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Tentaclii

~ News and scholarship on H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937)

Tentaclii

Monthly Archives: August 2020

A few more facts on Arthur Leeds

25 Tuesday Aug 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, New discoveries

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After I had found new details of Arthur Leeds and the Canadian Army in the Bloch letters, another new biographical item has been found in the volume of Moe letters. In September 1930 Lovecraft remarked…

I’d like to see the old boy [Leeds] myself, & certainly hope he’ll look me up if his itinerant outfit traverses this part of the world. Hope his prosperity is permanent — he deserves some peace and freedom from anxiety after the long gruelling years of the past [post-war poverty in New York City]. But what a beastly shame his Old Cap Colliers were not waiting for him. (Letters to Maurice W. Moe, page 515)

From this it appears that Leeds likely departed New York City soon after the Great Depression hit, and went home to Canada. There he found that his precious childhood things had either been thrown out or given away. “Old Cap Colliers” indicates that Leeds had once collected this 1880s-90s dime novel series (a series, incidentally, whose plots and situations were later extensively mined to fuel the 1930s pulp character Nick Carter, Detective).

After that Leeds had evidently once again ‘run away with the circus’ in the form of setting off with some travelling theatre, but this time at a better salary and perhaps as the manager. That’s how I read Lovecraft’s comments, and the new data is bolstered by Lovecraft’s 1931 comment that… “Leeds has come on slightly better times, through his side-line of the drama”. It seems likely this travelling theatre working the eastern Canada / Chicago area, perhaps travelling alongside and shadowing a large circus and thus quite lucrative. That Lovecraft thinks of it as a “side-line” may indicate it was seasonal work.

But the Great Depression deepened and the job probably didn’t last more than a couple of seasons. S.T. Joshi notes that Leeds was back in Brooklyn, New York City, in June 1932. There he appears to have turned to dealing in used correspondence courses. At some point he began to live on the fringes of Coney Island, as I’ve detailed in another recent post. It would be logical to assume that he was able to pick up seasonal work at the famous Coney Island attractions, while having time to write in the winter.

All this augments my Leeds biography and photo, which is to be found in my book Lovecraft in Historical Context #4.

More 130th Birthday items

25 Tuesday Aug 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books, Scholarly works

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Spanish, Italian and other languages are now starting to appear in the search-engine indexes covering the last five days. Here’s what I’ve picked up by search so far, to add to my previous coverage of Lovecraft’s 130th Birthday…

* New in Italian, and published on Lovecraft’s birthday, the book Chi ha paura di H.P. Lovecraft (Who’s Afraid of Lovecraft?, Oakmond, 290 pages)…

An articulate monograph full of ideas, De Sio’s work is framed by two experts in this area — Gianfranco de Turris and Sebastiano Fusco — who, in the extensive preface masterfully meld all the points covered by the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

Oakmond Publishing have a page for the book and it’s shipping now.

* Pietro Sabatelli usefully rounds up about 20+ Italian blog links offering posts for Lovecraft’s 130th Birthday. Scroll down to the foot of his post, and look under this banner…

* The day was chosen to launch the ‘Biblioteca Lovecraftiana Fundamental’ the term being used for a new door-stopper book. Contos Reunidos do Mestre do Horror Cósmico (Tales Gathered, by the Master of Cosmic Horror, Ex Machina, 540 pages). The publisher is in Brazil, so I assume Portuguese for this weighty…

anthology containing all 61 short stories written by Lovecraft and published in various magazines between 1917 and 1935.

Photo of the Twin Islands

24 Monday Aug 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, New discoveries

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Back in May 2019 I posted here on the Twin Islands. They don’t appear on all maps, but they are on this one of Providence…

At that time I was unable to find an actual photo of them. The photo is now found, and it also looks like it has a date that more or less fits…

The cameraman was up on Fort Hill and the picture looks up the Seekonk which then curves around to the left and goes out of sight. As a strong lad Lovecraft was a keen rower in a boat on the Seekonk, and he went down past the bridge and landed on these islands…

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.

Being rather tidal, presumably they had a quite Dagon-ish texture underfoot…

When at last I awaked, it was to discover myself half sucked into a slimy expanse of hellish black mire which extended about me in monotonous undulations as far as I could see, and in which my boat lay grounded some distance away. — “Dagon

Lovecraft Annual 2020

23 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books, Scholarly works

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Now listed on Hippocampus as shipping, the scholarly journal Lovecraft Annual No. 14, 2020.

Looking down the contents list, the follow items especially appeal…

* Steven J. Mariconda’s “Atmosphere and the Qualitative Analysis of ‘The Colour out of Space'”, which must be the major essay which was known about but which did not appear in his recent book collection.

* Dylan Henderson’s “Missing the Punchline: The Subversive Nature of H. P. Lovecraft’s Occult Detective”, which must be on Malone in “Red Hook”.

* Ken Faig, Jr.’s “John Osborne Austin’s Seven Club Tales: Did They Inspire Lovecraft?”.

* Andrew Gipe-Lazarou’s “The ‘Extreme Fantasy’ of Delirious New York” sounds interesting, presumably a survey of Lovecraft’s responses to ‘faery’ New York before it curdled into being his ‘feary’ New York.

I see that Lovecraft Annual No. 13, 2019, can also be had at a discount.

News from Association Miskatonic

23 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

≈ 1 Comment

France’s Association Miskatonic writes…


Hi! Since we had to cancel our 2020 [Lovecraft] convention due to the pandemic, we’ll be hosting online lectures this Autumn/Fall, in the last week of October. These will include…

* When Japan meets HPL.
* Junji Ito and HPL.
* How did the Call of Cthulhu RPG arrive in France, and what impact did it have?

Next year, hopefully in October 2021, we should be able to organise a ‘physical’ event here in Verdun, France, with lectures by Lovecraft scholars, screenings and exhibits.

Protected: Benefit St. map

23 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Maps

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“The Rutted Road”

22 Saturday Aug 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Podcasts etc.

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As the leaves crisp and fall, and the year turns toward cooler weather… “The Rutted Road” by H.P. Lovecraft, an early Autumn/Fall poem read by “Award-winning audiobook narrator and producer Mike Vendetti”. He also has many other readings of Lovecraft poems, such as “Providence”.

H.P. Lovecraft’s 130th Birthday: the round-up

21 Friday Aug 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

≈ 1 Comment

There will probably be more to come, but this is my round-up so far for 2020:

* The key website hplovecraft.com has… “completely overhauled and re-organized the “Lovecraft’s Letters” page” as a 130th birthday present. This being the page for the Lovecraft letters as published in book form.

* Portland’s H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival is celebrating Lovecraft’s 130th Birthday on the nearest weekend, via a “streaming event available to stream from anywhere in the U.S.”, and featuring “short films both new and classic from the festival’s 25 year history” and billed as “HPLFF Presents 130 Years of H.P. Lovecraft”. There is also a t-shirt for the event and the Festival’s co-director and “fellow Portland horror writers” ran an online Lovecraftian horror panel.

* The ‘Segundo Festival Literario H.P. Lovecraft’, aka ‘Literario 2do Festival H.P. Lovecraft’, appears to be taking place in Mexico from 20th-22nd August 2020, bringing together Lovecraftian artists, writers and film-makers in Mexico. Last year it was a physical event with stalls, talks and screenings at La Moderna. But this year it was perhaps only virtual. Online already is “Remanentes del pesimismo Schopenhaueriano en al obra de H.P. Lovecraft”, a 45 minute video lecture in Spanish on Schopenhauerian pessimism in Lovecraft. Doubtless more videos from the event will appear online soon.

* Elsewhere in Mexico there was a university event to launch the fourth edition of the La ciudad de las montañas de la locura (At The Mountains of Madness) and the blurb had it that… “there will be talks, short film screenings and will talk about art, science and cinema, all related to the writer.” The Casa Universitaria del Libro de la UANL also has livecasts via Facebook from August 17th to 22nd. “Among the themes will be addressed the relationship between Lovecraft and the First World War, his vision as a popularizer of science, the relationship between cinema and literature, and his poetry.”

* Also in Mexico, the 19th Macabre Film Festival at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico runs… “from August 25th to 30th, and will commemorate a hundred years of German Expressionism, and 130 years since the birth of H.P. Lovecraft”. The PDF Programme.

* Nothing from the Italian or other European Lovecraftians, that I can see. But possibly the search-engines have not yet got around to indexing the latest from across Europe. I get that impression from searches.

* I released my Annotated “Hypnos” at Tentaclii. This is the first substantial annotated edition, as Klinger omitted it from his two volumes, and the notes to be found from S.T. Joshi are fairly short.

* The latest Sept/Oct Halloween issue of Digital Production magazine, the substantial German trade magazine for high-end movie and TV digital FX and similar, was released on Lovecraft’s birthday with a ‘Cthulhu creation’ feature (article not yet online).

* There’s a “Cthulhu Mythos Sale” over on DriveThuRPG, which appears to be one of the largest of the RGP book sites. Tenkar’s Tavern has waded in and selected five of the best, and promises more picks soon.

* RPG gamers also chose the day to unleash Apocthulhu… “successfully launched the PDF edition of the APOCTHULHU Core Rulebook. It’s a 330 page behemoth packed with rules, world building resources, pre-defined settings…”.

* Comics artist Frank Brunner & Friends posted a nice arty ‘birthday-card’ on Facebook…

* A slightly less impressive Cthulhu Minecraft Skin was released. But fun, if you need a Cthulhu in there.

* Makowh released his full reading of “The Rats in the Walls”, accompanied by his own artwork which can be seen in crisper form at ArtStation.

* Harry Piper put together special 130th Birthday musings on “The Cosmic Pessimism of H.P. Lovecraft”.

* And lastly and rather more cheerily, the Journal of Geek Studies chose the day to celebrate Pokécrustacea: the crustacean-inspired Pokémon.

H.P. Lovecraft Walking Tours

21 Friday Aug 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

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Booking now, pre-Halloween H.P. Lovecraft Walking Tours in Providence, led by the Rhode Island Historical Society.

Friday ‘picture postals’ from Lovecraft: the India Wharf rail yards

21 Friday Aug 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Picture postals

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In late December 1923 Lovecraft explored the India Wharf rail yards in Providence, ending up somewhere on the waterside between Fox Point and the rail bridge that crossed into East Providence.

We edged through ghastly channels between black silent freight cars on the India wharf at the southern tip of Providence’s east peninsula, a region I had never penetrated, though I had for twenty years or more wonder’d about it. It was an eldritch wiggle, like that of Alciphron in the tortuous crypts of Egypt, and at last we came out where pale phosphorescence effused from century’d rotting piles, and the distant harbour-lights bobb’d and twinkled away to the south, the far south, the south of dreams and templed isles, and curious ports, and pagodas of gold with savor of spice and incense around them. (Letters to Maurice W. Moe, page 510)

The context was that Morton was going home on the New York boat. In this case Lovecraft even tells us the name, the frigate Concord, seen here in Providence…

Both Morton and Loveman appear to have preferred to travel back from Providence this way. Though it appears to have taken Loveman a few tries to find the right passenger line and time of day to avoid the boorish crowd he had endured on his first such trip.

Lovecraft had first walked Morton up a long and insalubrious street that led to the New York docks, a street where as he put it…

where murther lurks in the alleys, and one stumbles over corpses in the gutters … a confused blur of pallid lamps and Hogarth vistas.

The latter must mean glimpses down alleys and entrances toward the riverside, as they walked up to Fox Point.

Once the luggage was stowed aboard, Morton found he had quite some time to wait until departure. Thus the pair appear to have slipped away down the adjacent freight lines. Presumably, over the Christmas break, the trains were backed up and not moving. There are two options for the exploration route. Either the pair threaded through the rail yards and a maze of freight trucks a relatively short way, to find the first good clear view over water to the south and the open sea. Or they walked the rails around to the industrial Wilkesbarre Pier and looked south from there, which seems far more unlikely.

Thus I’d say they were likely standing about here, in the chill and deepening dusk of 27th December 1923…

It’s interesting to think that an encounter with the black freight cars, arranged akin to “the tortuous crypts of Egypt”, could have informed the mood of his Houdini story “Under The Pyramids” in February 1924.

After seeing Morton off on the Concord, Lovecraft wrote that he walked back into town and took in a silent “cinema”. What might have been playing at that point in time? Salome and Lon Chaney’s While Paris Sleeps were both released at the start of 1923. There was no new Chaplin comedy feature in the second half of 1923, as Chaplin had made his first swerve into trying to be “serious” and it was a box-office disaster. The rest of the end-of-1923 fare seems very unappealing stuff. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (early September 1923) might still have been in cinemas, but Lovecraft had probably already seen it by then. Yet there was the German UFA silent feature The Street. This sinister cinema was released at the end of November 1923, and UFA was a big studio with USA distributors. Lovecraft had no German, but for a silent movie that wasn’t a problem. In The Street…

“The city is an expressionistic nightmare, a dangerous and chaotic place. The unfortunate man encounters thieves, prostitutes, and other predators. But the real threat [is that] The street itself is alive and watching.”

One can then imagine Lovecraft, as he fell asleep in the cinema as he often did, softly chuckling to himself… “Ha, I did it first!”

The Street, 1923.

For Lovecraft’s birthday: Annotated “Hypnos”

20 Thursday Aug 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Scholarly works

≈ 2 Comments

Here’s my annotated “Hypnos”, for H.P. Lovecraft’s 130th birthday.

Download: annotated_hypnos_v1_2020.pdf

This is a version 1.0, and may well be polished up a bit and added to in a future version.

I’ll be hoping to gather together links to other people’s birthday offerings in due course, once the search-engines catch up with indexing today.

New S.T. Joshi podcast interview, and “How H.P. Lovecraft Chose His Pens”

19 Wednesday Aug 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Podcasts etc.

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The new podcast Hard to Believe #015 has a long interview with… “biographer S.T. Joshi on the life and legacy of Lovecraft”.

Also, the latest Arkham Reporter appreciates “How H.P. Lovecraft Chose His Pens”, with the aid of Frank Belknap Long’s late memoir.

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