Friday ‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: Rhode Island School of Design 2

18 Friday Jan 2019

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This post is a follow-on from last week’s Friday ‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: Rhode Island School of Design.

Rhode Island School of Design’s Pendleton Museum was an annexe to its main galleries and a favourite Providence spot for Lovecraft. It was a ‘must-see’ stop on the tour of the town given to his visitors, partly because entrance appears to have been free. The interior appealed greatly to Lovecraft because it was a faithful recreation of a Colonial era house. It was said to have been based on the Edward Dexter house in arrangement.

Pendleton House” [opened 1906] … “sedulously maintained in order to give the visitor a faithful picture of Georgian interiors as they really were.” — Letter from Lovecraft to Kleiner, 1919.

Attached to the [Waterman St.] museum proper is a perfect reproduction of a colonial mansion, containing the finest collection of American colonial furniture in the world.” — Letter from Lovecraft to Galpin, 9th August 1936.

When Lovecraft talks about a perfect Colonial interior, this is the sort of exemplar he has in mind at the level of the upper-classes. Albeit in richly plain colours, creams and warm polished woods, brass and flashes of gold gilding, rather than the dour black and white seen here.

Pendleton Museum or Pendleton House had its public ‘entrance through Waterman St.’, rather than its own frontage. Visitors would have had to walk through the Rhode Island School of Design galleries in order to reach it.

It was set to be matched with a long-anticipated Colonial style courtyard garden, but this was delayed again and again until finally the plans for it were drawn up in 1933, and the Garden was eventually realised until 1934. One assumes that Lovecraft was likely to have attended the opening event for the Garden, but I don’t know of any record of that.

Musical affect and fear

17 Thursday Jan 2019

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New and public from the School of Music at Ohio State, “Musical Affect and Embodiment: Fear, Threat, and Danger in the Music of The Lord of the Rings“…

recent research in music perception, speech prosody, and animal ethology was reviewed to create a list of musical techniques that might communicate fear and threat. […] Musical analyses of the soundtrack accompanying the Nazgul demonstrate abundant use of these and other factors […] in the context of the soundtrack to The Fellowship of the Ring.

Those who are unfamiliar with Tolkien, or who are unable to get past Bombadil or The Council of Elrond in the first part, may not readily associate him with horror. But he has many such elements and does them very effectively. In The Lord of the Rings there are The Black Riders, the Barrow Wight, the flying Nazgul, the tentacular Lurker in the Lake, the Balrog, Moria, the Dead Marshes, the Way of the Dead, Shelob, Sam in the high pass above Mordor, and Mordor itself. There are also horror elements in Merry’s account of the Ent attack on Isengard, the attack on Crickhollow, the battle of Helm’s Deep, and several encounters with wargs. Forests also have their eerie elements.

The essay looks specifically at the early scenes on Weathertop, and includes a handy table of the conclusions of previous research on the matter…

A new edition of Brumal and a new Brazilian book

16 Wednesday Jan 2019

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The new issue of the open access journal Brumal has appeared. Vol 6, No 2 (2018) is ‘Horror and the Fantastic’. English abstracts, then Spanish, Portugese or French texts. On a first pass, the specifically Lovecraft items are:

* “Towards a classification of space in fantastic horror texts”. In which… “we outline three sorts of spatial categories: the natural, the supernatural, and the preternatural spaces, and take incomparable English-speaking authors as a starting point, such as H. P. Lovecraft” before moving on to consider Spanish writers.

* And a review in Portuguese of the book O Fantastico: Procedimentos de Construcao Narrativa em H.P. Lovecraft (2017). [trans: The Fantastic: H.P. Lovecraft’s Procedures of Narrative Construction]

The book can be obtained from Brazil and I see it was also reviewed recently in Revista Abusoes. It appears to be a two-volume Masters dissertation from 1979, which gathered dust for nearly 40 years before being rediscovered, hailed as something special, and published.

New Book: Barbarian Life: A Literary Biography of Conan

14 Monday Jan 2019

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Marvel comics veteran Roy Thomas has an auto-biography of his life in Conan comics, and his wider fascination with the Conan character. DMR Books has a good review of the 296-page Volume One, which quietly scaled the walls of the Elephant God of Amazon just before Christmas…

Barbarian Life: A Literary Biography of Conan the Barbarian (Volume One), by Roy Thomas. In this book, Roy shares not only his memories of writing the first 53 issues of the comic book (Volume Two will cover the rest of his more than 100 issue run), but his own obsession with Conan and his creator.

I expect this book might be usefully paired with Barry Windsor-Smith’s The Freebooters, for an insight into the role of the artist in sword-and-sorcery comic-book making. Despite the publisher pitching this as simply a trade paperback collecting the Freebooter stories from the BWS: Storyteller magazine, it’s far more.

The IGN review explains…

This collection is unlike anything I have ever read. Part comic, part behind-the-scenes article, Barry Windsor-Smith’s The Freebooters is definitely unique. […] Most trades* these days give a slight glimpse into the creative process, but not like this. Readers will see unfinished pages, progressive pieces showing rough sketches to final, colored pieces. We also get a narrative that guides us through the thoughts and decisions that BWS made.

* = a trade paperback book collecting a series of comic books or strips, usually formerly issued in episodic pamphlet comic form to comics shops and collectors. Also abbreviated to ‘tpb’.

Lovecraft Was Right, part 358

14 Monday Jan 2019

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A new paper “The sounds of plants”. The researchers…

demonstrate, to our knowledge for the first time, that plants emit sounds that can be recorded from a distance. We recorded ~65 dBSPL ultrasonic sounds …

Since certain fungi also attract night-insects, it would be interesting to know if some of those also produce sound.

H.P. Lovecraft on the sounds emitted by the Mi-Go fungus race in the woods of Vermont, in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1931)…

It is more than two years now since I last ran off that blasphemous waxen cylinder [sound recording]; but at this moment, and at all other moments, I can still hear that feeble, fiendish buzzing as it reached me for the first time.

New from McFarland

13 Sunday Jan 2019

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Forthcoming books from McFarland, picked from their new Spring 2019 catalogue:

* Weird Tales of Modernity: The Ephemerality of the Ordinary in the Stories of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft. (July?)

* Journeys to the Underworld and Heavenly Realm in Ancient and Medieval Literature. (Seems relevant to an understanding of the wider context of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and others) (Already published)

* The Detective and the Artist: Painters, Poets and Writers in Crime Fiction, 1840s-1970s. (First sections likely to be relevant to an understanding of the context of “The Call of Cthulhu” and others) (February)

* The Horror Comic Never Dies: a Grisly History. A short history of 150 pages, seemingly fannish but deeply informed. (February)

Cthulhu in the Library?

12 Saturday Jan 2019

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, New discoveries

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From William Gerold’s b&w photobook College Hill; a photographic study of Brown University in its two hundredth year (1965). Gerold seems unaware of Lovecraft — and anyway couldn’t have photographed 66 College St. circa 1960-65, H.P. Lovecraft’s old house, as it had been moved from the site in 1959. Though he photographed some of the architectural details and sculpted animals and suchlike, and along the way managed to record this Cthulhu-idol like detail from the John Carter Brown Library (1904) at Brown University.

“My aunt is well acquainted with Mr. Champlin Burrage, an Oxford man, who is librarian of the John Carter Brown library at Brown. (I hope to meet him very soon.)” — letter from Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, April 1917.

Circa 1910 postcards of the Library frontage…

“Exhibitions to which the public are welcome are held throughout the year [at the JCB Library]” (1916).

And how it looked by the 1940s, becoming grow-over…

Update: Another photo has surfaced. This ironwork Cthulhu was not inside but outside the Library.

Friday ‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: Rhode Island School of Design

11 Friday Jan 2019

Posted by in Historical context, Picture postals

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The exterior of the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, in 1908. Opened on the site in 1893, and known as the Waterman Building, at 11 Waterman St.

When Lovecraft was a young boy, at his own fervent request his parents…

took him in 1897 to see a recently opened exhibit of Greek antiquities at the Rhode Island School of Design

The “entire first floor” was initially dedicated to the public exhibitions, in addition to the adjacent colonial-life Museum house (‘entrance through Waterman St.’) seen on the above map. But in 1897 the construction of the Metcalf exhibition galleries behind the Waterman building was completed. When these new galleries opened, the inaugural show is reported to have been an extravaganza of American and European paintings. But there was also a dedicated Greek and Roman Sculpture gallery with originals, casts and photographs. The opening of the latter gallery was accompanied by… “a course of seven lectures on the History of Greek Art before the students of the Rhode Island School of Design in the Winter of 1897-98” given by the President of Brown University. This Sculpture gallery was presumably what Lovecraft ‘the little Ancient’ saw when it first opened. Possibly it was the same as the sculpture court, seen here, that flanked the entrance to the School’s galleries…

The boy Lovecraft became a “constant” visitor in “1897-8-9″…

before long I was fairly familiar with the principal Grecian myths and had become a constant visitor at the classical art museums of Providence and Boston

Evidently the entrance hall was only a taster and there was far more statuary downstairs. This…

was an enchanted world” for him, with its “basement” museum of Greek and Roman reproduction sculpture.

Of course in Lovecraft’s famous story “The Call of Cthulhu” young Wilcox is… “studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design”.

A later additional Eliza G. Radeke Building was opened for RISD exhibitions at 224 Benefit Street, dropping down the hill at the back. Lovecraft attended its grand opening in late April 1926. That was about four months before he wrote “The Call of Cthulhu”. The new building included a collection of Greek and Roman art, and a large new collection of Greek coins, although I’m uncertain if this was a relocation and augmentation of the original Waterman St. Sculpture Gallery, or if it had contents that would have been wholly new to both Providence and Lovecraft. One imagines the curious Lovecraft peering into the probably-new coin cases, and spotting remarkably tentacular designs on the ancient coins…