Friday “picture postals” from Lovecraft: the 1807 Portland Observatory

21 Friday Dec 2018

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Lovecraft on a mysterious tower…

“Portland is not nearly as colonial as Providence, & looks just as citified, although it’s only 1/3 as large. Very fascinating from its marine colour — I went up that ancient tower (1807) shown on one of these cards, and had the maritime vista of my life! Have done the whole town and visited the colonial suburb of Stroudwater. Shall do the two Longfellow houses tomorrow — also a visit to Yarmouth, a quaint & ancient fishing village which will form my farthest north.” — H. P. Lovecraft letter of 26th August 1927, published in Mysteries of Time and Spirit: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Donald Wandrei.

Not that mysterious, actually. As his mention of “1807” identifies the tower as the Portland Observatory…

And here’s the tower in high-res, with my quick new colorisation. Although unlikely to be Lovecraft, note the Lovecraft-alike man standing on the raised entrance platform outside the tower’s doors…

Use it or lose it

19 Wednesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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I’m pleased to see that the UK Society of Authors is pushing for a ‘use it or lose it’ clause, as is the case in France. This aims to combat the way that many publishers currently keep old works out-of-print, and cease to market an author — while refusing to give the rights back to the authors so the books can be self-published or issued in new editions.

A ‘reversion clause’ would apparently be inserted in contracts. So I guess there’s the option for publishers to offer that to their authors now, without waiting for legislation on the matter. Thus to differentiate themselves in the market, and make themselves more attractive to authors.

Another hand-drawn map of Providence, 1907

19 Wednesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Historical context, Maps

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I previously posted a hand-drawn map made for a 1907 series of ‘Open Days’ in Providence, from The Official Program of the Old Home Week.

Now I’ve found a scan of the pocket walking booklet for the same event, A Little Guide to Providence, 1907. The neat little Guide focusses largely on the artistic and cultural life of Providence, as Lovecraft would have become aware of it circa age 16-17.

I’m pleased to see that the booklet has a version of the same map without the gutter problem of the earlier scan. At the back it has another map made in the same charming hand-made style as the first. I’ve rectified the slight lens distortion, perspective skew and colour-cast, as well as dropping them to 3,800 pixels so they’re manageable.

Looking at the map, it strikes me that if one were to combine Kingston and Plymouth placenames via a “Kin–mouth” amalgamation then one would come very close to the name Innsmouth, and with the “kin” perhaps pointing to that story’s underlying plot element of ‘kinship’.

The “lightning-scarred” Lovecraft

18 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Historical context

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I don’t bother with the likes of Twitter, but I occasionally use Social Searcher to take a fleeting keyword-based glance across the cesspool. Very rarely does anything newsworthy turn up among the parroting and blather. But today I noticed that a Twitter-diot is complaining about Lovecraft making up items such as “lightning-scarred” in “The Lurking Fear”. Yet a simple search of Google Books, Google Scholar and Hathi swiftly reveals many such uses…

* The U.S. Congress…

These lightning-scarred trees are readily found in any large body of timber. During the dry season of 1910 there were many electrical storms, and innumerable small fires were found immediately afterwards.” (1910)

* The U.S Bureau of Mines…

Lightning, however, sometimes strikes an airship without destroying it. The Friedrichshafen Museum has lightning-scarred parts of airships that have withstood thunderstorms successfully (1933)

* It appears to have been ‘house standard’ usage in American Forestry journal, and elsewhere in forestry publications and articles. One can find it, for instance in the pre-war publications of the ranger stations at Yosemite and the Grand Canyon.

Thus, while one can find it getting past the picky copy-editors of The New England Magazine in 1909 (“the lightning-scarred beech tree by the mill in the hollow”) and The Saturday Evening Post in 1919 (“He had seen living trees struck and had examined the lightning-scarred tops of fallen dead ones”), and it does occurs in the poetry of Aubrey De Vere and the 1910 translation of The Aeneid of Virgil (“[his] body lightning-scarred, Lies prisoned under all, so runs the tale”), Lovecraft does not seem to have been reflecting very much of a literary usage. For instance, there’s nothing in the obvious suspects such as Poe or Melville’s “The Lightning-Rod Man”.

It seems more probable that Lovecraft had noticed the then-current forestry usage, and I assume that was because he had perused a few journals for research before he wrote “The Lurking Fear” and made a working list of the correct terminology. He would also have been looking for books on mountain lightning and thunder-storms. See my annotated “Lurking Fear” for details on the extent of Lovecraft’s accurate knowledge of the Catskill Mountains.

Ulthar Post for Christmas

17 Monday Dec 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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My Patreon patrons will find there are now two new blog posts from me with a printable-size ‘Ulthar Post’ stamp. I realised that one can treat Patreon like a private patrons-only blog, so now that I know how to do it there will be more such posts.

It might look good on Christmas parcels, as well as hand-delivered Christmas cards.

The edge-deckling is in the cutout .PNG, but you might find it’s a bit tricky to add that by hand. Especially if you print it on paper at less than about four inches. Serrated shears of the sort used for fabrics are going to be too large, but careful use of a sharp X-Acto (USA) or Stanley (UK) knife to form deckling might do it. As it’s a PNG with a transparent edge it might also be used as a template for a very thin bit of 3D-printing — you might get an amusing beer-mat or fridge-magnet out of it.

Putting a simple drop-shadow on it before you print, and then printing on paper the same white colour as the envelope should also reveal the deckling.

You could of course get some real but large stamps of low value, and carefully stick the Lovecraft square over the top.

Call for papers: Brumal’s ideology issue

15 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by in Scholarly works

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The Spanish journal Brumal has a new call for papers on ‘the fantastic and ideologies’. Deadline 15th June 2019.

The call makes for a very difficult read in English. So I had a quick go at making it comprehensible, as well as far less verbose…

[Original]

Academics often assume that genre content is an industrial product, made to be a fleeting entertainment for juvenile minds. Another common assumption is that artists who use imagination in the form of ‘the fantastic’ are mere escapists, and that these artists and their audiences are to be condemned for seriously betraying their expected ideological commitments. While several outstanding works try to identify ideologies in the fantastic, we do not yet have a toolset which allows a meaningful dialogue between researchers. This is unfortunate, given i) the current immense popularity and range of ‘the fantastic’ and ii) the great power that media is alleged to have to infuse ideologies into young minds. Thus we call for papers on themes such as:

* The ideological critique of fantastic motifs.

* Conceptualization of values by means of fantastic metaphors.

* Comparison of ideological elements in fantastic fiction that belong to different literary systems.

* Outward expressions of particular ideologies in fantastic works: nationalism, liberalism, feminism, anarchism, socialism, etc.

* Authorship of fantastic texts and ideological construction.