Monthly Archives: September 2020

September on Tentaclii

30 Wednesday Sep 2020

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Our Indian Summer ends and the year turns. Increasingly cold gusts buffet Tentaclii Towers. Things crawl. Moths become crawling larvae that inch their way up walls, to wrap themselves in silk. Spiders crawl into houses and skitter around the bath-tubs. Chill winds send dry leaves crawling and tumbling over the paths. A new virus-hysteria also crawls over the land, very probably needlessly. The sturdy grocers who supply Tentaclii Towers bewail their empty shelves, where once there were walls of toilet-rolls and Dettol. Still, the ginger beer remains in-stock, and a good supply of this is now lining the cobwebbed cellars of Tentaclii Towers, thanks in part to my Patron patrons.

My Patreon total still stands at $69 a month from 24 patrons, as it did last month. But at least the total is not going down, at a time when many people are cancelling monthly subscriptions. This month my patrons have enabled me to bag two useful bargain-priced books. H.P. Lovecraft: Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei was found as a half-price £10 copy inc. shipping, as an Amazon Warehouse deal. Mauling by warehouse werewolves had apparently caused “severe damage” to the covers, but when the book arrived in the Amazon locker it was fine. Just a very slight and gentle crease in one corner of the front cover, hardly to be noticed. This new book immediately yielded up another piece in the jigsaw puzzle that is the life of Lovecraft’s friend Arthur Leeds. I had already established his late presence at Coney Island, but this was further illuminated by Lovecraft’s remark to Wandrei that Leeds had become associated with a human freak show. One then wonder if Lovecraft ever dropped in on this show, on some New York visit? It was a proper full-on freak show, and there are now at least two New York history books devoted to it.

I was also able to bag an eBay bargain, a copy of the Lovecraft Annual No.2 for 2008. This had somehow turned up in a thrift-store, way out on the plains of middle-America. Smaller thrift-store chains can have nice prices, as they don’t operate in the “we know the price of everything, add $10 on top, and just auto re-list it until it sells” mould. They want to ship ASAP, so they can make room for the next consignment of kind donations. They were willing to sell for a mere $10, inc. shipping across the Atlantic. Nice. The book should emerge from the hoary hold of a transatlantic tramp steamer any day now.

In other book news this month, I noted a new ebook edition of H.P. Lovecraft in Britain. This led me to discover that the original might still be available in paper from the author, and at a very nice price too. S.T. Joshi kindly revealed the next three titles set for the ongoing Letters series: “Letters to Hyman Bradofsky and Others; Letters to Woodburn Harris and Others; Letters to Richard F. Searight and E. Hoffmann Price.” The new expanded Letters To Rheinhart Kleiner and Others is being polished now and should be the next to ship, later in 2020. Spurred by the Kleiner letters being listed at Hippocampus, I was pleased to prise from the archives a fine light poem by Kleiner. This evoked the 1921 experience of visiting the early news-reel and travelogue cinema shows, and in a way it offers some additional context for Lovecraft’s circa-1922 emergence into the social world. His world was also widening at the cinema.

R.E. Howard books were not forgotten. I was pleased to hear of a new updated and expanded edition of the old Starmont Guide Robert E. Howard: A Closer Look, and I also noted a curious new book on Conan’s ‘philosophy’. My Patreon patrons were also alerted to the sale of a large and desirable Howard collection by mail-order, with items sensibly priced.

In scholarly journals from the continent I played catch-up with the Italian Studi Lovecraftiani journal for 2020 and 2019, and also gave English readers the translated contents lists for these volumes. For the 2019 edition this entailed quite some digging into various Italian blog posts, as there’s no simple list. I found another open journal, AILIJ : Anuario de Investigaciin en Literatura Infantil y Juvenil (2001-2019, ‘Research Yearbook on Children’s and Young People’s Literature’).

In continental books, the Italians are set to ship Io Sono Providence: la biografia di H.P. Lovecraft, this being the second volume of Joshi’s biography. The Italians also have a substantial new book on Kenneth Sterling and Lovecraft, by a past contributor to the Lovecraft Annual. In French I found in open access the academic book Fantastique et Evenement: Etude comparee des oeuvres de Jules Verne et Howard P. Lovecraft.

My own scholarly posts were rather light. But I took a look at Lovecraft’s pursuit of the Perkins line in his family-tree, and posted a much more substantial survey of Lovecraft and voodoo.

Tools for scholars are also of interest to some Tentaclii readers and I noted the release of the useful PDF Index Generator 3.0 (generates ‘back-of-the-book’ indexes), and showed how to keep the free DocFetcher running (generates a local index of folders of documents, enables keyword searching of these). For bloggers I gave many tips on setting up the free Open Live Writer, useful for those fleeing the ‘Block editor’ at the free WordPress.com blogging service. Also of possible interest to wranglers of words is my new free booklet of useful regex, the My Little Regex Cookbook, for Notepad++. My own JURN academic search-engine (open-access only, with a focus on arts and humanities) has now completed a back-end overhaul and link-check and is thus once again ready for the ‘back to university’ crowd. I also have a new link-tree which provides a handy list of my other non-Lovecraft projects, including JURN.

There was a ripple of science items this month. Fred Lubnow produced a new blog post, “Some Notes on the Biology of the Shoggoths”. There was a call for papers for “Science Fiction in the Museum”, a link to a new “Ancient Earth Globe” interactive website, and a podcast on the strange world of the lichens.

My regular Friday ‘Picture Postals’ feature once again dug into Lovecraft’s College St., and the second of these posts literally ‘dug in’ — with a look at the 1935 demolitions. For this I was able to pair record-photographs with art from Stacey Tolman, to reveal Tolman’s exact locations. Another ‘Picture Postals’ post also led in a roundabout way to another interesting local artist, H. Cyrus Farnum, via initial consideration of an all-night coffee shop in Providence. Another more general College St. post, “Between Waterman and College Streets”, considered if an evocative Athos Zacharias 1950s lithograph might (or might not) show Lovecraft’s final home.

Various forthcoming Lovecraft events were noted. NecronomiCon 2021 has appointed its poet laureate. There was an update on Hungary’s National Lovecraft Meeting 2021, plus details and a poster for Germany’s Cthulhu Fest 2021. Give the current behaviour of the second-wave virus (spreading, but seemingly not very deadly at all) it’s quite possible these will happen face-to-face. Or at least with some cool hand-made cultist face-masks.

In audio, Cadabra Records released a “Behind the scenes” video for their new 6 x L.P. boxed-set vinyl for H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness”, and I noted that their “The Loved Dead” vinyl LP is still available. Psilowave Records is getting in on the act, with a new two-LP “The Dunwich Horror” on coloured vinyl. Several Lovecraft-heavy album releases were noted in the heavy metal genre. There was more from the Voluminous podcast which is reading extracts of Lovecraft’s letters, and on YouTube I found a new and full reading of Lovecraft’s seminal expression of cosmicism “The Poe-et’s Nightmare”.

In the graphic arts, a popular Tentaclii post surveyed a wealth of recent Lovecraft graphic novels, and here I was especially pleased to discover the Lovecraftian graphic novel Weird Detective (2017). There was no DeviantArt art survey this month. Post-Inktober will be a better moment to make such a survey. But various archival bits of art were brought to light, and from Archive.org I was delighted to dig up “Lurker in the Lobby #3” by Kennon James, which depicted Lovecraft’s one-time job as a cinema-booth ticket-clerk. Where is the rest of this set, in this original form? Finally I noted that the H.P. Lovecraft Archive now has a handy new page linking to ‘Lovecraft’s Drawings’ as scanned and online in the Brown repository. These run from “Nude, Bearded Lovecraft” to “Kittens at Play”, all as drawn by Lovecraft himself.

That’s it for this month. Please consider becoming my Patreon patron.

New book: Io Sono Providence, vol. 2

30 Wednesday Sep 2020

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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The second volume of Io Sono Providence: la biografia di H.P. Lovecraft is now marked as “Arriving”. This being the ongoing translation of the S.T. Joshi’s famous biography of Lovecraft. The first volume shipped this time last year. Note that Volume 2 of the Italian translation is “1920-1928”, and there will be one more next year for a three-volume set. Congratulations to all concerned, and also for sticking to the release schedule despite the difficulties of the lockdowns in the last six months.

“The Poe-et’s Nightmare”

29 Tuesday Sep 2020

Posted by in Podcasts etc.

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Nathaniel Lindstrom has tackled a recorded reading of “The Poe-et’s Nightmare” by H.P. Lovecraft. The poem dates to sometime in 1916, and was first published in The Vagrant No. 8 (July 1918). The text is in the latest books of Lovecraft’s poetry, and also online here.

The narrator offers a clear and well-paced reading of this long poem in 20 minutes on YouTube, as the humorous intro Part One, the weird main section Part Two, and finally the outro in Part 3. So far as I’m aware this is the first ‘free and public’ complete reading of this seminal early expression of Lovecraft’s cosmicism.

The weird central section was reprinted and illustrated in Weird Tales for July 1952, with art by Jon Arfstrom.

The poem is perceptively analysed in detail by R. Boerem in “The Lovecraftian Nightmare”, to be found in the book H.P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism.

Everybody’s Magazine

28 Monday Sep 2020

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New on Archive.org, a microfilm run of Everybody’s Magazine 1899-1929. By the mid 1920s it appears to have become a cut-price Adventure type pulp, but with a tilt toward the women’s market. Here are the October 1928 contents…

Wikipedia has the title as lasting to 1929, then merging with Romance magazine. Pulp history has editor F. Orlin Tremaine taking over at this point, and he later went on to the famous Astounding.

Hathi has possible alternative scans. The new scholar.archive.org can search across all the microfilm journals Archive.org has been uploading recently, but possibly fiction-based titles such as this are excluded.

Three more books of Letters in progress

27 Sunday Sep 2020

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S.T. Joshi’s Blog has updated, and the new post makes me aware of a new two volume Czech translation I hadn’t heard about…

I have received a most distinctive item—nothing less than a Czech translation of my edition of The Annotated Revisions and Collaborations of H.P. Lovecraft.

He also gives titles of three forthcoming Letters volumes, presumably set for 2021-22…

Letters to Hyman Bradofsky and Others; Letters to Woodburn Harris and Others; Letters to Richard F. Searight and E. Hoffmann Price.

The pursuit of Perkins

26 Saturday Sep 2020

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In the spring and summer of 1934 Lovecraft appears to have been tracing his maternal Perkins ancestry into the English Midlands and the Welsh Marches. He wrote to Morton as from “Perkins Manor” in early March of that year. A letter dated 1st August 1934 to Edward H. Cole is catalogued in the archives as providing merely… “genealogical information on the Perkins family”. Presumably this is now in the volume of Cole letters, but I don’t currently have access to that book. Elsewhere in the letters we learn from Lovecraft that… “Perkins … didn’t reach R.I. [Rhode Island] till the 18th century” and it’s implied that he settled in “the Bay”. A letter to Barlow (O Fortunate Floridian, page 94) sees Lovecraft reveal more, with dates… “John Perkins (1590-1654) of Newent, Gloucestershire, who settled in Ipswich, Mass., in 1633. … son John Jr. (1614-1700)” also a forebear for Lovecraft, via John Jr.’s son Sam.

There was some local interest in this branch of the family, as Lovecraft tells Morton of the local Providence… “soulful poetess friend of my aunt’s — Miss Ada Perkins [who] was over [visiting in person] last week and calling up ancestral data”. Sadly it appears that Miss Perkins has left no trace in the online record, save that she may have had two sisters. It also appears from the same passage in the Morton letter that John Perkins (1590-1654) had arrived on the ship Lyon, and that a book then newly-added to the Providence public library had yielded up to Lovecraft the name of the wife of John Perkins, one “Judith Gater”. By this time Lovecraft’s “Perkins notes” had become a “stapled-together” bundle.

His pursuit of Perkins then merged into kitten-naming in his shared courtyard garden, which helped enshrine the sequence of the Perkins family-tree in print…

[I] called the little fellows “Newman Perkins” and “Ebenezer Perkins” after ancestors of my own — for I have a Perkins line. When the black kitten appeared, I went back along my Perkins ancestry and called him Samuel, after a forebear who fought in King Philip’s War in 1676. If there are any more kittens later on, I shall probably keep going back along my Perkins line (which is traceable to 1380 in Shropshire and Warwickshire) for names — John being the next in order.

A kitten name, ‘Sam Perkins’, then made it into one of the fantastical stories of his correspondent Duane Rimel. Lovecraft writes… [I] “was pleased to see his name in your new story!”  Poetry on the same kittie was also penned by Lovecraft himself, to be found in the new Cat Book.

The Perkins name also inspired a pen-name, with Lovecraft naming himself “Inspector Theobald-Perkins” during the assiduous hunt for a stamp-stealing clerk in a rural Post Office (a correspondent had sent a scarce and desirable stamp as postage, but it had been peeled off and replaced). By the Autumn and start of 1935 Lovecraft was styling himself “Theobaldus Perkins, Gent.” when writing to Morton as from “The Georgian Citadel”. By 1936 he was styling himself “Theobaldus Perkins-Field”, presumably reflecting another branch in the family-tree, perhaps newly discovered or documented.

Today such meanderings in Lovecraft’s life might seem fruitless. Certainly there is no use of a Perkins in his own fiction, unless one counts two spurious and passing uses (a hardware store in “Ermingarde” and a tiny bit-part in a Heald ghost-written tale). Still, spending a few minutes following such a burning and sustained interest on Lovecraft’s part can sometimes lead to new discoveries. Historians well know that the ‘irrelevant’ can become ‘relevant’ in the blink of an eye. Although here my only discovery was that the local Providence poetess “Miss Ada Perkins” was a visitor and friend of the family in the early 1930s, and had the Perkins family line in common with Lovecraft. Unfortunately she appears to have left no poetry or portrait.

Fiverr – how to find your ‘Favorites’ page

25 Friday Sep 2020

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Fiverr may be far from perfect but it still has many useful low-cost sellers, especially useful for writers, researchers and small publishers, if you’re willing to dig through the listings and make some test purchases. I recently had a very useful UserScript written for $10. $5 for the script and another $5 to fix the not-quite-right regex bit. When you type a phrase in DuckDuckGo, the resulting script auto-wraps it “in quote marks”. No need for “keyboard yoga” 300 times a day. It’s now free on GreasyFork. You’re welcome.

But it’s now not at all easy to find your page of saved ‘Favourite’ sellers on Fiverr. The page is still there, however. Rather than faffing about showing you the link in the interface (which may have changed by the time you read this in the future), here’s the actual URL. Just replace the YOUR_USER_NAME bit with your username.

https:// www.fiverr.com /users/YOUR_USER_NAME/lists/gigs-i-love

Friday ‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: College St. demolition, 1935

25 Friday Sep 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Picture postals

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This Friday ‘Picture Postal’ follows last week’s, which had the same location but looked toward the city. In 1935 old buildings on lower College Street, Providence R.I, were demolished. Here we see 32-34 College Street in the process of demolition.

The wheels of modernity were spinning up and the motor car was the future. Horse-yards, and the antiquarians and artists who might haunt them, were increasingly surplus to requirements. We can imagine that Lovecraft, who lived further up the street at No. 66, objected to the demolitions. As he had at the demolition of the Old Brick Row, and other regretful changes to the city’s fabric. Though I can find no evidence that he did so for the bottom of College Street. Given the state of some of the backs (24-28 seen above), and the need for grand schemes in the Great Depression, it might have been difficult to publicly call for their preservation. Such is the way of it. Someone in authority makes a quiet decision somewhere and a street or area starts to be neglected. 15 or 20 years later the place is in such a state that it ‘has’ to be demolished, and it’s by then difficult to argue in favour of preservation.

Here we see local artist Stacey Tolman’s drawing of one of the yard entrances in the former ‘Rosemary Lane’, or one very much like it, and another from the other side showing the last days of usage for horses.

Here we see the back courtyard of No. 32 (top) and No. 33 (bottom), with the motor car replacing the horse in the yard at No. 33.

Tolman had earlier painted this yard at No. 33 in happier days, with its calm bright scene poised between industriousness and a faint threat.

Today, cynical modern eyes might instantly see men gambling and idle slum-boys playing hoop, or might raise a lip at the ‘chocolate-box’ sheen common to the Rhode Island art of the period. But the men are looking over plans for a worthy new horse-carriage for the somewhat Lovecraft-like man standing by them. Sturdy working apprentices stand ready to fit an iron rim to a hand-crafted wheel. An industrious wife has hung out lines of washing and one can just see her fresh green herb-pots on the same platform. This is a picture of a living place at work, but threatened by time. A point Tolman has emphasised by having the fateful clock tower of the Courthouse peering over the rooftops, steadily striking out the hours.

Did Lovecraft know the courtyard? He comments on the matter in a letter of April 1925. His aunts had both sent him a sketch of the courtyard, presumably printed in the local paper. He was astounded that he had never actually seen this inner court… “in all the thousands of times I have passed up & down College Hill.” However, being thus aware of it, we can be fairly sure that he visited it at least once on his return to Providence.

The demolitions appear to have inspired Lovecraft’s ever-fertile imagination. Late in his life, in a bitter winter, he ventured out from No. 66 to visit with a local girl admirer. Her memoir later recalled…

“Did we know, he asked, his sombre eyes intent on our faces, that recently, when early buildings on Benefit Street and College Street were razed to make way for new ones, deep tunnel-like pits, seemingly bottomless and of undetermined usefulness, were discovered in the ancient cellars?” — memoir of a visit by Lovecraft in 1934, by Dorothy C. Walter.

It was, of course, a test to see how imaginative she really was. As Lovecraft wrote a few years later…

The bulk of the human race lives very little in the imaginative realm; hence can seldom grasp the goals, motives, & aspirations of anyone with whom subtle perspectives, symbolic associations, & obscure mental correlations form important emotional factors.

The end result of the demolitions, looking up the lower part of College Hill…

Studi Lovecraftiani catch-up

24 Thursday Sep 2020

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An item of news I missed in summer 2020, the release of a new issue of Studi Lovecraftiani, the leading Italian Lovecraft journal.

studi

No. 18 has…

* Cover painting by Matteo Bocci.

* A homage to the writer and friend Elvezio Sciallis, a narrator and story writer.

* Renzo Giorgetti looks at the symbolic and mythological basis of R’lyeh.

* Fabio Calabrese proposes a “fourth genre” of the fantastic: Lovecraftian fiction. Thus widening the field of fantastic literature.

* Sandro Mezzetto on “some sources of Lovecraft’s fiction”.

* Christian Lamberti on the Randolph Carter cycle.

* Davide Rossato surveys John Carpenter’s Lovecraftian cinema.

* A translation of an early “evaluation” on Lovecraft by Joseph Payne Brennan, being one of the first items of literary criticism of the fiction

* A translation of “HPL and the myths of scientific materialism” by John A. Buettner.

* Lovecraft on Poe’s places… “a full-bodied unpublished work by Lovecraft himself, translated here for the first time, where the Dreamer talks to us about the homes and places of Poe.”

And there’s more. No. 17, too. Since somehow it appears that Tentaclii also missed Studi Lovecraftiani in June 2019.  Following hot on the heels of a (perhaps late) January 2019 issue, which may be why I wasn’t looking for a summer issue in 2019.

No. 17 seems to have been about two-thirds a Ramsey Campbell / fiction / poetry issue by the look of it. But it also had unspecified… “essays and articles by Stefano Lazzarin, Renzo Giorgetti, Miranda Gurzo, Riccardo Rosati and others.”

A little further digging reveals some details on these items of non-fiction…

* Riccardo Rosati on HPL’s political thought, apparently comparing him with Evola.

* Stefano Lazzarin on ‘The Veiled Face: hyperbole and reticence in Howard Phillips Lovecraft’.

* Renzo Giorgetti on the importance of dreams as one of HPL’s sources of inspiration.

* Miranda Gurzo who sees “the mythology of Cthulhu as the symbol of the crisis of the modern world”, and suggests HPL’s possible sources in biblical Apocalypse imagery, re: The Book of Job.

* An examination of “Beyond The Wall Of Sleep”, which sounds like an English essay translated to Italian?

* A newly-translated 1937 poem by Lovecraft.

Open journal: AILIJ

23 Wednesday Sep 2020

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AILIJ : Anuario de Investigaciin en Literatura Infantil y Juvenil (2001-2019, ‘Research Yearbook on Children’s and Young People’s Literature’). An open-access journal in Spanish. Recent issues seem to be rather aimed at classroom teachers and school librarians, But some of the many book reviews in each issue may interest, when viewed in in English auto-translation. For instance the review titled “Science fiction narratives for children and youth” in the 2018 issue.