The Lost Lane, NYC

Here’s a poor scan of the article in the New York Evening Post (29th August 1924) which sent Lovecraft to Greenwich Village to seek out the little lost alley… “just off Perry street, past Bleeker”. This setting appeared a year later as the “little black court off Perry Street”, in which the narrator emerges after his ordeal in the Lovecraft story “He” (written 11th August 1925).

littlesketches-nyep-29aug1924

Top ten cautionary lessons

Top ten cautionary lessons to be learned from Mr. Lovecraft:

1. Don’t eat the cheap canned stuff.

2. Don’t choose a day-job that’s too similar to your creative work.

3. If you must work for idiots, at least get the payments up front.

4. Writing faux-antique poetry may not be the most certain route to fame and influence.

5. Don’t let the wife give up her day-job as soon as you’re married.

6. Candy bars are not a breakfast.

7. Keep carbon copies of all letters.

8. Don’t give your family’s money to an uncle to invest in a ‘sure-fire’ scheme.

9. When naming a cat, stick to traditional names like “Fluffy”.

10. Don’t correlate the contents.

Pacific Rim

del Toro’s Pacific Rim getting excellent reviews = slight uptick in the chances of a big-budget movie of At The Mountains of Madness. Although his next projects seem to be the SF classic Slaughterhouse-Five, and Frankenstein.

On enjoying Pacific Rim, note that the 12 years prior to the movie’s events are laid out in the 120-page comic-book prequel Pacific Rim: Tales From Year Zero, penned by the movie’s scriptwriter.

Lovecraftian places that really exist: yet more…

Ball’s Pyramid, Pacific Ocean.

cave4

Krubera Cave, the Arabika Massif, Georgia.

Temple of Aphaia on Aegina, Greece.

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, USA.

Woods of Coylumbridge, Scotland.

Moss mounds, high in the mountains of Peru.

Puente del Inca, Argentina.

Any Ancient Egyptian ruins still home to th kittehs of Ulthar.

See more Lovecraftian Places posts

Ecotopian Dreaming in H.P. Lovecraft

A conference paper as-mp3 by David Farnell, “Unlikely Utopians: Ecotopian Dreaming in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood”, delivered at the 2010 ‘Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe’ conference in Australia.

All the .mp3 files of talks from this conference are online. One that caught my eye was: Geographies of Hope: The Desire for Place in Californian Science Fiction which might be of interest to those researching weird fiction in California.