13 Tuesday Dec 2022
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi goes back to school in his latest blog post. News also of a travel book Creepy Cat’s Macabre Travels which has a chapter giving the author’s take on the modern-day city of Providence, Joshi’s musings on Algernon Blackwood as a probable appreciator of felines, and some updates on the forthcoming volumes of Lovecraft letters.
12 Monday Dec 2022
Posted in Historical context, Maps, Scholarly works
A map of early Providence by Richard F. Barlett, from Arthur E. Wilson’s popular history of early Providence Weybosset Bridge (1947). The combination of cover view and map allow one to orient oneself in similar pictures that look down on the very early bridge in Providence. Such as the 1762 one Lovecraft was enamoured enough to ask for a copy of, when he visit the private Shepley Library and Museum in Providence. Such views lack almost all modern landmarks and so are difficult to place. There are starred numbers on this particular map, and the key is found in small lettering on the ornate title plaque.
11 Sunday Dec 2022
Posted in Odd scratchings
Oh well, that didn’t last very long…
A bizarre and abrupt ruling, and difficult to fathom. So far as I know I’ve only ever had this one Twitter account and have never been suspended. Hardly used it after set up, let it go dormant for years, then started using it again when Elon took over. I guess some AI flagged that ‘re-activation’ as suspicious? Or perhaps there really was a ‘Harry Magic’, who got banned once decades ago? Oh well, ‘easy come, easy go’. I’ll be taking my talents to LinkedIn instead.
11 Sunday Dec 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
“The surf at Watch Hill, Rhode Island”, Providence. Possibly Watch Hill Beach, Westerly.
Cleaned a bit and with text label removed for added existential appeal. Probably the best vintage Rhode Island surf picture I’ve seen, in many years of perusing the cards. It’s now of an age to be public domain, please use it how you like.
11 Sunday Dec 2022
Posted in Scholarly works
Call: “Haunted Shores: Aquatic Surfaces and Depths”. Deadline: 31st January 2023. For a Gothic Studies conference, so they’re probably not much interested in Lovecraft. But Lovecraftians may be interested in the conference.
10 Saturday Dec 2022
Posted in Historical context, Picture postals
My thanks to Horace, who has left a link in the Tentaclii comments. His link leads to a 2021 YouTube upload of “Providence, R.I. in the 1910s and Early 1920s”, a compilation made by the Rhode Island Historical Society. Here are my notes on it…
[09:12] Good to see there was ginger-ale in Providence!
[static 11:36, static close-up 12:09, moving 21:04] Frontage of Keith’s Vaudeville, a known haunt of the young Lovecraft (then “Keith’s Continuous Vaudeville”, circa 1900). Not a great angle, but the ‘moving people’ third instance adds something. It was evidently a far busier street than static postcards might imply.
[16:43] It’s possible we see Lovecraft’s High School, but very dark and brief? Looks similar.
[17:55, 18:13] The plaza in front of the Post Office has a couple of very distant lookalikes, who vaguely evoke Lovecraft’s walk downtown for stamps and parcels. It’s winter (leaves are off the trees, heavy overcoats on) but it’s also mid-day and very sunny. So it’s not impossible he would have ventured out to the Post Office. So far as I know he had no other more local Post Office option, on or near College Hill. Though there were collection boxes for letters.
[20:49] Weybosset Street. As usual the view is too far down into the commercial centre to see the “Uncle Eddy” bookstore. That store is further up and behind the cameraman.
[20:59] We do see the Crown Hotel though, on Weybosset St. Sonia stayed there when she first came to the city, and she treated Lovecraft to a sumptuous dinner at the Crown in September 1921. So it’s only a few years distant from that moment, given that the footage is perhaps from about 1919/1920 or so.
[22:27] The Hope St. Reservoir, and full of water (it was drained and decommissioned circa 1927-28). Possibly the most interesting bit of the video, as it shows the reservoir that rose opposite Lovecraft’s old High School and Barnes Street (not that he was living there until 1926). Three quick views across the reservoir lip are shown. One with what looks like the State House dome in the distance, but it seems too close… and thus could well be a church with the same type of dome.
This is as good as restoration gets for these three views, with the current state of AI…
These would likely have been streets Lovecraft knew, both from his High School days, and later when living at Barnes Street. Here we can see a bird’s eye view. At Barnes Lovecraft lived just off to the left of the picture, a touch further along Barnes Street.
10 Saturday Dec 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
From Archive.org, their Public Domain Day 2023 Remix Contest… create and upload a short film of 2–3 minutes” using the newly-released public domain “Internet Archive collections from 1927”. Deadline: 6th January 2023.
Quite a bit of scope there for a 1920s-flavoured Lovecraft short, I’d say. Especially one accompanied by the… “snappy musical composition ‘You Scream, I Scream, We All Scream For Ice Cream'”. Which is set to slip deliciously into the public domain.
09 Friday Dec 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
Dark Adventure Radio Theatre’s “The Black Stone” has its cover artwork, and gives every impression that it’s available for download (if not quite yet a shipping CD). Including two 8th December reviews.
Presented with their usual 1930s-style radio drama approach and panache, it’s Howard’s loving-crafted 1931 homage to Lovecraft.
09 Friday Dec 2022
Posted in Picture postals
It was through a ‘Hell Gate’, appropriately enough, that H.P. Lovecraft entered New York City for the first time. The Hell Gate. In Letters to Family (p. 420), a September 1925 letter explains that…
[Queens Plaza] was the very first spot on Long Island that I ever saw; being at the portal of the great Hell Gate railway bridge, over which rolled my train on my initial metropolitan advent of April 1922.
Here are two pictures. One indicates and evokes the approach to this bridge, while the other looks down and off to the side of it.
The view has Hell Gate bridge on the far right, and the Queensboro Bridge on the left. The river is out of sight, down below both. Typically, Lovecraft tells his aunt that he recalls that in 1922 he had immediately noted from the train window “a huddle of nondescript wooden houses” down below, and filed them away for some future moment of antiquarian investigation. These later proved to be the “old time Astoria”. So his antiquarian interest in New York City had begun even before he stepped off the train in 1922.
The bridge is also known as Hells Bridge or Hell’s Bridge, Hell Gate Bridge, or the Hellbridge.
Lovecraft’s 1926 letter continues, describing a sight just seen on the same route…
I noticed en route [to Queens Plaza, across the Hell Gate in September 1926] a very attractive sight — the misty skyline of New York all grey and fairy-like as on the first occasion of my seeing it, three and a half years ago. The Queensboro Bridge loomed up deliciously in the middle-distance […] & the whole was glorified by slanting shafts of sunlight […] which dropt from an opening cloud to the vaporous regions of earth.
We actually have a fine mid-1930s National Archives public-domain picture of almost this very view… from the foot of the Hell Gate pilings, looking through the Queensboro Bridge at the grey towers of New York City in the distance beyond. I’ve here cleaned and toned it.
08 Thursday Dec 2022
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
The German Lovecraftians have proof copies of their forthcoming volume of Lovecraft’s selected poetry, translated and presented in a handsome 300-page edition…
With the publication of the volume of poems Fungi by Yuggoth and Other Poems, some of these verses are now available in German for the first time.
The editor and translator is said to have followed the ‘suggestions for arrangement’ of a poetry volume, from the lists which Lovecraft had set down for Barlow in the 1930s.
The new book is not available yet, but they say “we hope the presses will soon be running at full steam” for this, ready for shipping in spring 2023.
Also, their regular podcast has lost their key editor/uploader due to his work-pressures. They have replacements for now, but let them know if you can offer regular German-speaking help.
07 Wednesday Dec 2022
Posted in Scholarly works
New on Archive.org, and there for the first time, de Camp’s early Dark Valley Destiny: the life of Robert E. Howard. Howard scholars appear to have disliked the book’s Freudian ‘digging’ for neuroses and more, the fashionable ‘armchair psychoanalysis’ of the sort quite common in 1970s biographies. Seems to have been partly written 1970-74, at a guess as an offshoot of de Camp’s Lovecraft biography. Then published as a full book in a popular edition in 1983.
06 Tuesday Dec 2022
Posted in Historical context, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
Revelations of a Spirit Medium (1891) was a tell-all book which debunked the tricks of the spiritualist ‘mediums’. In doing so the book deeply inspired the teenage Houdini. Long suppressed by ‘buy and burn’ spiritualists, the book was then released in a handsome new 1922 facsimile edition complete with bibliography and glossary. This week it has also appeared as a new full public-domain audio reading on Librivox…
the most wonderful of the ‘medium’s’ phenomena will be so thoroughly explained and so completely dissected that, after reading this book, you can perform the feats yourself
I don’t see it listed in Lovecraft’s library or noted in the Letters, but given the date of the 1922 edition and the Houdini influence, it would certainly have been familiar to Lovecraft’s Providence friend C.M. Eddy Jr. (he was often in the employ of Houdini, as an undercover agent in disguise). At a guess, Lovecraft may have skimmed it when preparing The Cancer of Superstition. Which as Joshi explains…
appears to have been a collaborative revision on which Lovecraft and C. M. Eddy worked at the instigation of Harry Houdini
Also Houdini related, Deep Cuts has been lucky enough to get a copy of Miscellaneous Letters and looks at “Her Telegram To Lovecraft: Wilhelmina Beatrice ‘Bess’ Houdini”…
Lovecraft does not mention any further communication with Bess Houdini; while it is possible he sent her a note of condolence on her husband’s death, or that they exchanged a final note on The Cancer of Superstition, if that is the case those letters do not survive. All we have is a single telegram, the text of which is reproduced in Lovecraft’s Miscellaneous Letters.