08 Wednesday May 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A delightfully greenish and Innsmouth-ian-looking map made in 1777, showing the topography and water-ways in the long bay leading up to Providence.
I’ve shrunk it to 6000 pixels, so you can see lots of detail at 100%, yet it’s only 4Mb and thus doesn’t take forever to download.
07 Tuesday May 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A “Monochrome Mapping Competition” is on now. Three entries, any medium. Deadline: 15th June 2019.
Seems to fit well with the old-school zine aesthetic, which is why I’m posting it here. I’m thinking something like… a big flowchart map of Lovecraft entities + geography, as if painstakingly typed into a waxed stencil sheet and hand-printed by Gestetner stencil duplicator across two sheets of A4.
07 Tuesday May 2019
Posted in Scholarly works
The H.P. Lovecraft Archive has had an update…
5th April 2019: Overhauled the “Periodicals” section of the site, adding all tables of contents of all issues of Lovecraft Annual to the database; consolidating the search engines for Lovecraft Studies, Crypt of Cthulhu, and Lovecraft Annual; and adding the table of contents for Crypt of Cthulhu issue 112 to the database. These were some significant changes, so please contact us if you notice any problems.
07 Tuesday May 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The Lone Animator explains and illustrates his ‘making of’ the H. P. Lovecraft’s Star-Winds animation.
06 Monday May 2019
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
Possibly noticed by the Lovecraft circle during the New York City years, A Dictionary of Secret and Other Societies (1924). Newly on Archive.org.
There were apparently Druids in New England…
05 Sunday May 2019
Posted in Odd scratchings
Pulp Flakes has an extensive set of photos from the pulp convention and marketplace Windy City 2019. It looks rather sparsely attended, but I’m hoping that’s only because he got the pictures very early to avoid the crowds.
05 Sunday May 2019
Posted in Odd scratchings
New on Archive.org, The Lovecraft Collectors Library, Volume III and The Lovecraft Collectors Library, Volume IV. Both Lovecraft’s poetry rather than essays or letters. But still interesting, if you don’t have The Ancient Track.
04 Saturday May 2019
Posted in Historical context, Odd scratchings
An eBay listing brought to my notice the book H.P.L.: A Memoir (1945), by August Derleth. It’s in part a short basic biography of Lovecraft, as it was understood at that time, with bibliographies. Published as a $2.50 hardback of 122 pages, with apparently a list of Derleth’s own work in the rear.
It would be interesting to get this, if only to get a better handle on what the interested readership of the late 1940s, 50s and 60s understood about Lovecraft’s person, prior to the famous de Camp biography of 1975. Sadly it seems to be unavailable except on the high-priced £50+ collectors’ market.
Joshi’s Bibliography has a main entry on it, but only very tersely states: “broadly surveying his life and work”. I Am Providence is a little more forthcoming…
Derleth’s small monograph can hardly be called a biography… two [chapters] are biographical and one critical; all three are quite undistinguished.
The reader — curious as to Lovecraft’s reception by a new generation in the 1940s and early 50s — is rather left wondering about such basic matters as: did Derleth get the facts basically right, or not?
The I Am Providence bibliography also notes…
Derleth, August. “Addenda to ‘H. P. L.: A Memoir.’” in Lovecraft’s Something about Cats and Other Pieces (1949).
Again, we have to learn elsewhere that this reprints Clara L. Hess’s letter to The Providence Journal newspaper (19th September 1948), with a few additional facts and memories gleaned from an interview that Derleth obtained with her (presumably in late 1948).
While these items have obviously been superseded, they might form the basis of an article examining “what could the interested reader of 1960 have known about Lovecraft’s life?” But the current cost of obtaining both volumes, and similar supporting vintage materials, suggests that I won’t be the one to write that.
03 Friday May 2019
Posted in Historical context, Picture postals
Salem Pioneer Village was and is “the first living history museum in the United States”. It opened in June of 1930, with a full three-acre reconstruction showing visitors what life was like for the colony in 1630.
Lovecraft visited a few years later and wrote of it…
[1933]
“Among the novelties at Salem was a perfect reconstruction of the original pioneer settlement of 1626–30, with the crude shelters, wigwams, huts, & cottages which preceded the building of actual houses of European size, pattern, & solidity. Of course no originals of these rude domiciles survive, but accurate scholarship has been able to fashion pretty definite facsimiles from detailed contemporary accounts. The restored village is situate in a park at the harbour’s edge, amidst a landskip made to look as much as possible like the primal topography of Salem. Not only are the early huts represented, but typical industries like blacksmith-shops, salt works, fish-drying outfits, saw-pits, & the like are faithfully shewn. The whole forms the clearest & most vivid presentation I have ever seen of the very first stage of New-England life, & ought to help anyone to reestablish the true ancestral orientation which these disorder’d times so gravely disturb.
[1933]
“… the climax [of Salem] was the splendid reproduction of the pioneer Salem settlement of 1626 et seq., carefully constructed & laid out in Forest River Park. It consists of a generous plot of ground at the harbour’s edge, painstakingly landscaped & covered with absolutely perfect duplicates of the very earliest huts & houses – dwellings of a sort now utterly vanished. All the early industries are also reproduced – there being such things as an ancient saw-pit, black-smith shop, salt-works, brick-plant, fish-drying outfit, & so on. Nothing else that I have ever seen gives one so good a picture of the rough pioneer life led during the first half-decade of New England colonisation.”
[1934]
“The lore of ‘yarbs’ [herb-lore] is a definite element in the colour of early America, & one of the salient features of the reproduced pioneer village in Salem is a garden where all the traditional species are cultivated, so that the visitor may see them both growing, & hung up on walls & rafters to dry.”
03 Friday May 2019
Posted in Podcasts etc., REH
I take no notice of ‘Awards’ these days, literary or otherwise, for the obvious reasons. But I’ll make an exception for the annual Robert E. Howard Foundation Awards.
Perusing the nominations led me to the short appreciation of an R. E. Howard vampire story, “Nosferatu Necronomica – Solomon Kane in the Hills of the Dead”.
This in turn led me to discover that Tantor has kindly given away a free and complete and unabridged reading of the same story, from their paid audiobook The Savage Tales Of Solomon Kane, in .MP3 download.
Archive.org also has the free Weird Tales, August 1930, with “Hills of the Dead” in full.
02 Thursday May 2019
Posted in Historical context
New on Archive.org, another volume of The Lovecraft Collectors Library, Volume II: Selected Essays.
More essays and travelogues by Lovecraft…
* “A Descent to Avernus”. (Lovecraft offers a vivid account of his first deep cave experience, written summer 1928). [Also to be found at the back of Collected Essays: Travel].
* “The Brief Autobiography Of An Inconsequential Scribbler”. (Lovecraft recalls his childhood and early youth, from The Silver Clarion, 1919). [in Miscellaneous Writings, 1995]
* “Anglo-Saxondom”. (A very short extract from The Conservative, July 1918). [Also to be found in Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy]
* “Revolutionary Mythology”. (A very short extract from The Conservative, October 1916). [Also to be found in Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy]
01 Wednesday May 2019
Posted in New books, Odd scratchings
S. T. Joshi has a new blog post. He’s visited ‘Clark Ashton Smith country’ in sunny California, and has photos…
“we made an exhaustive tour of the CAS sites”.
One of the commemorative plaques for Clark Ashton Smith uses a word I had not heard used before… “isolationist” (i.e., a recluse)”. It’s certainly not a British word, used in that context. Though I had known it from commentators and scholars of American history and foreign policy, where it’s used to encapsulate a national policy stance.
A 1982 book on the poet Wordsworth noted… “It was the thought of writing The Recluse that supported Wordsworth in his isolationist position.” One can find the word in Writers Workshop (1961), talking of poets who ‘live what they believe’ and thus… “they are truly isolationist, recluse”. Further back it’s found in The American Journal of Individual Psychology (1953)… “The isolationist belongs here [in this category], the hermit, the recluse”. That’s the earliest I can find it used in that sense, and my feeling is it probably a new-coined meaning which emerged from psychology or psychological ‘writing about writers’, shortly after the war, rather than from some pre-1945 religious tradition of hermitage.
Joshi’s new blog post also notes a new book…
The PS Book of Fantastic Fictioneers is finally close to publication by PS Publishing in the UK. This immense two-volume compilation presents a series of essays on notable authors of weird and speculative fiction (including several filmmakers and contributors to other media), all lavishly illustrated with interesting documents and other items. I contributed four or five essays. This project has long been in the works, and I am gratified to see it finally appear.