Boston and Boylston St.

20 Friday Jan 2023

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This week on ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’, more Boston pictures. Rectified, cleaned and toned.

Firstly another contender for the Boston subway which is depicted toward the end of the dreamlike prose-poem “Nyarlathotep” (1920), in which a column of people…

filed down a weed-choked subway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad.

This is the subway inbound entrance that sat beside the Boston Public Library, seen here in 1915. Suitably gothic and Lovecraftian, more so than the one seen last week. Lovecraft almost certainly knew this Library entrance after 1919.

Then there’s his “Pickman’s Model” (1926), in which the artist depicts a scene in the Boston subway and names the station…

There was a study called ‘Subway Accident,’ in which a flock of the vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boylston Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform.

Here is a picture of the subway station itself. It may have had two platforms, one for the subway…

And another where the Elevated train came down and in, to meet the subway at a wooden platform…

Elevated -to- subway platform.

So take your pick as to which one the “vile things” were emerging from and into. But the older wooden-slats one feels the more likely. Note the news-stand with magazines, albeit some 11 years before Lovecraft was (probably) sitting there and imagining ghouls emerging from the trackway.

Where They lurk…

Romances of the Archive

19 Thursday Jan 2023

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I stumbled on a rare book listing, which made me aware of a book of possible interest. Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction (2001) was claimed to have something on Lovecraft…

Authors addressed in this collection of academic papers extend beyond the British canon despite the subtitle, among them H.P. Lovecraft, Umberto Eco.

I then found the TOCs for the book, which revealed more. The book is a general survey written by a single author, and obviously written from the American academic left as it was at the end of the 90s (expect Foucault, et al). Several of the fiction authors are slotted into themed chapters, and I imagine there must be quite a few plot-spoilers. The author knows enough to consider that Lovecraft can effectively qualify as British, which is encouraging.

There’s since been an explosion in ‘critical archival studies’ in academia, focused on institutional gate-keeping, erasure and memory, the making of art-chives by artists, technological impacts on presenting the past, etc. But I can’t say I’ve ever heard of this early book on the topic.

The first half of the book looks interesting as a set of informative surveys useful for anyone writing on the theme of archives and libraries in the weird. Specifically tales featuring archival access and deep research as a key feature of the plot. Here are the main items in that part of the contents-list…

Romances of the archive, identifying characteristics : A.S. Byatt and Julian Barnes.

Wellsprings : Edmund Spenser, Henry James, H.P. Lovecraft, Josephine Tey, Umberto Eco.

History or heritage? : Penelope Lively, Barry Unsworth, Peter Ackroyd.

Time magic and the counterfactual imagination : Kingsley Amis, Lindsay Clarke, Lawrence Norfolk, Nigel Williams.

The book is not on Archive.org, as yet.

The Reading Room, Boston Public Library. The room opened in 1895, and was likely visited by Lovecraft when he encountered the city some 25 years later.

Down in the Crypt

18 Wednesday Jan 2023

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This week Pulp.net catches up with Crypt of Cthulhu, and along the way brings news that…

it looks like Price has restarted the old Eldritch Tales fanzine that used to be published by Necronomicon Press, this one billed as #8 (properly Vol. 2, No. 8) in September 2022.

I have a personal buy guide for Crypt issues, to September 2018 when the PDFs became available. But there were a couple more issues after that.

Archive.org search results beta now live

18 Wednesday Jan 2023

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Ugh. The new Archive.org search-results UI is here. Cramped, ugly, bad use of fonts and sizes, and ‘flashing and flickering’ as results load and scroll. And as I try workarounds I’m discovering more annoyances. It’s obviously never seen the touch of a designer or typographer. They’ve managed to make it worse, not better.

Update: There’s now a “return to legacy search” link that wasn’t there a few hours ago. Phew!

The gloomy 30s

17 Tuesday Jan 2023

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An unusual new academic paper in Heliyon, “Sentiment analysis of Lovecraft’s fiction writings” (2023). The open-access paper looks at his fiction from 1905–1935, using software to find “emotion-inducing words” and then clustering these. Finds…

there exists an intimate connection between the emotions of fear and sadness in Lovecraft’s writings

… and that the darker tones deepen over time.

This was, most likely, strongly personal but not purely so. The entire cultural trajectory of the 1929-1935 period appears to have been bending that way. I say “appears” because I recall my old history teacher showing very clearly that this was not actually borne out in most people’s lives, at least for the employed in most of 1930s England. Until the war came, for many the 1930s was mostly a time of ‘getting on’ and moving up. New homes on Betjeman-esque suburban commuter estates, new motor-cars, new labour-saving devices, better health, better self-improvement opportunities, a surprising boom in incomes and pensions, much better shop-clothes for women and girls, and there were also the fine new art-deco cinemas and ice-cream. The weather was iffy due to some strong extremes, but people got through it. In my teacher’s view it was the intellectuals who were the miserable ones, infected by a virulent “we’re doomed!” pessimism and a dislike of the many opportunities for the upstart masses in this new modern world. The key book on the topic is the excellent and darkly amusing The Intellectuals and the Masses.

Also spotted in academia, a McFarland book due in June 2023. Horror and Philosophy: Essays on Their Intersection in Film, Television and Literature. Among other things this is said to have a chapter on Lovecraft, presumably centering around philosophical parallels in the perceived…

relationships between Jorge Luis Borges and H.P. Lovecraft

Project Pride at Cross Plains

16 Monday Jan 2023

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Ahead of the newly re-timed Robert E. Howard Days events on 28th-29th April 2023, there’s a call to support the town’s Project Pride, by joining for a very modest annual membership fee…

Howard Days and the Museum are not all they do: they are active in helping to keep Cross Plains a clean and attractive community, and in many charitable activities through the year.

Picture: via Cinema Treasures.

In Boston

13 Friday Jan 2023

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Friday the 13th, oh no! What better day to dive down into… the Subways of Madness! Many will recall the passage in Lovecraft’s story “Pickman’s Model” (1926)…

There was a study called ‘Subway Accident,’ in which a flock of the vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boylston Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform.

In May 1923 he described his own experience of “things dark and subterranean” in the Boston Subway, writing to Galpin in a letter…

[After a Boston Hub Club dinner I] hit the trail south [through the city]. Instead of rattling to the South Station on the elevated, I chose the subway, (I am exceedingly fond of all things dark and subterranean, and miss the rides up to 96th!) taking a train to Washington-Summer and there transferring to a S.S. train. [And thence to Providence].

Boston subway.

This shows that his usual Providence-to-Boston run, and back, would have taken him into Boston’s South Station, a main above-ground station for the city. An earlier letter confirms this was also the case in 1920…

“At Boston, I bade farewell to the Hubites, refusing overnight invitations & hastening to the South Station. I trod my native heath at 1:30 a.m. I reached home half an hour later”

South Station, Boston, with Elevated train and Elevated platform

This above-ground station also appears in “Pickman’s Model”…

We changed to the elevated [railway] at the South Station, and at about twelve o’clock had climbed down the steps at Battery Street and struck along the old waterfront past Constitution Wharf.

South Station Elevated platform, 1921.

News-stand window at South Station Elevated platform. Probably carried Weird Tales, in its day.

The “steps at Battery Street” elevated platform, Boston. These feature in “Pickman’s Model”.

“I didn’t keep track of the cross streets, and can’t tell you yet which it was we turned up, but I know it wasn’t Greenough Lane.” [to reach Pickman’s studio].

Greenough Lane, Boston.

So South Station itself, as well as the Elevated and the Boston Subway, is a setting. While the exterior of South Station is nothing spooky, the interior had a definite Lovecrafty flavour.

Later it appears in “At The Mountains of Madness” via the subway station in its lower depths. When the shoggoth-crazed Danforth recites the stations of Boston-Cambridge underground subway line to try to keep some sliver of sanity…

South Station Under–Washington Under–Park Street Under–

The tentacular tracks at ‘Park Street Under’.

The Boston subway (for there was no Providence subway, and HPL did not yet know New York City) also appears in the dreamlike prose-poem “Nyarlathotep” (1920), in which a column of people…

filed down a weed-choked subway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad.

Entrance to South Street Under subway station, Boston.