Gene Colan Lovecraft adaptation page

22 Thursday Oct 2020

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Newly up for sale, an original art board for Marvel’s Journey into Mystery, specifically the Gene Colan teen-friendly Lovecraft adaptation of “The Haunter of the Dark”.

Also a nice page of ‘Kirby Cosmicism’ from Thor, where in the pencilled margin notes you can see the synopsis and thus ‘the Marvel Method’ at work. For speed, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby would verbally spitball a plot outline, and Lee would jot it down into a basic synopsis. Jack would go away and pencil the pages to the synopsis, then Lee would come back in and ‘write to the art’ — often directly onto the boards.

Both boards are at nostalgicinvestments which has a website that’s just too annoying to link to, with weird rapid auto-refresh of pages that can’t be cured even by disabling Javascript and CSS.

Kittee Tuesday: thought-control kitties?

20 Tuesday Oct 2020

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Do rats, mind-controlled by weird invisible brain-parasites, launch themselves to their doom in the jaws of hungry cats? This faintly Lovecraftian claim has been made, sometimes with seeming authority, and then hugely amplified by the media and by the follow-on percolation of the notion into folk-belief. With the implication that kitty, having unaccountably turned up her nose at her Chicken Chunks ConCarne and instead chewed on a smelly rat, might then pass on the brain-controlling parasite to her humans.

Turns out, it’s something of a media myth, according to the new Royal Society paper “When fiction becomes fact: exaggerating host manipulation by parasites”…

… there is no sound evidence that the behavioural changes in infected rodents increase the transmission of  T. gondii to felids [i.e. cats …] The evidence surrounding the ‘fatal feline attraction’ is inconsistent and contradictory at best (as it is for all the impacts of  T. gondii on human and non-human behaviours).

Which doesn’t mean that this is impossible, just so far un-tested in a firm manner. If such a causal transmission and chain-of-effect were eventually to be found, the paper points out, it may be far more subtle and complex than we think. Of course, everyone who has a cat knows they can do thought-control of humans (“feed me… feeed me… feeeed meee…”), and cause them to head rapidly toward the kitchen. But the lurid ‘rat parasite’ claim is of a different order. It’s no doubt been a very handy excuse for cat-haters, over the last 20 years or so, along the lines of: “Oh no, we don’t let little Timmy anywhere near cats, they could give him a mind-warping brain-parasite…”

This also rather throws cold water on the possibility that H.P. Lovecraft, through his frequent heavy-petting encounters with just about every stray cat in the unsavoury parts of Providence, Boston, and New York City, “must” have had his mind turned toward weirdness by brain-parasites.

Stuff To Blow Your Mind: a three-parter on the Minotaur

19 Monday Oct 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Podcasts etc.

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The quality Stuff To Blow Your Mind podcast has a new three-parter on the famous Minotaur and its Cretan labyrinth.

Lovecraft would, like most children before the early 1980s, have early become familiar with Greek myth and with the Minotaur story. He found it early in his boyhood, and in vivid form, in Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales for Boys and Girls (1853). Despite the book’s misleadingly rustic title — from which one might expect only cosy mid-Victorian woodland cottages and merrily skipping milk-maids — Hawthorne actually recounts powerful Ancient Greek myth… “the stories of the Minotaur, the Pygmies, the Dragon’s Teeth, Circe’s Palace, the Pomegranate Seeds, and the Golden Fleece” (S.T. Joshi, I Am Providence). Sadly, libraries in the U.S. are now pulling Hawthorne from the shelves. Apparently he offends some perpetually-offended politically-correct sect or other. Laughably, Upton Sinclair, once the golden boy of the left and about whom Lovecraft was sniffy, is being swept away along with Hawthorne.

Machen links updated

19 Monday Oct 2020

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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I’ve updated the Web links on my 2019 post Machen’s autobiography – all three volumes now online and I had also linked there to Strange Roads.

Two of the 2019 links went only to Hathi, which wasn’t ideal since they don’t let you download the entire book. Hathi can also be slow, and can stop working if it thinks you’re trying to ‘pirate’ the book by reading too many pages. The new links are to The London Adventure and Strange Roads, which are now free and openly public on Archive.org with downloads. This leaves only Things Near and Far as the lone Hathi-only title.

If you want them all in printed-paper as good texts and with the S.T. Joshi stamp-of-approval, there’s also the new book Autobiographical Writings by Arthur Machen which I’m told will ship in November 2020.

Tales I

17 Saturday Oct 2020

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books

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A Portuguese translated Tales collection from Lovecraft, to be published from Martin Claret, 28th October 2020. It’s one of three such volumes but their page for these is broken, which doesn’t inspire confidence. Still, a very pleasing and clever cover for the first such book.

The bicycle is there because the young Lovecraft was a keen cyclist to about 1908, then it most likely became sporadic, and he marks 1913 as the terminal date for his giving up cycling altogether. For adults to cycle in Providence was not the “done thing” at that time.

‘Picture postals’ from Lovecraft: Westerly!

16 Friday Oct 2020

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This week, a postcard to accompany the recent Voluminous podcast reading of “I Am Home”. The letter being Lovecraft’s ecstatic recounting of his returning to Providence by rail, from what he had come to think of as the ‘pest-zone’ of New York City. As the train sped through Westerly he finally felt he was coming home…

Then at last a still subtler magick fill’d the air — nobler roofs and steeples, with the train rushing airily above them on its lofty viaduct — Westerly — in His Majesty’s Providence of RHODE-ISLAND & PROVIDENCE-PLANTATIONS! GOD SAVE THE KING!!

Interestingly there was a “Wolf’s Den” at or near Westerly (often mis-named as “Westerely”), though he may never have visited it.

The best is can get is …

We’ll have to investigate Chauncey. Westerly coaches pass through Hope Valley (so do the New York Greyhounds), but the fare is probably rather formidable.” — letter to Morton, January 1933.

But perhaps he never made it there. Poverty led him to write to Morton in June 1930 that…

I fear desperately that I can’t quite make the Westerly jaunt.

There seems no other evidence he visited. Perhaps Westerly remained always a tantalising stop on the train line to Providence, at which he never alighted? A local place that, like Block Island, he should have visited but didn’t?

It’s cultifectious…

15 Thursday Oct 2020

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works

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A new book, seemingly coming from an occultist perspective, Dark Magic: H.P. Lovecraft, Starry Wisdom and the Contagion of Fear…

explores the contagious qualities of Lovecraft’s tales, with their embedded sense of dread and their dismantling of human reason, and how they have propagated in the near century after his death … the infectious qualities of Lovecraft’s ideas are seen to parallel virology, mass infection, and the fraying state of the human psyche during times of pandemic.

Which blurb leads me to coin the new word “cultifectious”:— the quality had by a certain type of culture that is highly infectious and communicable, but not mere mass-market pop-fluff or some passing propaganda of-the-moment. It carries within it a complex nexus of elements that organically connect things usually divided — low and high culture, the deep past and the cosmic future, or ancient and modern science. Its infectiousness thus comes partly from being connected to ‘the genuine’ at both ends of one of those divisions, and by bringing these lightly into play with each other. Because it has something genuine woven through it, it may be difficult to make into a mass audience commodity unless brutally shorn of many of its intrinsic qualities. Instead it persists and spreads among initiates as a potent ‘cultic’ form of culture. It does not usually, however, gather about it the more oppressive hierarchical apparatus of ‘a cult’ in the religious sense. It naturally fascinates, rather than ponderously recruits.