A new project at Brown University, the Archaeology of College Hill. Taught, appropriately enough, more or less right alongside Lovecraft’s old garden, by the sound of it and by what can be seen in the photos.
The students have…
began an archaeological excavation of a green space next to Brown’s List Art Building … [the old] 58 College St. … In the late 1930s, it housed the now-inactive Alpha Tau Omega fraternity.
This was the closely adjacent building, close enough for Lovecraft to observe students from his windows, as his sunsets lowered into dusk and one might see into other houses before the curtains were drawn. The place featured in “The Haunter of the Dark”…
Students in the Psi Delta house, whose upper rear windows looked into Blake’s study, noticed the blurred white face at the westward window on the morning of the 9th, and wondered what was wrong with the expression.
Close enough for students to also see Lovecraft’s (Blake’s) expression while at his desk. There was no “Psi Delta” chapter in Providence, according to Annotated Lovecraft. It was thus Lovecraft’s polite gloss on the real Alpha Tau Omega. Presumably he had no wish to antagonise his direct neighbours, should they come to read the tale. As well they might. Yet the Tau Omega is referenced a little later in the story…
A youth in the Tau Omega fraternity house thought he saw a grotesque and hideous mass of smoke in the air just as the preliminary flash burst, but his observation has not been verified.
One hopes the current Brown students may move just a few yards back toward the List building in the future, and thus begin to excavate the site of Lovecraft’s garden. Now there’s an idea for a Mythos story.
Also relating to the List building, here’s one which may interest pychogeographers more than archaeologists. Just over 40 years after Lovecraft’s death, a 1978 meditation by Debra Shore on the top floor of the cramped and apparently rather spooky List Art Building. This is the modernist building the edge of which is seen in the above photo, and which stands on the site of Lovecraft’s home at 66 College Street. The peice for the Brown Alumni Monthly seems oblivious to the shade of Lovecraft, although obliquely evokes The Rats In the Walls, Pickman’s Model, Hypnos and others, for those who know their Lovecraft…
Located at the top of the building, where the stegosauric [i.e. dinosaur] ribs soar over the Providence skyline, rising massively from the Hill, is the painting Studio. [In which …] A sextet of crabs (blue, purple, green, gold, maroon, burnt orange) scrabble on a canvas, covering letters — which spell underneath, WE DREAM. […] A plaster head labeled “Phrenology” sits on a table. The skull is quartered, then divided further: the sections numbered. […]
The place is a mess, the floor lined with paper towels, cigarette packs, stretcher strips, empty turpentine cans, paper, cups – the debris of doing art. The floor is spattered with paint, scarred and splotched, scratched and marred. The walls have become a canvas, too, a backboard for design ideas to be batted against, an easel for a canvas to be stretched across, a sketchpad. Even the windows have become stained.
The sky, through one long slit window, is a subtle gradation of pastel hues, a value-study called sunset, a pale wash. Through this window, smeared with paint, the city glows, bustles, empties, rests. My reflection mirrors me; behind, the easels wait, the colors deepen in hue. The light flows in, and out. A new piece of cut canvas is draped over a new wooden frame, ready to be stretched and primed. Long strips of wood, like tallest reeds, lean against a wall. In the studio at dusk, a single painter paints. The others have packed up and gone home. The easels stretch toward the sky. A saxophone wails on the radio. Night comes.
