Kittee Tuesday: Cats of the Louvre

30 Tuesday Jun 2020

Posted by in Kittee Tuesday, New books

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Celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s keen interest in our feline friends.

A 420-page graphic novel about cats in a giant old museum, Cats of the Louvre (Sept 2019). Nice. Can’t think how I missed the appearance of this book in English, last year, but I did. Well-reviewed, it’s apparently a well-told and subtly ‘surreal’ tale, and not a twee shelf-filler for the Museum’s shop.

Arthur Leeds and the Canadian Army

28 Sunday Jun 2020

Posted by in Historical context

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My reading of the volume of Lovecraft’s letters to Bloch, now completed, has helped fill in a gap in the life of Arthur Leeds. On page 274 Lovecraft gives Kenneth Sterling a potted biography of his friend Leeds, and notes that…

During the war he was a volunteer with the Canadian Army … he has travelled extensively, even been to Egypt.

This new (to me) data helps fill in the circa 1916-1919 gap for the Leeds biography, as found in my book Lovecraft in Historical Context #4. Leeds was Editor of Scripts at the Edison movie studio in New York City until December 1915, so any war service presumably started (after basic training) in late spring 1916.

Presumably he embarked for France. The Canadian Corps. of volunteers was “one of the most effective allied fighting forces on the Western Front”, and if he was serving with them in an armed capacity he would have seen some heavy fighting in trench warfare conditions.

As for Lovecraft’s mention of Egypt, one wonders if Leeds headed there for a few month in late 1918/early 1919 on being demobbed? It would make sense to go somewhere both warm and safe (Egypt was then British) if one had the meagre funds to get to southern France and then by ship across the Mediterranean. Rather than return home to face a possibly brutal New York winter with no prospect of employment — the old New York movie industry had upped stakes and ‘gone west’ to California. Edison formally wrapped up its Bronx movie division in 1918.

Changes at Archive.org

27 Saturday Jun 2020

Posted by in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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Archive.org has now ended their ‘extended borrow’ feature for books. For the duration of the emergency, they had made borrowing a book possible to all members, regardless of how many others had also chosen to borrow the book at the same time. The Internet Archive ‘borrow’ service is now back to the old ‘one book, one borrow’ feature, akin to a normal public membership library that only has paper books. The mega-publishers would like you to think that the ending of it was due to Archive.org being ‘frightened off’ by their new law-suit. But this return to a ‘normal library’ approach was always planned, once the emergency period was over.

Archive.org has even added a useful new feature to ‘Borrow’. One that brings them more into line with the practice of Google Books, and with public libraries where one might take a book off the shelf and flip through it. On many books the potential borrower now gets a full-page preview of the page on which your search-hit occurs. This is potentially very useful for researchers who find the book is in high demand from borrowers. Hopefully someone will code a UserScript to place a ‘see this same page on Google Books’ link adjacent to the page preview. Thus potentially giving the researcher more free pages either side.

Book: Underground Rivers

27 Saturday Jun 2020

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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Underground Rivers by Richard Heggen. A 1,500 page PDF book kindly placed online for free by the author in its latest summer 2018 draft, under Creative Commons Attribution NC. Effectively it’s a chronological and thematic encyclopedia with comprehensive coverage of British and American popular culture, and abundant illustrations. It also has many rich dips into ancient mythology on the topic. It’s evidently a years-long side-project and the author, Professor Emeritus of Civil Engineering at The University of New Mexico, asks to be informed of anything he may have missed over the decades.

While many of the illustration are in the public domain, some are likely not. It would probably be safer to assume that the Creative Commons Attribution NC licence applies to the text only.

‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: Mammoth Cave

26 Friday Jun 2020

Posted by in Picture postals

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In early April 1905 a 15 year old H.P. Lovecraft walked down the old hill into town, buffeted and chilled by the unusually windy and snowy season. There he snuggled down in the warmth and silence of the Public Library and spent “days of boning at the library”, as he later said. The word ‘boning’ here being schoolboy shorthand for the elbows-on-the-table hardness of steady study — and perhaps also the dog-at-a-bone tenacity needed to do it.

His research subject was the Mammoth Cave in distant Kentucky, a vast and reputedly endless cave system that had already been well-mined by juvenile writers. It was to form the setting of his juvenile tale “The Beast in the Cave”, of which S.T. Joshi states “the finished version dates to April 21, 1905”. While the photographic postcards of the 1920s and 30s were at that point still decades distant, Lovecraft would almost certainly have dug up evocative engravings made in the 1880s and 90s by Edwin Hopper and others…

The Descent

The River Cliffs

On Echo River, with the hint of a lost doorway being discovered.

Cyclopean formations

So far as I know he never visited Mammoth Cave, but he did take a long trip to see the Endless Caverns, which I’ve documented in another post.

New features at WordPress.com

25 Thursday Jun 2020

Posted by in Housekeeping, Odd scratchings

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WordPress.com upgrades have just become more interesting. WordPress.com hosts this blog, and a half dozen others I run. Even £3-a-month blogging at WordPress can now include ‘Premium Content Blocks’ — available only to Followers who pay a monthly or annual subscription. This has been newly introduced, and at last makes WordPress the obvious alternative to Patreon. The future of Patreon seems increasingly uncertain, judging by their recent behaviour and reports on their balance-sheet and staff-cuts.

It would cost me £36 (about $45) a year, to step from Free to the paid ‘Personal Plan’ at WordPress. This would give me 6Gb of storage rather than 3Gb, and… the ‘paid subscribers’ features.

That would need to be done for two of my current free sites, Tentaclii and a local-history gallery site which is nearly full of local images (and thus will need another 3Gb by the Autumn/Fall). £72 a year is not impossible.

Ads would also be removed from a £3-per-month blog, but I’m not bothered about those — since I assume 99% of visitors run an ad-blocker in their browser.

I’m not saying I’m immediately going to switch Tentaclii from Patreon, having struggled thus far to get $65 a month there. But it’s an option I’ll be keeping in mind, as the weather cools and the ‘self-employed virus hardship’ payment comes in.

Dracula in Sweden

22 Monday Jun 2020

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. He has a book-sale on now and, among other new book news, has details of: two late novels by Frank Belknap Long set to be reprinted by Centipede; his abridged Lovecraft biography A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in His Time, now available in translation in Brazil; a forthcoming 300,000-word English translation of the Swedish version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula — possibly… “from an early version of the novel that found its way to Sweden in the 1890s. This version does not survive in English”. The Dracula translation has been edited by Joshi.