07 Saturday May 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A 1968 postcard painted by one “Pennington”, advertising a Lovecraft rock-band concert in California. Could this be Bruce Pennington, doing ‘Lovecraft the writer’ (Dreamlands sunsets etc) via ‘Lovecraft the band’?
Update: No, sadly not Bruce.
06 Friday May 2022
Posted in Historical context, Picture postals
This post follows on from ‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: Brooklyn Botanical Gardens – part one. This week I take a look at the Japanese Gardens, a favourite of Lovecraft when in New York City.
Reading Lovecraft’s letters, one might imagine these gardens were perhaps something rather small and oblong. Picturesque but, in a busy city, rather ‘crammed in’ alongside the overshadowing museum. In reality they were effectively a large and highly landscaped park, some way from the museum building and maturing nicely by the mid 1920s. They formed just the corner of an even larger park. This larger park had many features, including a run of gigantic tropical conservatories that in the 1920s were said to be some of the most extensive and well-stocked in the world. In the view seen below the Museum is located in the top right, with the Japanese ‘hill and pond’ garden park below it.
Here we see one of the Japanese garden’s small shrines in the Lovecraft period, newly colourised by me. The artist seen painting was actually one of the staff, and thus was very lucky. Because the institution’s journal for the period shows that artists and photographers were strictly forbidden from bringing any kind of tripod, stand, easel, seat or sitting device. Thankfully dogs were also banned, which must have pleased Lovecraft.
The rest of the pictures are rather poor quality, but are from the Lovecraft period. As such they indicate what he would have enjoyed in one of his favourite places.
The White memorial, for the philanthropist — importer by trade — who made the vast gardens possible. He died shortly before Lovecraft came to New York.
The Japanese rock garden seen in 1917, with the planting around the boulders still maturing.
The Lily Pools outside the Conservatories were obviously meant to ease the landscapes of the Japanese Garden into the long terraces that ran alongside the Conservatories.
One of the Conservatories seen in 1936.
The omnipresent gardens were almost terrifying in their strangeness, with bizarre and unfamiliar forms of vegetation nodding over broad paths lined with curiously carven monoliths. Abnormally vast fern-like growths predominated; some green, and some of a ghastly, fungoid pallor. Among them rose great spectral things resembling calamites, whose bamboo-like trunks towered to fabulous heights. Then there were tufted forms like fabulous cycads, and grotesque dark-green shrubs and trees of coniferous aspect. Flowers were small, colourless, and unrecognisable, blooming in geometrical beds and at large among the greenery. … Fungi of inconceivable size, outlines, and colours speckled the scene in patterns bespeaking some unknown but well-established horticultural tradition.”
— from The Shadow out of Time.
05 Thursday May 2022
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Newly listed on Hippocampus…
1. H. P. Lovecraft: Miscellaneous Letters.
Various letters to circles and correspondents, fragments of letters to Sonia, and also the letters Lovecraft sent to various local and national publications.
2. H. P. Lovecraft: Letters to Woodburn Harris and Others.
Letters to Woodburn Harris, Walter J. Coates, William Lumley.
Publication due in August 2022, according to the pages, and pre-ordering now. Both newly annotated.
According to Joshi’s recent “what is to come” list for the letters, by September 2022 the Lovecraft letters should then only have the following as ‘forthcoming’…
Letters to Hyman Bradofsky and Others
Letters with Frank Belknap Long (2 Vols.)
+ the single volume mega-index to all the published volumes of letters.
For some reason, from the UK I regularly need to turn on a USA VPN to get to the Hippocampus Press site. Anyone else outside the USA have the same problem?
04 Wednesday May 2022
Posted in Lovecraft as character, New books
New to me, a novel with Lovecraft as an extended character. It’s Martian Falcon (2015) by Alan K. Baker, who I find is a fellow Brummie from Birmingham, England.
The title is a play on the famous noir The Maltese Falcon. Lovecraft becomes a private investigator along with Charles Fort, in the New York City of 1925. A 1925 in which “the supernatural is real”. The Kindle edition is £2 in the UK. In paper it runs to 292 pages.
Skimming the reviews quickly builds a picture of a fun steampunk / mythos / pulp-noir / Martian mash-up adventure in an alternative New York. Sounds great.
Sadly, despite the cover’s ‘Lovecraft and Fort’ strapline seeming to suggest a series, there don’t appear to have been any more such novels.
04 Wednesday May 2022
Posted in Housekeeping
Well, what a month. One of those months where you do a lot of work… and it feels like you’re mostly just back where you started.
Not much in terms of new journals this month, though I noted that Hippocampus has listed the ’emerging scholars’ journal Lovecraftian Proceedings #4 (February 2022) in paper. The ebook of this for #4 has yet to appear on Amazon. Elsewhere I spotted that The Journal of Dracula Studies returned (it had vanished into the mists earlier, with a swirl of its cape). Various new scholarly online items were found and added to my Open Lovecraft page. Joshi confirmed I’ll have items in both his Penumbra journal and the Lovecraft Annual, in due course.
In new books, the paperback edition of the Joshi-edited anthology His Own Most Fantastic Creation: Stories about H.P. Lovecraft appeared. Also Joshi’s 1920s Lovecraft-as-detective novel Honeymoon in Jail. Ken Faig Jr.’s new book of research essays Lovecraftian People and Places appeared on Amazon and seems to be shipping now.
Various reviews and musings were noted and linked here, as well as relevant news from the German and Hungarian Lovecraftians. I also briefly caught up with Robert E. Howard material and events, ahead of the fast-approaching Howard Days in Texas.
On the Letters, I posted my final notes on reading the Galpin book of Lovecraft letters and some addresses in this led me to do some detective work in Cleveland… and I was pleased to newly discover the location of the cafe that Lovecraft and the rest of the crowd frequented during that fateful Cleveland visit. I also posted my notes on reading Selected Letters I, preliminary to tackling a re-read of the rest of the Selected Letters over the summer. From this I discovered the exact location and fabric and destruction-date of the ‘observatory’ tower on Nentaconhant Hill, via Selected Letters and some detective work. So far as I know these data points are also a new discovery. I also un-puzzled some of the puzzling aspects of the ending of Lovecraft’s war-story “The Temple”.
In my ‘Picture Postals’ posts I looked yet again at the foot of College Street, and found not one but two good pictures. Which just goes to show that, even when you think a particular place has been exhausted of old pictures, there may yet be more to be found. One of the two new pictures was a magnificent one showing the looming Industrial Trust building under construction, and I newly colourised this. While writing a post for a Patreon patron on the Brooklyn Museum, I realised that there are now pictures of Lovecraft’s adjacent beloved ‘Hill and Pool’ Japanese garden. Not great pictures, from scans of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record journal (1912-1944), but they are from the correct period. This led me to Part One of a look at the gardens in the form of their adjacent exotic hothouses.
In other ‘Picture Postals’ post I managed to find a good picture from inside the Providence Opera House and of the actual stage on which the young Lovecraft once strutted and slung slabs of Shakespeare at the audience. Judging by other online collections of such pictures I am the first to alight on a picture of the actual stage. Ken Faig also kindly pointed me to a cine home-movie showing the Market Place fruit-market site on the waterfront in November/December 1934, and a Lovecraft-alike man shopping for a Christmas tree (as Lovecraft did, for his new home at No. 66). Incidentally, through dipping at random into another volume of the Letters I learned that Lovecraft’s previous home at Barnes seems to have lacked furnace-heating for much of the time he was there. He seems to have only had piped heating there in the last two years?
Looking ahead in time I itemised some Lovecraft anniversaries for 2023, including the 50th anniversary of Lovecraft’s breakthrough into a mass market readership in America and the UK in 1973. I also looked at authors entering the public domain in 2023, with an eye to the more unusual or re-workable items. I suppose we will never be able now to confirm the Arthur Leeds death-date (he would have been entering the public domain in 2023) and thus will have to rely on the slipping years to gradually make all his tales public domain in the USA.
Tentaclii has of course returned. The old website host was, I think, trying to get rid of the legacy web-hosting sites it inherited many many takeovers ago, of which I was one. I paid them, but their unreachable ‘support’ meant that there was no way to find out why jurn.org was no longer responsive. I gave up on them and on the money paid, and just decided to move the backups to a wholly new domain on a new paid host, and to forget about the old address. It seemed the only option. The old site still hasn’t come back, so I now feel justified in the move. So, as you can see, Tentaclii is now located at https://www.jurn.link/tentaclii/ and though there was some initial hassle with getting the ‘domain verification’ email that problem is now sorted. As such the blog should now stay online for years, and is also now a lot faster and more responsive. It’s on a large service that only does hosting and does it well, and is also unlikely to get bought-out by some uncaring conglomeration that also does 100 other things and doesn’t much care about its websites. As such the blog and URL should hopefully stay online for a good few years now (sound of frantic tapping-on-wood…).
The site move was sadly not without cost, in money as well as a week of my time and frustration, and I really welcome PayPal donations from a generous benefactor to help cover the cost. The other way that readers can help is simply to link the new address in their own blog posts, and to spread the word on social media to those who might have lost track of where Tentaclii is. Many thanks. As usual, becoming a Patreon patron is also very much encouraged and encouraging.
Elsewhere in April, I completed a large ‘Carl Sagan’ special for the free Digital Art Live monthly magazine, and even managed to do a chunk of work on my forthcoming Tolkien mega-book.
03 Tuesday May 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
In the latest short-poetry collection from Libivox, a public-domain reading of the poem “The Dark Pool” by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, published as by ‘Francis Hard’ in the April 1925 edition — along with the Lovecraft/Eddy collaboration “Deaf, Dumb and Blind” and “The Wind That Tramps The World”.
Did the editor pop other poems in, when there was a page to fill? No. This seems to be his only one during the Lovecraft years. But he did have two in the magazine in early 1923, before his editorship…
* “The Closing Hand” in Weird Tales (March 1923).
* “The Snake Fiend” in Weird Tales (April 1923).
“The Dark Pool” runs to two minutes in a fine and well-paced reading.
Meanwhile, over in Canada… Lovecraft’s “At The Mountains of Madness” in an hour, on stage.
02 Monday May 2022
Posted in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, New books
S.T. Joshi’s blog announces that his new Lovecraft-as-character novel has been published. This is…
my detective novel Honeymoon in Jail, with Lovecraft and Sonia as the detectives … set in the spring of 1928, when HPL came to Brooklyn (unwillingly) to help Sonia set up a new hat shop.
Sounds fun. Available now in ebook and paper at 196 pages. The ebook is £3 in the UK. Possibly just the thing for a wet May ‘Bank Holiday’ Monday, as we often have here in the UK.
Also noted by Joshi is an amusing 1951 Jean Cocteau drawing of one of Lovecraft’s Deep Ones, currently for sale…
01 Sunday May 2022
Posted in Odd scratchings
Lovecraft would have had this slipping into his capacious mail-box in Spring 1935, the latest Marvel Tales. This is what it looked like…
Currently for sale on Abe at $100. Curious to think of Lovecraft being printed alongside John Wyndham (‘Harris’) and Clifford Simak, who I associate with the 1950s and early 60s. Lovecraft produced a short biography for the editor, but it never appeared. However, the much longer full text was kept and became “Some Notes on a Nonentity”.