03 Monday Aug 2015
Posted in Odd scratchings
Pulpfest 2015 has just posted its Lovecraft programme for August 2015. It will include…
* “Jon Arfstrom, perhaps the last living artist who contributed covers to the original run of Weird Tales … will talk about his career with pulp art historian, David Saunders.”
* “The Call of Cthulhu: The Development of Lovecraft’s Mythos” … a panel of Lovecraftian and pulp scholars.
27 Monday Jul 2015
Posted in Historical context, Odd scratchings
Lovecraft didn’t always refer directly to classical sources when using classical sounding names. Here is a small example…
…came upon a black, gleaming specimen which certainly cannot be other than an eikon of Tsuthoggua! It was a semi-shapeless congeries of nighted curves —— squat & swollen, & with a curious suggestion of flabby viscosity despite the superficially petrific composition… [and it] left little room for doubt that it once stood in some curtained niche… of some such arcane delver as Athlophoros, who dwelt in the Street of the Alembics & vanished suddenly shortly before the desertion of the city…” — letter to C.A. Smith, 21st March 1932.
You cannot be freed from Rheumatism until you dispel the Uric acid. Athlophoros will dissolve it, and you will note immediate lessening of pain. Your entire system will feel better…” (Lima News newspaper, Ohio, 4th Sept 1903, representative of ads in other papers of the era).
Athlophoros Co. was involved in a “United States vs. the Athlophoros Company” legal case in California circa 1930, in which “five government witnesses, all physicians, [testified] regarding the inefficacy of the patent medicine Athlophoros”. No-one came forth from the East Coast to contest the case.
Lovecraft’s letter thus appears to assume that the California-based Smith will get the jokey allusion, both to the Athlophoros medicine and its “arcane delv[ings]”, and also to the way that Athlophoros had recently “vanished suddenly” from California’s chemist shops (indicated as “the Street of the Alembics”, an alembic being a small portable distillery vessel for medicines and chemicals) circa 1930/31.
Where did the name come from? In classical Greek times the phoros was the name of the money paid to Athens by the Greek City States, for the upkeep (i.e.: to ensure the victory-worthy status) of the Athenian military forces. In Roman times Athlophoros meant ‘victory/trophy-bearer’, specifically the winner of a chariot race (“Crowning the Athlophoros”, in E. A. Wallis Budge, The Decrees of Memphis and Canopus: Vol. II), and was used thus as a personal common-name by at least one priest of Alexandria. So presumably the patent medicine name tried to borrow a certan lustre from the heroic Roman usage.
Given the above advert one wonders if Lovecraft may have once used a wash of Athlophoros extract for his own face, since he suffered from thick ingrowing hairs that could not be shaved and thus had to be painfully delved for and plucked. S.T. Joshi has a passage on Lovecraft’s struggles with these “black, gleaming … semi-shapeless congeries of nighted curves”…
Harold W. Munro testifies that as early as his high school years Lovecraft was bothered by ingrown facial hairs; but when Munro speaks of “mean red cuts” on Lovecraft’s face he evidently believes these to have been the product of a dull razor. In fact, as Lovecraft attests, these cuts came from his using a needle and tweezers to pull out the ingrown hairs. This recurring ailment — which did not subside until Lovecraft was well into his thirties — may also have had a negative effect on his perception of his appearance. As late as February 1921, only a few months before his mother’s death, Lovecraft writes to his mother of a new suit that “made me appear as nearly respectable as my face permits.” (S.T. Joshi, I Am Providence)
23 Thursday Jul 2015
Posted in NecronomiCon 2015, Odd scratchings
Paul Tremblay gets a look at some of the Lovecraft treasures of the John Hay Library at Brown University. Who knew that the Commonplace Book(s) were so dinkily cute?
11 Saturday Jul 2015
Posted in Odd scratchings
Oddities Of The State Archives…
a new exhibit [in Providence] is dedicated to odd and unexpected [Rhode Island] state artifacts. The historic objects range from counterfeit colonial money, to the death certificate of famed Providence author H.P. Lovecraft. Rhode Island Public Radio’s morning host, Chuck Hinman went on a private tour of the exhibit with State Archivist Gwenn Stearn.”
Also, coming soon at Brown University’s Hay Exhibition Gallery: “Lovecraft Exhibition — 17th August 2015 – 14th January 2016”.
29 Sunday Mar 2015
Posted in New books, Odd scratchings
Thomas Ligotti tumbles into the nighted, penguin-fringed abyss.
25 Wednesday Mar 2015
Posted in Odd scratchings
New science suggest that “unlighted” and “pallid” stars may generate the “thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes”, while remaining “voiceless”…
When they are accumulating new material stars could generate sound in a very similar manner to that which we observed in the laboratory — so the stars might be singing — but, since sound cannot propagate through the vacuum of space, no-one can hear them.”
… whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods—the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.” (“Nyarlathotep”)
22 Sunday Mar 2015
Posted in Odd scratchings
So, why do fungi glow? Amazingly, apparently this has been… “a controversial question for more than two millennia”. Turns out they glow to entice horrible eight-legged buzzing night-crawlers out of the gloomy windless forest, to feast upon their dripping flesh. Lovecraft probably knew that already, of course, as with so many other things — perhaps via some passing bit of conversation with a deep woodsman like Dwyer 😉
16 Monday Mar 2015
Posted in Odd scratchings
Machen’s Far Off Things, free in a Kindle .mobi…
* Far Off Things (1922) — First volume of the autobiography. On Archive.org.
* Things Near and Far (1923) — Second volume of the autobiography.
* The London Adventure (1924) — Third and final volume of the autobiography.
11 Wednesday Mar 2015
Posted in Odd scratchings
One more thing to blame on Derleth… the iPad / ereader / tablet design. 🙂 Here’s the cover he chose for the first edition of science fiction writer A.E. Van Vogt’s Slan (1946)…
17 Tuesday Feb 2015
Posted in Odd scratchings, REH
News of a new official Conan RPG, Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of. August 2015 from Modiphius Entertainment, and steered by a bevy of Howard experts.
This is CONAN roleplaying as Robert E. Howard wrote it – savage pulp adventure battling ancient horrors in the Hyborian Age! We plan to bring the game right back to its roots, focusing on the original stories by Robert E. Howard. The game will use the 2D20 system … but tweaked to give it that feeling of sword & sorcery”
It appears to be the fourth try at a Conan tabletop RPG since 1984.
Conan diorama model by Andreas.
17 Tuesday Feb 2015
Posted in Odd scratchings
Free version of Microsoft Office OneNote. It’s of interest to scholars working with older documents or Google Books pages, who need to quickly and accurately OCR snippets of online scans. It has industry-leading OCR for small text in archival scanned documents (Insert | Screen Clipping | Recognize Text), a benefit of Microsoft’s massive investment in typography R&D in the 1990s and 2000s.
15 Sunday Feb 2015
Posted in Odd scratchings
A new long blog article from the London Sound Survey: “Arthur Machen: the sounds from beyond the veil”…
“Part of H.P. Lovecraft’s acknowledged debt to Machen also lies in hearing without seeing. Well before Lovecraft’s half-human ululations emanated from somewhere below ground [Machen was using similar approaches]…”
Lovecraft first discovered Machen’s work in the summer of 1923 (S.T. Joshi, I Am Providence, p.454). Prior to that time he had already written many stories that featured “hearing without seeing” and “ululations … from somewhere below ground”, and had amply established the auditory as a key site for his horror. A minute’s selection of a few examples suffices to refute the idea that Lovecraft was inspired by Machen in his focus on the auditory…
“In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and a faint distant baying as of some gigantic hound.” (“The Hound”, 1922)
“And now I also heard; heard and shivered and without knowing why. Deep, deep, below me was a sound — a rhythm … To seek to describe it was useless — for it was such that no description is possible. Perhaps it was like the pulsing of the engines far down in a great liner, as sensed from the deck, yet it was not so mechanical; not so devoid of the element of the life and consciousness. Of all its qualities, remoteness in the earth most impressed me.” (“Transition of Juan Romero”, 1919)
The “thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time” (“Nyarlathotep”, 1920)
“All at once my feverishly sensitive ears seemed to detect a new and wholly distinct component in the soft medley of drug-magnified sounds — a low and damnably insistent whine from very far away; droning, clamoring, mocking, calling, from the northeast.” (“Hypnos”, 1922).
“What I did succeed in doing was to overhear the nocturnal playing of the dumb old man. … I often heard sounds which filled me with an indefinable dread — the dread of vague wonder and brooding mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not; but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth” (“The Music of Erich Zann”, 1921)