1925 NYC map

07 Friday Jun 2024

Posted by in Maps, Picture postals

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This week on ‘Picture Postals’, another map and also a departure from the Providence theme. New York City’s subway and ‘elevated’ railway system in 1925, drawn by E.R. Trott and given away to customers by a large hotel. In Red Hook Lovecraft was living in the bottom-right corner of the map. See “CLINTON” written in capitals at an angle, and then find “Atlantic” and intersect the two… and you’re about there.

2988 pixels on the longest side, and thus readable if downloaded at full size. A very useful map if reading Lovecraft’s 1925 Diary and letters from New York, since it also has many of the street names, parks, ferry lines, museums, libraries, and even the dock numbers. All for 1925.

And to bring the map somewhat to life, here we glimpse a typical subway entrance with news-stand, at Columbus Circle in October 1925. On one of the southern corners of Central Park…

Note the news vendor’s baseball bat, ready to hand. Hoodlums got what was coming to them, in those days!

A Doc doc

06 Thursday Jun 2024

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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I’m pleased to hear of a substantial new documentary film, on Doc Savage fandom and collecting. Nearly finished and set to preview at PulpFest 2024 in early August 2024…

Ron Hill is finishing work on ‘We Are Doc Savage: A Documentary on Fandom’. This feature-length documentary, two years in production, explores the history of Doc Savage fandom by interviewing dozens of the collectors, creators, and characters keeping the legacy of The Man of Bronze alive.

Trailers are available at the director Ron Hill’s website, as well as updates on progress. It sounds like a labour-of-love documentary and is stated as currently running 55 minutes. Though I guess there may now be scope for a crowd-funder to buy some rights, and thus make an extended version at some point? One which shows some images and clips that would require payment to use? But that’s just my guess.

Anyway, I’ve always had a soft-spot for Doc Savage. Having, as a lad, graduated from the Marvel/Curtis oversized b&w comics magazines (whole stories, effectively graphic novels and with decent artists), to some of the reprint books picked up at second-hand market stalls. That’s about where I left him in the 1980s, though I do recall the movie version (campy tone and cheesy music, but it had its moments).

What’s new with Doc? A lot of so-so modern comics, it seems. But, judging by a quick skip through Amazon, Will Murray’s very well-reviewed Doc Savage: Skull Island (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage Book #6) (2013) novel would be the best starting-point re: the more recent Doc offerings. The ‘Wild’ series of novels ran 2011-2018, and there are 21 books. The ones I looked at have audiobooks, albeit expensive ones on CD. No Audible. Amazon finally have a chance to tempt me to an Audible subscription and yet… the ‘Wild’ Doc audiobooks are not on Audible.

Surprisingly, I see nothing on YouTube for “doc savage” “wild adventures”. I’d have expected trailers?

“The Temple” on stage

04 Tuesday Jun 2024

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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A new “anniversary production” of the one-man theatre show of Lovecraft’s The Temple, at the Buxton Fringe festival in July 2024. Buxton is a spa town on the far western edge of the Peak District National Park, England, with a large upmarket cultural festival centering on its Opera House. The local newspaper has more details of the show.

Meanwhile, online… a generative video AI for the introduction of “The Shadow Out of Time”. Not an adaptation, just a filmic AI experiment to accompany narration. But an impressive showcase.

The Moon Terror

02 Sunday Jun 2024

Posted by in Podcasts etc.

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The Moon Terror by Albert G. Birch, new on Librivox as a three-hour audiobook.

It was issued as an offshoot of Weird Tales, drawing on their first four years of stories. As S.T. Joshi has it…

The Popular Fiction Publishing Company did publish one book in 1927 — The Moon Terror, with stories by A. G. Birch, Anthony M. Rud, Vincent Starrett, and [editor] Wright himself, all from early issues of Weird Tales — but it was such a commercial disaster that no more books of the sort were issued.

The new recording is just the Birch story, which was the lead item in the ill-fated volume.

Cohors Cthulhu

01 Saturday Jun 2024

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A table-top RPG that ‘Lovecraft the Roman’ might have enjoyed, Cohors Cthulhu: Tabletop Roleplaying Game. “A 2d20 RPG adventure of mighty Roman warriors and their barbarian rivals fighting the forces of the Mythos”. Funded with a cool £221,000 and shipped in late 2023, and now with a new follow-on expansion-set Kickstarter.

Although be warned that it seems to be as much about pagan forests as Roman army life…

Far from the Eternal City, deep in the forests of a hostile frontier, unravel the mystery of a village overcome by nightmares its people are forced to re-enact on the waking world. Without the support of a Roman column, cast into a strange land, will you survive with your sanity intact?

Far from nicely tiled Roman hot-baths and libraries, I’d suspect. Though that is also what Lovecraft himself hazily envisaged, and I’m fairly sure he would have tried his hand — had he lived — at an ‘Ancient Romans on the African frontier’ tale. Though in this game it appears that the pagan northern forests are the setting.

Campus Miskatonic 2024 / Métal Hurlant

30 Thursday May 2024

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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In France, Campus Miskatonic 2024…

This year again, we organise our HPL convention dedicated to HP Lovecraft in Verdun, France. We’ll deal with Lovecraft and the Great War.

Happening in Verdun, France, 8th-9th November 2024. ‘The Great War’ being the original way of referring to the First World War, prior to the Second World War.

They’ll be aided in this by new French editions of the letters, and new French translations of war tales such as “The Temple”.

Also in France, coming in August 2024, a chunky new Lovecraft special for the famous Métal Hurlant (‘Heavy Metal’) comics-magazine…

Echoing the 1978 Lovecraft Special, which remains one of the best-selling issues ever of Métal Hurlant, we invited a new wave of authors to delve into the complex and fascinating universe of the Master of Providence. The results go far beyond our expectations, demonstrating once again the deep resonance and timeless relevance of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s imagination. Every page of this issue will be proof of the continuing influence that Lovecraft has on new generations of authors.

272 pages, so it’s not just a news-stand floppy. Let’s hope for an English translation. Although Euro-comics are notoriously slow to produce translations (if at all), despite the fairly low-cost of translation and fix-up of the pages, easy digital distribution (Amazon Kindle ebook etc), and an obvious market. It’s curious that, as an industry, they don’t seem to want to sell their wares abroad.

Lovecraft is ill, part 78

29 Wednesday May 2024

Posted by in Scholarly works

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Another retrospective set of thoughts on Lovecraft’s illnesses and genetic inheritance. New on The Polyphony, a ‘medical humanities’ magazine from Durham University in the UK. “Narrating Anxiety through Lovecraftian Horror”, in which… “Buke Saglam takes us through the weird and wonderful world of Lovecraft’s writings, exploring the link between his work, his anxieties, and posthumanist thinking”.