01 Friday Aug 2014
Posted in Scholarly works
The second issue of the open access journal Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction is now online. Includes “Good Practices for Archivists Working with Fan Materials and Communities”.
31 Thursday Jul 2014
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Ancient mushrooms meet high technology such as 3d printing.
Fungus Chair in 3D-Printed Mould
Eco-friendly mushroom fibre replacement for foam packaging…
“Building The World’s First Mushroom Tower”…
One wonders what might happen when future bio-engineering is added to the mix. Take a giant puffball (up to five feet wide) and bio-engineer it to form a dome rather than a solid ball, and make it grow four times as big. Spray the resultant 20ft high dome with a further bio-engineered organism that turns the flesh into a durable weather-proof form. Pop-up houses, literally — just take a good saw and cut out your doors and windows. When you’re finished with it for the summer, spray it with simple salt or suchlike, so the autumn rain gets through the membrane and the dome just rots down to the ground within days, leaving no trace.
Herb’s giant puffball.
“Mycotecture: architecture grown out of mushrooms” (90 minute video lecture) by Phil Ross…
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q5i9poYc3w?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
31 Thursday Jul 2014
Posted in Odd scratchings
The largest living organism ever found has been discovered in an ancient American forest. The Armillaria ostoyae … has been spreading its black shoestring filaments, called rhizomorphs, through the forest for an estimated 2,400 years, killing trees as it grows. It now covers 2,200 acres of the Malheur National Forest, in eastern Oregon.
30 Wednesday Jul 2014
Posted in New books
Excellent news — Bobby Derie’s Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos is set for August publication, according to a new Hippocampus Press catalogue listing. The author had mooted to me a much later date, so I’m pleased to see it due out so soon. I’d welcome a review copy of this book.
And coming in September from Hippocampus, the affordable paperback of S.T. Joshi’s two-volume Unutterable Horror: a history of supernatural fiction.
29 Tuesday Jul 2014
Posted in New books, Odd scratchings
S.T. Joshi is back from the Dunsany castle in Ireland, newly married (congratulations!), and with news on his blog that in Ireland…
“we came upon hundreds of uncollected or unpublished works [by Dunsany] of whose existence neither we nor anyone else were aware”
He also reports that the new “Lovecraft Annual (No. 8)” is apparently “imminent”.
29 Tuesday Jul 2014
Posted in Historical context
The Rhode Island School of Design’s Museum of Art has just completed extensive renovations of the Eliza G. Radeke Building, costing around $8.4m.
H.P. Lovecraft attended the grand opening in late April 1926. Probably on Sunday 25th April, the day after the official dedication ceremonies of what was then known as the Eliza G. Radeke Museum of Art. Lovecraft also found that he shared his Barnes St. house with… “an official of the School of Design Museum” (Letters from New York, p.312). This calm new museum must surely have been a Lovecraft haunt in the years after his return from New York. Lovecraft already knew well the RISD Museum’s neighbouring…
This essay has been replaced by the essay in my new book of revised, expanded, and footnoted versions of my recent Tentaclii essays, Lovecraft in Historical Context: fifth collection.
28 Monday Jul 2014
Posted in Historical context
The Brooklyn Public Library now has a complete scanned run of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle online for free, including the years that Lovecraft was in Brooklyn.
Lovecraft’s marriage announced, 2nd April 1924…
The piano sale ad, 20th April 1924…
Evidently the $500 for the piano was not found from a private buyer. It was later sold for $350 in September 1924.
28 Monday Jul 2014
Posted in Scholarly works
* Kevin Corstorphine (2013), “‘Colors We Cannot See’: Invisibility and The Limits of Perception in Weird Fiction”. (Paper presented at the conference “The Weird” University of London, November 2013. Compares key stories of invisible monsters, and their probable influence on Lovecraft. Previously presented as “Invisible Monsters: The Limits of Perception in Bierce, Lovecraft and Machen” at the International Gothic Association meeting, University of Surrey, August 2013)
* Catia Cristina Sanzovo Jota (2013), “Terror and shock in H. P. Lovecraft. (Possibly a class paper?)
27 Sunday Jul 2014
Posted in Historical context, New discoveries
Rheinhart Kleiner opened his memoir of Lovecraft, “Bards and Bibliophiles”, in…
a little coffee shop at the corner of Court and Schermerhorn Streets, Brooklyn” (Lovecraft Remembered, p.188)
I may have found a picture of this cafe, titled “Schermerhorn Street looking north to Court Street, 1928” From Brooklypix…
Looking at the other available views of Schermerhorn/Court, it seems there were no other corner cafes there in the 1920s. The “Scotch Bakery and Lunch Room” can be seen on the right of the picture, and there is also a sculptural sign for it on the right-hand lamp post.
At the corner cafe Lovecraft and the gang would sup a 1 a.m. coffee and peruse the early morning editions of the New York newspapers, often before setting out for a long night walk. …
This essay has been replaced by the essay in my new book of revised, expanded, and footnoted versions of my recent Tentaclii essays, Lovecraft in Historical Context: fifth collection.
27 Sunday Jul 2014
Posted in Historical context
140 years of Popular Science magazine, online for free and keyword searchable.
26 Saturday Jul 2014
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
A blast from the past: a scan of a 1977 edition of Vermont History journal, containing the essay “Dark Mountain: H.P. Lovecraft and the ‘Vermont Horror'” by Alan S. Wheelock.
Keep in mind that Orton later corrected some of the dates and biographical facts in the article.
25 Friday Jul 2014
Posted in Historical context
New ending for my short topographical note of September 2013, titled “The location of “Juan Romero”: Area 52″. Scratch the couple of sentences speculating on how Lovecraft might have learned of the area, and replace with…
How did Lovecraft come to know of the area? He appears to have been inspired in his choice of a desert setting by reading an amateur journalism author he named in a letter as ‘Phil Mac’ (Prof. Philip B. McDonald), who had apparently used a similar desert / mining setting, but for a “commonplace adventure yarn” (Lord of a Visible World, p.69). It seems Lovecraft had copied out a “dull” and “commonplace adventure yarn” sent to him by McDonald, intending to send the copy to his correspondence circle with a detailed critique of his own. But then he decided to just spend a day writing his own story based on the same or similar setting, and he then sent out both… “Youze gazinks have seen both Mac’s and my yarns.”
Philip B. McDonald graduated M.E. (Master of Engineering) from Michigan College of Mines. In Lovecraft’s The Conservative, McDonald was stated to be “Assistant Professor of Engineering English, University of Colorado” in July 1918, though he later moved to New York to become assistant professor of English, New York University. It appears he was the husband of the noted amateur journalist Edna Hyde McDonald (“Vondy”). McDonald’s desert story was not used in Lovecraft’s The Conservative and seems not to exist today, nor any of his fiction. So we don’t know how closely Lovecraft used, or not, what he called “the richly significant setting” of McDonald’s “dull yarn”.
