Monthly Archives: February 2021

“I have an excellent microscope…”

28 Sunday Feb 2021

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An article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper this week, on the other noxious creeping things that are nibbling away at our museum heritage during lockdown, reminds readers that Lovecraft’s imagination would have seemed curiously validated shortly after his death. Namely, by the first magazine pictures arising from the use of the new electron microscope on biological specimens…

He imagined beings from unimaginable depths and realms who, with their proboscis, tentacles, suction cups, mandibles and multiple legs, could appear to us like microbes brought to human size — had the scanning electron microscope been used a year earlier in 1937, the year Lovecraft died.

Admittedly such imagery was coming through to the public from normal microscopes in the 1920s and 30s, and had existed as small engravings in encyclopaedias, but it was not quite so startlingly big and monstrously clear as the photographs seen from 1938 onward. This would have added an interesting visual layer to the initial reception of Lovecraft in the 1950s and 60s, and of course the visuals eventually found their horror form in the late 1950s atomic-mutant movies (The Fly and others).

So far as I’m aware, Lovecraftians do not know what “excellent microscope” Lovecraft owned, nor its magnification.

Lovecraft was right, part 472: the Stoic Lovecraft

27 Saturday Feb 2021

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H.P. Lovecraft… way ahead of the curve as usual. He was interested in, and read deeply into, the Ancient Roman Stoics and Epicureans. After about 1930 he came increasingly to live aspects of such a life, in a modified personal form well-adapted to shrugging off the turmoils and tribulations of the 1930s.

Now, like Lovecraft himself, these philosophies have become a small industry. The TLS this week reviews a shelf on new books on the topic (e.g. How to Be Free: An Ancient Guide to the Stoic Life) and reveals that the movement also has its share of get-rich-quick empire-builders…

… the Stoic revival extends beyond the bookstore. … The Stoa-curious can now head to dailystoic.com to have philosophical wisdom delivered to their inboxes or order a “Memento Mori medallion” from the online store. At modernstoicism.com they can sign up to “live like a Stoic for a week”. Real enthusiasts can attend an annual convention, Stoicon, held (at least before Covid) in cities across the world, to hear talks by classical scholars like Long or movement luminaries

Yet the reviewer finds the movement’s recent crop of short manuals and introductions, all from weighty university presses, to be worthy and faithful to the originals…

to a perhaps surprising degree, [these modern] Stoic treatises really are self-help manuals.

So it sounds like you could do worse, if you wanted a modern and readable introduction to this aspect of Lovecraft’s life in the 1930s. The Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft is also your go-to book on this aspect of his thought, paired with Joshi’s Decline of the West, though both will be heavy going. Ideally, at some point we need an accessible H.P. Lovecraft’s Philosophy For Beginners book presented in the style of the leftist For Beginners series. Here’s a sample page from Linguistics for Beginners to show the approach I’m thinking of…

Having a cat as a narrator would probably be a useful conceit, since the text would need to draw the parallels between these philosophies and the natural bearing and attitude of cats.

Lovecraft also advises Epicureanism to young sceptics among his correspondents…

As to any especial “creed of speculative scepticism” … I would advise Epicureanism as a base. That old geezer had the right idea, and drew from the right sources, largely my old friend Democritus. Read Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura for the best possible exposition of this unsurpassed philosophy.

‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: Riverside Drive

26 Friday Feb 2021

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The Riverside Drive scene on the card is almost certainly where we could have tragically lost Lovecraft in 1927, as he explains…

Just about a decade ago I began refusing to take dares beginning with the time a friend challenged me to walk along the foot-wide & not-quite level parapet of upper Riverside Drive in New York, with a 500-foot perpendicular drop to ragged rocks & railway tracks on one side.

“B.P.” usefully summarises the layout in the 1920s…

The first portion of Riverside Drive from 72nd to 85th Street was opened in 1879. Riverside Park terminated at 129th Street. The Riverside Viaduct completed in 1900, bridged the schism between 125th and 135th Streets. […] Above 168th Street Riverside Drive became somewhat rural [and] continued north to 181st Street.

Here we see the railway tracks…

What of Hulyer’s? The map places 60 West 125th Street about a mile south-east from the bridge shown. But it also reveals that this Huyler’s branch was just a half-mile south from Morton’s apartment (which was at 211, West 138 Street). We now know from the Letters to Family letters that there was at least one nightime Kalem Club meeting at Morton’s place. My guess that it was held there because it was high summer, and Morton likely had access to the flat roof of his terrace row (he had a very indulgent landlord). In and around Red Hook there was almost no access to the building roofs, as reported by an official slum report on the gangs of the district. Lovecraft’s 1925 diary also shows there he made at least one solo walk through Harlem to see Morton, and there were likely many other such walks. It’s thus not impossible, in the period when Sonia was helping out financially, that he and Morton could have dropped in on Morton’s best local soda, candy and ice-cream joint, even if it was further into central Harlem. The Huyler’s chain was very successful and appears to have been about the best one could get in terms of such drop-in stores.

Many Lovecraftians will also know the name Riverside Drive because it held a key Lovecraft “shrine” in New York City. This being the gallery of the visionary painter…

good old Nick Roerich, whose joint at Riverside Drive and 103rd Street is one of my shrines in the pest zone.

Maps put the gallery about a mile SW of the bridge seen in the above picture. Incidentally, nearby on the map is Morningside Heights, which explains Lovecraft’s 8th January 1925 telegraphic diary entry…

noon — meet LDC G.C.T. By. Exch. Ch. Art Gal. [Hatho?] Morningside & St Nick Hts. Ham. Gr. El. to G.C.T. Dinner St R. home. Tailor—Laundry Reading

Translated… he returns from the Leeds apartment after leaving there at 4am and walking across the Brooklyn Bridge and mailing some books and postcards on the way home. The next day he rises at noon, and meets “LDC” (Aunt Lillian) at the “G.C.T.” (Grand Central Terminus, aka Station) “By. Exch.” (Baggage Exchange?) some while later. They then visit the “Ch. Art Gal.” (City? Art Gallery). If “Hatho” indicates an unknown word, it could be a visit to Sonia’s “Hat House”, her hat store? The weather is presumably good and so they make for Riverside Drive bridge and walk a mile down the “Morningside” riverside section to see “St. Nick”, this being Nick Roerich and his gallery. The “Hts.” may be a mis-transcription for Mts, indicating Roerich’s mountain paintings. Then “Ham. Gr.” (Harlem to see Morton?, Greenwich Village?). Then they take the “El.” (elevated line) back to Grand Central Station and have a dinner there. They then take the “St. R.” (street railway, in contrast to the ‘elevated’) home. Lovecraft sorts his clothes in need of tailoring (his aunt had likely pointed out something in need of fixing) and for the laundry-service bag, and then he reads into the night.

Placing the three points on a map (bridge, Morton, the gallery) suggests that, once he was at Morton’s place, it would then be natural to walk with Morton a mile to the west through what is now marked as “West Harlem” to reach the Riverside Viaduct bridge. From the “Heights” there he and Morton could walk a mile south down the pleasant Riverside Drive (alongside the Hudson River) to reach Roerich’s gallery, and he knew that section of the route well enough to make it a prime walk with his aunt in January 1925. Possibly he and Morton occasionally walked on 2.5 miles down the same riverside, to reach McNeil’s Hell’s Kitchen district — possibly enabling a visit to McNeil. Though I’m not sure how salubrious the riverside walk would then have been, once it was south of 72nd Street, and how safe to then walk from the waterfront into Hell’s Kitchen. Public transport from the Roerich gallery might have been the safer option.

I’ve also found another card of a possible eatery. Safely back in Providence, Lovecraft no doubt dropped in at least once to sample the new “Franklin Spa”. This had been built while he was away in the big city (see the “1926” emblazoned on its frontage). It was about a quarter-mile south of the Public Library, in an area now swept away by a new concert hall.

New book: Lovecraft: The Great Tales

25 Thursday Feb 2021

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John D. Haefele, August Derleth specialist and author of A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos, has now published a book surveying H.P. Lovecraft’s tales. Lovecraft: The Great Tales is a 760-page doorstopper that (so the blurb has it) “defies critical orthodoxy”. The book is available now, and a perusal of Amazon UK suggests it’s currently paperback-only at £19 (listed at $25 in the USA). No ebook at present. From a mini-review in Publisher’s Weekly…

He provides some surprising interpretations, such as that “The Haunter of the Dark,” which features a lead named Robert Blake, was not inspired by Robert Bloch’s “The Shambler from the Stars,” as is commonly believed. Haefele even offers a radical take on the twist ending of one of the major long tales, “The Whisperer in Darkness,” suggesting that the alien imposter is in fact Lovecraft himself.

A visit to 211

25 Thursday Feb 2021

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Lovecraft’s friend and correspondent James Morton lived for many years at No. 211, West 138th Street, in a top floor apartment of a very dusty and unkempt building located a little north of the centre of Harlem, New York City. Lovecraft described it as a “single house”, Long in his memoirs as a “brownstone”. Both were partly right. Lovecraft was likely using the architecturally-correct Georgian term for a long single-block of row-houses, built in a pseudo-Georgian style in the 1890s, rather than meaning ‘a detached single house with a garden and yard’.

I’ve now found modern rental photos showing the inside of No. 215, the pictures being here suitable treated for a more retro look. The interior is not quite 211 but must surely evoke something very close to what a visit to Morton’s place might have been like. You have to imagine it prior to the strong gentrification, of course, and incredibly dusty as Lovecraft describes it in the new Letters to Family books…

No. 211 — the Morton mansion — is an old brick single house owned by an elderly eccentric named Edwin C. Walker; a spacious & unkempt edifice, thick with dust, & with half the rooms unused. Morton’s room is on the top floor, reached by dark & winding stairs, & is remarkably neat though atrociously dusty.

Anarchists, as a rule, tend to be disinclined to housework. The dust also suits their paranoia, usefully revealing the intrusion of the clandestine police investigators they imagine are around every corner. Lovecraft thought the street pleasant enough, though, with decent houses and trees and no policemen idling on the corner.

Entrance to 215, seen at an angle.

Entrance to 215

Lower exterior window of 215

The building’s owner was the fellow orator and publisher Edwin C. Walker (1849–1931) who then still ran the freethought / free-love / inter-racialist ‘Sunrise Club’ from there. This was a long-running bi-weekly dining meeting which had in its time seen a wide variety of invited after-dinner speakers, ranging from the distinguished racial universalist Du Bois (1919) to anarchist Emma Goldman on birth-control and censorship (1915), along with a wide range of fringe speakers on the burning topics of the era. Evidently ‘Red’ Emma was a regular guest, as she was impressed when she met and heard Du Bois there in 1919. These speakers are also known to have included spiritualist mediums. Glimpses of Walker’s Fair Play magazine of 1908, with a different mailing address, suggests the mix: pro-sex and birth-control stances; interest in the disciples of Walt Whitman; individualistic Stirnerite anarchism; anti-censorship; racial equality; and spiritualist ‘mediumship’. Lovecraft himself attended a meeting on pro and anti-censorship in 1922, finding the speakers and arguments facile except for the contribution on Morton.

It seems likely that the lower street windows of the building were those of Walker’s rooms, and thus in the latter years may have presented to the world a certain faded bohemian glamour in decor. Possibly there was sometimes a window-card to indicate the ‘Sunrise Club’, though in 1922 it was held in a nearby cafe for the meeting that Lovecraft attended. The “empty rooms” Lovecraft knew of were likely available as discreet meeting rooms on the first floor, above the prying eyes of police or journalists or Houdini-like debunkers. Walker is listed at that address in Hartmann’s Who’s Who in Occult, Psychic and Spiritual Realms, 1925. For more on Walker see The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America (1977).

Lovecraft evidently met Walker briefly, when he first visited and probably also thereafter. Though Walker was in his early-mid 70s in the 1920s. Lovecraft had a lot of time for ‘good old fellows’ but he was unlikely to have seen eye-to-eye with Walker, had they chanced to settle into conversation. Though they might have been alright if they had stuck to the pros and cons of censorship and anti-liquor matters, things on which they both broadly agreed. I imagine he might have been a slight influence on the character of Robert Suydam in “The Horror at Red Hook”.

A photograph shows that Walker had been quite a looker, seen here his prime about the year 1889 when his ‘Sunrise Club’ was founded…

The Wanderings of Alhazred - now in audiobook

24 Wednesday Feb 2021

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New from Tantor Necronomicon: The Wanderings of Alhazred as a nine-hour audiobook. It’s a big literary ‘life of’ Lovecraft’s fictional madman. I recall reviews that suggest it gets quite gory in places, as Alhazred goes through various lengthy torments. It appears to have been developed into a series of further books by the author, so perhaps more audiobooks will follow.

“Abdul Alhazred” by Katharsisdrill.

Druillet’s Lovecraft

23 Tuesday Feb 2021

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts

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Now at last I understand why the French so closely associate the Metal Hurlant artist Druillet with Lovecraft. It wasn’t just the Metal Hurlant work etc. His art was used for the covers of their seminal paperback series, and a great many of the French must have first encountered their Lovecraft that way. I’d never seen these before, still less all in one place, and I guess they must be so collectable and/or cherished that they’re rarely seen for sale. Anyway, here’s the set of covers, in the largest versions of each that I could find.

The last appears to be an anomaly in terms of the design. I’m guessing that the “et Derleth” on the cover might mean it’s “The Colour out of Space” fronting some of Derleth’s posthumous collaborations?

Lovecraftian Cooking Simulator

22 Monday Feb 2021

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Obvious, when you think about it. There’s a new Lovecraftian Cooking Simulator. Make Lovecraftian horror-themed dishes, try to avoid summoning monsters … get a secret Easter egg. The small mini-game prototype seems to have been rustled up very quickly as part of a game jam, but I like the idea.

A real Lovecraftian Cooking Simulator would involve Lovecraft having to live frugally on $x per day, long periods of semi-starvation (“reducing”, as he politely called it), grocery trips to the local What Cheer in search of bargains and discounted dented cans, midnight meals in seedy dock-front cafes, secretly putting aside titbits for stray cats, immense ice-cream and coffee binges, connoisseurship of various forms of spicy cooked cheese, assiduous avoidance of fish-bars and fish-markets, and a lifelong shunning of booze. There’s quite a set of game mechanics in that lot, I’d suggest, especially if the goal is to fuel Lovecraft enough to produce a masterpiece… while also not allowing either him or his kitties to die, and preventing him from concocting a meal with the wrong sort of deadly left-over ingredients and thus summoning hallucinatory monsters. Possibly occasional visitors from New York would arrive, bearing exotic and unusual foods they had discovered, which could lead to dream-visions of far desert ruins and weird mountain-top water-gardens.

Possibly it could become partly a storytelling board-game, with picture-cards, rather than a fiddly RPG with stats. It could even have some small tabletop figures…

Crowdfunder - Lovecraft-Long letters

21 Sunday Feb 2021

Posted by in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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There’s a new HPLHS Fundraiser to Preserve Lovecraft’s Letters to Frank Belknap Long…

A collection of original letters from Lovecraft to his friend Frank Belknap Long is being sold by a private collector. The 52 letters were written between 1920-1931 and total 509 pages, of which many have never been published. We believe these letters should be acquired and donated to the permanent collection at Brown, but the price is rather high.

So these are not the letters from “Long to Lovecraft”, as recently mentioned by S.T. Joshi on his blog. But rather unknown(?) and certainly ‘many unpublished’ letters from “Lovecraft to Long”. I imagine most of them cluster in 1920-1924 and 1927-30 (since he and Long were largely face-to-face in New York in the middle of the period).

The Italians also have their own video explainer for the campaign.

A note on upscaling, using AI Gigapixel, obviously used on the interior photo on the stamp when it’s seen a larger size. It looks fine above, but not when larger. For best results on that sort of image use the very latest version, in ‘Compressed’ mode and turn on ‘Face refinement’ (now far better than it used to be). Keep de-blur and noise-reduction very low.