I’m pleased to say that Tentaclii Towers has survived the first plague-winter. Not that there was much to survive, other than the lockdown itself. My fairly large electoral area registers just 17 deaths since last March, little more than the usual flu might bring. But now the winter is over and the surrounding rolling acres of inner-city Stoke-on-Trent are looking rather pleasant again, as the early springtime simmers through a string of warm days. A rhyme of magpies performs delightful acrobatics across the wide gravel driveway of the Towers. At night a peculiar smell bubbles up from ripening ponds.
This month my weekly ‘Picture Postals’ post looked at: Lovecraft and the Providence Opera house; discovered that a giant octopus and squid had once hung from the roof of the Brooklyn Museum; climbed aboard a typical motor-coach interior of the early-mid 1930s; and eyed the Museum of Natural History, Roger Williams Park, with particular reference to the ‘cosmic’ Lowell exhibition held there in 1916. As a post for a Patreon patron I also made a quick preliminary survey of ‘Poe’s home places and H.P Lovecraft’, with pictures. There were also photo-surveys which ventured inside both Weird Tales buildings in Chicago, the Dunham Building and then the Michigan-Chestnut, during the prime ‘Lovecraft years’.
I looked briefly at Samuel Loveman’s “young” friend Gervaise Butler and found two candidates. I suspect he is the younger of the two, a Gervaise Butler born 1904. Lovecraft knew him in 1929, and seems to have thought enough of him to have given him a little one-to-one mentoring in early 1929. In return Gervaise gave Lovecraft a scarce anthology of New England children’s rhymes and games. I also took a look for “Bernstein, late of the Golden Ball Inn”, Lovecraft’s alterations tailor in Providence. I found a fine picture of the young Robert Bloch at his typewriter, and new auction pictures of Lovecraft’s poem “Despair” (c. February 1919). I also rescued an engraving of the Ladd Observatory, 1890. I’ve started reading Lovecraft’s Letters to Family, and it should prove a mine of information. More on that and other volumes of letters over the coming months.
In new books I noted the non-fiction guidebook Le guide Lovecraftien de Providence; the revisionist The Emotional Life of the Great Depression from Oxford University Press; and Joshi’s new essay collection Progression of the Weird Tale as an ebook. Over on S.T. Joshi’s blog he noted that “Lovecraft’s Letters to E. Hoffmann Price and Richard F. Searight … will be out soon from Hippocampus.” I also came across an overlooked non-fiction book from 2018, El sonador de Providence. In imaginative works I see that The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poems of Clark Ashton Smith has appeared in an affordable format, and I also took a look at the Sonia/Lovecraft play “Lovecraft, mon amour” which is now being staged in France.
In new resources, I was pleased to find the Spanish comics journal Cuadernos de Comic (CuCo) has issues online from 2013-2020 in open access. Also a Lovecraft-era run of the journal Old-time New England. Elsewhere The Story Paper Collector (1941-66) is now freely available. Which reminds me that we really could do with the run of Lovecraft Studies online in full, at some point.
I surveyed DeviantArt for a choice gallery of recent new pictures of Lovecraft himself, and brought news that Archive.org has loaded up a million Thingiverse 3D models under Creative Commons, thus providing abundant artist reference and source material. Also in art, Lovecraft paperback-cover artist Ian Miller now has prints of the cover-paintings available. In comics I untangled and surveyed the various Toutain-edited and Toutain-sourced comics magazines of the 1970s and 80s, and suggested where one might find these amazing cultural artefacts today.
Not much in games this month, worth noting. The usual flow of indie-student ‘Lovecraft inspired’ games continues, but nothing big or remarkable. In RPGs the German Lovecraft Society has kindly been able to provide Germans with a full Lovecraftian open-source game framework based on Delta Green, which may bear fruit in due course. In the precarious world of movie-making it seems the suddenly ‘greenlit’ Lovecraft trilogy, being two movies set to follow the big-screen success of The Colour out of Space, has now been just as abruptly cancelled. Oh well, ‘easy come, easy go’.
There was very little new in audio this month, but the curious New England field recordings The Swamp In June and The Frog Pond were discovered on Archive.org. On YouTube there was the usual tidal-wave of Lovecraft readings, but in other types of material only a long survey-lecture of Lovecraft’s influence in Chile. In podcasts I find that the PodCatr service has become a lazy moggie and has failed to purr in my ear about the three new Voluminous episodes so far in 2021. Go get ’em.
As always, please consider becoming my Patron on Patreon. Even getting a boost of $1 a month is an encouragement. This month my Patrons have enabled me to grab a £12 bargain in the form of the new expanded Letters To Reinhardt Kleiner and Others (inc. 100 pages of letters and cards to Arthur Leeds), and also to pop the Lovecraft Annual 2020 into the same order for an extra £9. Expect a review in due course.
