Lovecraft’s 131st birthday

14 Wednesday Jul 2021

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I’m pleased to say that I’ve finished work on making Lovecraft’s 131st birthday present for 2021, and with just over a month to go. I hope it will be something that all Lovecraftians will find very useful — and repeatedly so.

Your target date this year is 20th August 2021, should you also wish to make or write something or to stage a small event etc. This year it coincides with the PulpFest 2021 weekend.

Notes on Letters to Family, Vol. II – part two

12 Monday Jul 2021

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More notes on my reading of the second volume of H.P. Lovecraft’s Letters to Family, here mostly relating to 1926-1928.

There is an interesting description, re: a possible inspiration for “The Colour Out of Space”, of a ground curiously mineralised and as-if “powdered with star-dust” (page 604). He finds this in September 1926 scattered around the 1707 birthplace of the early astronomer David Rittenhouse (1732-1796), a homestead that had been encountered by chance as Lovecraft was lost while exploring the Wissahickon Valley. “Colour” was written some six months later.

Lovecraft saw the grand historical-adventure movie Ben Hur (page 602). Later he remarks on his break from cinema-going, between Aug-Sept 1927 and May 1928.

He recalls the Old Corner Bookshop (page 612). Presumably Dana’s Old Corner Bookstore in Providence, as he had sold some of his mother’s books to them and later regretted parting with one such when he saw it on display in the window.

He remarks that, like himself, his friend Loveman also had many young proteges… “He had with him one of his numberless prodigy-proteges, a quiet blond youth whose accomplishments seem to be, so far, appreciative rather than creative” (page 632).

In April 1928 Loveman had noticed that the old rooming house, 169 Clinton St. on the edge of Red Hook, appeared abandoned and with some windows smashed. However, in May 1928 Lovecraft and Loveman went to bid it a final goodbye… only to find it revived (a fresh coat of paint and “marks of rehabilitation”) and thus presumably under new ownership (pages 634 and 661).

By April 1928 the Kalem meetings had “almost dissolved” (i.e. dwindled to just a few attendees) but were strongly revived while Lovecraft was again living in New York City.

On discovering that some museums would make a good affordable plaster-casts for private display, he remarks… “it was my original design in youth to have a private museum of Greek & Roman casts”.

He discovers an old Antarctic adventure novel he has not yet read, titled Revi-lona: a Romance of Love in A Marvelous Land (1879) by a journalist of the time. An explorer finds love with sex-starved women in a tropical shangri-la amid the ice. Apparently very floridly written and yet ultimately conveying the rather cynical and anti-utopian sentiments of an American newspaperman. The implication is that Lovecraft has read most such novels, but that this is a new find for him. Not on Archive.org under that title.

“The Spence book on Atlantis that I read so hurriedly just before departing for my trip” (page 637). There is no footnote for this book, and both “Spence” and “Atlantis” are curiously missing from the index. Lewis Spence wrote five books about Atlantis, and the most likely in spring 1928 was the relatively new The History of Atlantis (1927), though it might have been the earlier The Problem of Atlantis (1924) or Atlantis in America (1925).

Lovecraft read at least one non-fiction book by Lewis Mumford on architecture. This was prior to Mumford’s efflorescence of ideas on tools, technologies and civilisation.

He knew, read and kept the magazine published by the Hospital Trust in Providence. This produced the fine Netropian journal, with many local history articles and local drawings from the 1920s. Copies apparently languish in paper at Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design, un-scanned.

He mentions reading and being impressed by a volume of poetry by Gessler, friend of his best friend Belknap Long, titled Kanaka Moon (1927). Not on Archive.org.

He found Morton’s full library very impressive when he saw it fully assembled and shelved at Paterson, and thought it better even than that of Cook. “I’ve never seen so fine a private Library” (pages 657 and 658).

Lovecraft finds he has a family-tree line named “Fish” (page 663), and this is some years before the writing of “Innsmouth”.

There was a time when $5 would buy you a custom original plot-synopsis by H.P. Lovecraft. In the spring of 1928 he was writing many such plots for one “Reed”, at the jobbing rate of a dollar per page (page 668). We later learn this client to be a “Mrs Reed” (page 676), now of course known to be his revision client Zealia Brown Reed.

Lovecraft revised the first chapter of McNeil’s historical-adventure novel The Shores of Adventure (1929). In which the boy hero earns and acquires his father’s super-sword.

In summer 1928 he notes “a resumption of the Providence Line of New York boats”, meaning passenger services from Providence — New York City.

Lovecraft discovered an old unchanged working colonial farmstead, “in full sight of the distant towers of Manhattan” and with its inhabitants oblivious to modernity of New York City (page 678).

The Goat with a Thousand Young

10 Saturday Jul 2021

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Rock Hill Herald profiles the Lovecraft-contemporary known as the ‘Goat Gland King’, the sort of quack that Lovecraft appears to laugh at in several works. In this case, John Romulus Brinkley was active from 1916 into the early 1930s. He offered expensive quack treatments claiming that goat-gland transplants would “restore sexual vitality and fertility to impotent or ‘tired’ men”.

However as I’ve noted in “On Lovecraft’s glands”, while laughing at such things Lovecraft also held long-standing notions about ‘glands shaping personality’ and believed glandular compulsion to be the major factor driving various forms of sexual aberrancy. It appears to have followed, for him, that the more tiresome emotions could be ignored because they were just the passing result of “glandular secretion & hormonic discharge”.

These notions were not the result of some cranky middle-aged idée fixe but were more or less a normal take-up of the emerging science-based ideas of his time, half-baked though some of them may now seem. But he was perhaps unusual in extending his glandular thinking to aesthetic capabilities, which may have raised a few eyebrows among the reputable scientists in the field…

There are subtleties & overtones on my side that you can never get [on the] emotional & imaginative wave-lengths. […] we’re simply not built the same way & our glands simply don’t function the same way” (To Woodburn Harris, 1929).

One’s glandular state was then for him a kind of determinism. One had been ‘born that way’, and nothing could be done about it. But he once mused that this dulled state was perhaps not perpetually fixed. Some future eugenic improvement might open up people to new aesthetic experiences that they would otherwise be incapable of…

While nothing in our normal experience is ever likely to call forth any additional senses, it is not impossible that experiments with the ductless glands might open up a fresh sensitivity or two — and then what impressions might not pour in?” (To Ashton Smith, 1933).

In this he seems to vaguely anticipate the technocratic post-war ideas of Marshall McLuhan, who suggested that experiencing electronic media and information-flows might extended man’s “entire nervous system” and thus “produce an entirely different state of being” with access to expanded aesthetic senses. No need for those old 1930s goat-glands, just plug in your gleaming 1970s Home Cinematron screen.

Final five volumes of the Lovecraft letters

07 Wednesday Jul 2021

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S.T. Joshi’s Blog has updated. We now have titles for the final five volumes of the Lovecraft letters…

Letters to Woodburn Harris and Others.
Letters to Hyman Bradofsky and Others.
Miscellaneous Letters.
Letters with Frank Belknap Long (2 vols.).

And speaking of letters there’s a new Voluminous podcast on Lovecraft’s letters. “Currying Favour”, in which Lovecraft discusses the wonders of curry from an East Indian recipe. The home-made curry recipe which delighted him can be found in the back of the new Letters to E. Hoffmann Price and Richard F. Searight.

“… all the rare spices & savoury herbs that camel-caravans with tinkling bells bring secretly from forgotten orients” — Lovecraft, elsewhere, rhapsodising on rich food.

New on DeviantArt

03 Saturday Jul 2021

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New on DeviantArt…

“The Color out of Space” by Smilodon99, in a rustic woodblock etching style.

“Shadow Over Innsmouth” inspired painting by Thomas-Elliott-Art.

The shady town by GBLXVIII, showing Innsmouth. Creative Commons.

Choose Cthulhu – The Shadow Over Innsmouth Map by Qpiii. A Choose-your-own-Adventure map.

Lovecraftian Species by VanDeWolf. Giving a pleasingly fluid and semi-plant feel.

Portrait of H.P. Lovecraft with a black cat by Ghostexist. Given the age of Lovecraft here it’s unlikely to be meant to depict the beloved cat ‘Trigger-ban’, which ran away and was lost when Lovecraft was just a lad. And which also had green eyes.

And The Shadow In Innsmouth by Nick-Perks. Being The Shadow pulp character. In Innsmouth.

June on Tentaclii

01 Thursday Jul 2021

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Tentaclii Towers displayed itself in many moods this month, as the changeable weather of a typical English June settled in. Sometimes the walls were mist shrouded, sometimes basking in sun as if the Towers were a Mediterranean chateau. Inside the hoary Towers I relaxed my daily posting schedule. The vast Library of Ye Olde Postcards has also been locked up for the summer, to make time for other matters.

But in June my last few regular Friday ‘Picture Postals’ posts offered a view across “Night in Providence, 1933”, newly colorised; walked on “a hot day under the Brooklyn Elevated”; and I also spotted the man himself via a pleasing Dessin Jullia postcard portrait from France. Then, just as I thought the time-consuming ‘Postcard’ posts were in abeyance for a while, up pop some eBay pictures that appear to show Lovecraft’s childhood ‘ground zero’. The Seekonk near York Pond, before the extensive road-grading work. These pictures will appear enlarged and colourised and geo-checked in due course.

In scholarly work, a number of links to scholarly items were added to my Open Lovecraft page at Tentaclii. I noted a call for papers for the German book H.P. Lovecraft and Germany: Cultural Reflections, and offered some additional topic suggestions. I reviewed The Lovecraft Annual for 2020 at some length. I began the reading of Lovecraft’s Letters to Family, Vol. II, and I’ll be posting sets of notes here as I go.

In books I noticed that Lovecraft’s poetry is now in a Swedish translation, and that there’s a Dream Quest semi-artbook from the same publisher. I tracked down exactly who was interviewed in the way out-of-print book Speaking of Science Fiction, and along the way discovered there are now three volumes of Darrell Schweitzer’s Speaking of the Fantastic interviews with authors and editors. Wormwoodania brought news that there is a weighty Robert Aickman biography forthcoming, and I rescued and colourised a bad scan of a fine Ida Kar portrait of him to accompany my post on this news.

I’m always pleased when people record audio readings of Lovecraft’s more interesting poems, and this month it was Lovecraft’s early anti-booze poem, “The Power Of Wine” (1916) from SFFAudio. Which was not without macabre interest. In other audio I linked to several items from the successful Robert E. Howard Days 2021, and I noticed the most recent Voluminous podcast which surveyed the Long letters newly acquired by Brown University.

A passing notice here of a Lovecraft mention in the memoir Literary Lamas of New York led to me noticing the same author’s Evangelical Cockroach book of stories. This was later reprinted by Richard A. Lupoff and, in a lengthy trailer post for the reprint, I found that Lupoff had slipped in another comment on George Sylvester Viereck… “Woodford also published a late fantasy novel by the controversial German-American poet-journalist-propagandist George Sylvester Viereck”. See my earlier post on Tentaclii on Lupoff and his claims re: Viereck and Lovecraft.

In the visual arts I spotted the new 64-page comic, Nightmares of Providence #1 which is a stretch-goal anthology as part of an Alan Moore fundraiser and as such has major talent in it. I found several new items for the ‘Lovecraft as character’ category of posts, one of these also being a recent comic. Also on Tentaclii this month, more of my surveys of DeviantArt. Another such is to come in a few days.

There appears to be a lot of activity going on in the Lovecraftian games market, as usual, way too much for me to cover. But I have a soft spot for the Elder Scrolls series (Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim etc) and so was pleased to note the substantial DLC/mod “Here There Be Monsters” – The Call Of Cthulhu for Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. I believe there’s also a well-made Lovecraftian indie movie out and called The Deep Ones, though as yet I’ve not looked at reviews.

I’m pleased to also say I have a new ‘draw on the screen’ pen monitor, a £500 XP-Pen Artist 22 (2nd Gen, 2021). The 16-page technical review that earned me this beauty is to be found in the latest issue of Digital Art Live magazine, if you were thinking of getting one too. My ‘old’ PC is also back up and running, and nothing was lost from the hard-drive failure on the now-defunct ‘new’ one. Nothing except time, as it’s taken a solid two weeks of work, on and off, to get back to something like normal. The situation is still not ideal, but I don’t have the price of a new £1,000 PC that would be reasonable future-proof. My thanks to my Pateons, whose June Patreon donations helped be put a good 500Gb SSD drive in the ‘old’ PC. It’s fast enough that it should get me back the two lost weeks of time, before Christmas.

That’s it for June. Please consider becoming my patron on Patreon, or upping your regular donation. It really helps me out. One-off PayPal donations are also welcome via the sidebar link on the blog, to help buy new books of Lovecraft letters. I still have about eight of those to get.

A final thought: how will you mark Lovecraft’s birthday later in 2021?

“At last I came to the city itself – and here I still am!”

30 Wednesday Jun 2021

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New to me, the HPLHS has a two-page Providence Sunday Journal replica newspaper sheet. It marks the moment that most people in Lovecraft’s Providence learned that a major author had been living among them. HPLHS are expert prop-makers, so despite the lack of yellowing I suspect you can be sure it’ll look and feel, and perhaps even smell, like a real fresh-and-inky 1940s city newspaper sheet.

You also get the reverse, which continues the long article.