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It’s a gas…

11 Wednesday May 2022

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I’ve updated Monday’s 132 Wickenden Street post. I had mis-typed “Jack’s” instead of “Jake’s” a couple of times. Corrected now. I’ve also re-thought what Faig’s “one door east” means in the context of this new-found picture. It now looks to me like “Jake’s” had been on the opposite corner (i.e. the open forecourt seen here), and had moved across to the other corner at 132 when the Shell gas-station forecourt was built on the site of 126.

In which case this is it before the Shell station, albeit as a small picture…

* Opening times, April 1933 ad…

Both are closed from 8pm to 4am.

* March 1934 ad…

126 was now only in open in the afternoon and early evenings, perhaps a sign of staff problems. Canal St. was still only closed from midnight to 4am, with the expanded opening hours possibly a sign of needing the income.

* Late September 1935 ad…

The ad has No. 126 open 24 hours a day except Sundays, and no mention of Canal St. Which had closed down that same month.

The Lovecraft Geek returns

10 Tuesday May 2022

Posted by in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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I’m pleased to see that Lovecraft scholar Robert Price has re-animated his The Lovecraft Geek podcast, now the pandemic is effectively over. To the extent that there are three new episodes available. Before this, the last episode had been 31st March 2020. Then there was a long hiatus.

The new episodes can download to .MP3 from the show’s Podbay listing. Episode 22-001 is a 56-minute regular Lovecraft Geek, and one of the best I’ve heard. This is followed by two with Price’s new readings of Lovecraft’s “Dagon” and “The Temple” respectively.

It thus looks like there’s a good chance of another The Lovecraft Geek or two during 2022, so send in your questions to help encourage the next one.

I also took a look to see if more Lovecraft-related episodes had popped up over on the Christian MythVision YouTube channel, but no… they still only have his short 18 minute-one on “Lovecraft and the Origins of Religion” (June 2020). The rest of his podcasts over there appear to be about Biblical historicity and suchlike, and are thus not likely to be of interest to Lovecraftians. But there’s plenty to dig into in the back-catalogue of The Lovecraft Geek, linked above.

There’s also his The Bible Geek Show, and he mentioned on the new Lovecraft Geek that he recently did a complete Clark Ashton Smith reading there. Though he doesn’t say which episode.

Also mentioned in the new Lovecraft Geek are Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales and two of the best emulators of these are named… Myers for his The House of the Worm / Country of the Worm, but also the “early Kuttner”. And Price should know on that point, since he was the editor for Kuttner’s The Book of Iod: The Eater of Souls and other Tales (1995, Chaosium) collection. A quick perusal of Price’s Introduction in that book reveals the two stories he must be thinking of…

Kuttner penned a pair of pastiches of Lovecraft’s Dunsanian tales. These are “The Jest of Droom Avista” and “The Eater of Souls”.

Both short tales were in Weird Tales in 1937 and can thus now be found online as originally printed…

“The Eater of Souls”. (Plain text).

“The Jest of Droom Avista”. (Plain text).

132 Wickenden Street, Providence

09 Monday May 2022

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Fox Point Photo History has placed online a post-1938 photo of “Jacques Lunch” courtesy of Lou Costa. To Lovecraft this was “Jake’s”. The date looks to be the early-mid 1950s, though I’m no expert on American cars and it might be later.

Jacques Lunch, [1]32 Wickenden Street. Looking north on Wickenden Street.

The photo has the “1” in 132 Wickenden Street cut off by the scanner. It had formerly been at No. 126, and moved to No. 132 in 1938. So this is the later site that Lovecraft would not have known, but it indicates the situation. Since Ken Faig Jr.’s Moshassuck Monograph Series No. 18 (2019) has scrutinised the maps and puts the move from 126 to 132 as only “one door east”. In which case, as the picture looks north, the old location known to Lovecraft was very near if not adjacent to the above cafe. I wonder if it had perhaps been where the Shell garage forecourt is, as seen on the picture?

“Jake’s” as Lovecraft called it was a key local haunt of Lovecraft’s from 1926. There were however two branches for Lovecraft’s fave Providence eatery, a cheap “stevedore restaurant” which he had discovered in 1926 via Talman. “Stevedores” being burly dockworkers. In October 1929, in a letter to Wandrei (p. 171) he give a tantalising flavour of the place. Lovecraft records that he had recently enjoyed a visit to Jake’s with Talman. But he also recalls that the nervous Cook, visiting Lovecraft in Providence a short while later…

somehow harboured the least bit of reluctance toward lining up to the counter [at Jake’s, Canal St.] betwixt [black] stevedores and Salvation Army derelicts

This more central Canal St. Jake’s (formally “Jacques”) closed during the Great Depression, in September 1935. But a little later Lovecraft was pleased to discover that the other Wickenden Street branch of his favourite cafe was still open down on the even rougher waterfront at Fox Point…

I have discovered the slum branch of Jake’s is still open, so that if the call of old times is sufficiently strong, we can plunge down South Main St. & tank up with the familiar overdoses in a hardy waterfront section where the sparrows chirp in bass & the policemen go in carbine-bearing squads.” (November 1935, the volume of Wandrei letters, page 345). [carbine-bearing = bearing rifles].

However in July 1936 he told Talman in a letter that he had not recently visited the Wickenden Street branch on Fox Point, to confirm that the surviving waterfront branch was still open. It is of course possible he did visit Wickenden Street with Wandrei in November 1935, but his comment to Talman shows he was not sure if it had survived into the late summer of 1936. My thanks to Ken Faig Jr. for the 1936 letter data.

Here we see Fox Point and the docks in the distance, looking across to it from the Market Place district. The New York passenger boats arrived and departed there (see the pair of far white boats), and Morton and Loveman and possibly others used this method rather than the railway. I seem to recall that Sonia also travelled by boat. Thus Lovecraft would have walked up to the Point to meet them or see them off.

Wickenden Street was on the edge of the Fox Point ‘wedge’, and it does not seem impossible that this cafe would have been a natural destination with a friend fresh-off-the-boat and hungry for hot cheap food. The anarchist Morton being the most likely candidate to eat in a cheap “slum” cafe catering to stevedores and merchant sailors. As evidence of his venturesome-ness one can point to the time that he and Lovecraft clandestinely snuck into the adjacent rail-freight yards, then puzzled their way through a maze of sinister box-cars to reach a good shore view.

Here we look down on Fox Point, and the cafe appear to be more or less in the centre of the picture. Though I think it must be obscured by other buildings. The New York Boat docks are off camera on the right. The rail-freight yards are too low down along the shoreline to be seen.

The river Seekonk can however be seen in the distance, and perhaps a line that indicates one of the Twin Islands. The young Lovecraft used to land on these with his rowing boat, when he was a sturdy lad.

Sunday morning elevated, 1925

08 Sunday May 2022

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“Sunday morning elevated, 1925.”

Based on a 1942 record-picture photo of the New York elevated railway platforms, made for the U.S. Office of War Information. HPL added by me. So far as I’m aware, the source picture’s U.S. government status should put it into the public domain, and thus I’m open to offers to use this version as a book cover. Space could be added above/below for titles etc. The painting can be polished up a bit if needed.

‘D.I. Joshi and the Adventure of the Missing Cover’

08 Sunday May 2022

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S.T. Joshi blogged that he liked the “1940s private detective” look of this recent night-picture of him, snapped in Providence. He regretted it could not be used a book cover for one of his mystery novels. There’s admittedly not a great deal that can be done with such a poor tiny 450-pixel night picture with the face in shadow, but I’ve had a quick go…

Original:

Makeover for a book cover, sized up for a Lulu print-on-demand paperback:

How well it would reproduce on paper I don’t know, though Lulu covers are usually quite good. But it should do for an ebook, with some nice typography added.

Another version, de-blued and with the distracting ‘helicopter wing mirror’ panel-thing gone, and the cloud shmushed to give the slightest subliminal hint of a tentacle…

Pennington?

07 Saturday May 2022

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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A 1968 postcard painted by one “Pennington”, advertising a Lovecraft rock-band concert in California. Could this be Bruce Pennington, doing ‘Lovecraft the writer’ (Dreamlands sunsets etc) via ‘Lovecraft the band’?

Update: No, sadly not Bruce.

‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: Brooklyn Botanical Gardens – part two

06 Friday May 2022

Posted by in Historical context, Picture postals

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This post follows on from ‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: Brooklyn Botanical Gardens – part one. This week I take a look at the Japanese Gardens, a favourite of Lovecraft when in New York City.

Reading Lovecraft’s letters, one might imagine these gardens were perhaps something rather small and oblong. Picturesque but, in a busy city, rather ‘crammed in’ alongside the overshadowing museum. In reality they were effectively a large and highly landscaped park, some way from the museum building and maturing nicely by the mid 1920s. They formed just the corner of an even larger park. This larger park had many features, including a run of gigantic tropical conservatories that in the 1920s were said to be some of the most extensive and well-stocked in the world. In the view seen below the Museum is located in the top right, with the Japanese ‘hill and pond’ garden park below it.

Here we see one of the Japanese garden’s small shrines in the Lovecraft period, newly colourised by me. The artist seen painting was actually one of the staff, and thus was very lucky. Because the institution’s journal for the period shows that artists and photographers were strictly forbidden from bringing any kind of tripod, stand, easel, seat or sitting device. Thankfully dogs were also banned, which must have pleased Lovecraft.

The rest of the pictures are rather poor quality, but are from the Lovecraft period. As such they indicate what he would have enjoyed in one of his favourite places.

The White memorial, for the philanthropist — importer by trade — who made the vast gardens possible. He died shortly before Lovecraft came to New York.

The Japanese rock garden seen in 1917, with the planting around the boulders still maturing.

The Lily Pools outside the Conservatories were obviously meant to ease the landscapes of the Japanese Garden into the long terraces that ran alongside the Conservatories.

One of the Conservatories seen in 1936.

The omnipresent gardens were almost terrifying in their strangeness, with bizarre and unfamiliar forms of vegetation nodding over broad paths lined with curiously carven monoliths. Abnormally vast fern-like growths predominated; some green, and some of a ghastly, fungoid pallor. Among them rose great spectral things resembling calamites, whose bamboo-like trunks towered to fabulous heights. Then there were tufted forms like fabulous cycads, and grotesque dark-green shrubs and trees of coniferous aspect. Flowers were small, colourless, and unrecognisable, blooming in geometrical beds and at large among the greenery. … Fungi of inconceivable size, outlines, and colours speckled the scene in patterns bespeaking some unknown but well-established horticultural tradition.”

— from The Shadow out of Time.

Two new books of Lovecraft letters

05 Thursday May 2022

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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Newly listed on Hippocampus…

1. H. P. Lovecraft: Miscellaneous Letters.

Various letters to circles and correspondents, fragments of letters to Sonia, and also the letters Lovecraft sent to various local and national publications.

2. H. P. Lovecraft: Letters to Woodburn Harris and Others.

Letters to Woodburn Harris, Walter J. Coates, William Lumley.

Publication due in August 2022, according to the pages, and pre-ordering now. Both newly annotated.

According to Joshi’s recent “what is to come” list for the letters, by September 2022 the Lovecraft letters should then only have the following as ‘forthcoming’…

Letters to Hyman Bradofsky and Others

Letters with Frank Belknap Long (2 Vols.)

+ the single volume mega-index to all the published volumes of letters.

For some reason, from the UK I regularly need to turn on a USA VPN to get to the Hippocampus Press site. Anyone else outside the USA have the same problem?

Martian Falcon (2015)

04 Wednesday May 2022

Posted by in Lovecraft as character, New books

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New to me, a novel with Lovecraft as an extended character. It’s Martian Falcon (2015) by Alan K. Baker, who I find is a fellow Brummie from Birmingham, England.

The title is a play on the famous noir The Maltese Falcon. Lovecraft becomes a private investigator along with Charles Fort, in the New York City of 1925. A 1925 in which “the supernatural is real”. The Kindle edition is £2 in the UK. In paper it runs to 292 pages.

Skimming the reviews quickly builds a picture of a fun steampunk / mythos / pulp-noir / Martian mash-up adventure in an alternative New York. Sounds great.

Sadly, despite the cover’s ‘Lovecraft and Fort’ strapline seeming to suggest a series, there don’t appear to have been any more such novels.

New on Tentaclii in April 2022

04 Wednesday May 2022

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Well, what a month. One of those months where you do a lot of work… and it feels like you’re mostly just back where you started.

Not much in terms of new journals this month, though I noted that Hippocampus has listed the ’emerging scholars’ journal Lovecraftian Proceedings #4 (February 2022) in paper. The ebook of this for #4 has yet to appear on Amazon. Elsewhere I spotted that The Journal of Dracula Studies returned (it had vanished into the mists earlier, with a swirl of its cape). Various new scholarly online items were found and added to my Open Lovecraft page. Joshi confirmed I’ll have items in both his Penumbra journal and the Lovecraft Annual, in due course.

In new books, the paperback edition of the Joshi-edited anthology His Own Most Fantastic Creation: Stories about H.P. Lovecraft appeared. Also Joshi’s 1920s Lovecraft-as-detective novel Honeymoon in Jail. Ken Faig Jr.’s new book of research essays Lovecraftian People and Places appeared on Amazon and seems to be shipping now.

Various reviews and musings were noted and linked here, as well as relevant news from the German and Hungarian Lovecraftians. I also briefly caught up with Robert E. Howard material and events, ahead of the fast-approaching Howard Days in Texas.

On the Letters, I posted my final notes on reading the Galpin book of Lovecraft letters and some addresses in this led me to do some detective work in Cleveland… and I was pleased to newly discover the location of the cafe that Lovecraft and the rest of the crowd frequented during that fateful Cleveland visit. I also posted my notes on reading Selected Letters I, preliminary to tackling a re-read of the rest of the Selected Letters over the summer. From this I discovered the exact location and fabric and destruction-date of the ‘observatory’ tower on Nentaconhant Hill, via Selected Letters and some detective work. So far as I know these data points are also a new discovery. I also un-puzzled some of the puzzling aspects of the ending of Lovecraft’s war-story “The Temple”.

In my ‘Picture Postals’ posts I looked yet again at the foot of College Street, and found not one but two good pictures. Which just goes to show that, even when you think a particular place has been exhausted of old pictures, there may yet be more to be found. One of the two new pictures was a magnificent one showing the looming Industrial Trust building under construction, and I newly colourised this. While writing a post for a Patreon patron on the Brooklyn Museum, I realised that there are now pictures of Lovecraft’s adjacent beloved ‘Hill and Pool’ Japanese garden. Not great pictures, from scans of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record journal (1912-1944), but they are from the correct period. This led me to Part One of a look at the gardens in the form of their adjacent exotic hothouses.

In other ‘Picture Postals’ post I managed to find a good picture from inside the Providence Opera House and of the actual stage on which the young Lovecraft once strutted and slung slabs of Shakespeare at the audience. Judging by other online collections of such pictures I am the first to alight on a picture of the actual stage. Ken Faig also kindly pointed me to a cine home-movie showing the Market Place fruit-market site on the waterfront in November/December 1934, and a Lovecraft-alike man shopping for a Christmas tree (as Lovecraft did, for his new home at No. 66). Incidentally, through dipping at random into another volume of the Letters I learned that Lovecraft’s previous home at Barnes seems to have lacked furnace-heating for much of the time he was there. He seems to have only had piped heating there in the last two years?

Looking ahead in time I itemised some Lovecraft anniversaries for 2023, including the 50th anniversary of Lovecraft’s breakthrough into a mass market readership in America and the UK in 1973. I also looked at authors entering the public domain in 2023, with an eye to the more unusual or re-workable items. I suppose we will never be able now to confirm the Arthur Leeds death-date (he would have been entering the public domain in 2023) and thus will have to rely on the slipping years to gradually make all his tales public domain in the USA.

Tentaclii has of course returned. The old website host was, I think, trying to get rid of the legacy web-hosting sites it inherited many many takeovers ago, of which I was one. I paid them, but their unreachable ‘support’ meant that there was no way to find out why jurn.org was no longer responsive. I gave up on them and on the money paid, and just decided to move the backups to a wholly new domain on a new paid host, and to forget about the old address. It seemed the only option. The old site still hasn’t come back, so I now feel justified in the move. So, as you can see, Tentaclii is now located at https://www.jurn.link/tentaclii/ and though there was some initial hassle with getting the ‘domain verification’ email that problem is now sorted. As such the blog should now stay online for years, and is also now a lot faster and more responsive. It’s on a large service that only does hosting and does it well, and is also unlikely to get bought-out by some uncaring conglomeration that also does 100 other things and doesn’t much care about its websites. As such the blog and URL should hopefully stay online for a good few years now (sound of frantic tapping-on-wood…).

The site move was sadly not without cost, in money as well as a week of my time and frustration, and I really welcome PayPal donations from a generous benefactor to help cover the cost. The other way that readers can help is simply to link the new address in their own blog posts, and to spread the word on social media to those who might have lost track of where Tentaclii is. Many thanks. As usual, becoming a Patreon patron is also very much encouraged and encouraging.

Elsewhere in April, I completed a large ‘Carl Sagan’ special for the free Digital Art Live monthly magazine, and even managed to do a chunk of work on my forthcoming Tolkien mega-book.

The Dark Pool

03 Tuesday May 2022

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In the latest short-poetry collection from Libivox, a public-domain reading of the poem “The Dark Pool” by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, published as by ‘Francis Hard’ in the April 1925 edition — along with the Lovecraft/Eddy collaboration “Deaf, Dumb and Blind” and “The Wind That Tramps The World”.

Did the editor pop other poems in, when there was a page to fill? No. This seems to be his only one during the Lovecraft years. But he did have two in the magazine in early 1923, before his editorship…

* “The Closing Hand” in Weird Tales (March 1923).

* “The Snake Fiend” in Weird Tales (April 1923).

“The Dark Pool” runs to two minutes in a fine and well-paced reading.

Meanwhile, over in Canada… Lovecraft’s “At The Mountains of Madness” in an hour, on stage.

Honeymoon in Jail

02 Monday May 2022

Posted by in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, New books

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S.T. Joshi’s blog announces that his new Lovecraft-as-character novel has been published. This is…

my detective novel Honeymoon in Jail, with Lovecraft and Sonia as the detectives … set in the spring of 1928, when HPL came to Brooklyn (unwillingly) to help Sonia set up a new hat shop.

Sounds fun. Available now in ebook and paper at 196 pages. The ebook is £3 in the UK. Possibly just the thing for a wet May ‘Bank Holiday’ Monday, as we often have here in the UK.

Also noted by Joshi is an amusing 1951 Jean Cocteau drawing of one of Lovecraft’s Deep Ones, currently for sale…