Union Station

10 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by in Picture postals

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A 1911 photo postcard from Union Station, Providence. Possibly a useful bit of visual information for those crafting graphic novels featuring scenes from Lovecraft’s life. I imagine the trains were much the same a decade or so later. Passenger steam trains only appear to have begun to fade away in the mid 1930s, when one can find mentions of new diesel engines running passenger services on the Providence and Boston line.

In the following May 1926 letter Lovecraft has almost returned home from New York City, and his train is slowing on its approach into Union Station…

… I fumble with bags and wraps in a desperate effort to appear calm -THEN- a delirious marble dome outside the window – a hissing of air brakes – a slackening of speed – surges of ecstasy and dropping of clouds from my eyes and mind – HOME – UNION STATION­ PROVIDENCE!!!! Something snapped – and everything unreal fell away. There was no more excitement; no sense of strangeness, and no perception of the lapse of time since last I stood on that holy ground. […] Simply, I was home­ and home was just as it had always been since I was born there thirty­ six years ago. There is no other place for me. My world is Providence.” — from Selected Letters II.

EconTalk: Harry Houdini

08 Wednesday Jan 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Podcasts etc.

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The excellent in-depth podcast EconTalk sprang a Christmas surprise. 90 minutes with Joe Posnanski on the Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini…

Journalist and author Joe Posnanski talks about his book, The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Posnanski explores the enduring fame of Houdini who remains an iconic cultural figure almost a century after his death. Topics discussed include the nature of celebrity, the nature of ambition, parenting, magic, and the use of public relations to create and sustain reputation and celebrity.

The Black Stone

07 Tuesday Jan 2020

Posted by in Kittee Tuesday, Odd scratchings, REH

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The Library of America selected a prime “R.E. Howard writes Lovecraft” story as their Free Story of the Week: “The Black Stone”. At the end of 2019 it proved to be at #5 in their end-of-year tally of their most popular stories.

Here it is in Weird Tales for November 1931.

The cover of this issue is also interesting. C.C. Senf provides a bristling black kittee that must have delighted the cat-loving Lovecraft when he saw the picture.

The Lovecraft Geek – episode 3

06 Monday Jan 2020

Posted by in Podcasts etc.

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Another item I missed in the Christmas ker-fluffle. Episode 3 of the new run of The Lovecraft Geek podcast with the venerable Robert M. Price, which he released just before Christmas 2019.

He refers to Lovecraft’s massive daily output of the written word as “graphomania”, a rare word I don’t think I’d encountered before and was thus pleased to learn. There’s also “typomania”, which I guess is the correct modern keyboarding form today, though it wouldn’t apply to Lovecraft since he deeply disliked typing. Also mentioned in the podcast is a relatively-soon re-publication of an old out-of-print Starmont critical book on the Lin Carter mythos and other works (Lin Carter: a Look Behind His Imaginary Worlds, Starmont Studies in Literary Criticism, No. 36), and the publication of the long-unpublished Annotated Lovecraft.

Public domain in 2020

02 Thursday Jan 2020

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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Wondering what’s in the public domain from 1924? The mainstream media seem to be doing a very poor job of covering the matter this year, but I had a post back in the summer that looked into it in depth for the USA and elsewhere. As for Lovecraft…

for Lovecraft, 1924 brought publication of […] the notorious Eddy necrophilia collaboration “The Loved Dead”; and the ghost-written Houdini tale “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”.

This raises the question of if the Eddy estate can any longer prevent “The Loved Dead” (Weird Tales, May/July 1924) from appearing in U.S. collections of Lovecraft’s ghost-writing collaborations.

I also imagine the tale would, with a few additions and some tweaking, provide someone with an over-the-top comics adaptation in 2020.