‘Picture postals’ from Lovecraft: In the soda-fountain

05 Friday Nov 2021

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This week, a picture that evokes Lovecraft satisfying his craving for sugar.

Here we see what appears to be typical soda-fountain inside a Rhode Island drug store. The British have never had quite the same thing in retail, but chemist shop would be about the nearest term. That doesn’t quite catch it, though, as in America the retail mix included tobacco sales and the soda-fountain counter/corner. Large doses of sugar and strong tobacco were considered healthy, back then.

The date is perhaps the late 1940s, a few years after the war? Though some may be able to date it more precisely by knowing at what point the wearing of ‘bobbie-sox’ became a student fashion among the girls of Rhode Island.

But even if as late as the early 1950s, it’s still generally indicative both of the look and the all-ages / all-genders nature of such places back in the 1930s. Note the good selection of candy bars, and the Lovecraft-a-like man at the counter. Possibly about to try the ice-cream and give his verdict.

Lovecraft knew East Greenwich, noting in his ‘homecoming from New York’ letter the train passing through… “East Greenwich with its steep Georgian alleys climbing up from the railway”. He had had close family ancestors there, and in the archives is a card he sent from there to Morton. Thus it’s not impossible he may have once stopped for a summer ice-cream at the East Greenwich soda fountain.

Lovecraft notes in Travels in the Provinces of America (1929) the jobs of “Everybody one speaks to”, talking of the usual pattern for his visits to place. His short list includes “soda-fountain men”, which indicates he frequented such places…

hotel clerks, soda-fountain men, [train] conductors, [tram car] motormen, coach-drivers

Why not coffee shops? I assume they might have been more heavily tobacco-smoky sort of places, their ice-cream could have been more expensive and in smaller portions, the staff could have been less buffed, and there could also be less opportunity to select one of the cheaper candy-bars to sustain him on a long walk. Being also a chemist shop, they were probably reliably ‘open all hours’.

They were also suitable place to take young friends. For instance, I recall reading that when Lovecraft arrived in De Land, to meet Barlow for the first time, they immediately repaired to such a place.

Also, back in January 2020 I found a postcard showing Houdini in Providence, performing in 1917 for a vast crowd outside the building showing “Evening News” on its facade. The picture was relatively small, though. I’ve just this week found a better larger version…

Mapping Cthulhu

04 Thursday Nov 2021

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Humble Software Bundle: The Maps Bonanza. This is a current fundraiser bundle of fantasy/sci-fi mapping software. £22+ (about $30) gets you the core Campaign Cartographer software for RPG map makers, plus a lot of add-on packs including “The Age of Cthulhu” (not to be confused with the Goodman game of the same name).

I can’t find this “Cthulhu” add-on pack anywhere except for the bundle, and local searches of the Campaign Cartographer site, store and blog all come up empty. I suspect it’s a combo of two of the packs they release inside the Annuals they release each year? One obviously being Cthulhu City (December 2017), which appears to be free if you dig into their blog.

October on Tentaclii

04 Thursday Nov 2021

Posted by in Housekeeping, Odd scratchings

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Tentaclii saw the blog move to a new web address at jurn .org in October. Quite why the old blog was suspended I still haven’t been told. It wasn’t for anything you haven’t seen posted here already. Too many bare-chested barbarians? Linking to the wrong podcasters? Showing how to hack WordPress a little with the Classic Editor script? One too many Amazon links for books? Who knows. Anyway, all the posts and about a quarter of the pictures have been saved. The more important historical pictures should still be present here, as I keep local copies of those for future books. If anyone has a complete capture of the Tentaclii blog (with Win HTTrack or similar), then I would welcome a Dropbox .ZIP with just the 400Mb or so of pictures. All my other free WordPress blogs now have full and current local backups including pictures and PDFs.

Many thanks to my Patreon patrons for sticking with me, it’s much appreciated. I lost one $6 patron a few days ago, but thankfully a leading Lovecraft scholar has kindly increased his patronage to the same amount… and thus made up the loss. Hopefully people will start filtering back, especially once Tentaclii is indexed on Google Search, and then the Patreon won’t drop further. I know times are hard for all, what with inflation spiralling upward and with mortgages soon to follow. But if just three or four people could increase their patronage by a $1 or two it would be a great encouragement. Even now I still have hopes of reaching $100 a month. Until then the heating is staying off for as long as possible this winter, at Tentaclii Towers, to try to save cash and cover the electricity inflation and impending mortgage rise. Layers of clothes, a scarf/hat and a draft-excluder can together work wonders in keeping the heater switched off, I find!

The Voluminous podcast returned this month with “The Wind That Is in the Grass”, the Barlow-Lovecraft correspondence. This welcome news spurred my hunt for the exact spot in De Land, Florida, where Lovecraft would have alighted from the long-distance bus to meet Barlow. I was also pleased to track down at last the illustrated 10-cent British history books that Lovecraft admired and used as visual reference. They turned out to be his partial set of Our Empire’s Story, told in Pictures. I’m told he also later managed to complete the set. It would be good to see these as crisp scans on Archive.org at some point.

This month my Friday ‘Picture Postals’ visited the observatory in Nantucket where Lovecraft saw Saturn, gazed up at the imposing 1935-41 new entrance to the Brooklyn Public Library, slipped into the shoreline country at the back of Lovecraft’s favourite local destination of Newport, and took another look at De Land.

A run of Scientific American 1845-2016 began to appear on Archive.org from microfilm, providing ample insight into the science of Lovecraft’s day. I hear there is also a book in the offing dedicated to Lovecraft’s astronomy, telescopes and other scientific devices, and presumably also his observatory and planetarium visits and eclipse observations. Also popping up on Archive.org was the 1943 “Fungi From Yuggoth” stencil-duplicated edition, which was an evocative sight.

In scholarly journals I was pleased to see the first Miskatonic Missives funded so quickly and handsomely. I also brought news of a special journal issue on ‘Fungi in Contemporary Art and Research’, and noted the fine-looking new Heinlein Journal. My own copy of the new Lovecraft Annual 2021 also arrived at last, heavily delayed by the paper shortages. Thanks to my patrons who made that vital purchase possible. There will likely be a review here at some point.

In books I discovered that the Lovecraft ‘autobiography’ Lord of a Visible World can now be had from Amazon as a £5 ebook. It was duly publicised in the back of the Halloween issue of Digital Art Live magazine. Gary Gianni’s The Call of Cthulhu shipped, and a sumptuous edition of A Voyage to Arcturus was announced. I was pleased to find that the Lovecraftian Ramsay Campbell had an apparently enjoyable sword & sorcery collection Far Away & Never. Another find was the very little publicised but very well-regarded series of Lovecraftian mystery books by Jeffrey E. Barlough, though when I shall find the time and money for them I don’t know.

In podcasts S.T. Joshi did a long podcast with the worthy Save Ancient Studies Association, now on YouTube. For Halloween The National Review magazine’s widely listened-to Great Books podcast was on ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ by H.P. Lovecraft.

In the arts I was pleased to find a superb 3D H.P. Lovecraft by Khoi Nguyen, having been thinking along those lines myself (I’m also an expert on the Poser and DAZ Studio 3D figure software). In comics I discovered another Kadath adaptation, tucked away at the back of Fantasy Classics #15 (2008), and rather nicely done too. Various other shorter comics adaptations were noted. Though only slightly Lovecraftian (shoreline setting, flying polyps, surreal and dream-like) I was pleased to see that Claveloux and Zha’s classic comic Dead Season (aka “Off Season”, in Heavy Metal) is finally to get a good English edition next spring. I also produced a pre-Halloween ‘Gothic’ issue of Digital Art Live this month, as editor, which paid a suitable amount of attention to Lovecraft.

Well… what a month, what with the temporary loss of Tentaclii and several other unwelcome surprises. Please consider becoming my patron on Patreon, or increasing your amount there a bit. You can also just send a one-off PayPal donation via the link on my “About Tentaclii” page. You can also buy my books, which are not just on Lovecraft, but also offer things such as a deep investigation into the identity of H.G Wells’ famous Time Traveller (H.G. Wells in the Potteries), or the Gawain-poet (Strange Country). Both figures are local to me in Stoke-on-Trent. There’s also my comprehensive survey of the ‘hidden stories’ in The Lord of the Rings (The Cracks of Doom: Untold Tales in Middle-earth) as an Amazon ebook. You could also review these books somewhere, perhaps. So far as I know none has yet had a review, though I did try.

Thanks for reading, and please help spread the word about the new Tentaclii location. Update: Now at https://www.jurn.link/tentaclii/

On discovering and navigating pulp

04 Thursday Nov 2021

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Bloody, Spicy, Books has a new post The Shadow & Me, which points to the way in which even terrible movies can be formative experiences for kids who (at the time) knew no better. The 1990s screen world of Batman, Dick Tracy (ugh), The Rocketeer (Disney lavish version, ok-ish), and early Indiana Jones series all proved a formative environment for Bloody, Spicy, and led to print and to the ‘better Batman‘ of The Shadow, and Doc Savage. Of course, a lad who gets into print is perhaps a rarity, and I imagine that many other kids of the period may also have been influenced by the related pulpy games of the time (the classic videogame Crimson Skies springs to mind) and went haring off into a lifelong focus on videogames and RPGs.

But that was the 1990s, still largely a ‘take it when you can get it’ media world, even with VHS tapes and later DVDs. Even DVDs were expensive until the ‘3 for £10’ discounting of the early/mid 2000s allowed the creation of fledgling personal collections. The mass Internet only really arrived in 1995/6 and a lukewarm broadband and casual movie-downloading a decade later (for most people). 25 years later we are of course in a different world of abundance, with increasingly few rarities — usually obscurities that sit at the fringes.

As such it’s interesting to muse on how the ‘all you can eat, all tastes catered for’ superfast buffet of media has been affecting kids over the last decade, when ‘new’ is no longer a reliable synonym for ‘better than what came before’.

How do savvy kids now hack a way through the astro-turfing which serves to market the ‘latest thing’, and instead find routes to the best of the past? I guess careful roadmaps for pulp culture would be especially valuable here. Guides that highlight which would be the best item to introduce a character, author or sub-genre (‘sub-tropical lost world, with scientists’ etc), and if an audiobook has been produced for such. Perhaps we need a Big Bumper Guide to Powering into Powerful Pulp, aimed at 13 year olds rather than collectors or connoisseurs. A guide which discriminating lays out all the options and best starting points. Done in a visually attractive 8″ x 10″ manner, across 300 pages. So far as I’m aware, such a book does not yet exist. Though there are of course many worthy pulp history websites.

If you’re thinking of making such a guide book then the new non-PC guide to general children’s literature Before Austen Comes Aesop: The Children’s Great Books and How to Experience Them might be useful to look at, to see how such things can be structured and approached. There are also text-only survey books such as Don Hutchison’s The Great Pulp Heroes.

Legacies in wills might even help here. The affluent collector might set aside $20,000 to have a superb introductory for-teens guide produced, dedicated to a certain author or character which they have loved all their life. Better than a park bench or a 20-year plaque on a home for stray cats, I’d suggest.

A lot of those back-roads destinations in pulp culture can then be a bit bumpy to actually reach, especially with all the mis-selling on Amazon and the confusion generated by cynical reboots (the later dire Rocketeer cash-in comics spring to mind). As such it would probably also help to encourage a kid to break from the idle ‘just ask my clueless mates’ approach (Twitter, Reddit, insert this month’s teen social media fad) and instead cultivate good search-skills. In that case, simply being told that one can place good filters on one’s keywords and title searches (e.g. browser addons like Google Hit Hider by Domain, and about useful meta-engines like eTools), would be probably be a good start. (Sadly Google Hit Hider does not yet work with eTools, but hopefully it will soon).

More on the Barlow-Lovecraft meeting

03 Wednesday Nov 2021

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I find that the Barlow-Lovecraft meeting in Florida has been subject to at least one artistic rendering, on the cover of Lovecraft Studies #42-43. The style suggests it must be by Jason Eckhardt. Tentaclii readers will recall my several recent posts on the likely terminus in the centre of De Land.

This Autumn 2001 issue also featured the article “H.P. Lovecraft in Florida,” by Stephen J. Jordan.

A Voyage to Sfanomoë

03 Wednesday Nov 2021

Posted by in Podcasts etc.

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Clark Ashton Smith’s “A Voyage to Sfanomoë” (Weird Tales, August 1931) popped up in a new audio reading on YouTube. Not great audio quality, it has to be said. But it sent me in search of the full text for text-to-speech (TTS) with the Balabolka software.

The full text for “Voyage” is to be found at Eldritch Dark and the Weird Tales scans at Archive.org. The R’lyeh Tribune has a Poseidonis page which outlines how it fits alongside similar tales from Smith.

The finding of the audio reading also made me aware of the Ocean Star page Clark Ashton Smith: connections to the Cthulhu Mythos, in which the connections with Lovecraft’s Mythos are named and tabulated by story.

Update: There’s now a French translation audiobook reading on YouTube, “Voyage De Sfanomoë”.

Ray Bradbury Now and Forever

02 Tuesday Nov 2021

Posted by in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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“Ray Bradbury fan donates lifelong collection to University of South Carolina” and this is now accessible…

The Anne Farr Hardin Collection of Ray Bradbury Books, Fanzines, Pulps, Magazines, Correspondence, Photographs, Memorabilia, and Ephemera is now accessible to UofSC students, faculty, staff and visiting researchers by appointment with the Irvin Department.

There’s also an online exhibition version of the collection highlights, Ray Bradbury Now and Forever.

The “Ray Bradbury fan donates…” link is more than a press release, and is a good read in its own right.

Kuttner’s letters to Weird Tales

02 Tuesday Nov 2021

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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Dark Worlds Quarterly has a fine new illustrated timeline of Henry Kuttner’s Fan Letters to Weird Tales.

Talking of Weird Tales, S.T. Joshi’s Blog has updated. Among other items he brings news of a forthcoming collected stories of Robert Barbour Johnson, an author best known for his Lovecraftian ‘in the subways’ Weird Tales story “Far Below” (1939). I recall there’s already been at least one such collection, though perhaps not complete? The new book will also collect some of Johnson’s essays.

Quinn’s day-job

30 Saturday Oct 2021

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A Lovecraft letter reveals an item I don’t think I’ve ever noted elsewhere. Lovecraft states that his Weird Tales rival, Seabury Quinn, held a day-job as the Editor of The Casket. This being the twice-monthly trade journal for undertakers. Bacon’s Publicity Manual states of the title in 1933… “Goes to funeral directors and embalmers; circulation 8,900.”