November on Tentaclii

02 Wednesday Dec 2020

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As Britain morphs into the old East Germany, a matching iron-grey curtain of mist and December drizzle descends. But indoors it’s at least a more cheery picture, amid the piled-high Black Friday goodies and the soft glow of screens. Possibly the power cuts and food shortages will arrive in due course, but until then I’m personally quite pleased with my small baggings in terms of discounted software and 3D models. These were not Lovecraftian except in one case, as there were no book bargains or Amazon Warehouse deals on the Letters to be had this month. But some of the products of the software may show up here soon. I did keep an eye out for software of interest to Tentaclii readers, but neither PDF Index Generator or JitBit Macro Recorder offered a discount this year, and the Topaz GigaPixel AI discount was gone before I could mention it.

This month’s new research essays at Tentaclii took a look at “H.P. Lovecraft at Christmas”, and “Lovecraft and Havelock Ellis”, the early sexologist; and also “the Newport boat” which is an item of Providence scenery that appears briefly by implication in “The Call of Cthulhu”. This last post discovered a new picture of the very dock and this also doubled as one of my regular Postcards posts. In a lesser and related boat post I hopped onboard with Lovecraft as he took a steamer across the Mississippi in the 1930s. There was also an in-depth look at the Providence Art Club and specifically the old alley which was the haunt of the cat “Old Man”.

An actual new Lovecraft postcard was elsewhere put up for sale. This didn’t have new data, but the sign-off to C.A. Smith of “Yrs for the Eternal Infra-red Flame” at least gives Mythos writers a new “it came from Lovecraft” concept for tales. Someone should really collect all such sign-offs and salutations together, and date them, thus forming a sort of companion to the Commonplace Book. Sadly it won’t be me, as I don’t have the funds to order an immediate complete set of the published letters. Also relevant to Lovecraft-the-man was my quick summary post of “Some anniversaries for 2021”, of which the 100th anniversaries of “The Outsider” and “The Music of Erich Zann” seem the most notable.

Of new-found scholarly work, my Open Lovecraft had three more links added; and I was pleased to hear of a new Masters dissertation, “Providence Lost: Natural and Urban Landscapes in H. P. Lovecraft’s Fiction”, though this is not yet online.

A clutch of new journals popped out after Halloween, and with non-fiction too. These included Wormwood #35; the Italian Lovecraft journal Providence Tales; Bare Bones #3, and Skelos #4. Prompted again about Skelos I tracked back through their previous issues and filleted the non-fiction Lovecraft titles for your perusal. I also have a soft spot for Doc Savage, so noted here was the new The Bronze Gazette #84. This month the latest Lovecraft Annual No. 14, 2020 arrived in digital form on JSTOR for subscribing universities.

In open access and on archive.org, the microfilm journal The Art Digest arrived for free, covering the Lovecraft years of 1926-1937; and CLIJ: Cuadernos de Literatura Infantil y Juvenil is available for free from 1988-2009.

New books noted here included the greatly expanded H.P. Lovecraft: Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner and Others; Ideology and Scientific Thought in H.P. Lovecraft; the Annotated Guide to Robert E. Howard’s Weird Fantasy; and I also dug out a preview of the TOC for the forthcoming Renegades and Rogues: The Life and Legacy of Robert E. Howard. S.T. Joshi noted his Lovecraft biography I Am Providence is set for a 2021 Russian translation. Also noted here as forthcoming, but several years away yet, was the book Lovecraft & New York. This sounds like another welcome addition to the writing on Lovecraft and his topographies and topophilias.

Not much in the visual arts this month, other than archive diggings, but some will want to note that digital 3D Lovecraftiana can be had for bargain prices at present. The DAZ Store and Renderosity both have substantial Black Friday sales still on for a day or so. “Dead Pool” at the DAZ Store is basically Innsmouth for (currently) $15, and Renderosity has Lovecraft’s typewriter for $6. There’s also a modest 10% off Sixus1’s Aquarians Bundle which lets you populate Innsmouth. To run such 3D, Poser 11 Pro is currently a mere $80 at NeoWin Deals. They also have a… “Use code CMSAVE20 for an additional 20% off site-wide.” Which, if it works, would get you Poser 11 at an absolute bargain price of $64. Don’t delay, as Poser 12 is coming out any day now and will sweep away the deals.

My podcast notes at Tentaclii included one in which I was pleased to find Robert M. Price looking very hale and hearty at his new slot on the MythVision podcast, which I noted included a couple of new Lovecraft episodes; the discovery of A Scottish Podcast, this being a comedy Lovecraft podcast that seems well-regarded and worth noting; and a 50-minute “Lovecraft in the Merrimack Valley” talk from a local museum (time-bombed for 15th November, so it’s gone now).

In more substantial audio, Dark Adventure Radio Theatre released their new The Curse of Yig adaptation this month; Cadabra Records has a sumptuous new vinyl LP presentation of Lovecraft’s festive story “The Festival”; I linked a free recording of a world premiere of a song cycle All The Wild Worlds by Nicholas Ryan Kelly, which culminated in a Lovecraft poem set to music; and I found Clark Ashton Smith’s City of the Singing Flame and its sequel in free audiobook. I still haven’t got around to listening to this yet, but it’s cued up for Christmas. So many goodies, so little time…

I’m trying to find time to ease back into Tolkien and the post “Of cat-demons, Tolkien and Lovecraft” was a nice cross-over that resulted from this.

If you enjoy reading Tentaclii, please consider dropping me $1 a month or more via my Patreon please. Your Patreon giving has actually dropped slightly this month from $70 to $69, as one $1 patron has dropped out. So it would be encouraging to see a few more monthly dollars arrive over Christmas. Thanks!

“The Festival” on vinyl

30 Monday Nov 2020

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Need a suitable Yuletide spinner to enliven the hipsters at a dour Xmas party? Cadabra Records has a new vinyl LP presentation of Lovecraft’s festive “The Festival”, read By Andrew Leman to a score by Fabio Frizzi and with art by Jesse Jacobi.

Not quite on the store yet, with a page for pre-orders that’s not yet live. The record will ship 18th December 2020.

Cadabra Records on SoundCloud has a free sample.

New book: Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner and Others (new expanded edition)

29 Sunday Nov 2020

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hplovecraft.com has a new page giving the full table-of-contents for the new expanded H.P. Lovecraft: Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner and Others. Now expanded from 298 pages to 546 pages, and according to Amazon it started shipping about two weeks ago.

Had not my mother disturbed my ambitious effort of last May [1917], in which I utilised my absurdly robust-looking exterior as a passport to martial glory in the National Guard, I should now be digging trenches, drilling, & pounding a typewriter at Fort Standish in Boston Harbour, where the 9th Co. R.I. Coast Artillery is placed at present.” (Lovecraft, in Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner).

McFarland’s 30% sale

27 Friday Nov 2020

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McFarland has a Black Friday sale with coupon BLACKFRIDAY30 — and their huge list has a great many to choose from. Though it’s not all great, and in there are some gems such as H. P. Lovecraft’s Dark Arcadia, but also some that are not so good such as the Dune Companion. I spotted a book there that’s new to me, Arkham House Books: A Collector’s Guide (2004). This has a pleasing Cornell-like glimpse of Lovecraft on the cover.

Friday ‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: The Art Club

27 Friday Nov 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Picture postals

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This week’s postcard is of the Art Club on Thomas Street, Providence.

Here we see the road-fronting section of the Club known as the “Brick Club House” building. The publication date is 1914, but I would guess the date of the picture is perhaps a few years after purchase of this house by the Club in 1906. Due to it being brick-built my colorising of it has imagined the building unpainted, with perhaps blue windows and shutters. It had been altered “sufficiently” for the purposes of a 100+ strong Club, but it was only leased and it was apparently under threat of being swept away by a planned railroad tunnel. Thus it lacks the love and polish it was given in the mid 1920s and later. Yet even here we can see the new large front door with its “resounding knocker”. Some years later the building’s “countless wooden shutters”, also seen here, were removed and served to panel a new Reading Room set to one side of the Entrance. By circa 1909 the Club had a Library and subscribed to about 30 art journals.

Here we see the Club in the snow circa 1909, perhaps a year or two after the above picture. Two sets of shutters have already been removed…

Inside, a floor had also been removed, thus forming the tall exhibition gallery that rose to the skylight…

In “the season”, there was an art show hung here every two weeks. Lovecraft once recalled that…

my eldest aunt is still more expert in this [artistic] direction, having had canvases hung in exhibition at the Providence Art Club

There were also evening ‘dinners’ for the men and ‘afternoons’ for the women, at which speakers were sometimes invited. Occasionally there were events to which members could invite guest non-members.

In 1919 the “Dodge” house, glimpsed on the far-left of the first picture, was purchased by the Club, and further money had been raised to provide an extensive exterior makeover. Part of the intended change was to sympathetically brick over the old cobbled lane of circa 1786, with a restored Georgian arch and walkway. This horse-way had led back to the old stables and coach house at the rear of the property.

This arch is marked on the map-plan as 1920, but it apparently took until 1924 to complete. Lovecraft might have seen the ‘new-look’ Club before he left for New York City, but equally he might have been delighted to return a few years later to find the Art Club looking distinctly more Georgian and restored. Indeed, the Club was one of the very first places he went when he returned home…

Then followed a resumption of real life as I had dropped it two years ago — the life of a settled American gentleman in his ancestral environment. We went out to an exhibition of paintings at the Art Club, (the colonial house in hilly Thomas Street, in front of which I snap-shotted Mortonius last fall — I mean the fall of ’23) (circular enclosed [presumably a flyer for the Art Club]) and had dinner downtown at Shepard’s (neo-) Colonial Restaurant. In the evening a cinema show at the good old Strand in Washington Street completed a memorable and well-rounded day.” (Selected Letters II).

Seen on the left of the first picture of the Art Club was the spot that Lovecraft sometimes met and conversed with the cat “Old Man”. The arch under which “Old Man” liked to sit is not itself a Georgian original, though was loving restored to that style by the Club President George Frederick Hall. The cobbled lane he arched and partly re-cobbled was of that age, as one can see from the above map-plan.

Here we see this arch and the cat “Old Man”, as finely drawn by Jason C. Eckhardt for The H. P. Lovecraft Cat Book (2019). Here is Lovecraft recalling “Old Man”…

He was a great fellow. He belonged to a market at the foot of Thomas Street — the hill street mentioned in [The Call of] “Cthulhu” as the abode of the young artist — & could usually (in later life) be found asleep on the sill of a low window almost touching the ground. Occasionally he would stroll up the hill as far as the Art Club, seating himself at the entrance [to the alleyway]. At night, when the electric lights made the street bright, the space within the archway would remain pitch-black. So that it looked like the mouth of an illimitable abyss, or the gateway of some nameless dimension. And there, as if stationed as a guardian of the unfathomed mysteries beyond, would crouch the sphinxlike, jet-black, yellow-eyed, & incredibly ancient form of Old Man. […] I came to regard him as an indispensable acquaintance, and would often go considerably out of my way to pass his habitual territory, on the chance that I might find him visible. Good Old Man! In fancy I pictured him as an hierophant of the mysteries behind the black archway, and wondered if he would ever invite me through it some midnight … Wondered, too, if I could ever could back to earth alive after accepting such an invitation.

Lovecraft likely recalled his own lost cat of the same colour, Trigger-ban, who had run away when Lovecraft had lost his childhood home. Had this missing cat lived on, my guess is he would have been more or less be of the same age as “Old Man”. Lovecraft also likely knew that the line of the underground railroad tunnel ran along the back of the Art Club, going under the hill to emerge near the Seekonk River. The Art Club had been in danger of being swept away when the line was being planned. But in the end, the line of the new tunnel was usefully nudged a little on the map, so it ran at the back of the property. To one who was aware of such tunnels it might, poetically and in dreams, have provided an additional dark route into mystery. After the death of “Old Man” Lovecraft continued to meet and go with him in dreams…

Lovecraft dreamed of him even more than before — he would “gaze with aged yellow eyes that spoke secrets older than Aegyptus or Atlantis.” (S.T. Joshi, I Am Providence, quoting Lovecraft).

Of cat-demons, Tolkien and Lovecraft

24 Tuesday Nov 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Kittee Tuesday, New books, Scholarly works

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I’m currently reading the recent Tolkien biography by Raymond Edwards, newly in Kindle ebook in 2020. At least one Amazon reviewer has spluttered at the book’s occasional informed speculation, such as the suggestion that Tolkien read Ker’s classic scholarly synthesis The Dark Ages. Yes, it was a key book of the time and a highly readable and yet erudite synthesis. Edwards doesn’t put a date on it, but I’d say Tolkien probably read it and circa summer 1912 is the most likely date. The Amazon reviewer is anyway tripped up by not consulting a footnote on the matter — which reveals that Tolkien did read it and by the early 1930s, when he “quoted extensively from it”.

But for me Edwards is very usefully conversant with the ins-and-outs and ways of Oxford University life and its nomenclature, and has a keen insight into the mindset of intelligent lads of that era. Some further observations and phrasing suggest he’s writing from a traditionalist Catholic perspective, but this is offered very lightly and not laid on with a trowel. Despite its readability and seemingly reliability this is not the biography to read first, and it needs to be filled-in with the use of the Chronology (lucky Tolkien scholars have a vast day-by-day / week-by-week Chronology of his life, assiduously compiled by Hammond and Scull). But the new biography generally presents a readable and insightful narrative.

Lovecraft occasionally makes an appearance, being Tolkien’s contemporary. Here is Edwards on cat-demons and Lovecraft, about a quarter of the way through his book and at the point when Tolkien has been invalided home to Birmingham (early November 1916) after a fierce and victorious battle in France, and then stays at Great Haywood in mid Staffordshire (early Dec – late Feb 1917)…

The style of the Tales [very early First World War works, collected in Lost Tales] is a deliberate mixture of archaizing prose in the best William Morris manner, with a faintly precious Edwardian ‘fairy’ or ‘elfin’ quality, all flittermice and flower-lanterns and diminutives (partly down to [the whimsical side of the Catholic poet, Tolkien’s favourite] Francis Thompson, partly we may guess to [Tolkien’s young wife] Edith’s fondness for such things), with a dash of whimsy (cat-demons, talking hounds) that may owe something to Lord Dunsany. At moments, the effect is most like not Morris or Dunsany but, oddly, the later Randolph Carter stories of H.P. Lovecraft, which are explicit dream-narratives. The [key work in Lovecraft’s Dreamlands cycle was] not written until [1926–27]*, and [Dream-Quest] not published until after Lovecraft’s death, so there can be no question of influence either way, but there is a certain occasional likeness of tone. Lovecraft was two years older than Tolkien, and their backgrounds were not really alike; but there was perhaps something in the air. Both men, as well, had clearly read their Dunsany.

* I’ve corrected his dating.

There is another comparison to make, and at more or less the same time. Compared to Lovecraft, Tolkien at the end of 1919 saw the…

widening of modern knowledge of the universe & consequent opening up of new fields of ideas, should more than compensate for any blunting of our capacity for imaginative appreciation of certain aspects of nature, as compared with the ancients.

By which he means the nature-appreciation not only of the Egyptians, Greeks, Babylonians etc, but also the Northern tribes and peoples. And their ability to ‘spring’ imaginative stories from a local nature on which they relied for their very being. Here he also implicitly harks back to a long British Christian tradition that saw the natural sciences as a positive thing in terms of helping to reveal the works and workings of God.

Lovecraft worried about how such things might play out negatively on a longer time-scale, and in a mutually-reinforcing manner. In the mid 1920s he famously stated that…

the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

However, the Tolkien of 1919 was not the Tolkien of the mid 1930s. Later, as 1934 dawned and the darkness of the mid 1930s settled in, Tolkien too felt much as Lovecraft did about the changing times. Like…

A lost survivor in an alien world after the real world had passed away.

Artificial life

23 Monday Nov 2020

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The Voluminous podcast, which reads Lovecraft’s letters, “is going monthly”. But this week, in place of a podcast, there is an item of historical context and curiosity, re: the previous letter and its mention of.. “extravagant claims about creating artificial life in a laboratory that got a fair amount of press coverage in the spring of 1926”. Lovecraft’s Aunt Lillian had saved and sent the press clippings.

The enclosures were perhaps unconsciously ironic, as Lovecraft was then seeking to escape a different kind of “artificial life”, as he found it in the…

cosmopolitan chaos [of] New York — which has no central identity or meaning, & no clean-cut relationship either to its own past or to anything else in particular — but of course I realise that different minds have different requirements, & that there are those who find in the intense surge of artificial life a certain stimulation which brings out what is already in them. But [a young writer considering coming to the city] ought to be warned in advance that all life in New York is purely artificial & affected…

“… the horror will repay one for wading through the plethora of Scottish dialect.”

22 Sunday Nov 2020

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Scottish Lovecraftian Comedy. What’s that then, and is it more fun than a hairy highland haggis on the loose? Find out by listening to a new long interview with the maker of such…

Matthew McLean is the writer, producer and one of the stars of A Scottish Podcast. While the name may not suggest it, A Scottish Podcast is steeped in Lovecraftian horror. It’s also pretty damn funny.