectual background to Lovecraft, beyond the topography, architecture and places. They form a beautifully written intellectual history of early New England, and thus outline ideas Lovecraft would have been very familiar with — even if he rejected parts of such ideas…

The New England Mind: From Colony To Province.

The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century.

Apparently the two books were written in reverse order, but read together they tell the intellectual story from the founding of the colony onward. Despite the rather dry appearance of their contents pages, they are one of the most readable accounts of the thinking of the period, and the author was hailed by his fellows as an “artist” of history writing. The works endured. In 1982 American History remarked, noting that the books had stood the test of time and attempts to tear them down, that …

IT HAS BECOME COMMON TO SPEAK OF PERRY MILLER [author of the above books] AS AN ARTIST. BUT in the past few decades the idea that history is a literary art has dropped [away…]

They’re free on Archive.org.

Lulu say “no”

11 Saturday May 2019

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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In my day, a book by H. P. Lovecraft was in the school’s official ‘book pick’ brochure for 12 year-olds with pocket money to spend. In fact that was how I first encountered him…

Today, on Lulu.com, the hand-wringing prudes say “no” to accessing any book tagged with ‘Lovecraft’, even scholarly works…

Entwined: Botany, Art and the Lost Cat Swamp Habitat

11 Saturday May 2019

Posted by in Historical context

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Entwined: Botany, Art and the Lost Cat Swamp Habitat in Providence. A major joint project of the Brown University Herbarium and the Rhode Island Historical Society. There’s the new online website for it, and there was a just-gone exhibition.

Here’s H.P. Lovecraft…

My home was not far from what was then the edge of the settled residence district, so that I was just as used to the rolling fields, stone walls, giant elms, squat farmhouses, and deep woods of rural New England as to the ancient urban scene. This brooding, primitive landscape seemed to me to hold some vast but unknown significance, and certain dark wooded hollows near the Seekonk River took on an aura of strangeness not unmixed with vague horror. They figured in my dreams — especially those nightmares containing the black, winged rubbery entities which I called “night-gaunts” — from “Some Notes on a Nonentity”.

Where were Lovecraft’s childhood “hollows”? I wrote a detailed extended essay which delved into the likely sites. It can be found in my book Lovecraft in Historical Context: fourth collection as “In the hollows of memory: H.P. Lovecraft’s Seekonk and Cat Swamp” (in Historical Context #4). Cat Swamp was one of the sites I investigated and considered.

It was one of the oldest named places in the area, named as such in a document of 1667. It would be delightful to imagine it being named because it was a haunt of escaped cats brought by the settlers, and thus to imagine the possibility that the boy Lovecraft was once followed homeward at sunset by an Ulthar-like army of kitties. But that vision of Cat Swamp must be left to the fancy of a future graphic-novelist, as it seems equally likely that the swamp was named for the supply of useful ‘cat-tail’ rushes that grew there.

Before extensive drainage Cat Swamp started about a third of a mile north of Angell Street, and ended about a mile north of Angell Street where it formed the ‘Great Swamp’. This whole area (if unbuilt on) appears to have been open to children in Lovecraft’s childhood, as was the way in the era of free-range childhoods. The undergraduates from Brown would also go there to skate on the ice during freezing weather. Much of it appears to have been drained between about 1903 and 1907, i.e. after Lovecraft reached age 12-13, part of it going under housing and part to Brown University for sports use such as playing fields and a new gym. Given the close proximity to his home, the swamp may well have featured in Lovecraft’s younger exploratory boyhood, but he and his fellows seem to have gravitated to the riverside and by the time of his maturing middle childhood his “hollows” seem more likely to have been around York Pond by the Seekonk river. Possibly on a northern flank later taken for sand and gravel. That he often returned to the surviving southern wooded rise above York Pond in later life, to write letters in the open air, seems confirmatory evidence of his attachment to the place.