18 Wednesday Jan 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings
Ugh. The new Archive.org search-results UI is here. Cramped, ugly, bad use of fonts and sizes, and ‘flashing and flickering’ as results load and scroll. And as I try workarounds I’m discovering more annoyances. It’s obviously never seen the touch of a designer or typographer. They’ve managed to make it worse, not better.
Update: There’s now a “return to legacy search” link that wasn’t there a few hours ago. Phew!
17 Tuesday Jan 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
An unusual new academic paper in Heliyon, “Sentiment analysis of Lovecraft’s fiction writings” (2023). The open-access paper looks at his fiction from 1905–1935, using software to find “emotion-inducing words” and then clustering these. Finds…
there exists an intimate connection between the emotions of fear and sadness in Lovecraft’s writings
… and that the darker tones deepen over time.
This was, most likely, strongly personal but not purely so. The entire cultural trajectory of the 1929-1935 period appears to have been bending that way. I say “appears” because I recall my old history teacher showing very clearly that this was not actually borne out in most people’s lives, at least for the employed in most of 1930s England. Until the war came, for many the 1930s was mostly a time of ‘getting on’ and moving up. New homes on Betjeman-esque suburban commuter estates, new motor-cars, new labour-saving devices, better health, better self-improvement opportunities, a surprising boom in incomes and pensions, much better shop-clothes for women and girls, and there were also the fine new art-deco cinemas and ice-cream. The weather was iffy due to some strong extremes, but people got through it. In my teacher’s view it was the intellectuals who were the miserable ones, infected by a virulent “we’re doomed!” pessimism and a dislike of the many opportunities for the upstart masses in this new modern world. The key book on the topic is the excellent and darkly amusing The Intellectuals and the Masses.
Also spotted in academia, a McFarland book due in June 2023. Horror and Philosophy: Essays on Their Intersection in Film, Television and Literature. Among other things this is said to have a chapter on Lovecraft, presumably centering around philosophical parallels in the perceived…
relationships between Jorge Luis Borges and H.P. Lovecraft
16 Monday Jan 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
Now freely available, Ken Faig Jr’s “Three Generations of The Family of Author Sydney Fowler Wright”, expanded with a biographical introduction and new pictures.
16 Monday Jan 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings
Ahead of the newly re-timed Robert E. Howard Days events on 28th-29th April 2023, there’s a call to support the town’s Project Pride, by joining for a very modest annual membership fee…
Howard Days and the Museum are not all they do: they are active in helping to keep Cross Plains a clean and attractive community, and in many charitable activities through the year.
Picture: via Cinema Treasures.
15 Sunday Jan 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A nice paired look at Bruce Pennington’s Lovecraftian painting, as it graced two 1970s Panther paperbacks here in the UK.
14 Saturday Jan 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A peep at what Lovecraft looked like to the Spanish in 1967. Their translation of Dreams in the Witch House and other stories. Apparently ideal weekend reading for your motor-car jaunt, according to the sticker.
14 Saturday Jan 2023
Posted in Podcasts etc.
Newly released, the Librivox public-domain Short Ghost and Horror Collection 065. Includes audio readings of a tale by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, another by Lovecraft’s friend Henry Whitehead, and no less than three by August Derleth. Also Lovecraft’s own “From Beyond” (1920) which is not his best, but fun.
13 Friday Jan 2023
Posted in Picture postals
Friday the 13th, oh no! What better day to dive down into… the Subways of Madness! Many will recall the passage in Lovecraft’s story “Pickman’s Model” (1926)…
There was a study called ‘Subway Accident,’ in which a flock of the vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boylston Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform.
In May 1923 he described his own experience of “things dark and subterranean” in the Boston Subway, writing to Galpin in a letter…
[After a Boston Hub Club dinner I] hit the trail south [through the city]. Instead of rattling to the South Station on the elevated, I chose the subway, (I am exceedingly fond of all things dark and subterranean, and miss the rides up to 96th!) taking a train to Washington-Summer and there transferring to a S.S. train. [And thence to Providence].
Boston subway.
This shows that his usual Providence-to-Boston run, and back, would have taken him into Boston’s South Station, a main above-ground station for the city. An earlier letter confirms this was also the case in 1920…
“At Boston, I bade farewell to the Hubites, refusing overnight invitations & hastening to the South Station. I trod my native heath at 1:30 a.m. I reached home half an hour later”
South Station, Boston, with Elevated train and Elevated platform
This above-ground station also appears in “Pickman’s Model”…
We changed to the elevated [railway] at the South Station, and at about twelve o’clock had climbed down the steps at Battery Street and struck along the old waterfront past Constitution Wharf.
South Station Elevated platform, 1921.
News-stand window at South Station Elevated platform. Probably carried Weird Tales, in its day.
The “steps at Battery Street” elevated platform, Boston. These feature in “Pickman’s Model”.
“I didn’t keep track of the cross streets, and can’t tell you yet which it was we turned up, but I know it wasn’t Greenough Lane.” [to reach Pickman’s studio].
Greenough Lane, Boston.
So South Station itself, as well as the Elevated and the Boston Subway, is a setting. While the exterior of South Station is nothing spooky, the interior had a definite Lovecrafty flavour.
Later it appears in “At The Mountains of Madness” via the subway station in its lower depths. When the shoggoth-crazed Danforth recites the stations of Boston-Cambridge underground subway line to try to keep some sliver of sanity…
South Station Under–Washington Under–Park Street Under–
The tentacular tracks at ‘Park Street Under’.
The Boston subway (for there was no Providence subway, and HPL did not yet know New York City) also appears in the dreamlike prose-poem “Nyarlathotep” (1920), in which a column of people…
filed down a weed-choked subway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad.
Entrance to South Street Under subway station, Boston.
12 Thursday Jan 2023
Posted in Films & trailers
Dates for the 28th Annual H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival…
returns on all three screens of the Hollywood Theatre, 6th-8th October 2023
And for the Providence side of the event, “tentative” dates of 18th-20th August 2023.
11 Wednesday Jan 2023
Posted in Podcasts etc.
The latest Voluminous podcast is a five-hour 384Mb barn-filler of an episode. Yes, it’s the 1929 letter to Vermont farmer, town auditor and local chess-champion Woodburn Harris. Which can now be found in print in full and with annotations in the new Letters to Woodburn Harris and Others.
10 Tuesday Jan 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
New to me, the annual paid journal Inklings: Jahrbuch fur Literatur und Asthetik…
The German Inklings-Gesellschaft, founded in 1983, is dedicated to […] the fantastic in literature, film and the arts in general. The proceedings of the annual Inklings conferences are published in yearbooks.
Not focused on the British Inklings group (Tolkien, C.S. Lewis etc), though it shares the name. Also note, from the same publisher and also paid, ALPH: Approaches to Literary Phantasy. The latter has a special on Ancient Egypt in early fantasy and the fantastic.
09 Monday Jan 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
