19 Monday Feb 2024
Posted in Odd scratchings
The somewhat Lovecraftian (in my opinion) art of Caspar David Friedrich is on show at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, until 1st April 2024. Wasn’t Hamburg the place where they did all that Lovecraftian promenade theatre in 2023? Yes, that’s right they had a “Summer of Lovecraft”. Now it’s a winter of the Innsmouth-evoking shore-scapes…
18 Sunday Feb 2024
Posted in REH
Dark Worlds Quarterly surveys The Lost Cities of Conan, complete with a fine if small-sized map. With a little digging I find that Cap’n’s Comics has the same 1975 map in a larger and readable form.
18 Sunday Feb 2024
Posted in New books
Note that Fungi from Yuggoth by H. P. Lovecraft: An Annotated Edition (2022) is “back in print by popular demand”.
Note also that if my browser’s DNS is set to use Cloudflare, I can’t get to Hippocampus Press. Set it to Google DNS and I can get there. If you have the same problem, try switching away from Cloudflare.
17 Saturday Feb 2024
Posted in Scholarly works
The results of a quick scamper around the more obscure back-tunnels, in search of recent scholarly work…
* “Thoughtcraft: A Matter of Life and Death in Poe and Lovecraft”. A new open-access article in a Turkish philosophy journal, in Turkish.
* No full-text, but a long abstract for “Cosmic Shadows in The Homelessness of Humanity: an idea-historical investigation of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror based on Heidegger’s Angst” (2023).
[seeing] through the lens of Heidegger’s concept of Unheimlich and Angst, this paper illuminates new dimensions and latent meanings within Lovecraft’s literary works and mythos. This paper argues that Lovecraft’s tales and mythology are imbued with existential philosophy, mirroring the parallel development of Heidegger’s ideas during the same period.
* Freely online, “Maps to Arkham: Lovecraft, Landscape and Visual Poetry”. Being extensive commentary on the author’s coursework visual word-experiments… “which respond to Lovecraft’s attitudes towards language, walking and the landscape”.
* The recent journal Dark Dead Things #2 (2023) is nearly all “very disturbing” fiction, but also has the essay “Correlating the Contents: Mimetic Desire in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu””.
16 Friday Feb 2024
Posted in Odd scratchings
Scientists discover that acoustic stimulation makes fungi grow bigger and better. Unspecified “70 dB and 90 dB soundscape treatments” were played to the fungi. The result was “increased fungal biomass” and better “spore activity”, compared to controls.
90db is very loud, and Lovecraftian metal at that volume through good speakers would apparently make your body feel some physical force as if from unseen entities. One wonders if the fungi then have preferences for particular types of extreme sonic sussuration?
16 Friday Feb 2024
Posted in Lovecraft as character, Picture postals
For this week’s ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’, a glimpse of the lower depths of Brooklyn Heights. Atop which Samuel Loveman and Hart Crane lived, with magnificent riverine views. Views of the sort I’ve shown in several previous ‘Picture Postals’, along with pinpointing the exact locations involved.
But here the artist Charles Locke does what a good artist does, namely the opposite of what the herd are doing. Instead of the usual river vista he shows us the ‘depths’ of Brooklyn Heights, with the residential heights glimpsed soaring above. The walker on the sidewalk might almost be Lovecraft. The delivery man could almost be delivering more refrigeration equipment to Dr. Munoz (“Cool Air”). Above, out of sight, Loveman works on his poetry.
It looks like the artist’s view is at about the level of the footings of the Brooklyn Bridge, which is partially seen in the distance. One can imagine walking this scene in the dark, it must have felt — and probably smelt, due to the proximity of the river — quite Stygian. Lovecraft hints at the smell when he described Brooklyn Heights (talking of the part on the edge of Red Hook) as…
within sight of the sea, and with an old-world air of musty stateliness which to many suggests parts of London
“Musty” indeed. The water in the vicinity was not today’s relatively clean water, in which whales and dolphins now regularly cavort for New York City tourists.
Frank Belknap Long also briefly noticed the cliff-like topography of Brooklyn Heights. In his “The Space Eaters” (1929) he had Lovecraft-as-character…
Howard [Lovecraft] walked to the window. He drew back the curtains and gazed for a moment at the crowded harbor and the tall, white buildings that towered against the moon. He was staring at the skyline of lower Manhattan. Sheer beneath him the cliffs of Brooklyn Heights loomed darkly.
“Why didn’t they conquer?” he cried. “They could have destroyed us utterly. They could have wiped us from Earth.”
[…] I walked to the window and remained for a long time staring at Manhattan. There [in this view], I thought, is something substantial. It is absurd to imagine that anything could destroy it. It is absurd to imagine that the horror was really as terrible as it seemed to us […]. I must persuade Howard not to write about it.
And finally, I’ve found more or less the nocturne view they were looking at.
Anton Schutz, Lower Manhattan, seen from Brooklyn Heights in 1931.
Not quite on-the-dot in terms of the year of either Lovecraft’s first view of the city in this manner, or of Long’s 1929 tale. Also from a quarter mile further south (Montague Terrace). Crane could also see the Statue of Liberty, here unseen but off to the left. But the picture is probably as good as we’ll get until I find something even better.
There was also a colour version of the above, looking like a precursor for what would become the risen and dream-twisting R’lyeh.
15 Thursday Feb 2024
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
H.P. Lovecraft: Zoomorphic Manual, newly backed on Kickstarter. A bestiary of Lovecraft creatures, by a Spanish artist.
Also due in spring 2024, Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book: Weirdly Illustrated by Michael Bukowski. Pre-ordering now.
14 Wednesday Feb 2024
Posted in Odd scratchings
Heading that Lovecraft letter, the huge letter to Woodburn Harris (“WARNING! Don’t try to read this all at once”), Lovecraft uses for his letterhead…
Valentine Boiling Fitz-Randolph Byrd, of Virginia
10 Barnes Street
November 9, 1929
Why does he assume the first name “Valentine”?
Well, firstly because he could. Valentine could be a real name of the period in the English-speaking world. For instance, a Canadian-born colleague of Tolkien’s was named Eric Valentine Gordon (‘E.V. Gordon’). And an Edwin Valentine Mitchell edited The Pleasures of Walking (1948). The name was not uncommon.
It was more common in the U.S. state of Virginia. In a letter of 1936 Lovecraft suggests “Henry S. Valentine” as an ideal name for a fictional man from Richmond, Virginia. Thus the “of Virginia” bit of his 1929 letterhead. Lovecraft had been in Richmond, and had probably encountered a number of men by that name.
Lovecraft the Roman was also familiar with Emperor Valentinian, the last great western Emperor of Ancient Rome.
He would also have know that the Valentine Museum was one of the best known Poe museums of the period. Lovecraft also knew of the then-venerable sculptor Edward Valentine, who he envied because as a boy Valentine had known Poe.
He may have had a more personal fondness for the name because it occurred in his family tree. His aunt Annie E. (Phillips) Gamwell had several cousins of that name. Also in the family tree was a Rev. Valentine Rathbone b. 1724. This vicar was in the line that distantly connected him with Barlow’s family tree. The connection is discussed in a letter to Barlow of 22nd May 1936. The printed Barlow letters (O Fortunate Floridian) appear to omit a note enclosed with the letter, which read: “P.S. I burst this letter open again for nothing! My aunt recalled hearing of a Valentine Rathbone”.
As for the other names… “Boiling” is certainly not a common first or middle name, though it may perhaps be a self-depreciating allusion to ‘pot-boiler’ stories. “Fitz-Randolph” evokes the high British aristocracy, but also his own Randolph Carter fictional alter-ego. While “Byrd” was the name of the famous Antarctic explorer of the era.
13 Tuesday Feb 2024
Posted in New books
New to me, Long Memories and Other Writings (2022)…
This book gathers Cannon’s fictional and nonfictional writings about Frank Belknap Long, presenting an affectionate but critical portrait of a man whose long life was punctuated both with tragedy and with notable achievements in life and letters.
The book came out in summer 2022, but must have escaped my attention. Now also a £5 Kindle ebook on Amazon.
12 Monday Feb 2024
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
New books. A new page on hplovecraft.com details Miskatonic Missives, Volume I, numbers 1–3 and exactly what’s in the volumes.
Also, listed a recent on PS Publishing’s site is the new-ish The Weird Tales Boys (September 2023), billed as an…
exploration of the influence of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith and the iconic pulp magazine Weird Tales
… and apparently with a focus on unravelling the complex interactions of these three greats at the time the tales were being written.
11 Sunday Feb 2024
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
At the end of January 2024 on John Coulthart’s blog, he showed an early surrealist drawing “Exquisite Corpse (1927) by Andre Masson, Max Ernst, Max Morise”. The result of three-person collaborative ‘art game’, derived from a children’s game. He doesn’t mention this, but it struck me how similar this is to how later artists have depicted the basic idea of Lovecraft’s bibliophile ‘Great Race’ in “The Shadow Out Of Time”. Including the scale with humans.
The “Exhibition History” (the University of Chicago currently holds the original) only reveals a 1984 showing, but one wonders if Lovecraft might have seen it before “Shadow” (1934-35).
For comparison, however, here is Lovecraft’s own at-the-time drawing of the Great Race…
Not so similar, though admittedly the viewing angle is different. So perhaps it is some later artists who have chosen to accentuate the apparent borrowing from a surrealist experiment?
10 Saturday Feb 2024
Posted in Scholarly works
The software AnyTxt Searcher has come a long way since I last looked at it in 2020. It is still being actively developed, and the changelog shows it had a lot of attention in 2023. Useful for scholars, it’s genuine Windows freeware to build an index of the text inside likely file types (.PDF, .DOC, etc, including .ePUB) and then it very quickly searches for keywords inside these. The latest Christmas 2023 version can also index the contents of .ZIP files and even .ISO disk images. It can also OCR documents that don’t have copy-able text.
The old screenshots are offputting. Seen above is what mine looks like, with dark mode and an Advanced search run (which allows search “by phrase” and more). The indexing / results / opening speed, and the ranking of results, are all very pleasing.
For coders such as myself, scripts (e.g. .PY Python scripts or .BAT files) can be indexed by adding the file type from a huge list: Options > Index Manager > Index Rules > Add > Select > double-click on .PY, Add.
All that AnyTxt seems to be lacking for scholars of the fantastic is the ability to proximity search. For instance Newport w/20 tower (find instances of the word Newport if it occurs within 20 words of the word tower), which is the syntax the expensive $250 dtSearch Desktop uses in Boolean mode. The $40 Docfetcher Pro also has proximity, though in a clunkier format and Docfetcher Pro lacks a dark mode.
AnyTxt Searcher does has some basic advanced search operators, but not the NEAR that would partially emulate a proximity search.
Update: It can do proximity, though only with a very clunky regex: \b(?:hobbits\W+(?:\w+\W+){1,6}?supper|supper\W+(?:\w+\W+){1,6}?hobbits)\b
Still, in 2024 AnyTxt Searcher is now a nice free solution for Windows, assuming you want an alternative to whatever search the newer versions of Windows offer as standard. Pleasant and very fast to use, and you’d only need to go to the much uglier dtSearch Desktop, or Docfetcher Pro, for an occasionally-needed proximity search.
A good advert for supporting the lone freeware developer who’s trying to do something you want done. He may get there eventually, and in this case it’s taken the developer some five years to get close to perfection. As the veteran freeware sniffers at Major Geeks say of the software, “a really nice piece of programming”.