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Tentaclii

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

Tentaclii

Monthly Archives: June 2021

“At last I came to the city itself – and here I still am!”

30 Wednesday Jun 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context

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New to me, the HPLHS has a two-page Providence Sunday Journal replica newspaper sheet. It marks the moment that most people in Lovecraft’s Providence learned that a major author had been living among them. HPLHS are expert prop-makers, so despite the lack of yellowing I suspect you can be sure it’ll look and feel, and perhaps even smell, like a real fresh-and-inky 1940s city newspaper sheet.

You also get the reverse, which continues the long article.

Notes on Letters to Family, Vol. II – part one

29 Tuesday Jun 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, New discoveries

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I’ve begun reading the second volume of the new Letters to Family. Here are my notes on Lovecraft’s letters home, until the point when he returns home to Providence and Barnes St.


There is an evocative passage on “vast unknown islands” in the Arctic (page 560) in which Lovecraft seems to anticipate some future unwritten tale. Not impossible, at least historically, when you look at the topography and know that sea-level used to be much lower in the last Ice Age…

He laments that intellectually stunted people then made up “almost a majority” of the population of the USA, and he presumably was basing this on some test-based research of the period. A little later he also implies that knows whereof he speaks, when he says he has given up his former “loafing about slum cafeterias” on the edge of Red Hook.

He appears to have read the memoirs of the illustrator and leading printmaker Joseph Pennell, presumably The Adventures of an Illustrator (1925). This would have given him an insight into the artistic/publishing life of London from the 1880s to the early 1900s, and then the illustration side of magazine publishing in the New York ‘slicks’. By 1921 Pennell was living in Brooklyn, and its not impossible that in 1925 their circles overlapped at the edges.

He had begun reading some of the ghost stories of M.R. James and was impressed, referring to James a new “idol of idols”.

Evidently there was a large and capacious family scrap book, “Grandma’s red scrap book”, which had been kept into the mid 1920s and was still being added to. One wonders what became of it.

Vaudeville at Fay’s Theatre in Lovecraft’s youth could include lectures. He saw there a lecture by Dr. Cook, the polar explorer. Presumably this included a show of ‘magic lantern’ slides.

He saw the movie The Tower of Lies (1925) with Lon Chaney. Now a lost movie.

He gives the dates of his severe boyhood illness of 1903, “late April and early May”.

Loveman’s poetry was both “polished” and (later) proofread by Lovecraft (pages 551-2).

The location of Peter’s restaurant was “on Joralemon St near the corner of Clinton” in NYC.

Lovecraft’s Providence barber was named Fernando King at 72 Westminster Street. His partner in trade was Eduoard Fontaine. I see that the Nightingale Papers archive holds a local press “clipping and program for party held in King’s honor, 1926”. In New York Lovecraft’s final haircut is at “the barbers at State and Court”.

Lovecraft read the Henry James story “The Turn of the Screw” for the first time in February 1926, while working on his survey Supernatural Literature.

He makes a brief reference to the influenza of 1918, as a “scourge” (page 558). He later says that its symptomatic “effects are so far reaching” (page 576) suggesting he was still well aware of the unusual and devastating symptoms.

The plans for the giant Hope Reservoir were known to Lovecraft by February 1926. He talks about the plans, and what might replace it. We know from the Providence magazine that it was still not quite drained by early 1928, having begun draining in 1926. On return to Providence, he would live very near to it.

He saw the movie The Torrent, featuring Greta Garbo. This climaxes when “a huge storm hits the town, causing houses to flood, ceilings to cave in, and the dam to break bringing a torrent of rushing water”. A while later he saw an “impressive” costume-drama movie of the Jamestown Flood of 1889. Given that the giant, creaking and possibly dangerous (while the water level was being slowly lowered) Hope St. reservoir was almost directly behind his new home in Barnes St., these viewings seem well-timed.

He remarks that, at February 1926, he had never seen a decent display of the aurora (‘northern lights’).

He shops at the Clinton Delicatessen, presumably in Clinton St. Above it is the Taormina restaurant he and Sonia patronised in the 1925, but which had raised prices dramatically by 1926.

He recalls the Empire Book Shop in Providence, which he used to patronise, in Empire St. Another source gives the prop. as “H. D. Dana”, known later as a leading book dealer in Providence. By 1923 “new” at Weybosset St…

In the move to New York he lost the beautiful star-atlas booklet that accompanied the book Geography of the Heavens. The Library of Congress has it online now.

He talks of Eliphas Levi as “the best source of magical lore”, as translated by Waite (page 570). In March 1926 he is reading Constant’s History of Magick (page 585) but this again indicates Eliphas Levi — since Levi was Constant’s pseudonym. This must therefore have been the book The History Of Magic but Lovecraft’s epistolary whimsy has given the title an 18th century touch by using the spelling “Magick”.

He talks of enjoying “the subsidiary features” of movie-going, suggesting that he also sat through the cartoons, short travelogues, news-reels etc.

He states in the past he had read some “Hindoo” (Hindu) fables from India.

He disparages Freud and especially on dreams…”… his theory of dreams is perhaps the weakest link in his whole chain. Many of his hypotheses can be punctured quite readily…” (page 578)

Lovecraft reassures his aunt that, in his fragile mental state, he is not raving at immigrants in the streets… “don’t fancy that my nervous reaction against alien N.Y. types takes the form of conversation likely to offend any individual” and “don’t think I fail to appreciate the genius and good qualities of the entire assemblage” (by which he seems to mean ‘other groups, when considered in the round’). He also comments on the lack of leakage from the Kalems and his circle… “our group is not noted for faux pas‘s or inconsiderate repetition of opinion.”

He sees a re-run of the John Ford blockbuster movie “The Iron Horse” (1924) about the transcontinental railroad. Another movie that seems to foreshadow his return (by rail) to Providence.

Long patronises The Womrath Library, a library cum bookstore in New York, and sub-lends Lovecraft at least one book from it.

The family storage stables in Providence, at least at that point in time, are owned by a “Mrs Glazer”.

A favourite Italian joint in Providence was the Belvedere, “at the S.E. corner of Washington and Aborn”, and Lovecraft states he intends to make it a regular haunt when he returns.

He chanced to see the melodrama movie Stella Maris with Sonia, and recalled seeing the first half of the earlier Mary Pickford version in Providence in 1918. In 1918 he had to leave the cinema early due to health problems. This suggests the reason why he only saw half the Providence Houdini show.

He saw a foreign movie of Cyrando de Bergerac, possibly a French print of the Italian movie version of the time.

He saw the movie Don Juan, and enjoyed it all the more because the then-new Vitaphone technology sync’d the music perfectly.

He was impressed with the John Metcalfe (1891–1965) story “The Bad Lands”, in The Smoking Leg, and other stories (1925). This has not been collected in an anthology of ‘Lovecraft faves’ by Lovecraftians, presumably due to copyright. But note that the 1926 U.S. first edition should put it in the public domain in the USA in 2022. The story is now online, extracted from the British magazine publication of 1920. On reading, one immediately finds it a likely partial source of inspiration for “The Colour out of Space”, minus the colour and reservoir and meteor.

Pre-Halloween Walking Tour 2021

28 Monday Jun 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

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The H. P. Lovecraft Walking Tour & Film Screening Tickets. 16th-24th October 2021, in Providence. Booking now.

Review: The Lovecraft Annual 2020

27 Sunday Jun 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraft as character, Scholarly works

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REVIEW: The Lovecraft Annual 2020, which was published in late summer 2020 from Hippocampus Press.


It is summer 1935. Lovecraft and Barlow are sitting on a lake-shore porch in balmy Florida. They are listening carefully to Barlow Sr., one Colonel Everett D. Barlow, and are taking rapid notes on his talk. The beginning of a World War is only four years away, and Col. Barlow is observing that the nation’s defences have been left sorely lacking. The new Lovecraft Annual opens with the unusual item that resulted from this talk, and gives us the supporting materials that allow the modern reader to eavesdrop on the long-ago flow of talk. We first read the notes taken by Barlow and Lovecraft, on the pressing military topic of “National Defence”, and then the more polished version, and finally the finished published article.

By 1935 the period in which Lovecraft had ‘come of age’, albeit rather later than a normal lad might, was long gone. He had lived on, past the tumult of 1919 and into the period of relative political quiescence marked by a strong ‘anti-red’ public mood. This had run from the end of the First World War in 1919 until the start of the Great Depression in 1929. But by summer 1935 the relative political quiescence of the 1920s had evaporated, and Col. Barlow evidently wished to chivvy along the nation to put its defences in order against both communism and fascism. Judging by the texts presented in the Annual, he appears to have made his case concisely and eloquently. We are able to read the first notes from the ‘spoken’ version of his article, then the fleshing out of these by his youngest son, and then Lovecraft’s polished ghost-written article as it appeared in print in December 1935 (the ‘Winter 1935’ issue of The Californian). What changes between the versions? Not a great deal. The word “pacifists” becomes the more qualified and snarky “people called pacifists”. This seems a prescient snark, given what we now know about communist ‘front organisations’ and their quiet connections with noisy fellow-travellers in the mass media. “People called pacifists” and who hide behind the ‘peace’ label but who may be anything but, is the implication of the phrase. The article’s final version was also slightly pepped up by the insertion of a vivid mental picture of a U.S. battleship entering a harbour and thus usefully deterring some “excitable” dictator who had really meant what he blustered. This addition (page 12) feels like it might have been from Lovecraft rather than Barlow. In the article we also glimpse something of what appears to be Barlow Sr.’s evangelical Christian stance, a stance which may help explain some of the friction felt by his weird-loving and secretly-gay son. At the back of all this we probably also glimpse a part of why Lovecraft was made so welcome in the Barlow household. I suggest he may have been thought of as a steadying influence, who might help to prevent the brilliant and flighty young Barlow from being seduced into communism — as so many of Lovecraft’s circle had been by 1935.

Curiously, I recently found that — some years later — Barlow noted the “National Defence” article as being a “joint parody”. What are we to make of that? Simply a bad memory, jotted on the cover of an old text that he did not have the inclination to read over again? Did he confuse it, when packing up, with “Battle that Ended the Century”? The final text given in the Lovecraft Annual seems straightforward enough to me, as it presumably was to the editor of The Californian and his readers. Judging by a partial table-of-contents available online, the same issue of The Californian appears to contain several other military articles that sit well alongside that of Barlow Senior.

The run of essays in the Lovecraft Annual begins with Steven J. Mariconda’s long-awaited take on “The Colour Out of Space”. This did not make it to his excellent book of collected essays, but was known about and now it finds a place here under the title “Atmosphere and the Qualitative Analysis of “The Colour out of Space””. The focus is on Lovecraft’s conception of “atmosphere” in weird fiction. The discussion is short but illuminating, though initially made more difficult for Mariconda because Lovecraft himself cannot really offer a cogent definition of his key approach to his tales. Atmosphere in Lovecraftian weird fiction, Mariconda then suggests…

calls forth a mood” and is “a kind of synaesthesia [i.e. one sense triggers another sense] that takes effect as a result of a work’s literary content … an oblique effect that replicates the experience of a situation but is created with the essentially musical quality of words, that is to say, rhythm, assonance, alliteration, and repetition.

That seems a useful definition. I would add that it is also a kind of foreshadowing and often a foreboding, one that is beguiling yet does not reveal itself fully and openly. It can thus also work by ‘tantalizing’ — of which technique Tolkien is a master — via the presentation of an evocative detail which then entices the reader to interweave some slight and passing speculation of their own.

As Mariconda points out, “atmosphere” obviously seems to have natural links with changing weather, light in a landscape, fogs and mists, the hours of the night, and all the other time-served gothic stage-effects. Mariconda then takes Lovecraft’s “Colour” as being something of a metaphor for “atmosphere”. Atmosphere incarnate and grown monstrous, if you like. He also makes the interesting point that the alien colour cannot likely exist on its own. Because somewhere out there one would expect there to be a cosmic spectrum of alien colour, of which the colour is but one part. Although I would add that perhaps the very idea of our ordered sequential spectrum is unknown in such spaces, and would itself be an alien concept. Mariconda concludes with a useful survey of common words used within the story — nothing, various forms of between, against, behind, and air words such as vapour.

Richard Bleiler’s essay “H.P. Lovecraft’s First Appearance in Print” then usefully examines the background to Lovecraft’s first published text, a letter to the Amsterdam Evening Recorder newspaper, in upstate New York. Bleiler ably explains the background to this letter — a private man had handsomely backed a national weather-forecasting prize-contest. This contest attracted the attention of the 14 year-old Lovecraft who, to establish his bona fides with the newspaper editor, proudly itemised some of his weather station equipment including “psychometrical apparatus”. Lovecraft’s home station had been used for local forecasting from around April 1904. Bleiler wonders how Lovecraft came to write to the Amsterdam Evening Recorder, whose office was about 100 miles north of New York City and around 150 miles NW of Providence, and explores various ideas.

Bleiler several times speculates on Lovecraft’s ability to access the refined library of the Providence Athenaeum as a young lad, and in doing so he curiously overlooks the open access Lovecraft actually had to the city’s nationally-excellent Public Library and even to its ‘stacks’ storerooms. But a rather more vital point is also overlooked. The possible satiric nature of Lovecraft’s newspaper letter is assumed, and this notion hinges on the idea that “psychometrical” carried the later meaning that connects it with spiritualism and related pseudo-scientific charlatanry. Yet just a little more research would have revealed that ‘psychometrical’ measurements were a valid aspect of scientific meteorology, being used with bulb thermometers…

for determining the elastic force of aqueous vapour for relative humidity of the atmosphere.

Not realising this, Bleiler then misses the potentially important connection with colour, and thus with Lovecraft’s famous story “The Colour out of Space”. The introductory textbook Optical Thin Films and Coatings usefully explains that the field of Colorimetry is…

subdivided in three parts: psychophysical colorimetry, psychometrical colorimetry and instrumental color measurement. [early discoveries in the field included] Brereton (1631—1679) [who] observed the colors of the thin films which the action of the weather produces upon glass (weathering phenomenon)…

Popular Science magazine for August 1929 instructs boys, in plain English, on the making and using of a calibrated 50-field colour bar for use in measuring humidity. This hints that in earlier decades it would also have been normal for a boy’s home weather station to include a psychometrical colour bar.

What a missed opportunity, then, in which Bleiler might have gone on to explore what appears to be good evidence for Lovecraft’s early interest in the subtlest changes and hues of colour in special filter papers or in globules of atmospheric moisture on glass — and their potential presaging of the invisible onset of implacably destructive weather-forces.

Nor does Bleiler connect the ownership of “six maximum and medium thermometers by Castella” with the “6 circular windows with shutters, in case of severe storm” in the young Lovecraft’s “Climatological Station”. It seems the young Lovecraft had a six-sided box for his thermometers, most likely adjustable and with numbers on it to identify each one. Presumably a formula then corrected for slight imprecision among the six (due to wind, shade, sunlight etc) and gave a precisely averaged and more reliable temperature. The form of the box is a small point, but it helps to indicate how seriously the young Lovecraft took the science. It may also faintly amuse modern RPG six-sided dice fans, to know that the young Lovecraft had a large six-sided box, presumably capable of spinning and from which he read off numbers.

The next essay is Dylan Henderson on “The Subversive Nature of H.P. Lovecraft’s Occult Detective”. Seven pages of fifteen are taken up in an initial recounting the sub-genre’s history, up to and including August Derleth’s Solar Pons tales. While this history may be familiar to some, it does serve to show the sub-genre was becoming rather formulaic by the writing of “The Horror in Red Hook” in August 1925. Henderson then usefully outlines the several ways in which Lovecraft’s Detective Malone departs from the formula: Malone works alone without the usual sidekick or love-interest; he can discover little; he finds he is powerless in the face of a vast occult conspiracy; he is shattered by what little he does discover. As such, “Red Hook” was obviously a subversion of sub-genre expectations, but at no point in Henderson’s essay was I convinced that it was ever meant to be a parody of it. I suggest that Lovecraft had not read enough in the sub-genre at that point to risk parody — for instance at that point he had not yet even encountered Blackwood’s ‘John Silence’ occult detective tales, or the other key stories he would encounter while researching his long survey essay Supernatural Literature. Nor had he read Chambers’ similar Slayer of Souls (1920).

Also, I would add that Red Hook has a then-contemporary setting, which also makes it an unlikely vehicle for parody. Lovecraft the humorist could have spun out a hilarious cane-twirling cape-swishing parody of a historical gothic detective, had he wished. No, my feeling is that Lovecraft was writing commercially for a specific pulp audience after studying a specific magazine in the market, and would know that even a covert parody would not get past the editor and sell. But neither could he write to formula, however much he might wish to land in Detective Tales and open a much-needed new market. He might at least innovate a little, and do so much as Henderson outlines. Henderson’s essay thus suffers from not unearthing the precise circumstances of the writing of “Red Hook” — which can now be found on page 331 of Letters to Family, and elsewhere regarding the new Detective Tales. The tale was plotted and written at great speed over a solid ‘clear the decks’ period of about 36 hours, and it then seems likely that this was something of a pulp speed-writing experiment for Lovecraft. How quickly could he turn out a long saleable $50 pulp ‘shocker’ story that addressed his own concerns and his lived local experience, and also the wider politics of the nation (i.e. the relative failure of the Immigration Act of 1924, on which so many hopes had been pinned)? A story that had all that, and yet remained somewhat outside ‘the formula’ that Detective Tales expected? Given the speed of writing and these competing demands, it is perhaps to be expected that the resulting tale is a rather ungainly entertainment and a ‘botched gamble’. But at least it still entertains and provides useful — if rather pungent — glimpses into Lovecraft’s psychological state at the start of August 1925 as his pressure-cooker mind began to boil over on the edge of an odorous and noisy New York City slum. As I have shown elsewhere, “Red Hook” also accurately encapsulates various ethnographic and topographic details that no other writer of the time recorded — making it a useful item for the historical record. Lovecraft’s Norwegians, Syrians and other national groups were not figments of his overheated imagination, as some have claimed.

If anything, though, I would suggest that the tale’s central innovation is that Malone is not the hero. The attentive reader eventually and suddenly realises that Suydam can be understood as having risked all, including passing through death, to foil the cult’s raising of Lilith by toppling her vital occult pedestal back into the watery abyss at the key moment. Suydam can be seen as the real hero of “Red Hook”, and that I feel is the real innovation of Lovecraft’s experiment with the occult detective story.

In the next essay, “Yuletide Horrors”, Cecelia Hopkins-Brewer closely examines “The Festival” and the poem “The Messenger”. I was not convinced of a direct parody of her suggested source, but certainly there are general similarities and apparently both Lovecraft’s work and her hymn have an interesting 6-6-6 beat. One wonders if the canny Weird Tales editor Wright noticed this in “The Messenger” — he published the first three verses which are said to have the 6-6-6 beat. Hopkins-Brewer also interestingly surveys Lovecraft’s activities at various Christmas holidays, though omits 1924, 1926-27, and 1929-32.

Will Murray’s “The Doomed Lovecrafts of Rochester” then offers a clear account of the convoluted strands of madness and death which wove themselves around the benighted Lovecraft family in the later Victorian period, leading ultimately into an equally clear account of the later facts concerning Lovecraft’s mother and her madness. He does not however note the walks and talks Lovecraft had with his mother when she was mad, or Derleth’s involvement in getting the Hess memories of the madness. I believe the quotes given come from Derleth’s interview with Hess, probably conducted in late 1948.

Ken Faig Jr. has “John Osborne Austin’s Seven Club Tales: Did They Inspire Lovecraft?” We know that in 1920 Lovecraft had an idea for what sounds like a similar book, which he described to Kliener as “a hideous novel to be entitled The Club of the Seven Dreamers”. Faig gives us succinct plot summaries from Austin’s Seven Club Tales, and from these I can see some passing similarities to works such as “Cool Air”, “The White Ship”, “Dagon” and “The Strange High House in the Mist”.

Andrew Gipe-Lazarou then surveys “The ‘Extreme Fantasy’ of Delirious New York” as experienced by Lovecraft. This long essay comes from a thesis and suffers from an unfortunate overuse of architect-speak and acronyms (e.g. “the WFM is incompatible with the PCM”), but is stimulating on Lovecraft’s topophilia and has much to say in linking this with perceptions of architectural forms. For instance he makes an interesting point about Lovecraft’s understanding of the “secondary aestheticism” of colonial architecture and its ability to generate a sense of weirdness (Selected Letters II). This phrase indicates the “creative unevenness” that retains traces of the owner and builders, and the “responsiveness to the natural terrain” that might in certain lights and weathers make the structure seem to somehow be living. Massing of buildings in itself may be evocative in a Dunsanian manner, even if the buildings are not (e.g. the rooftops of Marblehead) and it is suggested that this viewing principle was transferred by Lovecraft to certain early views of the lit-up towers of New York City. Also noted is the sudden transition from one psychic zone to another — Gipe-Lazarou quotes from Lovecraft on his own adoption of this TARDIS-like psychogeographic strategy, most likely learned from McNeil in Hell’s Kitchen…

visitors not infrequently commented on the virtual transition from one world to another implied in the simple act of stepping within my door. Outside—Red Hook. Inside—Providence, R.I.!” (Selected Letters II).

But later in the essay Gipe-Lazarou over-reaches when he recalls Lovecraft’s Syrian neighbours and suggests that in “Red Hook” Lovecraft “is implicating the Syrian” in his new-found horror of the city, suggesting a depiction of “the Syrian’s anti-city”. Because the text of the story does not support such claims about the Syrian immigrants of the time, clearly stating that the cryptic and furtive Lilith-worshipping newcomers are…

eloquently repudiated by the great mass of Syrians in and around Atlantic Avenue

“Eloquently” suggests a certain cultivation and discernment, and may even hint that Lovecraft had come to understand — after some initial annoyance at their exotic wailing music coming through his walls — that the large number of Syrians in the city were actually refugee Christians who were fleeing persecution in their homeland.

Nor do two quotes, given by Gipe-Lazarou to support his point, hold up when checked. He writes…

The Syrian, according to Lovecraft, is responsible for the death of old New York … he is an agent of “de-provincialisation” of America and the merger with the modern “world-culture” stream (MWM 453)

No, the Syrian is not held “responsible”. Because when one looks up the given reference in Letters to Maurice W. Moe (‘MWM’) there is no mention at all of Syrians. Lovecraft is talking to Dwyer about the effects of industrialisation on the old-time provincial New England and the consequent intellectual feting of a “decadent” European culture, in a regional attempt by New England to “deprovincialise and merge herself into that stream of [the] world-culture” whose members understand themselves as being a “good European”. Lovecraft is not blaming the Syrian(s) who lodged with him in the Clinton St. boarding house, is not mentioning Syrians, and is talking at length about New England and Europe. Indeed, there is counter-evidence — a Syrian tailor tailored (very amicably) Lovecraft’s fraying clothes, and he was served (very amicably) coffee in at least one Syrian cafe in Red Hook.

The next essay in the Annual is “An Arctic Mystery: The Lovecraftian North Pole” by Edward Guimont. The author tracks down and itemises a wealth of Arctic references in Lovecraft. He finds no influence on the story “Polaris” from Dunsany, “as is often claimed”. He also draws together some interesting threads on small points — for example the Arctic explorer ship Terror was once stationed nearby at Block Island, where Faig has determined Lovecraft had two ancestors as founding settlers. Guimont also amusingly points out that, at Lovecraft’s birth, the possibilities of Ice Age mammoths being extinct in Alaska was by no means certain and their presence there was still being discussed. The essay also has some useful and careful tallying of the historical record with Lovecraft’s letters re: the genesis of At The Mountains of Madness (page 151). Guimont also makes reference to a Lovecraft-as-character, found in Derleth’s unimpressive pulp story “Beyond the Threshold” (1941). Lovecraft is there Josiah Alwyn, explorer of remote regions including the Arctic. I note that, in a curious co-incidence of name and profession, Tolkien also had a far-travelled explorer Alwin Lowdham in his abandoned “Notion Club Papers” (1945).

Cesar Guarde-Paz’s “Textual Sources and Corrigenda Minora to “A Living Heritage: Roman Architecture in Today’s America”” seeks to correct the text of Lovecraft’s “A Living Heritage”, via exemplary delving into the textual history and some close squinting at the famously fourth-dimensional handwriting. Along the way we learn that Lovecraft had not only access to the famous 9th Encyclopaedia Britannica, but also to its multi-volume companion American Revisions and Additions to EB. Good to know, as I would not have known that from consulting my edition of Lovecraft’s Library.

Next is Simone Turco’s “On Hawthorne’s Unwitting “Children”: The Strange Case of H. P. Lovecraft”. Drawing on Burleson’s early work on Hawthorne he makes the interesting point that the boy Lovecraft’s determined interest in the pagan world might be understood as a juvenile purging of the Christian notion of ‘sin’, this then suggesting a certain later alienation from Hawthorn’s preoccupation with the literary idea of ‘unpardonable sin’. As I’ve suggested elsewhere, there might however have been some unconscious displacement from the religious to the biological for Lovecraft — the idea of a tainted heredity, understood within a eugenics framework such as the four-generation family degeneration theory, might have operated in a similarly ‘unpardonable sin’ manner for the adult Lovecraft. Turco’s finely written essay is excellent on the idea of ‘the house’ (pages 184-85) and comes to a firm conclusion.

The Annual concludes its essays with Duncan Norris’s very long “Zeitgeist and Untoten: Lovecraft and the Walking Dead”. This assiduously goes in search of the walking dead in Lovecraft, first distinguishing them from other forms (‘the ghoul’ etc) and then ploughing through story after story. The author finds “The Outsider” to be the first unambiguous use of such and concludes — after also surveying the cultural after-life of his zombies — that Lovecraft created zombies in their modern form. The master’s standing as “the font of the modern zombie is unchallengeable”.

Incidentally, Norris notices the source of “The Outsider” epigraph in Keats and calls it “a curious choice” — as it references two lovers illicitly escaping from a crowded castle. I would suggest that, as we know that the tale was read to potential marriage partner Myrta Alice Little, this may be one of the small changes she is known to have offered after the face-to-face reading. Elsewhere in the essay there is also the fascinating suggestion that the hit movie The Mummy (December 1932) appears to have borrowed a key plot element from Lovecraft’s “Under the Pyramids”. Was Hollywood borrowing from Lovecraft as early as 1932? Could be. Did Lovecraft notice? So far as I am aware he saw it with the Long family, but his opinion of it went unrecorded.

Finally the reader is then treated to some short but informative book reviews, mostly of recent books of Lovecraft’s letters (Wandrei, Talman, and the expanded Galpin). But among these there is also a review of a translated book. The Flock of Ba-Hui is by a pseudonymous writer of samizdat Lovecraftian tales in China, and S.T. Joshi treats these tales to a glowing and positive review.

“Lays of the Octapods”

26 Saturday Jun 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

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A new and tentacular Edward Lear poem has been discovered, “Lays of the Octapods” (1882), a companion to his known short poem “The Octopods and Reptiles”. It begins…

When the leaves were turning brown
Five hundred thousand Octopods
All painfully came down
And on the back of every one
A Pofflikopp held fast …

These appear, judging by the rest of the nonsense poem, to have been air-octopii that fell to earth because they had died of indigestion.

By Crom! It’s Roy Thomas…

24 Thursday Jun 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Podcasts etc.

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From Howard Days 2021 The Cromcast now has the keynote speech by Roy Thomas in audio.

Those interested in comics as they are in 2021 will also find much interest in an outstandingly interesting podcast interview with Kristian Donaldson (Supermarket, The Dark), including an account of a month-long road-trip that ping-ponged between military sites such as Area 51 and hippy communes in the South-West. He’s getting a new self-funded digitally-created graphic novel out of the curious tensions he felt between those communities. The interview is very long, but downloading and then playing it at 1.2 or 1.3 speed and deepening pitch works nicely (the AIMP player can do that with ease). The .MP3 download hides here…

Nightmares of Providence

23 Wednesday Jun 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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A new 64 page comic, Nightmares of Providence #1. It appears to be a one-shot connected with a Kickstarter stretch-goal, part of a campaign for a deluxe collected edition of Alan Moore’s Providence comics. But Nightmares is by other artists/writers. Amazon UK knows nothing, but it should be shipping any day now… if the comics-trade catalogue Previews is to be believed.

In the ravine of memory…

21 Monday Jun 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, New discoveries

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At £18 each can’t afford either of these antique stereo cards, but this is highly likely to be Lovecraft’s childhood ravine, adjacent to the road before the road grading. The photographer is from Providence.

Road and Seekonk.

And presumably the ravine adjacent to the same road.

A comparison with a winter picture from a lower elevation, known to show the results of the extensive and earth-moving and road-grading work that swept away much of Lovecraft’s favourite haunt of middle-childhood. As I wrote of this in my essay on the Seekonk site in Lovecraft in Historical Context #4…

The [Blackstone Park, Seekonk] shorefront road now runs as a barrier between the pond and the river, to join up the River Rd with Irving Avenue. Above is an undated photo of this corner, looking south-east, after the grading of the Irving Avenue extension and the connection of the two roads (possibly circa 1900). One can still see road surveying stakes in the foreground. My feeling is that the height of the bluffs on the north side of York Pond were lowered by earth-moving at this time.

I have the eBay pictures ready be posted as colourised up-res versions in due course. But some may want to own the original stereo card pictures.

‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: a hot day under the Brooklyn Elevated

18 Friday Jun 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Housekeeping, Picture postals

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A hot day under the Brooklyn Elevated railway, 1933, or the ‘El’ as Lovecraft’s letters often called the city’s elevated train service.

The trains would periodically thunder noisily above the walker, as seen in the picture. In a letter Lovecraft once reported that his friend Frank Belknap Long had to ‘hike for the El’, meaning Long had to walk a long distance on the sidewalk under the high rails. With the aim of reaching the wooden stairs leading up to an elevated platform, and a rail line heading in the desired direction.

Off the daily posting schedule for a while

17 Thursday Jun 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Housekeeping

≈ Leave a comment

As the summer (and much reading and writing) beckons, I’m taking Tentaclii off the daily posting schedule from tomorrow. There should still be several posts a week here, but don’t expect the usual regular daily posts for a while. Daily posting will return in due course.

Robert E. Howard Days 2021

17 Thursday Jun 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Podcasts etc., REH

≈ Leave a comment

Adventures Fantastic brings the first report on the 2021 Robert E. Howard Days event in Texas, and has pictures. The delayed event managed to go ahead, complete with veteran comics writer Roy Thomas as guest of honour.

There’s a Robert E. Howard Days 2021: Cimmeria reading video on YouTube, the Cromcast has a full recording of the “R.E.H. in Comics” panel, and doubtless other recordings will be online soon.

Lovecraft in Die #17

16 Wednesday Jun 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

H.P. Lovecraft appears as the ‘big reveal’ at the end of the recently-released serial comic Die #16, and now makes a sustained as-character appearance in the current issue #17. Die is based on a popular RPG game, it seems.

In the comic he is deemed to have died in 1919, after blinding himself because of the horrors he was seeing and learning about. He is here the blind ‘Master of Dreams’ who serves as brief ‘realm-guide and info-dump’ for the super-hero-like RPG team. I say brief, but he appears for 14 pages, which all look superb and are kind of fun. Lovecraft is then rewarded by the team by being easily killed with a single head-bash, because he is “no longer needed” (no… I couldn’t figure that bit out, either…). His death (again) unleashes his hordes of nightmare creature-dreams on his dream-realm and thus on the team. Moral: ‘Don’t kill the Master, because it will unleash his horrors’, I guess.

But then the team just teleport away from the monsters (erm… Wellsian centipedes?) and the brained Lovecraft. Which was rather lame, I thought. Die has superb art and interesting fantasy-horror concepts going on, but possibly some too-easy get-outs. But perhaps that’s the way it is in the table-top RPG version of Die. Don’t like a NPC character? Just kill him off… In trouble? Just teleport away…

I guess now we wait for the trade-paperback for this Die story-arc to see how it all plays out and if it makes sense when read in full. The trade is due early November as Die, Volume 4: Bleed, with 168 pages.

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