“our radio compasses helped us through the opaque fog”

I delved back into the BBC’s archives via the new online archive of Radio Times listings, looking for Lovecraft items on the BBC. The item below is one of their earliest. It perhaps exemplifies why some people had a bad reaction in the 1970s to what they thought was Lovecraft. Because in this case, the nation would have been listening to a 1957 Derleth story wrongly attributed to Lovecraft…

(1972)
Study on 3
The Horror Story 1: Gothic Tales
20th-century Gothic is illustrated by H.P. Lovecraft’s story The Gable Window, read by EDWARD BISHOP.

So far as I can tell “The Gable Window” was wholly by Derleth, only being very loosely based on Lovecraft via one of the brief story ideas found in the Commonplace Book.

Berkeley Square on TV

The Turner Classic Movies channel is airing the movie Berkeley Square (1933) in November in America (Sunday 23rd of November at 8:15am ET). Currently only available on grainy VHS tape or as a VHS rip, my guess would be that this Turner showing could be the restored 35mm print version which was first screened at the 2011 H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.

At home — & on my own initiative — I saw Berkeley Square again … Talman & Long, who saw the play, say that the cinema version is slightly inferior. As you say, there are things about the transferred identities of the two Peters which tend to arouse questions [Lovecraft discusses plot points and historical accuracy for a page] But with all its defects this thing gave me an uncanny wallop. When I revisited it I saw it through twice — & I shall probably go again on its next return. It is the most weirdly perfect embodiment of my own moods & pseudo-memories that I have ever seen — for all my life I have felt as if I might wake up out of this dream of an idiotic Victorian age & an insane jazz age into the same reality of 1760 or 1770 or 1780 the age of the white steeples & fanlighted doorways of the ancient hill, & of the long-s’d books of the old dark attic trunk-room at 454 Angell St. (Selected Letters IV, pp.362-364)

Rhode Island History contents list

A handy single searchable PDF with the complete tables-of-contents for Rhode Island History journal, January 1942 through Fall 2007. All rather dry of Lovecraft interest, apart from the late 1970s when there are a few possibly interesting articles such as “The Ku Klux Klan in Rhode Island”, and “Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam,” by Robert W. Kenny. Kenny being the young 18th Century literature specialist at Brown, who was the initial source of Brobst’s information that Lovecraft was once spotted working as a cinema ticket-seller. (Thanks to Ken Faig for the Kenny-Brobst information, though I was the one who discovered that Kenny was an 18th Century literature specialist).

Marblehead lecture on Lovecraft

The incipient “H.P. Lovecraft was Here! Come unto us, ye tourist hordes!” trend gathers a little more pace, as Marblehead gets in on the action with a forthcoming public lecture

The lecture will take up Lovecraft’s obsession with Marblehead and St. Michael’s, their importance to his macabre and influential writings, and controversies about fact and fantasy in Lovecraft’s literary landscapes.

Providence, pocket universe

Lovecraft is deftly name-checked in the opening of the nicely-designed main booklet that welcomes new graduate students to Providence…

A long time ago, the writers Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft wrote of strange surreal realms hidden from common eyes. It was in the nooks and crannies of Providence that they experienced other universes, stranger and more fantastic than our own. While I am not a superstitious man, I find that this place is its own pocket universe, its population of geniuses focusing great energy into strange and fantastic projects. Being here is a unique experience, and I hope you explore all it has to offer.