I hear that Peter Lamborn Wilson is now with the angels.

Doubtless some thumping great 650-page biography will, one day, proffer a paragraph that draws strange parallels between P.L. Wilson and H.P. Lovecraft. For instance, living as-if back in 1911, quitting New York City for the rural Hudson Valley, engaging playfully with the weird Fourier-ist backwoods of American history, dreaming of wandering mad Arab visionaries and Sufi dream-voyagers, seeking traces of lost Egyptian desert utopias, musing on the hermetic ‘will to power as disappearance’ in the service of eventual re-emergence and re-discovery in other places and at other times.

But for now I plant a few quick signposts-in-the-sand, following a quick catch-up survey of where his post-2001 work might be found.

His latest book appears to be Peacock Angel: The Esoteric Tradition of the Yezidis (2022). Which should help clear up any misconceptions gained about them in Lovecraft’s “Red Hook”. This follows on from his Cauda Pavonis: Esoteric Antinomianism in the Yezidi Tradition (2019).

His The Temple of Perseus at Panopolis is a 400-page table-trembler which imaginatively and poetically… “aims to give a thick impression of a single Egyptian city, Akhmim, called by the Greeks Panopolis or ‘city of Pan’. As a time-machine, this book will take the reader back to the 5th century AD, when the last champions of Paganism were battling against the coming triumph of Christianity.” Sounds interesting. A little later on his heavier book False Messiah: Crypto-Xtian Tracts and Fragments (2022) is said to prod at the various esoteric encrustations that have attached themselves to Christianity.

His fantastical fiction is to be found in Night Market Noodles & Other Tales (2017) and his collection of Borgesian and Nabokovian hoax-fictions False Documents (2015). I can’t find any other such collections. I’ve never read any of it, but it’s on the list now.

Riverpeople (2014) is his “epic” mixed poetry and prose text, which appears to be akin to Moon’s PrairyErth but shorter. It’s on the landscapes and people of his adopted home-place in the Hudson Valley, above New York City. The Esopus River, to be exact, which it appears Lovecraft knew in the form of his cherished “Esopus grist mills”. Riverpeople is flanked by a book of essays arising from his interest in early American weird-history, The American Revolution as a Gigantic Real Estate Scam: And Other Essays in Lost/Found History (2019). Another sentiment with which Lovecraft might have nodded in agreement, if not quite agreeing with the romantic anarchist politics (the ponderous and un-readable fellow anarchist Murray Bookchin frowned on Wilson too, which I consider to be a Good Sign). Wilson’s related essays, such as “Back to 1911: Temporal Autonomous Zones” and “Caliban’s Masque: Spiritual Anarchy and the Wild Man in Colonial America”, are to be found in the miscellaneous clear-out collection Anarchist Ephemera (2016). Which, since it’s Creative Commons, is on Archive.org as a PDF.

Like Lovecraft he was also a poet. I can find three chunky volumes of selected poems published in 2018, Lucky Shadows and Vanished Signs and Thibault or the Secrets of the Sea. Said by Autonomedia to have all been selected from his “1999–2014” poetry, and then split into books distributed among three different publishers. A note on Vanished Signs suggests a chunk of that volume is from his earlier Ec(o)logues (2011), which was apparently an evocation of “anarcho-surrealist” bucolic ruralism. Sounds like News from Nowhere for the Terrance McKenna generation. After that the poetry seems to swing a little darker with the final(?) School of Nite (2015) which was a 60-page photobook with sombre photos and poems.

His essay collection New Nihilism (2018) collected essays on comics-and-freedom (said to be excellent), evading the corporate media, and his enduring love of Celtic culture and history (not the cringe New Age gift-shoppe variety) among other topics. Sadly he does not appear to have ever engaged with Lovecraft in essay form. That would have been an interesting long essay. But it’s one that we shall now never have.

I see that The Silver Key (blogger-scholar and author or Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery) is also off Facebook, and has a few observations…

passive scrolling, and ‘likes’, which is what Facebook / Instagram / TikTok, etc. encourages, eats up your time in an insidious fashion, far more than you know.

He’s now powering into LinkedIn though, which I guess is kind of Facebook for the business crowd. I’m not on LinkedIn either. Or Instagram or Twitter. In my case, my departure from Facebook (abruptly blocked for the cryptic reason of having the “potential to reach too many people”) has seen me continue to post all the useful localist information that I used to fillet-and-post. But instead of on my Facebook Groups, all that’s now at a WordPress-powered hyperlocal called The Potteries Post.

Time for another monthly round-up of items miscellaneously Tentaclii-fied.

In my regular Friday ‘Picture Postals’ posts I completed my photographic stroll around Lovecraft’s beloved Japanese Garden at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, discovering among other things that it was far larger than imagined and also had vast hot-houses. A possible partial inspiration of “The Shadow out of Time”, and definitely inspiring for his friend Belknap Long’s later wartime Curator of the Interplanetary Gardens series for boys. I looked into where the Eddy Jr. tale “Black Noon” might be found today, which spurred a ‘Picture Postals’ post on both the Dark Swamp and the adjacent Durfee Hill, with a new composite map and a side-trip (as Lovecraft did) into Pascoag and pointing up its “Red Hook” connection. One small new discovery was made, indicating why Morton might have wanted to visit Durfee Hill.

In other pictures, a picture was found of the 132 Wickenden Street branch of Lovecraft favoured “Jake’s”, and I mused on if he might have ever set foot in this branch. Faig Jr. suggests not, and it certainly looks like there’s no evidence. But I pointed out the proximity to the New York boat docks. Rather usefully, I also found the opening times for both this and the main branch. The ferreting away at “Jake’s” then led me to discover a very nice picture of the main site at 9 Canal St. Providence, and not just an exterior either. A superb interior with customers and owners, which I promptly cleaned and colourised. To top this discovery, later in the month I found the very elusive “John’s” in Brooklyn, though sadly not as an interior. Also “Bickford’s”, another Brooklyn favourite. This formed a quartet of posts — Bickford’s, Johns, pictures of John’s, and then ‘who John was’. With many new discoveries and pictures along the way. Now we at last have the addresses and names it’s possible that other Lovecraftians, especially those who know the history of New York City and have access to paid U.S. newspaper databases and city archives, will be able to find more in the future.

In scholarly work, there was news via S.T. Joshi of the two new volumes Miscellaneous Letters and Letters to Woodburn Harris and Others, set for August 2022. The Spanish edition of Joshi’s I Am Providence is out. The German Lovecraftians reported the imminence of their scholarly volume on the “cultural interplay between H.P. Lovecraft and Germany”. Which I assume will be issued in German, though hopefully someone will be translating it soon. Leslie Klinger’s annotated The Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories appeared, an affordable cut-down one-volume paperback version of the previous volumes. The selection and ordering looks very suitable for beginners, and I believe he used the Joshi texts.

In my reading and note-taking on the Selected Letters I got as far as ‘Notes on Selected Letters II – part one’. The concluding part two is coming soon. I made the seemingly new discover about the strong likelihood that his reading of New Lands by Charles Fort influenced “The Colour Out of Space”. If he read it before and not after March 1927, that is.

In matters relating to historical context, I linked to useful blog post elsewhere about William Dean Howells, musing on which added to my knowledge about censorship in Lovecraft’s era. A PulpFest post also had me thinking about Lovecraft’s role in networking the productive end of early SF fandom, and thus ultimately in the exploration of space (via SF’s influence on the Space Race). I also spotted a scholarly book on Theosophy’s wider cultural impact, which I assume must include Weird Tales, Lovecraft and some of the circle.

In open archival material, I grabbed and rectified a nice new eBay scan of the Old Brick Row in Providence. A useful simplified map of Providence was found. The newly online archives of the Year Book of the American Society of Bookplate Collectors and Designers, 1923-1931 may also hold some as-yet undiscovered treasures. I also discounted the notion that Lovecraft might have known the novel The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, but along the way discovered a very interesting bit of proto-sci-fi.

As for the Lovecraft Circle, I noted the new Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard: Volume 2, and that J. Vernon Shea’s late memoir of Lovecraft is online as printed in Fantasy & Science Fiction (May 1966) with interesting surrounding context. Fritz Leiber’s collected and collectable science-fiction cat stories, Gummitch and friends, turned up to “borrow” as a scan on Archive.org. I did some digging re: the facts on an obscure and as yet untranslated 1980s mythos anthology from Spain.

Not much in the arts this month, though I don’t track the waves of videogames and Lovecraftian films. But I see there’s a “Quest of Iranon” opera production set for the stage in June 2022. Tanabe’s Innsmouth No Kage manga graphic-novel is to be published by Dark Horse later in the year. The overlooked ‘Lovecraft as character’ novel, Martian Falcon (2015) was discovered and it looks rather fun.

The only podcast this month was in the form of the welcome return of Robert M. Price’s The Lovecraft Geek — and with a cracker of an episode.

In scholarly software, PDF Index Generator 3.2 looks well worth having. The AI auto-coloriser DeOldify can now be run without Internet access, via a Windows installer. Also rather handy for some, you can block the drop-down suggestions on Google Scholar. These block lines are what I cooked up for uBlock Origin and they currently work on Scholar…

Also handy is a Web browser UserScript to Display the total time for a YouTube playlist. The old one had stopped working, but this one works for now. Try it with the new ‘best of’ Tom Shippey on Tolkien playlist.

As usual, please consider becoming my patron on Patreon, as these days every little helps. Despite Prime Minister Boris firing various “big bazookas” of money at the public over the last three years, not a penny of it has yet reached me. So the monthly Patreon is very useful. Thankfully there have been almost no departures of patrons due to Tentaclii’s recent domain change-over. Mentioning and linking to Tentaclii is also useful, and costs nothing except a moment’s time.

Many thanks, and stay clear of the Monkey Pox!

I’d never heard of Jaroslav Foglar before, but the writer has an exhibition on in Prague until 4th September 2022, “The City As A Phantom: Prague inspirations of Jaroslav Foglar”.

Foglar’s lived and worked in Prague as a young child, eagerly absorbing the atmosphere of the places where he lived, worked or met with friends. Then he transformed it into the mysterious city of his novels. Foglar elevated the seemingly mundane urban scenery into a mystical and mysterious labyrinth, connecting many time-layers, each living their own lives and fascinating and enticing to explore. Such an image of the city [based on Prague] opens up to the reader in many of the author’s novels, most notably in his most famous trilogy, which motivated a whole generation of readers to search for the original motifs and locations of the book.

So he sounds like a mix of an authentic (rather than ersatz modern ‘young adult’) ‘urban fantasy’ and the typical Scouting-type boy-adventures of the 1930-40s. Although written for boys his novels have apparently… “left a deep trace in Czech popular culture”, despite his work being banned under first the Nazis and then communism from 1950 – circa 1968. With a brief respite in the early 1960s when he seems to have been permitted to work on a newspaper comic-strip. One biography of growing up under communism states that boys would avidly seek out his ‘banned’ books in the city’s second-hand bookshops.

A 2017 article, on his concurrent strong influence in Eastern Europe on outdoors education, notes he is… “mostly unknown to the international audience” either as a writer or educator. It also offers a useful one-line summary of his themes…

Foglar’s specific outdoor adventure characteristics include timelessness, place, romance, mystery and challenge, and traditions with rituals.

From what I can tell after a quick scoot-around he also appears to have influenced comics too. There was a 2018 comics tribute to his work and characters…

For the ‘Amazing New Adventures’, dozens of contemporary authors and illustrators from the Czech Republic and Slovakia came up with 50 different visions of how to continue the tales. Some of the authors were even born after the original series ended, and only know it in retrospect, while others lived in the 1960s and even 1950s. These new adventures range from stories set back in the 1940s with the same basic look and lettering as the original series to very modern takes on the themes, with science fiction, horror or comic aspects and freestyle illustrations reflecting new trends in graphic novels.

Sounds interesting… but his fiction and comics have never been translated into English if Amazon is anything to go by. I’m guessing the original books don’t work well outside of Eastern Europe and perhaps their “mystical and mysterious” aspects may not have aged well?