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…