Rear entrance of the Newport Historical Society…
Newport Historical Society
17 Tuesday Aug 2010
Posted in Historical context
From the Vault
17 Tuesday Aug 2010
Posted in Podcasts etc.
Need royalty-free dark ambient music for your H.P. Lovecraft podcast or audio-zine? Composer Mark Morgan kindly has 24 tracks of his finest dark ambient music — for free. The Vault Archives album is Mark’s music from the first two Fallout videogames, remixed and remastered in full-spectrum gorgeousness. If you’re looking for quality horror / thriller / eerie background music, this is it. It’s free to use for non-profit purposes. There are also some more bitter-sweet tracks such as “Dream Town”, and some that would suit the night-time “travelling” scenes in a downbeat road movie. Download from Archive.org.
Dead ancestors
17 Tuesday Aug 2010
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Grognardia delves into the prehistory of the Cthulhu tabletop RPG game…
“Sandy Petersen and Lynn Willis’s roleplaying masterpiece, Call of Cthulhu, was in fact the second Lovecraftian RPG Chaosium attempted but the first one to be completed and actually published.”
Drabblecast #175 : The Outsider
16 Monday Aug 2010
Posted in Podcasts etc.
The Drabblecast : short stories from the far side of the weird, has a new free audio reading of Lovecraft’s “The Outsider”.
Also extracts from the “The Fungi From Yuggoth” sonnet sequence. If their embedded Quicktime trips you up, their plain MP3 download links are here.
I’ve added Drabblecast to the ‘Fiction magazines’ category on my “Lovecraft on the Web” directory.
6,000 old photos of Providence
16 Monday Aug 2010
Posted in Historical context
Panorama of Providence, 1903. One of 6,000 items (almost all historical) on the Providence Public Library Flickr stream.
Providence in 1903.
I had assumed that Lovecraft never set foot on a sea-going vessel, but looking at the pictures there seems to have been a thriving commuter service by steamboat to New York. Did he always travel to New York by train, or sometimes by steam-boat? [Update: it seems he never went to New York that way, but friends such as Morton and Loveman did.]
Reference reading room, Providence Public Library.
Children’s reading room, Providence Public Library.
Ladd Observatory, Providence. Frequented by Lovecraft in his youth.
Quinsnicket, one of Lovecraft’s favourite parkland/woodland walks in Providence.
Bookish
16 Monday Aug 2010
Posted in Odd scratchings
Now that’s what I call a library! Fit to hide a copy of The Necronomicon in…
Picture on Flickr | Set on Flickr
A useful reminder of how magnificent a public library could be in Lovecraft’s youth. Are there similar pictures of the interior of the public libraries in Providence during the early years of the 20th century?
The current Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County website has a deeply buried about the building page with another picture of the interior. The guilty local worthies who decided to do away with this magnificent library are not named. Interesting how such cultural/architectural vandals always seem to be able to slip unnoticed out of city histories. But you might find the answer in the official book on the library.
Halo Round The Moon
15 Sunday Aug 2010
Posted in Odd scratchings
“A Halo Round The Moon” by E. A. Wilson. From: The Worst Journey In The World : Antarctic, 1910-1913 (1922).
“I hate the moon — I am afraid of it — for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and loved it sometimes makes them unfamiliar and hideous.” — from “What the Moon Brings”, by H. P. Lovecraft. Written on 5th June 1922.
The Works
15 Sunday Aug 2010
Posted in Housekeeping
I’ve added a new section on the Links Directory sidebar for “The Works” (online, open-access only), at the foot of the left-hand column. These are not indexed by the Google Custom Search Engine.
Rick Sardinha
15 Sunday Aug 2010
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Rick Sardinha added to the Selected Artists links category…
His works were produced for “An Exhibition of Unspeakable Things” (illustrations of Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book), an exhibition at Maison d’Ailleurs gallery which ran from 28th October 2007 to 6th April 2008.
Squidies for kiddies
15 Sunday Aug 2010
Posted in Scholarly works
Looking to stash the perfect Christmas present for the little monsters? Just published, Here There Be Monsters: The Legendary Kraken and the Giant Squid
It seems to be a careful and well-illustrated little volume of 80 pages, moving from the myths to modern ocean science.
“He seamlessly moves among exploration of history, mythology, film, literature and scientific discovery; the discussions of how everyone from Alfred, Lord Tennyson to Jules Verne to Walt Disney kept the myth of the ferocious kraken alive in people’s imaginations are especially interesting. The book is abundantly illustrated with charts, maps and photographs.” — Kirkus Reviews.
Lovecraft and archaeology
15 Sunday Aug 2010
Posted in Historical context
In 2007 there was an audio file online, of a talk titled “Lairs of Cthulhu: Archaeology, Myths and Mysteries in the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft”. Sadly the file has vanished into the aether of the net, but I found a detailed set of notes on the talk at the Bookkake website. One quote suggests, perhaps, why Lovecraft never considered archaeology as a career — even if he could have torn himself away from his beloved New England…
“Those were the great days of collecting. Anything for which a fancy was taken, from a scarab to an obelisk, was just appropriated and if there was a difference of opinion with a brother excavator one laid for him with a gun.” — Howard Carter.
More reviews of The Last Lovecraft
15 Sunday Aug 2010
Posted in Films & trailers
Toronto Film Scene has a positive review of The Last Lovecraft. Sound on Sight‘s review is far less positive. I guess it’s the sign of a cult movie that it divides audiences down the middle.
