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Tentaclii

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

Tentaclii

Monthly Archives: November 2020

“The Festival” on vinyl

30 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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Need a suitable Yuletide spinner to enliven the hipsters at a dour Xmas party? Cadabra Records has a new vinyl LP presentation of Lovecraft’s festive “The Festival”, read By Andrew Leman to a score by Fabio Frizzi and with art by Jesse Jacobi.

Not quite on the store yet, with a page for pre-orders that’s not yet live. The record will ship 18th December 2020.

Cadabra Records on SoundCloud has a free sample.

New book: Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner and Others (new expanded edition)

29 Sunday Nov 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books

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hplovecraft.com has a new page giving the full table-of-contents for the new expanded H.P. Lovecraft: Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner and Others. Now expanded from 298 pages to 546 pages, and according to Amazon it started shipping about two weeks ago.

Had not my mother disturbed my ambitious effort of last May [1917], in which I utilised my absurdly robust-looking exterior as a passport to martial glory in the National Guard, I should now be digging trenches, drilling, & pounding a typewriter at Fort Standish in Boston Harbour, where the 9th Co. R.I. Coast Artillery is placed at present.” (Lovecraft, in Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner).

Stratosfear

28 Saturday Nov 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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The band Tangerine Dream are not one you associate with cosmic horror, more trippy cosmic voyaging of the “White Ship” variety, but John Coulthart finds subtle traces of influence from Lovecraft, Smith, Poe and others.

McFarland’s 30% sale

27 Friday Nov 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings

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McFarland has a Black Friday sale with coupon BLACKFRIDAY30 — and their huge list has a great many to choose from. Though it’s not all great, and in there are some gems such as H. P. Lovecraft’s Dark Arcadia, but also some that are not so good such as the Dune Companion. I spotted a book there that’s new to me, Arkham House Books: A Collector’s Guide (2004). This has a pleasing Cornell-like glimpse of Lovecraft on the cover.

Friday ‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: The Art Club

27 Friday Nov 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Picture postals

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This week’s postcard is of the Art Club on Thomas Street, Providence.

Here we see the road-fronting section of the Club known as the “Brick Club House” building. The publication date is 1914, but I would guess the date of the picture is perhaps a few years after purchase of this house by the Club in 1906. Due to it being brick-built my colorising of it has imagined the building unpainted, with perhaps blue windows and shutters. It had been altered “sufficiently” for the purposes of a 100+ strong Club, but it was only leased and it was apparently under threat of being swept away by a planned railroad tunnel. Thus it lacks the love and polish it was given in the mid 1920s and later. Yet even here we can see the new large front door with its “resounding knocker”. Some years later the building’s “countless wooden shutters”, also seen here, were removed and served to panel a new Reading Room set to one side of the Entrance. By circa 1909 the Club had a Library and subscribed to about 30 art journals.

Here we see the Club in the snow circa 1909, perhaps a year or two after the above picture. Two sets of shutters have already been removed…

Inside, a floor had also been removed, thus forming the tall exhibition gallery that rose to the skylight…

In “the season”, there was an art show hung here every two weeks. Lovecraft once recalled that…

my eldest aunt is still more expert in this [artistic] direction, having had canvases hung in exhibition at the Providence Art Club

There were also evening ‘dinners’ for the men and ‘afternoons’ for the women, at which speakers were sometimes invited. Occasionally there were events to which members could invite guest non-members.

In 1919 the “Dodge” house, glimpsed on the far-left of the first picture, was purchased by the Club, and further money had been raised to provide an extensive exterior makeover. Part of the intended change was to sympathetically brick over the old cobbled lane of circa 1786, with a restored Georgian arch and walkway. This horse-way had led back to the old stables and coach house at the rear of the property.

This arch is marked on the map-plan as 1920, but it apparently took until 1924 to complete. Lovecraft might have seen the ‘new-look’ Club before he left for New York City, but equally he might have been delighted to return a few years later to find the Art Club looking distinctly more Georgian and restored. Indeed, the Club was one of the very first places he went when he returned home…

Then followed a resumption of real life as I had dropped it two years ago — the life of a settled American gentleman in his ancestral environment. We went out to an exhibition of paintings at the Art Club, (the colonial house in hilly Thomas Street, in front of which I snap-shotted Mortonius last fall — I mean the fall of ’23) (circular enclosed [presumably a flyer for the Art Club]) and had dinner downtown at Shepard’s (neo-) Colonial Restaurant. In the evening a cinema show at the good old Strand in Washington Street completed a memorable and well-rounded day.” (Selected Letters II).

Seen on the left of the first picture of the Art Club was the spot that Lovecraft sometimes met and conversed with the cat “Old Man”. The arch under which “Old Man” liked to sit is not itself a Georgian original, though was loving restored to that style by the Club President George Frederick Hall. The cobbled lane he arched and partly re-cobbled was of that age, as one can see from the above map-plan.

Here we see this arch and the cat “Old Man”, as finely drawn by Jason C. Eckhardt for The H. P. Lovecraft Cat Book (2019). Here is Lovecraft recalling “Old Man”…

He was a great fellow. He belonged to a market at the foot of Thomas Street — the hill street mentioned in [The Call of] “Cthulhu” as the abode of the young artist — & could usually (in later life) be found asleep on the sill of a low window almost touching the ground. Occasionally he would stroll up the hill as far as the Art Club, seating himself at the entrance [to the alleyway]. At night, when the electric lights made the street bright, the space within the archway would remain pitch-black. So that it looked like the mouth of an illimitable abyss, or the gateway of some nameless dimension. And there, as if stationed as a guardian of the unfathomed mysteries beyond, would crouch the sphinxlike, jet-black, yellow-eyed, & incredibly ancient form of Old Man. […] I came to regard him as an indispensable acquaintance, and would often go considerably out of my way to pass his habitual territory, on the chance that I might find him visible. Good Old Man! In fancy I pictured him as an hierophant of the mysteries behind the black archway, and wondered if he would ever invite me through it some midnight … Wondered, too, if I could ever could back to earth alive after accepting such an invitation.

Lovecraft likely recalled his own lost cat of the same colour, Trigger-ban, who had run away when Lovecraft had lost his childhood home. Had this missing cat lived on, my guess is he would have been more or less be of the same age as “Old Man”. Lovecraft also likely knew that the line of the underground railroad tunnel ran along the back of the Art Club, going under the hill to emerge near the Seekonk River. The Art Club had been in danger of being swept away when the line was being planned. But in the end, the line of the new tunnel was usefully nudged a little on the map, so it ran at the back of the property. To one who was aware of such tunnels it might, poetically and in dreams, have provided an additional dark route into mystery. After the death of “Old Man” Lovecraft continued to meet and go with him in dreams…

Lovecraft dreamed of him even more than before — he would “gaze with aged yellow eyes that spoke secrets older than Aegyptus or Atlantis.” (S.T. Joshi, I Am Providence, quoting Lovecraft).

Faeries in Machen and Lovecraft

26 Thursday Nov 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context

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In Horrified Magazine, musing on “Voices Under the Hills: Faeries in Machen and Lovecraft” and also their use of the old year-cycle (Lammas, Candlemas, May Eve, Halloween, etc).

Also musing on the uses made of the British faerie tradition is the blog British Fairies. Now with a growing number of blog articles which appears to be leading up to a book.

Call: Fantasy Art and Studies #10

25 Wednesday Nov 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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The 10th issue of Fantasy Art and Studies will be “dedicated to music” and is calling for creative work. While the journal is French, for this issue they appear to be also open to work in English. Deadline 5th January 2021.

Of cat-demons, Tolkien and Lovecraft

24 Tuesday Nov 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Kittee Tuesday, New books, Scholarly works

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I’m currently reading the recent Tolkien biography by Raymond Edwards, newly in Kindle ebook in 2020. At least one Amazon reviewer has spluttered at the book’s occasional informed speculation, such as the suggestion that Tolkien read Ker’s classic scholarly synthesis The Dark Ages. Yes, it was a key book of the time and a highly readable and yet erudite synthesis. Edwards doesn’t put a date on it, but I’d say Tolkien probably read it and circa summer 1912 is the most likely date. The Amazon reviewer is anyway tripped up by not consulting a footnote on the matter — which reveals that Tolkien did read it and by the early 1930s, when he “quoted extensively from it”.

But for me Edwards is very usefully conversant with the ins-and-outs and ways of Oxford University life and its nomenclature, and has a keen insight into the mindset of intelligent lads of that era. Some further observations and phrasing suggest he’s writing from a traditionalist Catholic perspective, but this is offered very lightly and not laid on with a trowel. Despite its readability and seemingly reliability this is not the biography to read first, and it needs to be filled-in with the use of the Chronology (lucky Tolkien scholars have a vast day-by-day / week-by-week Chronology of his life, assiduously compiled by Hammond and Scull). But the new biography generally presents a readable and insightful narrative.

Lovecraft occasionally makes an appearance, being Tolkien’s contemporary. Here is Edwards on cat-demons and Lovecraft, about a quarter of the way through his book and at the point when Tolkien has been invalided home to Birmingham (early November 1916) after a fierce and victorious battle in France, and then stays at Great Haywood in mid Staffordshire (early Dec – late Feb 1917)…

The style of the Tales [very early First World War works, collected in Lost Tales] is a deliberate mixture of archaizing prose in the best William Morris manner, with a faintly precious Edwardian ‘fairy’ or ‘elfin’ quality, all flittermice and flower-lanterns and diminutives (partly down to [the whimsical side of the Catholic poet, Tolkien’s favourite] Francis Thompson, partly we may guess to [Tolkien’s young wife] Edith’s fondness for such things), with a dash of whimsy (cat-demons, talking hounds) that may owe something to Lord Dunsany. At moments, the effect is most like not Morris or Dunsany but, oddly, the later Randolph Carter stories of H.P. Lovecraft, which are explicit dream-narratives. The [key work in Lovecraft’s Dreamlands cycle was] not written until [1926–27]*, and [Dream-Quest] not published until after Lovecraft’s death, so there can be no question of influence either way, but there is a certain occasional likeness of tone. Lovecraft was two years older than Tolkien, and their backgrounds were not really alike; but there was perhaps something in the air. Both men, as well, had clearly read their Dunsany.

* I’ve corrected his dating.

There is another comparison to make, and at more or less the same time. Compared to Lovecraft, Tolkien at the end of 1919 saw the…

widening of modern knowledge of the universe & consequent opening up of new fields of ideas, should more than compensate for any blunting of our capacity for imaginative appreciation of certain aspects of nature, as compared with the ancients.

By which he means the nature-appreciation not only of the Egyptians, Greeks, Babylonians etc, but also the Northern tribes and peoples. And their ability to ‘spring’ imaginative stories from a local nature on which they relied for their very being. Here he also implicitly harks back to a long British Christian tradition that saw the natural sciences as a positive thing in terms of helping to reveal the works and workings of God.

Lovecraft worried about how such things might play out negatively on a longer time-scale, and in a mutually-reinforcing manner. In the mid 1920s he famously stated that…

the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

However, the Tolkien of 1919 was not the Tolkien of the mid 1930s. Later, as 1934 dawned and the darkness of the mid 1930s settled in, Tolkien too felt much as Lovecraft did about the changing times. Like…

A lost survivor in an alien world after the real world had passed away.

Artificial life

23 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Podcasts etc.

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The Voluminous podcast, which reads Lovecraft’s letters, “is going monthly”. But this week, in place of a podcast, there is an item of historical context and curiosity, re: the previous letter and its mention of.. “extravagant claims about creating artificial life in a laboratory that got a fair amount of press coverage in the spring of 1926”. Lovecraft’s Aunt Lillian had saved and sent the press clippings.

The enclosures were perhaps unconsciously ironic, as Lovecraft was then seeking to escape a different kind of “artificial life”, as he found it in the…

cosmopolitan chaos [of] New York — which has no central identity or meaning, & no clean-cut relationship either to its own past or to anything else in particular — but of course I realise that different minds have different requirements, & that there are those who find in the intense surge of artificial life a certain stimulation which brings out what is already in them. But [a young writer considering coming to the city] ought to be warned in advance that all life in New York is purely artificial & affected…

“… the horror will repay one for wading through the plethora of Scottish dialect.”

22 Sunday Nov 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.

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Scottish Lovecraftian Comedy. What’s that then, and is it more fun than a hairy highland haggis on the loose? Find out by listening to a new long interview with the maker of such…

Matthew McLean is the writer, producer and one of the stars of A Scottish Podcast. While the name may not suggest it, A Scottish Podcast is steeped in Lovecraftian horror. It’s also pretty damn funny.

Will Murray interview

21 Saturday Nov 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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PulpFest interviews Doc Savage expert and Lovecraftian Will Murray…

The pulps are filled with yet to be discovered stuff. There’s a lot more to be learned and tons of creators deserving rediscovery. Start digging into the people behind the bylines. They were real people who led their own lives. Bring them to life as individuals. Often, they left behind some great stories.

There’s also a new issue of the Doc Savage journal, The Bronze Gazette #84, with articles including “The Challenge of Collecting Doc Savage Pulps” and “Exploring Doc Savage Fandom in the Pulp Era”.

Friday ‘picture postals’ from Lovecraft: the John Hay Library

20 Friday Nov 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Picture postals

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This week, just a plain postcard view of the John Hay Library of Brown University. Here we see it as was when it began receiving Lovecraft’s letters and papers. If I recall rightly these were first gifted by young Barlow in the late 1930s, shortly after Lovecraft’s death, and they were somewhat reluctantly received. Most postcard views from the Library’s first decades are from one side, but this photographer obviously had permission to go onto the Brown campus lawns to set up his tripod and make this face-on b&w picture (here enlarged and colourised). The design of the back of the card suggests the late 1930s. Possibly it was an official card, though in that case one would expect the back to state this. But perhaps the stamp-surround is actually Greek for “Brown”?

A complete historical survey of “H.P. Lovecraft and the Brown campus, staff and students” remains to be written (feel free), but we know that H.P. Lovecraft occasionally strode through these grounds, perhaps mostly to guide visiting guests such as Barlow and Morton toward eminent collections such as the Annmary Brown Memorial, the Harris Collection of poetry, and (very probably, for Morton) the Geology Dept. I seem to recall that in his later years he occasionally heard public lectures on the campus and paid at least one late visit to the astronomy club there and was impressed by how the science had progressed. It’s also not impossible that the shady grounds were simply a place to stroll with his aunt during the quiet heat of the July-August holidays, when students and faculty were away. After all, his home was just around the corner, and directly behind the Library building.

Thus it seems possible to imagine that, as he neared home after a walk in the grounds, he would admire the Library’s flashes of austere sun-struck frontage as seen through the summer leaves. Did he also ever imagine that his own letters and works would one day form the Library’s most popular and well-known collection? Almost certainly not. At summer 1936 even his poetry was overlooked by the Library’s enormous Harris collection, which apparently claimed to contain representative samples of all American poets of any note. As a sometime pulp writer all he might have vaguely hoped for in the mid 1930s was that, when the economic good-times returned, one of his young fans might at last hand-crank out a good-enough book collection of his tales. And that this hand-bound limited-edition might then somehow pass the sniff-test at the Library accessions desk, perhaps being accepted because it shone a sidelight on a curious and by-then forgotten corner of Brown’s campus history.

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