‘Picture postals’ from Lovecraft – the view from Columbia Heights

08 Friday Jul 2022

Posted by in Picture postals

≈ 2 Comments

A return to New York City for this week’s ‘Picture Postals’. To Columbia Heights, and the view of the river and city from there.

Here we see a preliminary study in oils of New York Bay from the rooftops of Columbia Heights, 1923. The artist is unknown. Samuel Loveman was living at 78 Columbia Heights from 1924, near Hart Crane who had then been at 110 Columbia Heights for some years. It was from the latter address, on his first visit, that Lovecraft had…

my first sight of the illuminated Manhattan skyline [being] from its roof!

Thus this picture gives some notion of what that view might have been like, albeit in the daytime and looking away from the city towers and from the famous Brooklyn Bridge.

We get a feel for the other side of the view from this rooftop picture of the poet Hart Crane at No. 110.

Those wishing to track down a really good glass-plate early-1920s view at night should be able to triangulate from this. To see how close the Brooklyn Bridge view is to the elevation and distance seen here. The above painting should also help with location. For a view featuring one of the most photographed bridges in history, the chances seem good of finding a large panorama picture made in the early evening circa 1916-1926.

Over time Columbia Heights was the site of one of several evening ‘dream-visions’ of the city towers, ethereal and faery in the river-mists at dusk with the lights coming up. Lovecraft at first found the city…

delightful to visit on account of its faery pinnacles & wealth of museums & the like

The Woolworth Tower, seen here at night in 1923 perhaps exemplifies the spirit of Lovecraft’s views, if not the actual initial view of massed towers across the water as seen from Columbia Heights. Though Lovecraft did also ascend this tower, then the highest skyscraper yet built in the city, and would have had many ground-level and Elevated railway views of it in the dusk from various angles.

Despite his later sentiments about the city, Lovecraft still sighed in 1933 when he recalled his old response to such sights…

I shall never find another Dunsanian city of wonder as utterly unreal & linked with incredible cloud-mysteries as the exotic & unexplored labyrinth of sea-born towers that was the dim, half-fabulous Manhattan of 1922.

Of course his later experiences of living in the city year-round gave him quite another view of the place, and it became for him “the pest zone”. The experience left with him with…

the abiding terror of him who comes to New-York as to a faery bower of stone & marble, yet finds only a verminous corpse — a dead city of squinting alienage

Again, an old postcard helps evokes this sentiment — Luna Park (Coney Island) at night with gargoyle-dragons…

SALTES

07 Thursday Jul 2022

Posted by in Housekeeping

≈ Leave a comment

SALTES, a custom search-engine for Lovecraftian researchers. Not great at present, partly because Tentaclii is not yet properly re-indexed by Google (e.g. search: “waterfront”). But it covers the basic URLs and it’ll grow over time. You can also jump off the end of the search results, to run the same search on the main Google Search.

News from Germany

07 Thursday Jul 2022

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

The German Lovecraftian society has posted their June update.

* In German books… “BookRix has published Selected Essays on H.P. Lovecraft by S.T. Joshi as an eBook. A print edition is expected to follow in August.”

* They anticipate starting their own podcast in the near future, which may interest German-speaking readers of Tentaclii.

* On 18th and 19th June, the Lovecraftian live horror radio play “Off the Ancient Track” was performed at the Galli Theater in Frankfurt. Next performances 6th and 7th August. Booking now.

Bradbury’s “The Exiles” (1950) – the Lovecraft version

06 Wednesday Jul 2022

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraft as character

≈ Leave a comment

My thanks to ‘Susmuffin’ for locating Ray Bradbury’s Martian story “The Exiles” (1950 version), featuring Lovecraft as a character. It appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Winter/Spring 1950. Though a Mars story it is not formally part of The Martian Chronicles, being set long after the end of that cycle. By that time Mars has been abandoned by humans, but the first new colonists are now arriving and they encounter what might be Martian ‘ghosts’ in human form. Ironically, given the censorship theme of the story, the Lovecraft section was excised for later printings of the story.

I’ve extracted it in a printable plain-text form as a PDF, in the hope that a reader with a talent for voices might make it an audio recording for YouTube: Bradbury_The_Exiles_1950.pdf

The Dark Brotherhood (1966) and “The Lamp of Alhazred” (1954)

06 Wednesday Jul 2022

Posted by in Lovecraft as character

≈ 2 Comments

Don Herron usefully notes an occurrence of Lovecraft-as-character in his new blog post “Two-Gun Bob: In Memoriam?”…

Derleth himself also engaged in the fun, as in “The Dark Brotherhood” from 1966, a masterful parody in which he dropped ‘Arthur Phillips’ for Howard Phillips [Lovecraft] … A tale not openly about Lovecraft.

From the story’s opening…

The police have been beset by the usual number of cranks, purporting to offer information about the matter, none more insistent than Arthur Phillips, the descendant of an old East Side family, long resident on Angell Street

A quick glance at the Archive.org copy shows that much is made by Derleth of Providence at night, and Lovecraft’s night-walking. Not knowing Derleth, except from having read a few in the 1970s Panther paperbacks at around age 14, I hadn’t realised this was a Providence-set Lovecraft-as-character tale. It’s to be found on YouTube in a good 80-minute audio reading from Aaron Strouse.

Robert M. Price in an old copy of Crypt of Cthulhu touches briefly on Lovecraft in Derleth, usefully noting that in Derleth…

‘Ward Phillips’ in “The Lamp of Alhazred” is obviously and transparently Lovecraft.

Sadly “The Lamp of Alhazred” is not on YouTube except in Spanish. The text is however available and The Weird Tales Podcast reading from 2019 has it as an .MP3 download. Downloads are best because the pitch and speed can be shifted in the AIMP player, as well as having the graphic equaliser on the ‘Headphones’ preset. In this case it’s too fast and a little high and thus the speed needs to be slowed and the pitch shifted accordingly.

So there you go, an audio double-bill of ‘HPL as written by Derleth’. Though I have to say that I gave up on the slow and ponderous “The Dark Brotherhood” after three and a half chapters. The character is obviously Lovecraft, in all but name and a Sonia-a-like also appears. But I doubted there would be much more biographical ‘reveals’ as the story progressed moved on into Derleth-land. The much shorter and earlier “The Lamp of Alhazred” is more engaging, and not without some charm at the end.

Incidentally a local search for “The Lamp of Alhazred” (1954) also led me to Reader’s Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos (1973), which briefly noted Bloch and Derleth’s uses and also added that…

HPL appeared in one of Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles”, indulging in one of his (Lovecraft’s) favourite pastimes, eating ice cream.

I don’t recall that at all, from my fairly complete re-listen to the Martian Chronicles some five or six years ago now. Anyone know which story?

Patrick base mesh, and kitty

05 Tuesday Jul 2022

Posted by in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

“Patrick base mesh” is new on ArtStation, affordable and with a permissive licence. It shouldn’t take too much work in a 3D package like ZBrush or Blender to turn this into a toon H.P. Lovecraft.

Also a fabulous new contender for an Ulthar kittie, although not toon, in the form of the new Savannah Cat (requires the base Cat Mars) for the 3D software DAZ Studio. Also a contender, via a sci-fi coat re-colour, for one of the “Cats of Saturn” heard about in Dream-quest.

Recordings from Howard Days 2022

04 Monday Jul 2022

Posted by in Podcasts etc., REH

≈ Leave a comment

Audio recordings from the 2022 Howard Days sessions are now being posted on the blog of The Cromcast: A Weird Fiction Podcast. Donations for future annual Howard Days events are always welcome, if you enjoy them. Eight so far, as posts:

* The REH Influence on Gaming.

* Robert E. Howard in the year 1932.

* The Glenn Lord Symposium. Three papers and panel.

* Guest of Honour speech at The Robert E. Howard Celebration Banquet.

* Late Night ‘In Conversation’ at the Pavilion, Cross Plains.

* Conan the Barbarian at 40. (Reminiscences of making the first two Conan movies).

* Rusty and Shelly Burke at the Cross Plains Public Library.

* What’s Up with REH? (Latest developments in Howard’s characters, in publishing and entertainment). Wrong media is linked on the post. The required audio is here. Some of the reveals: A “Red Nails” prequel novel by a top writer, The Blood of Serpent, as the first big ‘splash’ release in October 2022 to coincide with the 90th anniversary of Conan. Sounds good, as long as the action sounds like Howard. And a big sumptuous Conan artbook. Also a new monthly Titan Conan comic-book with top talent, to be released around the same back-to-uni time, now that Disney/Marvel has thrown the character overboard.

* A Chat with Matt John of Rogues in the House games podcast

Beware the Creative Commons licences, which are muddled. On the blog posts the audio is all very usefully placed under full Creative Commons Attribution. However, the licence is regrettably different on the Archive.org mirror-copies, adding the show-stopper of “No Derivatives”.

Lots of ‘bathroom’ echo on the main speaker’s audio for “What’s Up with REH?”, so I used it as a test-file for the Izotope RX 7 AI-powered audio repair software — which for months now I have been meaning to get around to installing and testing. Specifically for its ‘Dialogue De-reverb’ module. Works fine. I applied this preset on the standard ‘General Reduction’ preset, and after 25 minutes of re-rendering the audio and three minutes of saving the file I had a much more listenable version. This version is now on Archive.org and, though it’s a ‘derivative’ I’ve assumed the blog’s original CC Attribution licence applies.

Another comics adaptation of Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

03 Sunday Jul 2022

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

Another comics adaptation of Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, set to be in the comic-book stores as a #1 ‘floppy pamphlet’ comic-book in mid September 2022. By Florentino Florez, Guillermo Sanna, and Jacques Salomon. No mention of how many issues. The usual run on this sort of thing is five or six. But I’d guess about eight (192 pages) might do it more justice. Nice #1 cover-art, which reminds me a bit of late-1970s Dave Gibbons on 2000AD.

New on Tentaclii in June 2022

02 Saturday Jul 2022

Posted by in Historical context

≈ Leave a comment

Time for another monthly round-up for Tentaclii. As always, please try to support me via Patreon or an occasional PayPal donation or even an Amazon Gift Voucher. Also, please note that I may well be looking for additional regular-monthly paid work from September 2022. If anyone can use my talents for $500 a month, please enquire. Digital magazine production and historical research work are a speciality. At present I’m producing Digital Art Live magazine each month, and have been for years now. To contact me, just post a comment on Tentaclii and I’ll see it.

This month on Tentaclii, in ‘Picture Postals’ I took more deep dives into Lovecraft’s New York City: strolling along Willoughby / Fulton Street, Clinton Street, and also popping into Automats pre and post-Deco. In the most recent posts in this series I put the final touches to the discovery of Lovecraft’s favourite cafe and grocery in Brooklyn, with a useful map, the names of businesses and business-men surround the cafe, and new vintage photos of 169 Clinton Street. I think this burst of New York research is pretty much done now. It adds to the story of Lovecraft’s cafes, most of which turn out to have unusual characteristics or unusual characters who ran them.

I also posted research essays on Lovecraft and Haldeman-Julius’s censorship-busting “Little Blue Books” of the 1920s and 30s, and on Lovecraft’s passing adoration of the now-obscure French writer Remy de Gourmont at the end of his ‘decadent phase’. A question from a Patreon patron also resulted in the short essay “Lovecraft and E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith”. E.E. Smith being a contemporary cosmic tale-weaver but of a very different sort.

I linked to a scan of the Lovecraft poem “New England Fallen”, new at the Brown Repository and not in the collected poetry. A new collection of mid 1960s sci-fi convention programmes being posted on Archive.org enabled me to put a face to Lovecraft’s biographer L. Sprague de Camp. I also found a small new 1923 item by Everett McNeil, “oldster” of the Lovecraft Circle, the non-fiction “The Feast of the Dead”.

I posted my lengthy “Notes on Selected Letters II: Part Two”; “Selected Letters III”, and “Selected Letters IV”. I’m now starting on the final Volume V, again making notes as I go. Relating to a recent ‘Picture Postals’ post, I was pleased to find evidence that Lovecraft did see the hothouses at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. The Letters also offered more evidence for his early love of florist’s shops and fine ornamental gardens.

New scholarly books noted this month included Ken Faig Jr, Pike’s Peak or Bust: The Life and Works of David V. Bush (Lovecraft’s major revision client in the 1920s); S.T. Joshi published The Parameters of the Weird Tale, with some Lovecraft-related essays not in his recent volume collected essays on Lovecraft; and also Cosmicism and Neocosmicism in H.P. Lovecraft (forthcoming). New in Spanish was H.P. Lovecraft: poesia fantastica completa (‘the complete fantastic poetry’). I suggested the need for a volume of Lovecraft’s maps, alongside the forthcoming mega-index to the volumes of Lovecraft’s Letters, and outlined a contents-list.

In the arts, the opera A Dream at the End of Time, a Lovecraft musical was staged in Los Angeles for a week’s run. Various forthcoming TV and movie adaptations of Lovecraft were noted. A number of new public-domain audio readings were linked, including The Strange World of Harry Houdini from 1920s issues of Weird Tales. The useful typewriter font ‘X Typewriter’ was found and linked.

In terms of free research materials, this month I found a run of the journal Old-Time New England, 1910-1981 on Archive.org. And as for research tools I made a home-brew mouse-gesture to fix the Opera browser’s problem with Google Search + spellcheck (only relevant if your browser can’t do spellcheck on search-terms you type into the Google Search box).

I was ill for two weeks this month, and so my Doctor Who Tom Baker watch or skip list was updated. Some months back I had stalled in my re-watch at the end of Season 14. But now I’ve also seen series 15, 16, 17 and 18 and have updated the watch/skip list accordingly. I’ve now also ferreted out the ‘watch’ list for the subsequent Doctor Who, Peter Davison (1981-84) which totals 11 stories.

That’s it for June, onward to July!

‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: back to the old house…

01 Friday Jul 2022

Posted by in Historical context, Picture postals

≈ 2 Comments

This week on ‘Picture Postals’, back to the city of Providence from New York. A restored and colourised 1971 picture of the sad fate of the site of Lovecraft’s final home, the house at 66 College Street. The roadway is just off-camera to the right.

Though it should be said that his house was at least moved and not destroyed, being slowly rolled through the streets of his city like a ominous rumbling monster. And at least the brutalist late-modernist block (the ‘List Building’ aka ‘List Art Building’, ’64 College Street’) seen here was to be used as an Art History building with an incorporated Gallery and studios. The worthy British art historian Kenneth Clark (Civilization) gave the opening address for the building, another factor Lovecraft might have approved of. Further, the building’s elevation and windows serve to preserve something of Lovecraft’s views across Providence to the west when the leaves are off the trees.

On the right one can see the back of the John Hay Library at Brown, with its back-terrace invisible from this angle. Today this holds Lovecraft’s letters and the Lovecraft Collection.

Lovecraft’s house stood about where the central elevated small block is, as seen here. With a back wing (not seen here) going further back…

As can be seen, by 1971 the quiet 1930s courtyard garden is now a two-part car-park divided by a central wall, but some of the trees and large shrubs on the left may have been retained. They may have once formed a border along which the K.A.T. roamed.

The building’s hilltop position, limited $3m budget and narrow plot required compromises. A page on the Brown website now observes that much of the building often has a dark and haunted feel, which seems most suitable for the site of H.P. Lovecraft’s house. It was largely designed for its incongruous external ‘look’, and was presumably deliberately intended to damage the coherence of the sense-of-place on College Hill. As a consequence…

“Room divisions are awkward and classrooms often artificially-lit … Long empty corridors feel abandoned and ghostly…”

Though a dark and spectral feel is perhaps a good thing. University managements have a tendency to turf out friendless and un-trendy humanities subjects like Art History from fine buildings — especially ones surrounded by leafy and westward hilltop views — for re-use as their own office space. I’ve seen it happen myself, at Birmingham. Monstrosity, gloom and strange angles have their uses, as H.P. Lovecraft could have told the current Art History Dept.