New Book: A Wild Tumultory Library

17 Tuesday Sep 2019

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Just published, Mark Valentine’s A Wild Tumultory Library is a 350-page collection of a wealth of short essays on the most obscure ‘forgotten’ writers, books, and a few bookshops — with what appears to be a strong British focus. A small sampling of the many titles…

The Palace of Isis: A Note on Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘Mysterious Kor’. [1940s, so not an influence on Tolkien’s Kor]

Pagan Mysteries in the Novels of P.M. Hubbard.

Some Books on Tea Cup Reading.

Modern Ghosts: The Macabre Fiction of L.P. Hartley.

The Ancient Art: The Tales of A.E. Coppard.

‘Great-Nephew to the Queen of Faerie’: A Note on the Grindletonians.

Zodiacs in Britain.

At the Sign of the Black Pterodactyl: George Hay and Books of ‘Some Other Dimension’.

First Postgraduate Forum on Research in the Fantastic

17 Tuesday Sep 2019

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Super, Germany now also has a big multi-day Tolkien conference alongside the UK. I never knew that, but perhaps it’s new. Jena University will host the conference from 11th to 13th October 2019. This year’s theme is “Power and Authority in Tolkien’s Work”.

Lovecraftians in Germany may want to note that the organisers are piggy-backing the wider “First Postgraduate Forum on Research in the Fantastic” on this, with the Forum ahead of the conference on the 11th October 2019.

Lovecraft’s College Street in a game-engine

17 Tuesday Sep 2019

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Maps, Odd scratchings

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It strikes me that there are now enough pictures of College Street to be able to recreate this area in a 3D first-person videogame, following my picture-sourcing and resulting cavalcade of discoveries of the last week (see my posts and Patreon-only posts here at Tentaclii). Only Lovecraft’s central ‘garden court’ itself is still elusive in ground-level photography. [Update: Ken Faig has good maps showing precise boundaries around No. 66 and the location of the cat-shed].

A 3D recreation of the area could be set-dressed almost exactly as it would have been when Lovecraft was living at 66 College Street, complete with seasonal and atmospheric effects.

The game environment could also stretch all the way down College Street, as that other end of the street is well-documented visually — this section would usefully offer offices for an investigative RPG game. The resulting completed environment could then be released under GPL (open source), so that anyone could devise and build a game from that base environment. Or just virtually stroll around in it.

If “monsters n’ machine-guns” are felt to be needed then the could also be an underground element, re: the tunnels under the hill…

“Did we know, he asked, his sombre eyes intent on our faces, that recently, when early buildings on Benefit Street and College Street were razed to make way for new ones, deep tunnel-like pits, seemingly bottomless and of undetermined usefulness, were discovered in the ancient cellars?” — memoir of a visit by Lovecraft in 1934, by Dorothy C. Walter.

The disused Providence East Side Railway Tunnel under the hill could also feature. At the far end the tunnels could give access to the Seekonk River shoreline and perhaps even a short boat trip through heavy fog to the Twin Islands in the river. Wrapping the game’s horizons in a heavy Halloween fog and night would mean less work, re: making backdrops showing views of distant horizons.

The environment space I’ve outline above offers a fairly limited, and thus manageable, set of places:

The Paxton/Arsdale Boarding House.
The Carrie Tower.
Van Wickle Gate.
The lawns and reception on the main Brown University frontage.
The John Hay Library.
Lovecraft’s house, lane and garden.
The Alpha Delta Phi fraternity house.
The Providence Athenaeum.
Offices on lower College Street.
Court House on lower College Street.
Tunnels under College Hill.

Apart from a working looped tram (trolley-car) line, no vehicles would be required. A basic set of NPCs would be students and faculty, artists from the School of Design, various librarians and curators, and the more elderly retired residents. There would probably be a need to make and animate the tall elm trees and cats from scratch, but that’s not impossible for a talented game-making team. The Egypt-set edition of the Assassin’s Creed game has shown that convincing cats and cat-luring/petting can be done well in 3D videogames. All the rest of a game could be left to those who wished to build their game on top of this base game-world. A basic starting point for a game could be that the Cats of Ulthar have sent emissaries into the real world, seeking Lovecraft’s help in the Dreamlands, but then find themselves mute and treated as normal cats. Lovecraft is the only one who can ‘talk’ to the Ulthar cats, but only partially — even he must collect old lore and folklore that will enable him to speak with them.

Such a faithful and authentic recreation would probably do quite well on Kickstarter or similar. Especially if it was: i) to be made by a reliable team with some RISD and/or Brown endorsement; ii) the end result would be be GPL’d (open source); iii) and it would be made with a major free game-engine such as Unreal.

Kittee Tuesday: Wholly Cats

17 Tuesday Sep 2019

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Celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s interest in our fascinating felines.

An example of the work of Peggy Bacon, drawn for the fine and still-useful “cat owner’s manual” book Wholly Cats (1962). Other than the walls in the picture, this evokes something of the congregating cats in Lovecraft’s ‘garden court’ at 66 College Street.

The New Ray Bradbury Review: horror special

16 Monday Sep 2019

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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The latest edition of The New Ray Bradbury Review, No. 6, 2019 is on Bradbury’s horror.

Do make sure to look at the publisher’s blurb, as it’s a small masterpiece… of cringing defensiveness, something that is surely no longer needed for a master of genre literature in 2019. Nor does the blurb’s lurch into clueless comparisons reassure the potential buyer: Stephen King, the Oxford Lovecraft edition (very questionable), and an apparent Oxford edition of Clark Ashton Smith… but where is that last item? Perhaps the blurb writer was thinking of the Penguin Classics edition.

Yet if one can get past the blurb and the flippant cover-art, then clicks the ‘Look Inside’… the actual table-of-contents reassures.

Time for the journal’s editors to have a few words with their publisher, I’d suggest, about how the journal should be marketed and presented for sale.

There’s also another new journal on one of the greats, whose ‘poetry with a pen’ was of a different sort. The latest issue (#77) of the high-quality Jack Kirby Collector journal is a “Monsters and Bugs” special issue…

100 pages in colour, for just $10.95.

Meanwhile, down on the farm…

15 Sunday Sep 2019

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The new feature-length movie adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” appears to have been a success, both critically and in terms of being picked up for cinema distribution in the USA. Here in the UK it opens in London in early October. The movie seems to have had to get through a ‘double-hate’, with early negative reviews not only from haters of Lovecraft but also from haters of the lead actor Nic Cage. But it appears to have moved past those with ease.

On the back of a renewed interest in pastoral/rural science-fiction, Clifford D. Simak’s best novel Way Station has been picked up for a TV movie adaptation. Matt Reeves (Cloverfield, two of the new Planet of the Apes reboots) is to adapt it as a “large-scale sci-fi thriller”. It’ll be a single TV movie, apparently, rather than a mini-series. Let’s hope he doesn’t bring the Cloverfield found-footage look (camera so shaky and unsteady as to make the movie unwatchable) to Way Station. As usual with anything ‘Simak’, be very careful what you read about his work — blurb writers for Simak seem to delight in giving huge plot-spoilers.

One suspects that, inevitably, some modern political correctness will get slipped into the script. Perhaps in the 2020s the political equivalent of the Christian movie-snippers will arise, if they haven’t already done so. Those old-school snippers would deftly edit or blip out all the profanity and nudity and gore in a movie and produce a ‘clean version’.

On Waterman Street: the Paxton/Arsdale

15 Sunday Sep 2019

Posted by in Historical context, Maps, New discoveries

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I’ve found a picture of the Paxton/Arsdale frontage. First, here’s the map oriented to the same viewpoint as the photographer…

Here we see the Waterman Street approach to the Brown University campus at the top of the hill, with the clock-tower in the distance. It’s 1909.

The twin pale buildings in the centre of the picture are the Paxton frontage. They have different roofs because they were once separate buildings, before being joined and painted alike. The resulting large boarding house was later called the Arsdale, then re-named again from 1946 as the male dormitory ‘Hopkins House’ housing some of the many Brown students returning from service in the Second World War. (My thanks to Ken Faig and David Schultz for discovering the later names of the place). Lovecraft lived at the back of this boarding-house and shared a courtyard garden and cats with it. His aunt ate either her main or midday meals here, and it seems that Lovecraft accompanied his aunt to festive meals here if he wasn’t in New York with the Long family. He may also have taken some meals here in the depths of winter. This was also the home of two of his late correspondents including Marion F. Bonner (for the letters see Lovecraft Annual 2015).

It’s also possible that Lovecraft would telephone from this building — there are two 1934 memoirs of Lovecraft in Lovecraft Remembered. In one, Kenneth Sterling discovers Lovecraft has no phone at home, in the other Dorothy C. Walter is telephoned twice by Lovecraft. Both are recalling 1934 at 66 College Street. In the Dorothy C. Walter instance Lovecraft was certainly at home, and would not have gone more than a few yards out of his door due to the bitter cold and ice outside. This suggests he may have made outgoing phone calls at the Arsdale, just across the garden court from 66 — unless perhaps the downstairs tenant at 66 had a phone that could be used. At the old address of 10 Barnes he had used his landlady’s phone for calls.

Update: my thanks to David Schultz for pointing out that the C.A. Smith letters indicate that Lovecraft’s aunt had a phone in her section/apartment of 66 College St.

Here we seen a long view from the tall Industrial Trust building. It’s late January 1929 and we can just make out the back of the Paxton/Arsdale. One can just about make out the garden space between Lovecraft’s house and the boarding-house.

College Hill from above

14 Saturday Sep 2019

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Here is a bird’s-eye engraved view of Lovecraft’s 66 College Street in 1908, before the building of the Library on the corner. From the book Memories of Brown (1909). The house is set back from College Street in a garden court.

The John Hay Library is the large white squarish building see in this newly-found a view of College Hill in summer 1959. Lovecraft’s house just visible in original position next to the Library…

Compare with 66 College Street seen from the ground…

The John Hay Library would be built on the corner seen to the right of Lovecraft’s house in the 1908 picture, the Library rising where this former “President’s House” had stood…

The house next to it was also taken for the Library.

Below is the bird’s-eye scene seen the other way, looking at the vantage point from which the above 1959 telephoto picture was made. Here it’s 1962 and the building being torn down is opposite the Van Wickle gate and on the opposite corner to the John Hay Library (top of College St.).

This 1946 view, looking west from a similar spot at the top of College Hill but this time looking through the elm trees, is also indicative. The roof of the John Hay Library is seen on the right of the picture, and the Industrial Trust building can just be seen in the distance on the left.

And here the Industrial Trust building (the main slim tower seen in both pictures above) looks back again, in a telephoto view down on Lovecraft’s house in late January 1929.

I’m uncertain what the two long white marks are. They may be damage, as there appears to be a patch of damage below them with a small ‘x’ on it. Update: by referencing against the 1959 picture, it can be determined that the long white streaks are very tall thin chimneys emerging from the rear section of an adjacent house.

There are also a number of bonus pictures, for my Patreon patrons, showing the site of Lovecraft’s house and garden after it was removed but before the Brown arts block was built on it.