21 Saturday Oct 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings
Currently on eBay, Robert H. Barlow’s Leaves II (1938) ‘zine.
This also has what’s said to be an unpublished Barlow story…
the unpublished 1933 work Gem of Evil
The same seller also has a Wandrei poem, and an Ashton Smith drawing and poem.
13 Friday Oct 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings, Picture postals, Scholarly works
Letters to Wilfred B. Talman – the fifth set of notes.
Here’s my fifth set of notes on the book of Lovecraft’s Letters to Wilfred B. Talman and Helen V. and Genevieve Sully (2019). These notes cover letters from the end of July 1932 through March 1934. Lovecraft is still writing to Talman, at this point in the book.
p. 211. Lovecraft gives more details about the passenger shipping from Providence to Newport…
the Mount Hope and the all-year-round mail ship Sagamore. The latter has come down to 50 cents for the round trip to Newport and back [and gives the passenger 6.5 hours in Newport, due to a later return-time]. Accordingly I have been three times and intended to repeat…
Thus the 1898 Sagamore was a “mail ship”, which tells us a bit more about her. She began the Providence – Newport Block Island run toward the end of her life in 1928, and is not to be confused with the Lake George ship Sagamore.
The problem with the later return is that the two-hour trip was colder than on the larger Mount Hope. But the fare was the main attraction. The Sagamore fare sometimes went as low as 15-cents for a day’s round-trip, but the passenger had to put up with what Lovecraft called “freight and cattle”. Thus she was sometimes a cattle boat as well as a mail boat. Also, the Sagamore was smaller and thus had more vibration, as Lovecraft said… “the vibration will play the devil with my penmanship” and between this and the cold he could not easily write on board.
p. 211. Confirming what I had thought, Lovecraft states clearly… “Block Island, which I have never seen”. Thus a prime and well-photographed local tourist-trap had never been visited. So far as I’m aware, it never was. Despite the Sagamore being able to take him there.
p. 212. “Went over to see C.M. Eddy Jr. last night — first time in ages”. This tells us that the broken friendship was at least partially renewed by the end of July 1932. And properly so, by a home visit rather than Eddy’s attendance at a Providence gang meeting. Presumably Muriel was also there, and perhaps their children would have also been around the place early in a long summer evening. Lovecraft gives no address for the Eddys, but this was likely at the address I found recently…
the Ghost Stories magazine for April 1929 printed a letter from Muriel Eddy from her address of “317 Plain Street”, Providence. [… this was] in Lower South Providence and about a half-mile from [Lovecraft’s local used bookseller] ‘Uncle’ Eddy and his family at 100 Gallup Street.
The place still stands today as a neat wooden house of the type typical of Providence, and in a neighbourhood that now appears to be gentrifying.
p. 215. Lovecraft’s overview essay “Fairyland” essay was researched and written at speed for the personal benefit of a correspondent (Talman) during a very busy time. It is referred to here on p. 215 (September 1932), and printed as an appendix ‘Some Backgrounds of Fairyland’ on p. 489.
p. 215. Belknap Long was then selling off his library, seemingly all of it. He had become a vocal socialist by this point in the Great Depression, though I don’t recall he was volunteering at Hell’s Kitchen soup-kitchens as a result. Perhaps the fire-sale was to ‘raise money for the cause’, though?
p. 217. Lovecraft reveals he has acquired a new feline friend… “at the house on the corner near the letter-box” used for his posting of letters. He is still living at Barnes Street at this date, so this may help identify the “letter-box” Lovecraft used for mail at that time. It would have been located quite near to a corner. Though I don’t think that posting-boxes show up on old street maps of Providence.
p. 220. In October 1932, the greatest letter-writer of the 20th century estimates he has “50 to 75 correspondents” on the go.
p. 224-25. Talman had written a Dreamlands tale titled “The Heads of Gyrwy”. It’s not printed in the book, so is presumably lost. It depicted “the decayed huts of the Gyrwians still remaining in the time of Dwerga”, Dwerga being a place over which “an atmosphere of menace” hangs. According to Lovecraft he (Lovecraft) pictured this place as on “the upper reaches of the River Skai” and “just out of sight of Hatheg-Kla”, but the story obviously involves Dwerga being erased from the Dreamlands, presumably by the “Heads of Gyrwy”. Lovecraft imagines that when he visits it in his dreams it will be marked only by a marker … “rock [with] the tale writ thereon in a tongue to which no key exists outside certain hints in the dreaded Necronomicon“.
p. 228. “Good old [Arthur] Leeds is back [in New York City] and as a Coney Island barker”. Coney Island was the large and famous site of amusement parks, arcades and sideshows. A “barker “was the “roll up, roll up, see the two-headed man!” front-man who enticed people in to see a substantial attraction. Leeds was known to have worked a great deal with travelling circus and freak-show entertainers, as a straight ‘front-man’, so it was likely a freak show. Lovecraft’s letter was February 1933, so presumably Leeds had been hired to start in the spring and work through the new 1933 summer season. At this time Lovecraft had “not set eyes on him for five solid years”, implying that he and Leeds had last met circa January 1928. But they corresponded.
p. 228-29. His initial description of his new residence at 66 College Street, with drawings.
p. 238. In October 1933 he makes pictures of 66 College Street, having “dragged out my 1907 #2 Brownie” box camera.
p. 241. He discusses punctuation, especially the comma. He finds…
… the minuter details are largely trivial, custom-generated, & subject to diverse usage. No two people punctuate alike. […] the exact context aught to determine the insertion or absence of commas. Hard and fast blanket rules are never applicable to matters like [the one you cite]. […] All one need do is to try to be uniform […] I believe that punctuation aught to mark vocal and rhetorical pauses as well as purely logical divisions […] It is a mistake to regard punctuation as anything but a surface adjunct to language. […] It has nothing to do with grammar, but is merely a convenient device for clarifying the meaning of written language.
p. 242. In a discussion on the use of “Esq.” for names, Lovecraft notes his Providence tailor is a “Harry Steiner”.
p. 245. In early March 1934 and Lovecraft stated that the temperature outside No. 66 College Street was “17 degrees below [zero]”. His old place at Barnes Street had some heating fitted, late in Lovecraft’s tenure there. But the abundant steam-heat being pumped into No. 66 (from the adjacent John Hay Library) may well have helped prolong his life, given such deep sub-zero winter temperatures. I haven’t studied the matter in detail but I get the impression that the weather of the later 1920s/30s was far more turbulent than today, and involved more extremes of winter cold and summer heat.
p. 246. Lovecraft had however ventured through the “beastly weather”, going along the hill to visit the R.I. School of Design. There he had seen exhibitions of Egyptian and Etruscan tomb paintings, North Staffordshire pottery from England, and a “rather notable” show of Hispanic paintings.
p. 246. He states he is reading “Count de Prorok’s account of his Carthaginian excavations”. Born in 1896 and thus a near contemporary of Lovecraft, the Count Byron De Prorok excavated Carthage from 1920 to 1925. He became more and more one of the several ‘Indiana Jones like’ figures of the 1930s. Lovecraft was reading his book Digging for lost African gods; the record of five years archaeological excavation in North Africa (1926).
p. 247. He states he has just read Machen’s new book, The Green Round (1933). This was Machen’s final novel. A man visits the western parts of Wales and there enters a mysterious and apparently natural grassy hollow. He comes away with more than he expected, and brings it back to the metropolis. Lovecraft found the work “extremely interesting — with some very potent reflections on that persistent sense of unreal worlds impinging”. While it had the fault of “rambling diffuseness” and is “hardly one of Machen’s greatest”, he says “I’m vastly glad to have read it”. I note that the novel’s initial set-up sounds like it may have a similarity to the initial set-up of the Barrow Downs sequence, which happens early in The Lord of the Rings.
p. 248. Lovecraft has been to a local Providence cinema with Brobst. They saw the movie The Ghoul (1933) with Boris Karloff. Lovecraft passes no extended judgement, but only states tepidly that… “Some of the atmospheric effects weren’t bad”.
07 Saturday Oct 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings
Regular readers will know I enjoy the occasional copy of Commando, and comic art in general. So I was pleased to hear about the exhibition Into Battle! The Art of British War Comics. Open now and running until 30th April 2024, at the Soldiers Museum near Oxford in the UK. The location is about seven miles north of Oxford, a town which is well served by train services.
The history of British war comics through the archives of classic comic titles such as War Picture Library and Battle Action. These men’s comics have been publishing continuously in Britain for over 130 years.
They remain a viable popular ‘pocket-money priced’ genre, even in the face of piracy and a multitude of other entertainment time-sinks such as videogames and sprawling TV series. As evidenced by the ongoing Commando series.
The exhibition has original art and appears to be free entry. It could be combined with another free museum in Oxford itself. Though 30 minutes of searching reveals an unappealing bunch of possible combinatory options in the town for autumn / fall 2023. Unless perhaps an exhibition on ‘colour in the Victorian period’ interests. However, note that right next door to the museum is Blenheim Palace which has a “blockbuster” Icons of British Fashion exhibition opening on 23rd March 2024. There’s a month’s overlap there with Into Battle!. If you also had an overnight stay, then the Into Battle! / Icons of British Fashion combo could be combined with ‘doing the Ashmolean’ the next day and perhaps also an evening peep at some of the Tolkien sites. However, that would be springtime, so you’d need to book things well in advance and also anticipate the likely pre-election ramping up of the train strikes.
Meanwhile, in New York City, a “small” exhibition titled ‘The Museum and Laboratory of the Jewish Comics Experience’ opens 9th October 2023 and runs until the end of 2023. The Center for Jewish History in Manhattan survey the history of Jewish comics and the Jewish creators of many of the most iconic American comic-book characters like Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four and more. Along with comics-creation workshops and a cosplay booth, which sound like they’re aimed at under-16s.
Unpublished cover for the famous Amazing Fantasy #15 (first Spider-Man)…
27 Wednesday Sep 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings
A new UserScript plugs an Amazon Historical Prices graph into each Amazon listing page. Possibly of use to book dealers tracking price trends over time, or those seeking to buy a more expensive item (perhaps a few weeks ahead of the possible purchase point, as ‘the countdown to Christmas’ has reportedly started very early this year). One might even use it to spot trends (e.g. the item ‘tends to become cheaper for a short while, once every two weeks’) caused by an AI spotting page-visiting trends among other potential buyers. The script’s code looks clean to me.
24 Sunday Sep 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings
I’m now paging toward the end of the Fables series, reading through the 22 x ‘trade’ collections (2002-2015). This is the DC series I blogged about recently because the maker has sent all his Fables IP into the public domain.
I’ve only read one DC book in the last 20 years, and without the news of the IP release I’d have been especially wary of a book featuring ‘re-imagined fairy-tale characters’. To me, ‘re-imagined’ is a dog-whistle for ‘made politically-correct’. But a sampling of Fables found it to have excellent brisk storytelling, no political tub-thumping, and the artwork becomes very pleasing after the first couple of trades because it often somewhat emulates Jack Kirby (minus the krackle). Everything is very polished on the page, and as you’d expect…
Fables does have a bit of a creaky start during the first one and a half books, as everything gets hoisted into place. It’s also very “talky” for a comic. You do wonder if being forced to remove 50 words from each and every completed Fables non-action page would have improved the reading experience. Vol. 13 (‘The Great Fables Crossover’) I found to be a no-consequences mid-series filler and it’s definitely skip-able. But otherwise, great… absorbing and imaginative comics entertainment with superb storytelling. How memorable it will be in toto I’m not yet sure. Will it be like those blockbuster TV series, which gripped at the time, yet can’t even be remembered six months later? I have yet to find out, since I still have the last three trade books to go. But I read that the series has a “very satisfying” ending.
Apart from one passing and somewhat jokey mention of “Yuggoth”, there are no Lovecraft influences that I can see. But of course, now it’s public domain, there’s no stopping a Lovecraft crossover.
23 Saturday Sep 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings
The Lovecraft Arts & Sciences 2023 Winter Fundraiser has opened on GoFundMe.
20 Wednesday Sep 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings
Dark Worlds Quarterly has An Open Invitation to Bloggers…
I am quite interested in writing guest posts for your blog. (And equally interested in having your posts appear here.) I want to write about Space Opera, Cthulhu Mythos, Sword & Sorcery and other topics (robots, comic books, strange Northerns, Pulp in general.) But primarily these three.
17 Sunday Sep 2023
Posted in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings
The other Lovecraft Film Festival, the 28th Annual H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, has dates: 6th-8th October 2023…
three days of the best new independent short and feature films in the cosmic horror genre, classic screen gems, special Guest speakers, author readings, panel discussions, art, live events
S.T. Joshi’s blog has also noted that the 2023 Portland (Oregon, USA) version of the annual Festival will have a “Lovecraft and Cats” discussion panel.
There are also plans to take the Festival to Mobile, Alabama in November.
16 Saturday Sep 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings
Nice…
As of now, 15th September 2023, the comic book property called Fables, including all related Fables spin-offs and characters, is now in the public domain. What was once wholly owned by Bill Willingham is now owned by everyone, for all time.
It’s the result of strong dissatisfaction with the publisher DC comics…
The one thing in our contract the DC lawyers can’t contest, or reinterpret to their own benefit, is that I am the sole owner of the intellectual property. I can sell it or give it away to whomever I want. I chose to give it away to everyone.
His Substack has the full details about his giving away a best-selling, long-running and Eisner Award-winning property, which Comic Book Treasury summarises as…
The series is about people from fairy tales and folklore who really exist in magical realms, but they were forced out of their worlds by The Adversary… and now live in exile in ours!
A sample page…
The already existing comics volumes themselves (at least 22 collected trade editions) are presumably not public domain, due to the involvement of others in their making. I assume it’s the formerly Bill Willingham-owned IP (characters, costumes, names, powers, world, storylines, backstory, settings) which is now freely usable. There’s a handy 256-page Encyclopedia for the series.
13 Wednesday Sep 2023
Posted in AI, Odd scratchings
Amazon’s has new ‘AI declaration’ rules, currently only being applied to ebooks…
We define AI-generated content as text, images, or translations created by an AI-based tool. If you used an AI-based tool to create the actual content (whether text, images, or translations), it is considered “AI-generated,” even if you applied substantial edits afterwards.
Book creators must declare any use such of generated AI, even if later heavily edited by a human.
Thus it seems important not to have book covers that include any AI created elements. Even if you use a stock AI-created backdrop for a book cover, and it’s only 20% of the final cover, Amazon requires the whole book be labelled “AI generated”.
If not labelled then there seems a real risk it will be pulled from the store. This will be especially relevant when AI watermarking is rolled out, as Amazon’s bots will then be able to auto-detect the AI. In the meanwhile there’s also a risk with content that might attract the attention of activists of either the right or the left, seeking a way to have it ‘cancelled’. They might pounce on an undeclared use of AI.
AI translation is also covered. Thus if a scholar uses an AI-powered translation service to translate just one required quote (from Latin, say), then presumably again the whole book has to be labelled “AI generated”. AI-made abstracts, tables-of-contents, cover blurbs (and eventually AI generated back-of-the-book indexes) could also fall foul of the new rules. Even if heavily edited by a human.
And you might say… how will they tell? Ah, well… AI output from the main corporate tools is set to be invisibly watermarked, with Google already rolling out its version of the watermarking last week. Nvidia just signed up to watermarking, raising the prospect of embedding at the graphics-card level. Steganography… look it up.
And where such labelling leads to is very uncertain. For instance, having your book labelled “AI generated” might soon mean it doesn’t appear in search, or is only to be found on the Amazon store with difficulty. You may even find it’s blocked by some third-party Web browser add-on, cooked up by an AI-hater.
An example is DeviantArt’s AI declaration, required of people posting pictures. This seemed benign at first… until it wasn’t. Some weeks later, users found they could block all those “AI” tagged images. Those who had been honest and trusting of the company suddenly found their work being automatically ‘disappeared’.
12 Tuesday Sep 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings
NecronomiCon Providence dates. 15th-18th August 2024 in Providence, and “2024 convention passes will begin to go on sale ~January 2024”.
10 Sunday Sep 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings
Letters to Wilfred B. Talman – the fourth set of notes:
My fourth set of notes on the book of Lovecraft’s Letters to Wilfred B. Talman and Helen V. and Genevieve Sully. These notes cover letters from July 1931 to May 1932. Lovecraft is still writing to Talman, at this point in the book.
Page 180. A mis-transcription or perhaps a sleepy ‘slip of the pen’. I’d suggest that “retroactivity” should, for sense, read “radioactivity”…
It would take radioactivity to do that [i.e. fully awaken him in time to catch the 9am coach departure] after the Rip van Winkle coma from which I’ve just emerged.
At that time, radioactivity could still be thought of as a personal tonic rather than a deadly poison.
Page 180. It’s July 1931 and he has apparently only just learned the trick of pressing his trousers by putting them under the mattress in a hotel. He learned it from a “comic picture”, which might mean a comic-strip, a cartoon or even an animated short at the cinema. I seemed to recall he said somewhere he learned it from Arthur Leeds or Everett McNeil, but apparently not.
Page 182. 10th September 1932. Steam pipes and radiators are being fitted at Barnes St., at last. There was apparently no such heat before, and I seem to recall that even afterwards the pipes did not extend to certain upper visitor rooms.
Page 183. Talman has sent Lovecraft a card with “proof symbols” on it, which will be “invaluable” for proof reading. It’s interesting that Lovecraft had not used these before October 1931, despite his extensive revising and proof reading work. But perhaps it was the card that was “invaluable”, rather than the already-known symbols.
Pages 186-87. In late October he writes of a visit to Norwich, “an ineffably fascinating old town on the steep terraces that rise over the river Thames”. The story “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is written a few weeks later, and thus perhaps Norwich played a small part in building the atmosphere of Innsmouth? Norwich, USA, is 25 miles SW of Providence, at the end of a long navigable inlet from the sea.
Page 187. Lovecraft is obviously familiar with the painted cat postcards of Wain.
Fittingly, in Spain the translation of Lovecraft’s “Cats and Dogs” has a Wain cat on the cover.
Page 189. He hears a public lecture at Brown from Willem de Sitter, on the new discoveries about the size of the universe. Sitter speaks ably and with good English.
Page 191. Talman was contributing articles to Seabury Quinn’s magazine.
Page 191. His friend Cook’s library is now gone, “due to his financial collapse”. It seems that the collector who the gang called ‘The Colossus of the North’ had been forced to sell most of his collection as the Great Depression deepened.
Page 191. Lovecraft recommends the rare book Dealings With The Dead by Sargent, on funeral, burial and mortuary practices through history.
Page 192. “My breakfast each morning consists of doughnuts & cheese … 365 days a year” except when in ‘nut-free places. He states the ‘nuts were always shop-bought, never home-made.
Page 193. Talman had sent Lovecraft the Argosy issue with the headlining “Voodoo Express” story. Lovecraft read it and partly approved… “it does pack a punch at intervals. That train alone is worth anybody’s dime.” Lovecraft wants to see the book The Cat in the Mysteries of Religion and Magic.
Page 205. Lovecraft is attending the Marshall Woods public lecture series at Brown.
Page 205. Lovecraft had a direct ancestor, son of Mike Phillips I, who built… “Mowbra Castle (still standing) near Wickford”. This is not the Wickford in Ireland, so there is no connection to the story “The Moon Bog”. The place is described thus…
In Belleville, still on the Post Road, stands the Phillips house, known as “Mowbra Castle”. It was probably built about 1695-1700 by Michael Phillips, who came from Newport. Its plan somewhat resembles that of the Arnold house at Moshassuck, but the chimney is nearly square, and the fireplace in the side room is at an angle of ninety degrees with that in the main room.” (Early Rhode Island Houses).
Page 209. Rimel’s horror tale “The Curse Wheel” was set in the “Ramapaugh” region. The story appears to be lost.
Page 209. Lovecraft has been tipped off that a New York City magazine called Weird Whispers might be a market.
Page 210. Lovecraft has visited the “Germanic Museum” in Boston, and urges Talman to see the Romanesque interior. This was a large and well-funded teaching museum dedicated to illustrating the civilised arts, created from early medieval times onwards, by the nations of “Germany, Holland, Switzerland, Scandinavia, England (and later Australia)”. It opened in 1921, and was especially known for its fine replicas of some of the most treasured medieval carvings and sculpture.
