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Tentaclii

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

Tentaclii

Monthly Archives: September 2023

Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival

30 Saturday Sep 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Scholarly works

≈ 1 Comment

The forthcoming book Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology (December 2023) may interest some readers…

If a literary movement arises but no one notices, is it still a movement? […] this anthology collects for the first time over fifty speculative poets. […] Alongside such established names as C.S. Lewis, Patrick Rothfuss, Edwin Morgan, Poul Anderson, Jo Walton, P.K. Page, and W.H. Auden, this anthology also includes representative texts from cultural movements such as contemporary neo-paganism and the Society for Creative Anachronism.

No mention of Tolkien, but I guess it may have been difficult or expensive to get the Tolkien Estate’s permission to reprint?

See also the 2021 article in Studies in the Fantastic, titled “Antiquarianism Underground: The Twentieth-century Alliterative Revival in American Genre Poetry” on…

a wholly neglected subset of the alliterative revival [which] involves American genre poets working in fantasy, horror, and science fiction.

In ‘The Cabinet’

29 Friday Sep 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Picture postals

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This week on ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’, the old home of the Rhode Island Historical Society. No interior pictures that I can find though, which seems a pity. Still, here’s the exterior…

On the right we see the former home of the Rhode Island Historical Society, aka ‘The Cabinet’, and with the name carved above the entrance. Opened in November 1844, an event in which one William Gammell (Professor of Rhetoric) gave the opening address. Gammell was of course the family name of Lovecraft’s aunts. I don’t have the genealogical wizardry of Ken Faig Jr. at my fingertips, but I wonder if Prof. Gammell was somewhere in Lovecraft’s family tree?

The city’s Public Library was then able to furnish me with a bigger but rather more garish scan of a postcard using the same picture…

It housed the Society’s library, and by the early 1890s had added a two-story domed extension. At this point a booklet was produced titled The Library and Cabinet of the Rhode Island Historical Society (truncated scan) and which gave an overview of the contents of its special collections. The booklet reveals the Society held the “Whipple papers” for 1661-1791, which I guess might have been Lovecraft’s grandfather’s line? They certainly later took the papers of Lovecraft’s uncle…

After his death last year, the R.I. Historical Society took over his unpublished manuscripts.” (November 1916, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner)

One wonders if they still have them? Has any Lovecraftian ever looked through them?

Anyway there we have two reasons why Lovecraft might have occasionally visited. Also noted by the 1890s booklet are 1,700 bound local newspaper volumes. There are no further details of the library holdings, which would have been beyond the scope of the booklet, but at that time it held 15,000 books and 35,000 pamphlets.

Then “Brown acquired the [old] building in 1942”, according to the current Brown Repository notes. I’m uncertain of the exact date of the move of the library but Joshi has…

At the very end of his life Lovecraft saw the opening of the John Brown house (1786) as a museum, and it is now the home of the Rhode Island Historical Society.” (Joshi, I Am Providence)

New home of the Historical Society.

“At the very end of his life” and the “1942” date both suggest that in the colour postcards above we see the location for the “Historical Society” that Lovecraft would have known and used, when he wrote things like …

I looked up the R. I. [Rhode Island] Casey line in J. O. Austin’s Genealogical Dictionairy of R. I. at the R. I. Historical Society. I hadn’t done any looking since over a year ago, and had never tackled this book before — but bless me…” (Selected Letters II, page 323).

This was written in March 1929, so “over a year ago” suggests he may have been there late 1927, for some post-“Dexter Ward” work.

Also note that in his “The Shunned House”…

I was forced to ransack both the Rhode Island Historical Society and and Shepley Library

And in Dexter Ward, Ward’s…

hours were spent mainly at home, in rambling walks, in his classes and drills, and in pursuit of antiquarian and genealogical data at the City Hall, the State House, the Public Library, the Athenaeum, the Historical Society, the John Carter Brown and John Hay Libraries of Brown University, and the newly opened Shepley Library in Benefit Street.

Today the ‘old’ Historical Society building is ‘Mencoff Hall’ (68 Waterman Street, Providence). Luxuriously renovated and modernised, expanded up to four floors, and now devoted to Brown’s advanced post-doc training in Population Studies — seemingly as the subject relates to disease and public health.

In a nice nod to history, today the Rhode Island Historical Society’s online catalogue is still called ‘The Cabinet’.

I’d welcome interior pictures of this pre-war ‘Cabinet’, if anyone knows of any.

Audio recordings from PulpFest 2023

28 Thursday Sep 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Podcasts etc., REH, Scholarly works

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Streaming audio recordings from PulpFest 2023, now available. The list includes, among others…

* Sword and sorcery in “The Unique Magazine” [Weird Tales]

* Weird Tales on radio

* Those weird men’s adventure magazines

* Illustrating Conan for the commercial market

* Weird Editors

* Doc Savage and his offspring

No .MP3 downloads, but anyone handy with “Inspect element” and DIV-wrangling will find the link they want.

There are also dates for your 2024 diary. PulpFest 2024 will be in Pittsburgh, USA, from the 1st – 4th August 2024.

Built-in Orderly Organized Knowledge

27 Wednesday Sep 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Podcasts etc.

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An amusing review of the amazing Built-in Orderly Organized Knowledge device.

Amazon Historical Prices

27 Wednesday Sep 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

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A new UserScript plugs an Amazon Historical Prices graph into each Amazon listing page. Possibly of use to book dealers tracking price trends over time, or those seeking to buy a more expensive item (perhaps a few weeks ahead of the possible purchase point, as ‘the countdown to Christmas’ has reportedly started very early this year). One might even use it to spot trends (e.g. the item ‘tends to become cheaper for a short while, once every two weeks’) caused by an AI spotting page-visiting trends among other potential buyers. The script’s code looks clean to me.

de Camp’s other essays, more essays

26 Tuesday Sep 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in de Camp, Historical context, Scholarly works

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Spraguedecampfan has a new long review of Blond Barbarians & Noble Savages (1975) by L. Sprague de Camp. Not on Archive.org. As de Camp wrote of the item…

This group of essays is a collection of ideas that have come to me in studying the lives and works of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard

And news of a new book of essays, Beyond the Black Stranger and Others: New Essays on Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft (2023) being essays by Charles Hoffman. In Lovecraft…

* Flights to Hidden Lands: H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and James Hilton’s Lost Horizon – A Study in Contrasts

* Some Notes on Poe and Lovecraft

330 pages, currently in paperback only.

Dungeon, 1986-2010

25 Monday Sep 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, REH

≈ Leave a comment

New on Archive.org, a long run of Dungeon magazine from 1986-2010. Being the official D&D magazine, by the look of it. Even if you’re not into RPGs, it has a wealth of illustrations.

Also the official news ‘zine from 1981 to 2004.

The Loved Dead

25 Monday Sep 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Podcasts etc.

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Just the thing for a damp Monday, a new and listenable human reading of “The Loved Dead” by C.M. Eddy Jr. & H.P. Lovecraft.

Fables, read

24 Sunday Sep 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

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I’m now paging toward the end of the Fables series, reading through the 22 x ‘trade’ collections (2002-2015). This is the DC series I blogged about recently because the maker has sent all his Fables IP into the public domain.

I’ve only read one DC book in the last 20 years, and without the news of the IP release I’d have been especially wary of a book featuring ‘re-imagined fairy-tale characters’. To me, ‘re-imagined’ is a dog-whistle for ‘made politically-correct’. But a sampling of Fables found it to have excellent brisk storytelling, no political tub-thumping, and the artwork becomes very pleasing after the first couple of trades because it often somewhat emulates Jack Kirby (minus the krackle). Everything is very polished on the page, and as you’d expect…

Fables does have a bit of a creaky start during the first one and a half books, as everything gets hoisted into place. It’s also very “talky” for a comic. You do wonder if being forced to remove 50 words from each and every completed Fables non-action page would have improved the reading experience. Vol. 13 (‘The Great Fables Crossover’) I found to be a no-consequences mid-series filler and it’s definitely skip-able. But otherwise, great… absorbing and imaginative comics entertainment with superb storytelling. How memorable it will be in toto I’m not yet sure. Will it be like those blockbuster TV series, which gripped at the time, yet can’t even be remembered six months later? I have yet to find out, since I still have the last three trade books to go. But I read that the series has a “very satisfying” ending.

Apart from one passing and somewhat jokey mention of “Yuggoth”, there are no Lovecraft influences that I can see. But of course, now it’s public domain, there’s no stopping a Lovecraft crossover.

Lovecraft Arts & Sciences 2023 Winter Fundraiser

23 Saturday Sep 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

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The Lovecraft Arts & Sciences 2023 Winter Fundraiser has opened on GoFundMe.

The Art Club

22 Friday Sep 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Picture postals

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This week on ‘picture postals from Lovecraft’, a continuation of last week’s theme. A look at some of the little side-ways that Lovecraft enjoyed and ventured down. Here is what looks like a press photograph (likely made with the ubiquitous pressman’s Rolleiflex square format camera, possibly late 1950s?). We see the Providence Art Club seen from an unusual angle. I’ve newly colorised the picture, which I’m fairly sure is from the Public Library collection.

A little way ahead of the cameraman, but before the artists on the sidewalk, we glimpse the archway and cobbled entrance… which was where Lovecraft used to often meet ‘Old Man’ after the master’s return to Providence…

He belonged to a market at the foot of Thomas Street — the hill street mentioned in Cthulhu as the abode of the young artist […] Occasionally he would stroll up the hill as far as the Art Club, seating himself at the entrance to one of those old-fashioned courtyard archways (formerly common everywhere) for which Providence is so noted. At night, when the electric lights make 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.

Opening letters…

21 Thursday Sep 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books

≈ Leave a comment

A useful new page at hplovecraft.com details exactly what’s in the book H.P. Lovecraft: Letters to Hyman Bradofsky and Others. Includes his letters to…

a pair of brilliant weird artists, Virgil Finlay and Frank Utpatel

According to S.T. Joshi’s latest blog post this is… “the second-to-last volume in the Lovecraft Letters series, to be followed next year by A Sense of Proportion: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long”. He also notes that the new For the Outsider: Poems Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft is in his hands.

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