‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: Blackstone Park

11 Friday Mar 2022

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This week, not postcards but more postcard-like gems from the collection of the Boston Public Library. Here we see Providence’s imminent Blackstone Park, circa the early 1860s. The pictures were in a brochure proposing the establishment of the shore-front park. Blackstone Park was indeed established in 1866, but 40 years later it had become a delight for small boys — since the city had allowed it to fall badly… “into disuse and neglect by the early 1900s”. This was when the young free-range Lovecraft knew the place as a boy, and thought he glimpsed flute-playing fauns in its dappled depths.

I’ve colourised the picture. We have to imagine another 40 years of growth added to this, and trees consequently much larger above the grassy rides and rills. Perhaps some of these watery “brooklets”, as Lovecraft called them, were by then dried up in summer. Since drainage of College Hill and the adjacent shore-line was changed, as the city developed and the local ravines were filled in or blocked.

Here is Lovecraft on the Park, writing in 1918…

Scarce a stone’s throw from the house lie the nearest parts of that beautiful rustick reservation known as “Blackstone Park” — wherein I have been wont to wander some twenty or more years. Here Nature unadorn’d displays a multi-plicity of agreeable phases; ravines, groves, brooklets, thickets, & Arcadian stretches of river-bank — for the park borders on the wide & salty [river] Seekonk. … How beauteous indeed is untainted Nature as beheld in so idyllick a spot as Blackstone Park! … I think this park would explain why such a born & bred town man shou’d possess such a taste for rural musings & Arcadian themes!

Lovecraft occasionally took favoured friends there. Here he is in 1927…

the next day we [he and Cook and Munn] lounged about the Blackstone Park woods beside the Seekonk — agrestick haunt of my earliest infancy, and true genesis of my pastoral soul.

And in the mid 1930s he was sitting on the banks of the Seekonk… “Almost every warm summer afternoon” or else he took a short trip up in the “the fields & woods north of Providence”.

Below we see, from the same Boston collection, Blackstone Park’s grassy water-meadow. Most likely this is the “meadow” marked on one map as being roughly in the middle of the park, and located back across the road from the Boat Club house.

Above we also see the edge of the “meadow” area in winter flood, in the context of the Boat House and the shore road. The river Seekonk often flooded over, and thus the meadow would have been seasonally a boggy salt-meadow in its lowest section. It’s quite possible that this Boat House was the point from which the young Lovecraft set off on his solo rowing expeditions on the Seekonk. It was then a difficult and somewhat dangerous river to be out on in a small boat. Yet he became skilled enough with his boat and the river currents to land on the mud-squelching “Dagon”-like ‘Twin Islands’, so rarely shown on maps. Here is an exception.

This was the landscape of water and mud and washed-in sea-things which stirred his early nightmares of a drained Seekonk, and to which the genesis of his “Dagon” can be traced.

Modern seekers can note the boathouse and the site’s current drainage channel here on the right of the current map. It’s my recent composite of a 1972 bird’s-eye picture I found and a modern outline map of the Park. By 1972 the trees were crowding in. If the river’s salty winter over-wash has since been kept out, then I’m guessing they may have now fully colonised the old meadow.

Book bits

10 Thursday Mar 2022

Posted by in New books, REH, Scholarly works

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Some books bits that don’t seem to justify a post on their own.

The European Conservative journal has a free review-article on the “Afterlife of an American Pulpster”…

Two recent American novels feature not the vivid characters who were products of R.E. Howard’s imaginative pen, but fictionalized versions of the man himself. Teel James Glenn’s A Cowboy in Carpathia was published in 2020 by Pro Se Press. David Pinault’s Providence Blue appeared in 2021 from Ignatius Press.

hplovecraft.com now has the table-of-contents for the third book in The Robert H. Waugh Library of Lovecraftian Criticism. Looks tasty. The entire three-volume set will weigh in at 900 pages.

Taskerland reviews, as a Lovecraft newbie daunted by I Am Providence, the shorter H.P Lovecraft: A Short Biography. This being S.T. Joshi’s 100-page whistle-stop abridgement.

S.T. Joshi’s Miscellaneous Writings and his 1980s Journals have been published.

Cattle-boats and andwheres

09 Wednesday Mar 2022

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I’ve started in on the new and enlarged book of Lovecraft-Galpin letters (thanks to my Patreon patrons for the purchase). These are fronted with the Cole letters, which at first glance promise to be very dull amateur journalism business. But they very soon liven up. Lovecraft starts writing ‘as-if an 18th century gent’ to the new son of the Cole family, and later letters are from New York or illuminate the poverty of the early 1930s. I’m up to about 1934 so far.

We get the name of the 50-cent boat that Lovecraft took to Newport in the depths of the depression, the summer passenger boats having engaged in a price-war. It was not, as it turns out, the salubrious and gleaming liner of postcard dreams. His old tub doubled as the Providence-Newport cow-boat, meaning that Lovecraft shared the journey with moo-ing and slightly bemused cattle. The boat came back later to Providence than the more expensive competitor, and presumably without the cows to provide body-heat, and so Lovecraft found it could be cold even in August.

Also, the book gives the solution to the small problem of the ‘andwheres’. It turns out this curious word was Lovecraft’s own coinage. His friends, being given the whistle-stop tour of Providence in the early 1930s, heard his constant repetition of “And where, but in Providence, would you see such a fine…” used of grassy lanes in the heart of the city, quaint back-street courtyards, relic backyard barns, sublime semi-rural vistas, etc. His friends found this phrase wearing, and so he abbreviated the outburst to a simple one-word “Andwhere…”. This found its way into his letters, when he calls a choice forgotten nook or grassy relic lane an ‘andwhere’ type of place. Thus it was similar, in inventive quality and topophiliac pleasure, to Vita Sackville-West’s later coinage of “through-leaves”. This indicated a small-but-special enjoyment encountered on a walk… such as kicking through dry leaves or running a picked-up stick along iron railings.

‘Picture postals’ from Lovecraft: At the market

04 Friday Mar 2022

Posted by in Picture postals

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Here we see the Providence farmers’ market, more or less as Lovecraft would have know it as a teenager. I’ve added a missing bit at the bottom of the picture, by pasting it in from a near-duplicate b&w view. The card is dated 1909, although there is a somewhat similar close-up picture in the archives dated 1904. Which may indicate that the picture itself is perhaps 1904-08? Anyway, when Lovecraft was a teenager.

I guess adolescent summer night-walks in the city could theoretically have brought him to the market just as it was setting up at the crack of dawn — and thus offered him the opportunity to snaffle the best-and-freshest? Judging by one title on a postcard, which reads ‘Fruit Market’, fruits were a speciality of this market. Lovecraft is often thought of as a devoted store-candy lover, but he was also quite partial to fruits and fruit-cocktails.

I don’t know if the market also sold more mundane winter foods, such as potatoes. But I imagine that the Lovecraft family’s market-day shopping, as opposed to the lighter store shopping, was perhaps not something done by Lovecraft himself in his later teenage years. Strapping lad he may have been, and with muscles developed by rowing on the nearby and difficult Seekonk, but it was then common to have the heavier household staples delivered to one’s home.

Whatever its wares, the market place was evidently one of his frequent and favourite ‘passing through’ places. Here he celebrates the place in fiction, in his Dexter Ward…

He liked mostly to reach this point in the late afternoon, when the slanting sunlight touches the Market House and the ancient hill roofs and belfries with gold, and throws magic around the dreaming wharves where Providence Indiamen [i.e. the old long-distance trading/passenger ships] used to ride at anchor. After a long look he would grow almost dizzy with a poet’s love for the sight, and then he would scale the slope homeward in the dusk past the old white church and up the narrow precipitous ways…” (“The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”)

The above picture looks toward the distant dome of the State House and is thus an unusual view, and it may need some orientation. Here we see a useful bird’s-eye view, as if looking down from College Hill. The cameraman’s view across to the state house is indicated by my red line.

‘The Old Brick Row’ is thus off-camera to the right, on the postcard seen above. As many will recall, Lovecraft later wrote a public poem for this one-time landmark set of buildings. He also wrote a long public letter on the buildings that lay at “the historic meeting place of bay and hill” and which held behind them “richly mellow old-world lanes”. This was published abridged in his local Sunday newspaper. A scan of his original is now to be easily found in full on the Brown repository.

This cherished row had been a welcoming sight when he returned to his city after New York, the “incomparable colourful row of 1816 warehouses in South Water street”. The row would have faced Lovecraft as he left the business district and paused on the wide bridge area to gear himself for the climb up College Hill. It has to be said that these facades appear to be rather mundane, on what seems to be the only postcard showing them. Possibly his word “colourful” then referred to the many subtle ways that time had touched and varied the red Georgian bricks, mingled in poetic double-meaning with the antiquarian’s concept of ‘local colour’.

Interestingly his poem on the old “East India Brick Row”, like Dexter Ward, also evokes the sun and ‘fire’ in this place. Here he evokes the sun as it stuck and coloured the buildings that once ran along the side of the marketplace…

No one remembers when they did not shew
   The dawn’s bright ingots like an open chest,
Or when, near dusk, they were not there to glow
   With hinted wonders from a fire-lashed west.

They are the sills that hold the lights of home;
   The links that join us to the years before;
The haven of old questing wraiths that roam
   Down long, dim aisles to a familiar shore.

Below we see South Water street before and after the partial ‘covering’ of the shipping channel, so as to make the enlarged market area needed to serve the rapidly growing city. This work evidently served to prevent the tall trading ships from coming right up into the heart of the city. Here the last facade of the Old Brick Row is glimpsed on the left, and we see the full run of the row on the right-hand picture.

Stereo-views, here newly restored and colourised by me, and placed side by side for comparison. With thanks to Boston Public Library.

Lovecraft also evokes this long harbour at the end of his “Observations on Several Parts of America”. On finally returning back home at dawn he finds the city…

quiet and mystical with dawn-haze and elder memories … A fresh salt wind came up from the harbour, over the roofs of the centuried warehouses and the Old Market House of 1773; and down the narrow, curving line of the old town street by the shoar I glimpsed the chimneys and gambrel roofs of mouldering houses known to ancient captains…

February 2022 on Tentaclii

03 Thursday Mar 2022

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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The winter has definitely turned the corner here in the English Midlands, and another February is over. The land is not yet in the sunny season of “sportive lambkins”, as Lovecraft once put it. But after four pounding and bitter northerly wind-storms, it’s now all calmed down again. During the final wind-storm it got so cold that I had to put the heater on for the first time this winter, for a few hours. But now our birds and plants are definitely saying that a sustained spring is just around the corner. The pandemic measures are also removed here in the UK, and a relative freedom also appears to be around the corner. One thing not being removed is costs, which are soaring everywhere and likely to go higher. As always, Tentaclii readers can help me to to enjoy the spring a bit more please, by giving a few $’s a month via Patreon or by boosting their donation. Or by buying my books and other fundraiser items.

In Lovecraft scholarship this month, I noted that the Polish Litteraria Copernicana journal was a Lovecraft special-issued titled “Lovecraftiana”. I linked the forthcoming ‘Symposium from the Untold Depths: Lovecraft and the Popular’ in the UK. S.T. Joshi will be in the UK in May, and giving at least one museum lecture here. This month I also completed a substantial piece for his Lovecraft Annual 2022 and submitted it.

On forthcoming books, there was news in The Fossil that the book Adventurous Liberation: H.P. Lovecraft in Florida is moving forward and the author stated it has “gone to the editor for final review”. Ken Faig, Jr.’s forthcoming book Lovecraftian People and Places has listed at Hippocampus.

In small historical context posts at Tentaclii, I was pleased to find a picture of leading New York educator Angelo Patri, who helped Lovecraft’s friend Everett McNeil at a crucial time. I stumbled on “Desultory Notes on Cats” (1844) by Edgar Allen Poe and it proved to be an obvious (if regrettably short) precursor to Lovecraft’s own essay. I was pleased to find a clear overhead photo of a favourite Lovecraft letter-writing spot on the Seekonk river, albeit from 1972 rather than 1932.

I noted a Ladd Observatory Event in Providence that appears to be an annual ‘open observing night’. I’m uncertain if a visitor can obtain access at other times, still less ease themselves into the observing chair. Most probably not the one Lovecraft would have used, but still.

In my ‘Picture Postals’ posts I took a visual look at Lovecraft’s visit to New Orleans; with maps and pictures I tested to destruction the possibility that the High Bridge was the site at which Lovecraft observed the 1925 eclipse; I looked at Lovecraft’s final attendances of public lectures at Brown, and found a glimpse of an inner lounge; and I also looked at the Yale quadrangles he enjoyed.

Over in Europe, Lovecraftian theatre seems to be still alive despite the pandemic. There was an announcement of a Lovecraft opener for the Kreuzgangspiele in May, and “Lovecraft, Mon Amour” will have another staging in April. The acclaimed Portuguese director Edgar Pera has also produced a new Lovecraft movie. There was also a touch of theatre activity in New York, where the Write Act Repertory called for Lovecraft plays.

Here in the UK the ITV TV station is apparently making a Lovecraft documentary of some sort, which will be interesting if there’s some costume drama added. In the USA a TV-movie adaptation of “Dreams in the Witch House” is said to be due in 2022.

In fiction I noted the new Dreamlands anthology New Maps of Dream (2021). I also noted a couple of Tolkien related items, which may have interested some readers.

In art the new ‘Dream by Wombo’ art-AI has interesting possibilities for weird art and illustration. Though the results are sadly ‘non-commercial use’ according to the two guys who are Wombo. The newspaper El Pais gave the world a very simple and pleasing Lovecraft caricature via a comic-strip. Chaosium offered a new video profile of their key artist Loic Muzy, titled ‘Illustrating Cthulhu’.

I didn’t look for anything game-related this month, but there’s likely to have been activity there both in videogames and RPGs.

In audio, the Voluminous podcast this month featured Lovecraft’s letters to fellow amateur journalist Edward Cole. Librovox popped out an unexpected public-domain reading of of Henry S. Whitehead’s “Editorial Prejudice Against the Occult” (1922), which gives a snapshot of magazine editor prejudice against the sort of stories that his friend Lovecraft was beginning to write. I also looked at Eno as weirdist and worked out an initial-listening set of albums for the instrumentals, from which one might pick out a refined playlist. I found the unusual archive of historic ‘Rhode Island Fish Sounds’ in audio, though sadly not under Creative Commons.

Audio software was also a focus this month, which may have been of interest to readers who are also into podcasting and spoken-word production. As part of getting a historic interview into text, after a little research I was able to upgrade my tools. I found the desktop Nuance Dragon Professional 15 does pretty good offline AI auto-transcription from a podcast .MP3 file. I finally got rid of Audacity as an editor, and now have the equally freeware replacement Ocenaudio. And I discovered that Izotope RX is a great AI repair kit for various common glitches in spoken-word audio. Those faced with an old interview, which has echo and other problems, may find things like Izotope RX’s ‘Dialogue De-reverb’ module especially useful.

I’ve completed the next issue of Digital Art Live which will be on ‘Plants’, especially 3D-model alien plants. As a side-post I noted here on Tentaclii that Dark Worlds Quarterly has been doing a fine ongoing series on plant monsters in the pulps and golden age comics.

Ok, that’s it for the short and cold month of February. Onward into March…