H. P. Lovecraft And His Legacy

Howard Lovecraft and the Undersea Kingdom

2012-01-19T23:26:00.001-05:00

Howard Lovecraft and the Undersea Kingdom was sent to me as a preview copy. Please be aware that this "Lovecraft" is a horror-fantasy character, so if you just read Mr. Joshi's magnum opus biography of HPL you might be a little confused.

In this alternate reality, Howard is maybe about 6 years old (his father is still alive) and the mighty sleeping one Cthulhu is named "Spot" by little Howard. The images drawn by Thomas Boatwright are a radical mixture of minimalism, pastels, and abstraction. The writers, Brown and McPherson are clever with asides and wit - like one might have in an old "What's Up, Doc" Chuck Jones cartoon. It is not all whimsy, there is also a deadly and Lovecraftian seriousness about this graphic novel. These characters could be killed, or suffer a madness that would be much worse than death. The evil food chain ascends eldritchly upward so that even the devils themselves could be consumed if they fail in their unstated mission.

This is Lovecraft, so there is always a "book". Whether the book is a book, or the book is a metaphor, it is immediately critical to the plot and the devil's missions. But in this case, He Who Dreams and Should Not Be Named, is quite tame and kind of sweet. The world is somehow very wrong, and this little boy, Howard, must somehow make it right. That's quite a task, if this were really a little boy, but it seems that the boy is also a paradigm of wisdom and enlightenment.

How this plays out is not hinted at the end of chapter one, but rest assured the next chapters are equally entertaining. However, here are a few hints of the energetic fun and horror in the next chapters.

In chapter two a very interesting character appears, one who would be perfect had he been a real actor in an old Basil Rathbone movie. You may find the character funny, or eerie, but I found this character one of my favorites. Then "Spot" gets himself in – well – a spot. Will he escape in time to save Howard? We wonder if Howard's father is mad, or is he as sly as a warped Yukon Cornelius? Then before chapter two ends, some very Innsmouthian manifestations occur. And oh, my, what they do to good old 454 Angell Street!

In chapter three, as a cat lover, I cringed at what might happen to Howard's little black cat. Then come the "bubbles". Very clever of the artistic maestro to think of that! Whether the writers or the artists are responsible for the many sound effects, kudos to each who had a part. I live in the part of the country that has cicadas. I hate 'em. But I'd take a pack of them before I would that horrid winged thing that attacks our beloved team. (I do believe in spooks, I do, I do!) Then as we close in on the end of the last chapter, we suddenly understand the title of the graphic novel!

I enjoyed the full panel scenes, and the way that the story boards were not just rectilinear predictability, but kept me on my toes. I loved the small homages to many very old movies, or if that was unintended I suppose I'm showing my age and love of old films.

Bruce Brown and Dwight McPherson are masters of writing. E. T. Dollman's lettering is clean, readable, and artistic in its own way. Thomas Boatwright so captivated me, I had to go online and see more. What I saw confirmed what I initially thought: Not only can he do classic illustration, but he has a style all his own. If he continues, hymns will be written about his artistic career.

The Undersea Kingdom is in this months "Previews" and can be ordered from comic shops right now.

T-shirt, three days only

2012-01-13T21:08:00.002-05:00

If you happen to be a collector, here is a timed announcement.

Steve dropped me a note, and says that a t-shirt is being printed for 3 days only (shirt shows up at 12 a.m. Saturday). He says it will be a limited edition, never to be printed again.

Here are the links for you to check out.

http://www.theyetee.com/

At Steve Thomas there is a discussion of this iconography.

The New Death and Others by James Hutchings

2012-01-11T08:22:00.001-05:00

A copy of The New Death and Others was made available to me, Chrispy. This is one of the better of "old school" Mythos and I appreciated the way it was written. I count 66 short stories and poems which can be savored individually, or all at once.

In "How the Isle of Cats Got its Name", it begins wonderfully with "Death stalked the cats of Tekelee." This pretty much explains the blend of the Poe, Lovecraft and RE Howard style throughout. It is adventurous, thoughtful, and yet Mr. Hastings allows himself the freedom to express himself as James Hastings, and not be trapped inside some preconceived notion of what the Mythos should be or not be.

A brief portion of "If My Life was Filmed" goes "...someone famous once / would have the role of me / and if five stars meant 'excellent' / you'd give it two or three ...", which to me I find refreshingly self-deprecating yet closeted in a desire to shine. This too, is a bit Lovecraftian in the best sense, as Lovecraft strove to excellence, yet always under-appreciated himself.

Fun of Sword and Sorcery exudes in "The Mirror of Tuzun Thune", "Un-numbered years ago it came to pass / that desolation settled on King Kull / His throne of gleaming gold seemed tarnished brass / and soft and subtle silk seemed rough and dull ...", and goes on to elaborate the dynamics of the conflict between Kull and Thune in 12 epic stanzas.

James Hutchings is selling on both Amazon and Smashwords at a very reduced and bargain value. The links are below.

Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/New-Death-others-ebook/dp/B005Q8Q8DY

Smashwords:

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/92126

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

2011-12-24T06:47:00.001-05:00

T Peter Park Update

2011-12-17T19:11:00.001-05:00

Peter, I am told, is fine now. I am trying to make contact with him.Thank you, each of you, who wrote to me about him. I will certainly tell him, when I reach him, that people still care deeply for him.

T Peter Park

2011-12-12T13:25:00.003-05:00

I'm not sure where else to post, so I am back at the HPL blog. Peter and I spent many emails over the years discussing HPL, and his own mythic beliefs and theories. Of that, I am not unique, as many care deeply for Mr. Park and his legacy and interests.However, since his serious illness in late 2010, I have not found anyone who has an update on his condition of whereabouts. I fear the worst and hope for the best.If you do know of Mr. Park's condition, whatever that may be, could you drop me a line at chrisperridas@yahoo.com?Thank you.

Yuggothian Driven Computer

2011-11-08T13:29:00.000-05:00

Fungi interact with computer to make Cyborg!

Ia !!

Scientists have succeeded in forming a "feedback loop" between a computer and a common yeast to precisely control the switching on and off of specific genes.Full Story here.

Wonderful Weird Tales Site

2011-09-29T09:46:00.000-04:00

Tellers of Weird TalesThis tells the story: "Welcome to Tellers of Weird Tales, a compilation of biography and bibliography on the men and women, writers and artists, who contributed to Weird Tales magazine and its companion titles, Oriental Stories and The Magic Carpet Magazine, from their founding in the 1920s and '30s until the revivals of the 1970s and '80s."

Friday's entry was on Mary McEnnery Erhard (ca. 1885-?), and many more! Check it out.

Did Cthulhu get hit by satellite?

2011-09-28T07:58:00.000-04:00

From the Call of Cthulhu:... heavily armed steam yacht Alert of Dunedin, N. Z., which was sighted April 12th in S. Latitude 34° 21', W. Longitude 152° 17' with one living and one dead man aboard. ... The Emma, he says, was delayed and thrown widely south of her course by the great storm of March 1st, and on March 22nd, in S. Latitude 49° 51', W. Longitude 128° 34', encountered the Alert, manned by a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes. ... and in S. Latitude 47° 9', W. Longitude 126° 43' come upon a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh...

While we are uncertain of the precise locations of Cthulhu, it is likely that the creature is both mobile when it wants to be, and its domain extends over a wide swath of territory. As in the recent Cloverfield movie, a satellite awakens a great beast when it falls into its domain.

Nasa's UARS spacecraft fell to Earth north-east of the Samoan islands.

Orbital tracking experts have now established that the defunct satellite entered the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean at 14.1 degrees South latitude and 170.2 degrees West longitude. Any debris that survived Saturday's fiery descent would have plunged into open water, the US space agency says.

Yuggoth Update: A new Planet "X" Uncovered?

2011-09-27T14:38:00.000-04:00

A computer simulation has shown that our solar system couldn't have formed without an extra planet. But if that theory is true, what happened to it?

Yuggoth Article

David Nesvorny from Colorado’s Southwest Research Institute reached the conclusion after performing around 6,000 computer simulations about the formation of the solar system, nearly all of which required the extra planet .. The computer simulations also explain the fifth planet's fate ... the five gas giants begin tightly wound together. But soon the lighter planets of Neptune and Uranus get pushed into a further orbit by Jupiter and Saturn, and the fifth planet gets ejected from the solar system ... somewhere out there, there may still be a solo gas giant ... floating aimlessly through space.

Fungus Among Us: Patagonian Galls

2011-09-26T22:13:00.001-04:00

Dateline Patagonia, 23 August 2011.

Lovecraft's Fungi From Yuggoth may have been horrific, but German lager would not exist without a boost from the yeast of Patagonian beech tree galls. The entire article can be found here.

Buy Books at Miskatonic Books

2011-09-20T23:50:00.001-04:00

Fellow lover of weird fiction,

For the past several months we’ve been busy building our new site at www.miskatonicbooks.com to better service all our customers who love weird tales, ghost, mythos and dark fantasy.

We have only scratched the surface of our inventory and will be adding hundreds of more books from your favorite genre authors and publishers daily so check back often. Check out our featured author page here FEATURED AUTHORS

Like our old bookstore, our new site will cater to Lovecraftian fiction and weird tales in general. You’ll find our new site is easier to navigate, quicker checkout, and faster page loads. You’ll also get $5 media rate shipping on any size order that ships in the US and 5% back in points to be used on future purchases for anything at www.miskatonicbooks.com

If you’ve ordered a book through our store at Horror-Mall your order is still valid and there is no reason to reorder on the new site. All orders placed through Horror-Mall will be filled as usual.

If you have any questions please feel free to email me at miskatonicbooks@me.com

Please click the banner below to check out our new site and be sure to subscribe to this blog to stay up to date on all the new titles at www.miskatonicbooks.com and our own publications through our Arcane Wisdom imprint.

Thanks so much for your continued support!

Ufo's?

2011-09-20T08:45:00.002-04:00

Lovecraft wrote often about "aliens on Earth" in a fictional manner, and much of what he wrote has seeped into Fortean and cult interpretations.

Unless one counts the 1890's reports, it has been nearly 2/3 of a century since the modern flying saucer phenomenon swept the Cold War world. Surely we have learned something since then?

In fact there is a lot we know, but not what we might have suspected. Beginning shortly after the WWII victory in Europe by the allies, an immediate cold war began inciting rampant paranoia in the United States not seen again since shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Unbelievably vast sums of money were expended to create clandestine organizations - most who did not even know each other existed - and they immediately set about to create spectacularly frightening and innovative technological marvels.

We also learned that humans are remarkably observant and equally poor at interpretation of those observations. Many of the clandestine airborne objects were sighted and reported setting off a frenzy in the government. Some thought this evidence that the Soviets were ahead in technology, not understanding they originated from sister, yet clandestine, organizations. Others were shocked that defense strategies were impotent to see or stop “something” that thousands were seeing. Retaliation was not analysis, but threats to civilians to shut up, and later to discredit vocal individuals with ridicule or with other socio-psychological techniques.

However, once the threat was perceived as relatively non-existant, a second wave of “cover-up” began. First, recruiting scientific types to counter observations and reports, then to coerce media to ignore or ridicule observations, and finally to simply ignore any reports.

Thousands of amateur civilians began to suspect something was strange, and since true scientific inquiry was marginalized by government pressure, they began to take their own reports and go down numerous blind alleys. Often, psychologically impaired individuals muddied the water, but by the 21st century some answers were forthcoming. Freedom of information acts also assisted in discovering that the intelligence agencies were mostly clueless as well for most of this time.

Humans experience complex reactions. An ordinary object perceived through extraordinary circumstances prompts layers of interpretation by the brain. A candle seen through a greasy window does not look much like a candle, but under usual circumstances we know it is a candle. But not when we are tired, have experienced collateral trauma of some sort, or are in a dream-state, or influenced by disease, or drugs, adrenaline, or other chemical modifications.

As hundreds of thousands of reports flooded into amateur organizations, they quickly began to see a wide range of phenomenology that did not fit well into “alien invasions”. Some did try to categorize a plethora of alien species based on innumerable reports, but one may as well categorize things based on dreams and nightmares. This is not the first time organizations faced this problem. Scholarly, but paranoid clergy once tried the same thing with demons, fairies, and in other cultures, other categorizations. This, in turn, corrupted the input because people began to read written descriptions of other reports and reinterpret what they experienced through those filters. A sort of cult-feedback loop happened, well-known to folklorists. Instead of reporting what they experienced, they put on a primary filter using language extracted and influenced by those who were actually taking the reports.

It took a great while to recognize this, and again, true academic and scientific researchers were unavailable due to self-exile. Real examination of this phenomenology might have made theses and jump-started careers, but no, they ran. A notable exception was Carl Sagan who tried for a short time, until he also seemed to either become exasperated or began to feel marginalized by colleagues and perhaps worried it might impact his career and income.

In any event, our world may have indeed been invaded by some aliens. There seems some solid evidence that alien microbes are here, and maybe at least once or twice a ship or probe may have landed. But with all the hoopla we would never know it for certain, and the leaders of our governments might be the last to know. It has taken most of sixty-years to begin to divide the paranormal experiences from the real experiences. When real experiences are uncovered, and examined carefully, a large number of these have been found to be clandestine government objects, devices, and activities - most by errant sub-contractors with the military quick to cover it up. Other observations have been found to be meteors, space debris disintegrating in the atmosphere, electrical or electro-magnetic effects, and so forth. This validates the keen observation ability by humans, and documents how poorly we can interpret phenomenon out of our ordinary experience. These same observations have been attributed to aliens, conspiratorial agents, ghosts, alternate-dimensions, devils, visions, deities, or angels.

It should be about time for experts and professionals to assist those who labor part-time as amateur investigators. Yet even as investigators close in on answers, our government is broken and dysfunctional, and professionals (such as scientists) are more than ever marginalized and fearful for their positions.

Kappa Alpha Tau Report: Willow

2011-09-15T13:24:00.004-04:00

Dateline: NEW YORK (15 September 2011) — A calico cat named Willow disappeared from a home near the Rocky Mountains five years ago. Willow escaped when contractors left a door open during a home renovation. Willow was suddenly found Wednesday on a Manhattan street, identified by an implanted chip, and will soon be returned.

How she got to New York, nearly 1,800 miles away, no one knows. Whatever happened, Willow dodged coyotes and owls in Colorado, life on New York streets, and everything in between. Willow was just five and a half pounds.

A Kappa Alpha Tau Lovecraftian Salute to Willow!

interlude

2011-09-15T09:50:00.001-04:00

Today: Not about Lovecraft, but still funny ...

“Remember, amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic.” Attributed to Jack Benny.

By the Light of a Gibbous Moon

2011-08-31T14:02:00.004-04:00

(Art from "I Think I Went Mad" blog).

Here is an interesting new book out. It contains short fiction inspired by HP Lovecraft and is now released as a Kindle book. House of Yig is one of those stories, and this can be found free here (click).

It begins:

House of Yig
I, Father John Marylebone, have promised to record the statement of the Pocumtuck Indian called ‘Blind Crow’ exactly as spoken. This particular Pocumtuck is a fine reader of the English language, and has some letters as well, but he insists that his tale be recorded by a more learned man. He has done much work with the Church as we help the Pocumtuck people come into the Light of Christ, so I am happy to oblige.
Firstly I must set down, at my subject’s grave insistence, that he is not called ‘Blind Crow’ because he is old and sightless. It is an affectionate jibe chosen for him because of his clumsiness with tools and, I speculate, also because of his croaking laugh. It is a laugh unheard in Deerfield Township for many a long month now.

More.

Welcome to Cluthu Country

2011-08-31T09:29:00.003-04:00

That is not a typo, Lovecraftians. Salute !! to our brothers and sisters of New Zealand, and highlight on:

Situated in the Cluthu River valley on highway 1 and Cluthu Valley Road lies the rural New Zealand paradise featuring the town of Balcluthu.

What more could a Lovecraftian want for relaxation?

The heritage of Clutha Country is rich and diverse. From Early Maori to European exploration, right through to the days of the gold rush and the hum of industry, the story of Clutha makes for a good yarn. Here's a quick rundown on our little slice of history...

Clutha Country’s rivers flow from inland mountains and lakes, creating fertile plains and verdant valleys. The magnificent coastline rich with sea life provided Clutha Country’s first great industry, and introduced the first colonial era. In Captain Cook’s 1770 journal, he wrote of a wealth of whales and seals as well as a safe harbour at Waikawa. However, a cartographer of the admiralty erroneously applied the name of Port Molyneux to this safe harbour, which was near the mouth of the Clutha River. The information contained in the entry still had dramatic consequences on the social history of coastal South Otago.

Taking back the blog!

2011-08-28T15:51:00.002-04:00

Sort of. Mr. Lovecraft has had this blog for many years now. But he and I must make a new deal - from time to time, Chrispy will hold center court.

News: Status of my proposed books. I am 2/3 of the way through the tentatively titled "Lovecraft's Grandfather: The Business Life of Whipple Van Buren Phillips". It is not peer reviewed, but I have showed it to one or two people. Their feedback, believe it or not, was that it was worthy of publication (I have a publisher if I finish by the way) and if I proceed to make it scholarly, I had flubbed the footnote formats badly. It has been many years (decades) since college term papers, so I admit I am very rusty. I am a scientist, but I am not an historian, nor a biographer, so I am learning new skills in order to attempt this. Wish Chrispy luck.

I am completed with "Young Lovecraft" to mid 1892. It is not to my satisfaction, but it certainly shows that what has been said about Lovecraft's first 2 years has much more to be stated. I can never praise Mr Faig enough, but by others these critical first two years have been given short shrift especially in light of new primary documents that have come to light on Miss Guiney, the Auburndale, MA. speculative real estate development between 1888 and 1893, and Winfield's expansive sales trips per his hotel announcements.

Don't hold your breath. Things could go south on these books. I am currently 55 years old, and this is very much a part time development that has to fit my very limited time. I have determined that if I do publish, it will most certainly not be for financial gain - unlike other Lovecraft endeavors. The sheer lack of interest in these subjects (perhaps 2,000 people out of 7 billion?) means that this is a labor of personal interest and for scholarship, though I hope some money might eventually be made and given to some charity or other. It is payment to Mr Lovecraft for the hours of entertainment he has given me since 2002.

What else is Chrispy doing?

If you don't see me on Facebook, or playing some Zynga game (curse you psychologist-demons of Zynga) that meas I am at work, church, or blogging over at Miskatonic books. I am rapidly losing touch with my old T-12 gang and old Horror Mall friends who are deeply into their own endeavors in and out of horror. I wish them good luck!

I am not writing horror as much as I used to, and I already see that my skills are rusting. So I may start up again. I have dozens of unfinished projects that would take me into my old age if I choose.

I feel toward our US government much as I do toward the governors of Kentucky. Each election I say, "How can we get worse candidates than these? How can any governor be this bad?" Yet I have watched wacky governors and presidents (of both parties) enrich themselves and their friends, while doing nothing to stop inevitable disaster. All I can say is I suppose we are getting what we deserve, and I will continue to complain, but expect no better.

This leads me to my next diatribe. I am no fan of Richard Dawkins. Today, I saw that he had his own pontificating windbaggish lambast of America, Texas, Republicans, and specifically governor Perry. Perry was clearly baiting political targets, and Dawkins fell for the bait, though one wonders why? He seems not to "have a dog in the hunt" in American politics, but loses little opportunity to sell his books. Or should I say one panderer should recognize another?

Ivory towerists never see the real populist reasons for things. It has been a while since I took biology, thank you, and I did major in chemistry, but if I recall Darwin's ideas, they were specifically stated in a way that I might paraphrase: When natural environments change they cause biological organisms to rapidly adapt to them.

I know almost no creationist, scientist, molecular biologist, or even CSISCOP's to object to this. We see it every day in every way, particularly with new dog breeds and Franken-crops. However, there is much to object to the catch-all term 'evolution', particularly as usurped and practiced by the British elites, Nazis, American medical staffs, and others who proposed social-Darwinism for political and elitist gain. Why one must denigrate people of faith - Buddhist, Muslim, or Christian for the sake of selling books on a THEORY I don't understand.

There are millions of scientists and engineers who are people of faith and practitioners of hope, love, and charity. They seem not to have an issue with living their lives peacefully, and do not get in the face of their brothers and sisters, grind axes, or descend to calling names. If only ivory towerists would do the same. And this should apply to name-callers on either side of this issue.

Lastly, what is wrong with horror?

I can sort of summarize my feelings a few ways. First, high expectations. We might think a return to the Stephen King/Anne Rice days is normal. THAT was the aberration. We are in a very normal sales volume for horror based on 20th century norms.

We insist of horror being in novel form. Horror is best practiced as short story. So what happened? Corporations pay by the word for some insane reason, so today's writers pad their works to get maximum gain for the least effort. They must type a minimum of three novels a year to maintain their B-list rankings, and be able to pay bills. Or they must hire assistants to type their books form outlines they provide and hope the imitations are sufficient to maintain their minimal fan base.

Please, bring back short story horror and pay a living wage to writers for it.

Alas, I fear that the days of Poe and Lovecraft writing a few short stories of quality each year, or even Charles Schultz doing every word, every line, every drawing, and every ink is as passe as, well, playing defense or the two-point shot in basketball.

Horror is corporate, and corporations - this may come as a big surprise - maximize profits at the expense of the least amount of outlay to employees. Karl Marx had the wrong solution, but he stated the problem correctly. Profit is good, but greed is bad, and absolute greed corrupts absolutely and is what we have today.

This is precisely the battle between E Hoffman Price and H P Lovecraft. Price stated that only in writing was the amateur held up as better than the professional. Lovecraft countered that selling stories for only money will always end up in mediocre work and hack work. They talked past one another, and neither made very much money. The middle ground ends up one of two ways. Very lucky talented writers write what they want and the audience finds them and supports them. Very unlucky talented writers end up poor and their stories in the garbage after they die.

I will guarantee there are wonderful, talented, horror writers you have never read because they did not attract a corporate backer, were unable to advance through the hurdles placed before them, and gave up. Or they chose to write something else to pay bills - say like Max Brand writing westerns, or Conan Doyle writing Sherlock Holmes. I guess that is back to natural selection.

Horror is a two-way street. You must meet it half-way. We have the worst economy in our lives, and the real unemployment is closer to 20%, and we have no confidence in anyone. We have to stop the merry-go-round and break the cycle of mistrust. If you are lucky enough to have a job, and inspired enough to enjoy horror, find a wayward writer and support that person. Take a chance on someone new. Buy their book, or support a trustworthy publisher (there are a few left) who is trying to help new talent. Do your homework, and while you may purchase a few duds, you will find a writer who resonates with you in the independent press.

OK, Mr Lovecraft, thank you for letting me have these few minutes on the HPL blog.

Lovecraft alphabetic letters

2011-08-28T08:47:00.003-04:00

This was sent to me by Paul, and as we post all things Lovecraftian, you may want to check this out. I do not know what the fundraiser is for, so check it out if you are so inclined. The link is above and here

For those who've been following the hints on our Twitter account this is the new Yoggie project - Lovecraftian Letters! Yes, now you can create your own Lovecraftian miniature tales and share your dark wisdom with everyone in your kitchen with over 500 Lovecraft-inspired magnetic words!

We've set up a fundraiser preorder via IndieGoGo to help get this unique item into production. The preorder comes with a variety of additional benefits and exclusives and we anticipate that sets will start shipping very shortly after the fundraiser closes in early October.

Lovecraftian Letters - we think "Grandpa Theobald" would approve. (Well, we hope. )

Based on H.P. Lovecraft's unique lexicon, Lovecraftian Letters contains over 500 words and word fragments that allow anyone to create phrases and tell miniature tales of eldritch horror. The handsome set comes in a metal tin you can use to try out your squamous combinations before putting them on your fridge (or brain cylinder).

There's never been anything quite like it and it's only from YSDC.

The fundraiser/preorder closes on the 10th October and all orders include prepaid worldwide shipping. It's something a little different from us and we're hoping you like it.

Giant Lobster

2011-08-22T08:31:00.003-04:00

Lovecraft mingled folklore, real events, and his imagination into some of the spookiest stories. Hoping to keep that spirit of newness and excitement alive, we frequently discuss weird beasts with slight Lovecraftian imagery to your attention.

What people thought they saw were organic shapes not quite like any they had ever seen before. Naturally, there were many human bodies washed along by the streams in that tragic period; but those who described these strange shapes felt quite sure that they were not human, despite some superficial resemblances in size and general outline. Nor, said the witnesses, could they have been any kind of animal known to Vermont. They were pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be.

August 2011:

According to the Wildlife Conservation Society, the general formula to estimate a lobster's age is its weight in pounds times four, plus three. That makes Coney Island's Big Red is an astounding 75 years old and still growing.

New England Lobster's bookkeeper, Jennifer Vargas, set out to save the giant creature when it was received on the West Coast. "This seemed like a [lousy] way to go," she told the Daily News. "A lot of the customers were interested in him -- the problem was, they didn't have a pot big enough."

The New York Aquarium in Coney Island, run by the Wildlife Conservation Society, responded to an online posting, and the 18-pounder was shipped back East.

Young Lovecraft and Astronomy

2011-08-19T08:34:00.003-04:00

For this post, Chrispy will cast modesty aside. In earlier posts, Chrispy uncovered nearly the exact dates that Lovecraft almost died early in 1910. This was based on an obscure and sudden comet appearance, Comet 1910A.

He lost a great deal of weight, likely due to complications from measles and lung infection. He made a slow recovery, but was feeling well enough by the time of Halley's comet to go out at night by trolley and view it with his telescope and sketch it. With the help of several friends, mainly Steve and Dave, the precise point where he did his sketches was determined.

The articles below show the hysteria over Halley's comet which only phased Lovecraft in that he would have been appalled by what he would call ignorance. Note the "Comet pills" in the article below.

He went back and forth on Percival Lowell and his theory. This parallels public articles. Lowell was a powerful, popular figure and astronomers did not cross him lightly. However, as new telescopes went on line, Lowell's power faded, and astronomers were more vocal. This echoes the articles Lovecraft did in newspapers, as he mostly responded to the breaking news of astronomy.

What is becoming clear is that Lovecraft adored astronomy, but somehow he had a disconnect. He was a reasonably good observer, and a reasonably good writer conveying astronomical knowledge, but he did not become a good theoretician. Even with all the data he accumulated from hours of observations, Chrispy has not yet detected one original theory has been found in his writing - not even a bad one.

(His presentation of the theory of a ninth planet was bold, but it was a belief that many held based on a number of theories of the time. Lovecraft poeticized his Yuggoth, his near-contemporary Clyde Tombaugh searched for it.)

Can one fault his telescope? Not really. He read copious articles in professional and amateur journals. He associated with the staff at Ladd observatory, even using it from time to time. If he volunteered to crunch data, no evidence has been found.

This is not meant to be critical, as Lovecraft had a stack of issues between 1904 and 1911 that were daunting. He fell quickly behind in math comprehension - not a natural proclivity - and never recovered. He grasped other people's ideas rapidly, but could not use them to create his own. This may be an inherited Phillips trait, as all his successful Phillips' ancestors and relatives appeared to do just this. They were excellent managers (Chief Operating Officers of today) such as Theodore W Phillips and his adopted son also Theodore, or his grandfather who took other people's ideas and created wealth from them, or sadly, like Edwin his Uncle, saw opportunity but could not capitalize on it.

The articles below should expand into more readable views if you click them.

To Walter Coates, 1926

2011-08-09T00:01:00.001-04:00

Note from Chrispy.

I have tried to make the blog as family friendly as possible. Thousands of people wander by, some addicted to HPL, some only tangentially interested in the topic. The absolute bombastic sentiments of this letter I can't agree with, and it is part of Lovecraft's personality that makes me cringe. I can't make him different, and I am also uncomfortable censoring him a centruy later.

If you do read onward, be prepared for the worst.

_____

H. P. Lovecraft. Autograph Letter Signed "HPL".
Two pages, 5.5" x 9", n.p.
[Providence, Rhode Island], n.d.
["Tuesday", perhaps 1926], to Walter J. Coates, plain paper, ink.

The text of the letter reads, in full:

"My dear Coates: - I wasn't especially defending Emily Dickinson, but was merely pointing out the multiplicity of the causes - & the soundness of a few of them - which impel occasional revaluations of literature from age to age.

The present case is not unique, as you may easily see by following the reputation of any varied assortment of authors through a space of several centuries. It is a mistake, too, to single out Victorian opinion as a basis of comparison.

In many ways the middle 19th century formed a naive & curious Dark Age of taste in all the arts - I hardly need point out its architectural barbarities. If we want to formulate a norm for the Anglo-Saxon main stream, we must consider the average massed opinion all the way down from Chaucer's time.

The Elizabethan age represented a far truer flowering of our racial impulses than did the Victorian. However - as I said on my card, your main thesis seems to me perfectly sound & well taken.

Undeniably - all apart from the effects of natural change and altered philosophic-scientific-psychological perspective - the world of American taste & opinion is distinctly & lamentably Jew-ridden as a result of the control of publicity media by New York Semitic groups. Some of this influence certainly seeps into Anglo-Saxon critical & creative writing to an unfortunate extent; so that we have a real problem of literary & aesthetic fumigation on our hands. The causes are many - but I think the worst factor is a sheer callous indifference which holds the native mind down to mere commercialism & size & speed worship, allowing the restless & ambitious alien to claim the centre of the intellectual stage by default.

In a commercialised civilization, publicity & fame are determined by economic causes alone - & there is where the special talents of Messrs. Cohen & Levi count. Before we can put them in their place, we must de-commercialise the culture - & that, alas, is a full-sized man's job!

Some progress could be made, though, if all the universities could get together & insist on strictly Aryan standards of taste. They could do much, in a quiet & subtle way, by cutting down the Semite percentage in faculty & student body alike.

It is really amusing how we simple Western Europeans have allowed Orientals to trample over our brains for 1500 years & more - ever since we let them saddle us with the sickly Jew slave-religion of Christus instead of our own virile, healthy, Aryan polytheistic paganism. In this matter of religion, though, we are coming back - for the Jew-Christian tradition will be extinct in the Western world in two or three more generations, save for the nominal Catholic ritualism of the eternal rabble.

We are getting back to the same Aryan philosophy & paganism which are naturally ours by right of blood & instinct. However - that isn't what we were discussing. As for literature - you'll find that the causes for contemporary change are many & complex, & that Semitisation is only one contributing influence.

Let Great Britain, still largely un-Semitised, be your index of comparison. Scientific thought in England is pretty straight Anglo-Saxon stuff - Bertrand Russell, Aldous & Julian Huxley, H. G. Wells, Sir J. Jeans, Eddington, &c. &c. - but we find the forces of change emphatically at work.

It was out of Ireland - where Jews are almost as happily scarce as snakes - that James Joyce's "Ulysses" came. The causes of our cultural changes, be they renaissances or decadences, are buried deep in complex historical & psychological phenomena. Our present convulsion - which is probably a renaissance in some phases & a decadence in others - is far too big an affair to be traced to any single origin. Roughly speaking, the thing is due to the effect of sudden new doses of knowledge, & of sensationally rapid changes in ways of living, travelling, earning money, & making things.

Personally, I think we're losing more than we're gaining; for of all the current changes only the matter of added knowledge & intellectual liberation seems really good to me. Weiss & Harris write very interestingly - especially Harris, who is refreshingly intelligent despite a narrow aesthetic horizon. He'll expand with the years, I think.Rather cool autumn hereabouts, so that I haven't been outdoors as much as last fall.

I don't envy you up in the Arctic regions! Best wishes - & I eagerly await your second article on literary transvaluations.

Yr obt servt
HPL

P.S. Is the magazine you want The American Poetry Magazine, edited by Clara Catherine Prince, 358 Western Ave., Wauwautosa [sic], Wisconsin? The man who prints that is a friend of a friend of mine, & is thinking of founding a pedagogical publishing house. If he does, I shall probably be his chief reviser.
_____
"Walter J. Coates was a fellow amateur journalist and small-time publisher introduced to Lovecraft, most likely, through W. Paul Cook (later to publish Lovecraft's The Shunned House). Coates' and Lovecraft's friendship developed over a mutual love for New England and poetry.

Coates published a great amount of Lovecraft's writing in his regional magazine Driftwind, beginning with HPL's essay "The Materialist Today" in October 1926. Later, Coates would print a good amount of Lovecraft's poetry in the same periodical.

The most striking content in this particular letter from Lovecraft to Coates is the former's bald articulation of an obvious anti-Semitism.

In the midst of a letter discussing Emily Dickinson and socio-literary issues, and amongst discourse on writers such as Russell, Huxley, Wells, and Harris (most likely his friend Woodburn Harris, to whom he had probably been introduced by Coates) Lovecraft launches into a diatribe on a culture he sees as "Jew-ridden as a result of the control of publicity media by New York Semitic groups."

Lovecraft's view of Jewish people is a most curious aspect of his personality. In many letters to friends and associates, Lovecraft espoused a similar opinion of Jewish people as he articulates here. Yet, he had numerous Jewish friends, and in his one marriage, betrothed himself to a Jewish woman, Sonia Greene.

Debate rages over the depth and degree to which Lovecraft actually felt his own anti-Semitism, but there can be no doubt that "the gentleman of Providence" held a viewpoint that is quite unpopular and out of vogue in current times.

Frank Belknap Long attempted to contextualize or rationalize Lovecraft's apparent racism in a letter to L. Sprague de Camp which appears in the latter's Lovecraft: A Biography. Whether or not one believes Long is his or her choice, for certainly enough evidence can be found from Lovecraft's own pen to support a charge of anti-Semitism.

Still, Long attempts to come to the aid of an old friend: "This may be hard for you to believe. But during the entire NY period, in all the meetings and conversations I had with him, he never once displayed any actual hostility toward 'non-Nordics' - to use the term to which he was most addicted - in my presence, either in the subway or anywhere else...If one of them had been in distress he would have been the first to rush to his or her aid. Emotionally he was kindliness personified. It was all rhetorical - the kind of verbal overkill that so many of the hippie underground-press writers engaged in in the sixties.

It was a sickness in him, if you wish - the verbalization part - but it wasn't characteristic of him in a deep, basic way."

This letter is in remarkable shape, with usual mailing folds, one small crease at the bottom right corner, and a barely noticeable fingernail nick along the right edge.

The page has toned slightly, but is overall in very fine condition.
(S. T. Joshi, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life 427)
From the Robert and Diane Yaspan Collection.

Shipping: Flat Material, Small (view shipping information) Auction Location:
3500 Maple Avenue, 1st Floor Gallery, Dallas, Texas, United States

Science Fiction

2011-08-06T23:17:00.003-04:00

Here is an image (click to expand) of Google Insight's tracking of the term science fiction. There is a notable decline in interest in the term. Astonishingly, Northwest Africa seems to rate high in searches for the term.

Hola! Lovecraft

2011-08-04T16:46:00.003-04:00

(Click Image and it should expand to be more readable)

Google Insights is a statistical tool to track trends. Since 2004 Lovecraft has plummeted in interest. One hopes that Chrispy's blog did not bore people away from HPL. :)

However, look at the global map. Spanish speaking nations score high in Lovecraft interest, while the USA is quite low.

The decline in Lovecraft trends proportionately to the rapid lack of interest in traditional science fiction.

There is a slight uptick in interest in Lovecraft lately, and one hopes it will continue.

HPL Walking Tour 20 August 2011

2011-08-03T08:04:00.002-04:00

Celebrate the 121st birthday of America's master of the strange and macabre. Author of "The Thing on the Doorstep" and "The Call of Cthulhu," H.P. Lovecraft was born in Providence in 1890. Join us on a walking tour which explores the College Hill neighborhood where Lovecraft drew literary inspiration and where he called home.

H.P. Lovecraft:
A Literary Walking Tour
Saturday, August 20
11:00 a.m.
Tour departs from the John Brown House Museum
52 Power Street
Providence, RI
Contact Barbara Barnes: (401) 273-7507 x62 or bbarnes@rihs.org

The Pale Mansion

2011-07-26T08:34:00.003-04:00

... The Pale Mansion tells the story of one Arthur Bollingham, an heir to the eponymous estate. As the young man will soon find out, the Pale Mansion is not just any old house, and living there might not be as healthy as in other places of the country...

Chrispy had a chance to read through, this and if you like stories with the antiquarian pace of H. P. Lovecraft (would you be reading this if you didn't?) then check out The Pale Mansion!

Excerpt

New CD Release: Shorter Horror of M R James

2011-07-19T00:01:00.001-04:00

Press Release, 18 July 2011

Nunkie Productions release a CD of rare material by the Master of the English ghost story

CURIOUS CREATURES
The Shorter Horror of M R James
Read by R M Lloyd Parry

Are there, here and there, sequestered places which some
curious creatures still frequent… ?

Montague Rhodes James [1862 – 1936] asked this question at the end of A Vignette, the last ghost story he ever wrote. This enigmatic, eerie tale is set in his childhood home in Suffolk, and apparently relates an authentic supernatural experience, one that he says “has had some formidable power of clinging through many years to my imagination.” It was published in a London magazine five months after his death, and is one of nine shorter, lesser-known works included on this pleasingly terrifying new double CD – two of which have never been recorded before.

Curious Creatures… also includes: A Livermere Poem ● A Night in King’s College Chapel ● The Malice of Inanimate Objects ● Rats ● A School Story ● There Was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard ● After Dark in the Playing Fields ● Stories I Have Tried to Write

The CD is performed and produced by actor and playwright Robert Lloyd Parry. Since 2005 he has toured a trilogy of one-man shows based on six of M R James’s best-loved tales around the UK, USA and Ireland. Reviewing the first of these, The Times said “Lloyd Parry catches the sense of dread that gives James his originality”. In 2008 he was award the Dracula Society’s Hamilton Deane Award for Best Performance in the Gothic Genre.

Curious Creatures – The Shorter Horror of M R James is available for £16.99 inc. p+p from www.nunkie.co.uk

For further details please contact Robert Lloyd Parry on roblloydparry@hotmail.com or 07722 859011.

Chrispy is back !

2011-07-18T16:01:00.002-04:00

2,795 blog posts.

I had to take a break, my dear readers. Not that I rested, oh no. But I have recently been flooded with new items from many good people, and it is time to start setting them down for each of you to review.

I am continuing to write on a Whipple V. Phillips biography, and a lengthy (multi-year?) new biography of Young Lovecraft (pre-1914). There has been so much new material I've found, I feel that it is worthy of an endeavor. Oh, if I only live long enough to finish it!

OK, starting tomorrow and following, I will begin to give you new information on items that have been forwarded to me. If you are one of those, I will get it up as soon as I am physically able to do so.

Onward ...

Fungus I Have Known: Yellow Fungus

2011-04-20T22:08:00.004-04:00

Above are some very vivid and startling fungal growths that were probably as big as 9 or 10 inches across. These images were taken on 26 October 2008. We have went back each year and while the yellow fungus is still there each year, it is only in very small clumps no more than maybe an inch or two.

ScientiSnaps: HPL Three Years After His Death

2011-04-17T08:13:00.003-04:00

In 1940, HPL was still vividly remembered and honored in scientifiction magazines. This one is from Walter E. Marconette of Dayton, Ohio and starting in February, 1939were mimeographed, a rather recent innovation over hectographing.

The Very Old Folk was featured here, and as it came from a letter written to Donald Wandrei on Thursday, 3 November 1927, he must be implicated somehow in its use. It would not be used in print by Derleth until 1944 in Marginalia.

SUMMER 1940 (Volume 3 #3) had this:

DEDICATION
Thls issue is respectfully dedicated to the memory of the late Howard Phillips Lovecraft 1890 · 1937 * Gentleman, Scholar, Correspondent of great renown, and the greatest modern Master of the Macabre.

Contents:

Fiction
"The Very Old Folk" by H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Chestnut Mare" by David H. Keller, M.D
"Midas" by Charles R.Tanner

Verse
"The Nightmare Lake" by H. P. LOVECRAFT

Articles & Features
"Kaleidoscope" by Walter E. Marconette
"H. P. Lovecraft; Strange Weaver" by J. Chapman Miske
"Book Review; After Many a Summer Dies the Swan" by Jack Williamson
"Fantasy Footnote" by Harry Warner, Jr

Departments
"Fireside" (an editorial and readers department)
Advertisements....... 2, 26, & 27

_____
*edit
The seller typed in HPL's death as 1957, but of course it was 1937. Thanks Dave for pointing that out, and it is now corrected.

Additionally, STJ in his new bio mentions that the Old Folk exists in three versions, at least, but confirms this is essentially Wandrei's version.

An Odd Providence Happening (1910)

2011-04-07T16:57:00.004-04:00

Speaking of the Aurora Borealis (4 April 2011 post), here is one that happened in Lovecraft's youth. 21 July 1910.

Eva had some type of ecstatic spell and called for an end of the world. Her let down, or come-upance as it might be, came on the day of a mild aurora borealis. It is unknown if she was a member of "the jehovah witnesses", but maybe.

She would have been nearly identical in age to HPL.

The Aurora Borealis in "Polaris"

2011-04-04T11:09:00.009-04:00

Well do I remember the night of the great Aurora, when over the swamp played the shocking corruscations of the demon light. After the beam came clouds, and then I slept.

And it was under a horned waning moon that I saw the city for the first time.
_____

The third sentence mentions a "horned waning moon", which precisely matches data for late on the 7th of March, 1918. Of course this is a typical situation each and every lunar cycle. However, that evening was a night of low moonlight.

The "horned moon" can be coraborated in two sources, one calculated (briancasey.org), and one contemporary (Armour's Almanac 1917 for 1918). You will see (click to expand images below) that in Boston, the last quarter Moonwas 5 March 1918 at 5:44 AM. New Moon was 12 March 1918 at 2:52 AM.

However, why is 7 March such an interesting date? It was the date of a spectacular aurora borealis that dazzled New England and shorted out telegraphs. The product of solar flares, the energy is tremendous as it interacts with Earth's magnetic field. This one was a "hum-dinger". Between about 9:45 PM and 11:00 PM on 7 March 1918 the electric wires sizzled. The NYT article is below. Conveniently, Popular Astronomy received a Massachusetts report on the visual giving as close as what Lovecraft would have seen from his window or outside if he ventured into the cold (note snow on ground).

There is a slight complication, as that on 5 April 1918 another Aurora was seen of less intensity. That report is also listed below.

A star map from Popular Astronomy for March 1918 is included with green sketching (by Chripy) for the aurora (above). Polaris is marked in red. It runs right through Charles' Wain (wagon), also known as ursa major and the big dipper. Polaris is part of the "little dipper". One supposes that while Lovecraft was writing Polaris, he recalled the aurora and impulsively mentioned it.

To date, Chripy has not seen a definitive dating of Polaris. However, Darrell Schweitzer in Discovering H.P. Lovecraft (p. 75) states that "'Polaris' seems to have been based on a dream Lovecraft had in Spring of 1918, which is related in some detail in letter 34...". (i.e. to Maurice Moe, 15 May 1918, "...several nights ago ..." HPL had a dream about a city.] S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz in An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia mentions that it was written in late Spring or early Summer 1918 using the letter as a terminus date. This is repeated in The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories (2004).

Whether seeing the aurora in March, or even in April, stimulated the subsequent dream in May, Lovecraft clearly had this event in mind and forced the connection to the star Polaris.

Beyond the Wall of Sleep: Anderson's Star

2011-03-30T00:01:00.000-04:00

Lovecraft and reality! There was a star ...

Beyond the Wall of Sleep
I have often wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong. ... I have merely set down certain things appealing to me as facts, allowing you to construe them as you will.

All this he tells me — yet I cannot forget what I saw in the sky on the night after Slater died. Lest you think me a biased witness, another pen must add this final testimony, which may perhaps supply the climax you expect. I will quote the following account of the star Nova Persei verbatim from the pages of that eminent astronomical authority, Professor Garrett P. Serviss: "On February 22, 1901, a marvelous new star was discovered by Doctor Anderson of Edinburgh, not very far from Algol. No star had been visible at that point before. Within twenty-four hours the stranger had become so bright that it outshone Capella. In a week or two it had visibly faded, and in the course of a few months it was hardly discernible with the naked eye."

Lovecraft used Serviss' article (above), but he didn't have to go that far. When he was a little boy, he almost certainly saw that star. So did everyone in Providence, though Chrispy can't say that HPL recorded it in his astronomy writing, only years later in his notable story. If he and grandfather Whipple read the paper at all that week, they would have seen the headline below in one of the newspapers. This actually comes from the weekly circular printed by the Providence Journal called Manufacturers and Farmers, as the Providence Journal is difficult to find online.

Unfortunately, Chrispy does not have time to type up the entire article, but it can be read by clicking one of the links.

In Providence, Professor Upton and his staff were at Ladd Observatory, but Frank Seagreave lived on Benefit Street and constantly monitored the skies independently. He is mentioned prominently in the article, and very well known in his day.

Link

The Lovecraftsman: HP Lovecraft will be featured in the season finale...

2011-03-28T10:07:00.000-04:00

The Lovecraftsman: HP Lovecraft will be featured in the season finale...: "In the upcoming two-part season finale of Supernatural on the CW, HP Lovecraft is going to make an appearance in the double episode, ..."

Doom & Gloom

2011-03-28T09:58:00.000-04:00

Doom & Gloom

Fungi Not From Yuggoth: Cordyceps

2011-03-26T12:41:00.001-04:00

Be afraid! Could a codyceps turn you into a zombie?

Houdini's Birthday

2011-03-24T16:22:00.002-04:00

As celebrated by Google.

April Derleth

2011-03-23T08:19:00.001-04:00

Publisher April Rose Derleth, 56, died March 21, 2011. The daughter of author August Derleth, April was co-owner of Arkham House with her brother Walden Derleth, and ran the company as president and CEO starting in 2002.

Arkham House has announced that sales and unfulfilled orders will be temporarily suspended.

303 Angell Street

2011-03-23T00:01:00.001-04:00

A few blocks from HPL.

33 Angell Street

2011-03-22T09:05:00.001-04:00

A few blocks from HPL and the Phillipses.

Are We Just Globs of Bacteria?

2011-03-21T00:01:00.003-04:00

Are we all just globs of bacteria? If so, then the Lovecraftian materialists win, and Lynn Margulis is right.

Lynn Margulis rocked the biological world with her 1967 declaration that mitochondria were actually embedded bacteria somehow absorbed several hundreds of millions of years ago by animal life. The formidable Ernst Mayr declared her contribution "of enormous importance."

Margulis rejects the current trends of mathematical microbiology and neo-Darwinism. Her belief is that "evolution" occurs not by natural selection, but by sudden stresses forcing symbiogenesis. This is not exactly the same as Stephen Jay Gould's punctuated evolution, but goes toward solving the same issue.

Essentially, organism living in close proximity comingle and absorb microorganisms that in turn give them benefits that make sudden leaps forward for them to overcome the environmental stress, and to dominate their niche in that same environment. Examples are mitochondria in animals and chloroplasts in plants. Therefore evolution explodes in big jumps, not gradual selection over aeons.

She offers a specific example of a slug that ingested algae absorbing the chloroplasts making the slug photosynthetic. It also changes colors to reds and yellows exactly as leaves do when seasons change. In her view, cows are 40 gallon fermentation tanks. People hear because at some point a cilia containing bacteria was absorbed into the ear canal mechanism that was super-sensitive to calcium crystals (balance/vertigo) and sound waves. Also the cones in the eye.

Therefore, life does not branch, it forms webs of intersections at given times and environments. And we are in a real sense a complex web of millions of types of microorganisms in symbiosis all harmonized and specifically selected to our environment to attack and repel other microorganisms that are not acceptable to the conglomerate.

Margulis thus proposes one of the most radical forms of materialism in biology. We are unique only because of our incorporated microorganisms long ago disguised as organs and tissue. It is the collective "consciousness" of quadrillions of micro-life-forms that make us both individuals and species. Any radical alteration of these collectives then make us – or any other collective-organism - very different species or life-forms. It also explains a lot of parallel evolution. Like micro-environments or macro-environments create collectivisms that mimic one another (emus, ostriches, rheas, etc.)
______

And this news flash may flow right into Margulis' mincrobe-materialist viewpoint of evolution.

Experts at Edinburgh University set out to discover how the Transylvanian naked neck chicken (the Churkey) came by its appearance. A protein influenced by production of Vitamin A, BMP12, is produced, suppressing feather growth and causing the bird to have a bald neck. The findings could help poultry production in hot countries because chickens with naked necks were better equipped to withstand the heat. They also have implications for understanding how birds, including vultures, evolved to have featherless necks. Transylvanian naked neck chickens are thought to have originated from the north of Romania.

Kansas: Dust in the Wind.

Wilhelm Nauck

2011-03-20T00:01:00.002-04:00

Here you will see that Mr. Nauck was a significant presence in language studies in Providence.

Abbie Shepardson Nauck - 1

2011-03-19T00:01:00.002-04:00

You will see in this article that the future Mrs. Nauck was quite accomplished at violin.

Lovecraft in the 21st Century: A View

2011-03-18T00:01:00.003-04:00

Below are three non-consecutive paragraphs from Davis' interesting blog-excerpt and from the book, Darklore Volume 5. Hopefully, you will be tempted to read it in its entirety.

Calling Cthulhu
by Erik Davis

For Lovecraft, it is not the sleep of reason that breeds monsters, but reason with its eyes agog. By fusing cutting-edge science with archaic material, Lovecraft creates a twisted materialism in which scientific “progress” returns us to the atavistic abyss, and hard-nosed research revives the factual basis of forgotten and discarded myths.

Lovecraft’s fiction expresses a “future primitivism” that finds its most intense esoteric expression in Chaos magic, an eclectic contemporary style of darkside occultism that draws from Thelema, Satanism, Austin Osman Spare, and Eastern metaphysics to construct a thoroughly postmodern magic.

Lovecraft’s father was a traveling salesman who died in a madhouse when Lovecraft was eight, and vague rumors that he was an initiate in some Masonic order or other were exploited in the Necronomicon cobbled together by George Hay, Colin Wilson, and Robert Turner. Others have tried to track Lovecraft’s occult know-how, especially his familiarity with Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn. In an Internet document relating the history of the “real” Necronomicon, Colin Low argues that Crowley befriended Sonia Greene in New York a few years before the woman married Lovecraft.

more --- click!

Abby Clinton Shepardson Nauck

2011-03-17T00:01:00.000-04:00

At last, REVEALED!

The violinist, Mrs. Nauck, wife of Wilhelm, was from a musical background. It appears her father was a sort of inventor of a reed tuning device. She lived a long life.

Above an e-clipping of where she played for a wedding in 1910.
Additional below:

Name: Abbie Clinton Shepardson Nauck
Gender: Female
Burial Date:
Burial Place:
Death Date: 04 Mar 1939
Death Place: Providence, Rhode Island
Age: 82
Birth Date: 1857
Birthplace:
Occupation:
Race:
Marital Status: Married
Spouse's Name: Wilhelm Nauck
Father's Name: Edmund E. Shepardson
Father's Birthplace:
Mother's Name: Emma M Evans
Mother's Birthplace:
Indexing Project (Batch) Number: B03124-4
System Origin: Rhode Island-EASy
Source Film Number: 1955171
Reference Number: 26
_____

Name: Wilhelm Nauck
Gender: Male
Burial Date:
Burial Place:
Death Date: 24 Jun 1925
Death Place: Providence, Ri
Age: 66
Birth Date: 1859
Birthplace:
Occupation:
Race:
Marital Status: Married
Spouse's Name: Abbie S. Nauck
Father's Name: Carl Nauck
Father's Birthplace:
Mother's Name: Luise Sheideman
Mother's Birthplace:
Indexing Project (Batch) Number: B03100-0
System Origin: Rhode Island-EASy
Source Film Number: 1940317
Reference Number: 234

Frank Belknap Long, Sr !

2011-03-16T00:01:00.000-04:00

The Beginning of Frank Belknap Long, Jr.?

Belknapius, as HPL called Frank Belknap Long, Jr., was a progeny and keenly fascinated with creating the blend of horror fantasy known as "the weird tale". It's hard to know who adored who the most, HPL or Long!

One little e-news clipping (above) seems to be the very beginning of young Mr. Long, Jr., though he was but a glint of love between these two people at the time. This reports his parents marriage!

If you are a romantic about weddings, these details may make you swoon. The Bride wore white – with flounces! The bridesmaids wore yellow and saffron! Diamonds were given out like candy! (Almost). Dr. Long (senior) was a dentist, and at least for the wedding day, a Baptist.

You'll see the date of this marriage was on 20 November 1895. Dr. Long had been practicing dentistry (a dental surgery specialist), and as can be seen (from the Dental Cosmos, Vol. 34, 1892) he'd graduated 10 March - only a few years before.

It shouldn't be presumed that just because Belknapius' father surgically extracted teeth from suffering patients that this drove him to write The Hounds of Tindalus, but then again …
_____

For you genealogy buffs:

EMMA AUGUSTA MANSFIELD [Belknapius' grandmother}, born July 22, 1846, married Sept. 15, 1869, Charles E. Doty. Their children are May Mansfield Doty, born Oct. 18, 1870 ; Cassie Mansfield Doty, born Feb. 22, 1872 : and Mansfield Mudge Doty, born Aug. 18, 1879.

This makes Mrs. Long (nee May Mansfield Doty) about 20 years older than HPL, and much youunger than his mother's age - Susan born 1857.

Celebrating H.P. Lovecraft: A Library Walk

2011-03-15T08:13:00.001-04:00

March 19, 2011 - - time sensitive info.
Special Walking Tour
Celebrating H.P. Lovecraft: A Library Walk
Saturday, March 19
Time: 11:00 a.m.
Location: John Brown House Museum
Fee: $10 per person
For more information contact: Barbara Barnes
401-273-7507 x62 or bbarnes@rihs.org

Fungi Not From Yuggoth

2011-03-11T19:18:00.003-05:00

For more fungi see:

http://discovermagazine.com/photos/24-the-funky-fungi-freak-show

Lunar Extreme

2011-03-10T21:24:00.000-05:00

On March 19, 2011, the moon will swing around Earth more closely than it has in the past 18 years, lighting up the night sky from just 221,567 miles (356,577 kilometers) away. On top of that, it will be full.

Lovecraft in Context

2011-03-05T00:24:00.002-05:00

Lovecraft has been roundly criticized for his negative ethnic beliefs. As should we all.

However, we must continue to place hPL in context, and as a child of the Phillips family. HPL was born in 1890, and his family came from western Rhode Island. His grandfather, Whipple, once met Abraham Lincoln, and the entire family was staunchly Republican - as a time when Republicans were just beginning to be a party.

A new book clearly states Lincoln's early beliefs - sentiments that ran deep in many white families in the United States. This is not to take away any proactive or positive attributes of Lincoln, the Phillips family, or even Lovecraft. It is what it is, and people are products of our times. Beware throwing stones in a glass house. The news article states Lincoln spoke thusly:

"For the sake of your race, you should sacrifice something of your present comfort for the purpose of being as grand in that respect as the white people," Lincoln said, promoting his idea of colonization: resettling blacks in foreign countries on the belief that whites and blacks could not coexist in the same nation.

Lincoln went on to say that free blacks who envisioned a permanent life in the United States were being "selfish" and he promoted Central America as an ideal location "especially because of the similarity of climate with your native land — thus being suited to your physical condition."

As the nation celebrates the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's first inauguration Friday, a new book by a researcher at George Mason University in Fairfax makes the case that Lincoln was even more committed to colonizing blacks than previously known.

Next New Horror?

2011-03-02T00:01:00.002-05:00

As anyone can tell horror is down for the count. Only parodies are selling. The latest is "mash-ups" which is a traditional or literary out-of-copyright setting or characters set in a zombie, or sometimes vampire story. Jane Austen zombies and Abraham Lincoln vampires are two recent ones.

Zombies are hot. Most likely because we feel we live in a world that has become zombiefied. Our governments are inept, overtaken by their shadow counterparts. We are unemployed, and therefore just living-dead.

However, as a student of antiquarian horror, I can say that the next new horror will not be a rehash of what has come before. While the old saying, "People who do not know history are doomed to repeat it," is true, there is a corollary. We do not live the future in a rear-view mirror. We are a people who are influenced subliminally by our present.

Lovecraft's fiction was about his xenophobia. The Weird Tale circle was a means to deal with transition out of Poe influenced, and Gothic horror. They collided with a parallel fantasy movement, scientifiction. It dominated fantasy fiction for decades as science moved us from the Industrial Revolution to the Information Age. It was Modernism.

In that milieu, Robert Bloch, Shirley Jackson, and even Tom Harris came out with a blend of reality-noir-right-next-door horror.

We are now post-post-modern. The bizarro fantasy fiction wave has explored a number of avenues of that post-post-modern phase and is still doing so with great effect and success, though none of it has hit NYT best seller status.

When 9/11 changed the world, did you notice that ghost fiction and reality was everywhere? We wanted to understand our roots, and so we told ghost stories on TV and in small communities. Ghost stories are society's means of remembering history, and those who have lived before us. That all changed when the world economy went south. Zombies are now the rage.

But what's next?

I think the merger of Lovecraft-Mythos with Forteanism is one path. It is quite obvious in the movies.

The other wave is just beginning. Conspiratorial horror. Steve Alten and Whitley Strieber have pioneered that format. Alten's Grim Reaper and a few others of his tie together cabala, conspiratorialism, and well researched history. Streiber, long a believer of extra and ultraterrestrials has several books out now exploring what that might mean. His and Art Bell's Day After Tomorrow combined conspiratorial viewpoint with adventure.

Horror is down, but I'm enjoying new writers who are already percolating what will be the new-new thing.

Cat - Human Bonding

2011-03-01T00:01:00.004-05:00

Kappa Alpha Tau report here. Lovecraft adored cats, and they seemed to know that instinctively by his many reports.

Cats Adore, Manipulate Women

Cats attach to humans, and particularly women, as social partners, and it's not just for the sake of obtaining food.

Cats attach to humans, and particularly women, as social partners ... nearly identical to human-only bonds, with cats sometimes even becoming a furry "child" in nurturing homes.

For the study, led by Kurt Kotrschal of the Konrad Lorenz Research Station and the University of Vienna, the researchers videotaped and later analyzed interactions between 41 cats and their owners over lengthy four-part periods. Each and every behavior of both the cat and owner was noted. Owner and cat personalities were also assessed in a separate test. For the cat assessment, the authors placed a stuffed owl toy with large glass eyes on a floor so the feline would encounter it by surprise.

The researchers determined that cats and their owners strongly influenced each other, such that they were each often controlling the other's behaviors. Extroverted women with young, active cats enjoyed the greatest synchronicity, with cats in these relationships only having to use subtle cues, such as a single upright tail move, to signal desire for friendly contact.

While cats have plenty of male admirers, and vice versa, this study and others reveal that women tend to interact with their cats -- be they male or female felines -- more than men do.

"In response, the cats approach female owners more frequently, and initiate contact more frequently (such as jumping on laps) than they do with male owners," co-author Manuela Wedl of the University of Vienna told Discovery News, adding that "female owners have more intense relationships with their cats than do male owners."

Cats also seem to remember kindness and return the favors later. If owners comply with their feline's wishes to interact, then the cat will often comply with the owner's wishes at other times.

_____

Chrispy believes there is an error in this report: Although there are isolated instances of non-human animals, such as gorillas, bonding with other species, it seems to be mostly unique for humans to engage in social relationships with other animals.

In my Weird Beasts study, I have found innumerable cases where infant mammals bond to females of other mammal species. It does not seem to matter, at the infant state, the maternal instincts tend to outweigh species differentiation for many, many mammal species. I can't say it isn't rarer at the adult stage, though.

There is an incredible National Geographic magazine essay about the domestication of foxes! Ferret domestication is prevalent. It appears that many mammals can be domesticated rapidly over less than 30 or 40 generations and it rapidly changes their genetic mutations and speciation.

Palo Moyombe?

2011-02-28T09:02:00.003-05:00

Over the weekend, it looks like maybe a weird off-shoot of Palo Mayombe may be at work. This fits the profile of a "gang or cult", and the high $$ aspect for motivation. It would also explain why mostly catholic cemeteries seem affected.

More here.

Bodies Stolen in New Jersey

2011-02-28T00:01:00.004-05:00

These news stories, while sensational, come and go quickly as the media loses attention. So I preserve them on the HPLblog. He was sometimes interestd in ghoulish things, though he was squeamish. His Statement of Randolph Carter was of grave matters, so to speak. The Hound, which he later frowned upon, was very ghoulish. We need not go into Herbert West.

Though the police discuss that it may have been a cult, I have my personal reservations that it was satanic cults. It may have been for medical black market, or a gang prank, or the work of a proto-serial killer, but it's hard for me to believe satanists. Time will tell.

I've added a Google map showing the locations of the cemeteries, approximately, and how close they are. Elizabeth, of course, is where HPL wrote the story He.

The story {excerpted}:

PERTH AMBOY, NJ (23 February 2011) — A ghoulish cult practice may have been the motivation behind the theft of human remains from cemeteries in Woodbridge and Perth Amboy, officials believe. Authorities are now asking area cemeteries and the public to report suspicious activity to the police and also to help identify any suspects.

The body snatchers targeted the remains of a 72-year-old man interred at Most Holy Rosary Cemetery in the Fords section of Woodbridge and the remains of a 2-year-old boy buried at St. Mary’s Cemetery in Perth Amboy, officials said Wednesday.

The Perth Amboy incident was reported on Nov. 28 by a cemetery visitor who saw the open grave. The Woodbridge incident was first noticed last Tuesday by a passerby who reported that a granite mausoleum “had been disturbed,” officials said.

The families of the deceased have been notified by the authorities. Investigators believe people engaged in a “non-traditional religious practice” may be responsible.

Get Ready Fans: Lovecraft Issue Coming!

2011-02-27T00:01:00.003-05:00

Famous Monsters Of Filmland #255
Publisher: Movieland Classics LLC
Pub. Date: April 06, 2011
Current Availability: Pre-Order
UPC: 07447025970155

The #1 film monster magazine, in full-color and packed with all of the features that you've come to love! We celebrate all things Lovecraft with an epic 'At the Mountains of Madness' cover by giant monster maestro, Bob Eggleton.

What the Moon Brings (Morgan Scorpion)

2011-02-26T00:01:00.000-05:00

The Wizard of Oz Comes to Providence

2011-02-25T00:01:00.000-05:00

About two years after Lovecraft died, Technicolor came to the movies. Both Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz exploded across the giant screen. He never got to see them. Growing up with silent movies, he might have simply yawned, crotchety at "them" ruining the movies with sound and color. Then again, he may have oohed and ahead like we do when we first got to see high def.

However, when he was but a wee lad of ten, a new book hit the stores called The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by a chap named Lymon Frank Baum. Between 1900 and 1903, the book soared to success, and a play was almost immediately discussed. Not just any play, but an "extravaganza". You see even in those days competition for viewers dollars was keen.

Two comedians - no not Bert Lahr - were obtained and they were the core of the humor. After debuting in Chicago, it moved to New York to WOW crowds, and then two companies split to tour the country. The original cast hit Boston and Providence.

They played four shows at the stalwart Providence Opera House. The book, Oz, Before the Rainbow (Mark Evan Swartz, 2002, John Hopkins Press), discusses the creation and production in great detail. Here, Chrispy has made it personal to Lovecraft.

However, I have not come across any evidence that HPL saw this show. He would have been 13 years old at the time, and his family still wealthy. Did he? I just don't know. If he did, or if any of the family did, or if any of his friends did, there seems not to be any impact. Perhaps because rumors had already gotten out that there were adult themes in the show (it was slightly Vaudevillian with a mildly risque song included sung by Lotta Fauste) HPL was not allowed?

To most of us of a certain age, the 1939 movie splashed across TV screens in the 1960's, 70's, 80's and more. In those days, the 1939 cast were all alive - just very, very old. (I still recall Bert Lahr doing Lays potato chip commercials.) Now, on Blu-Ray we can see more of Oz than the folks who watched it on the screen at the debut. The impact that the movie made on us, is exactly the impression that the extravaganza play made on the elite of America for the two generations BEFORE the movie.

However, it does not seem that The Beast in the Cave (HPL, 1904) was a cowardly lion.
_____

PS, the Providence newspaper illo is precisely that of the cover photo for Oz, Before the Rainbow. It shows the scarecrow being oiled by the tin woodman, and it is dated to 1902.

Necromancy? or Utility?

2011-02-24T00:01:00.000-05:00

Recent examinations have shown a very ancient cannibalistic ritual, and utilitarian use of skull caps. Anthropologists have pointed out that not every cultural sub-unit objects to cannibalism, but it is rare. Practitioners most likely ingest rare diseases over time and don't last long - for instance HIV is often thought to have been derived from the eating of bush meat, i.e. anthropoids. Other practitioners do this out of desperation, and low food supplies.

Here is a brief summary and link to a full article. This seems very Lovecraftian, as HPL wrote the Hound frequently referencing body fragments, and late in life adored a human skull trophy a fan sent (Willis?) - likely a Native American skull.

... bone cups made from human skulls, unearthed in a Somerset cave, are the oldest of their kind, researchers believe ... the handiwork of early modern humans, who used stone tools to prepare and finish the containers around 14,700 years ago ... three cups, made from the skulls of two adults and one three-year-old child ... , were dug up several decades ago, alongside the cracked and cut-marked remains of ... have now been re-examined using new techniques ... the human bones show clear signs of butchery, implying that the bodies were stripped for meat and crushed for marrow before the heads were severed and turned into crockery.

Link

Borders: Not Quite R.I.P.

2011-02-23T05:04:00.000-05:00

I have to say I frequented Borders a lot. It took me a long while to forgive them for eviscerating our local honored bookstore, Hawley Cooke, but I finally did.

For nearly 2 years I would carry my 30% off coupon and shop - finding almost nothing to buy. Their horror section was weak on Lovecraft, and their shelvers often could not tell Romance from Horror from Harry Potter from Science Fiction. The saving grace was that they carried Dorcester's (R.I.P. !) books of my favorite B-listers*, but usually it was shelves crammed with Kalems - King, Koontz, Lumley, Matheson.

Well, Saturday (I am typing this Saturday afternoon) it was wall-to-wall people at the 20-40% off sale.

I had already staked out my claim having absolutely no fear that anyone would even go to my cob-webbed sections. I grabbed a Zombie book with a Brian Keene story in it. That one copy of that book had sat unmolested by anyone for about 6 weeks. Then I went over and got a 2008 paperback by Steve Alten - again untouched for weeks.

I picked up a slightly handled $25 !!! book on worn-out vampire stories. There was one by Manly Wellman I didn't recall, but not for $25, thank you. I may actually have it somewhere, anyway. The rest are very familiar to anyone with a small antiquarian vampire selection.

It annoyed me that H. P. Lovecraft was plastered on the cover as a "features and benefits" point-of-sale lure. It was, of course, The Hound.

Instead, I took advantage of the 40% off magazine sale, and grabbed Famous Monsters, and Movie Monsters - issues which I usually don't collect - but if I ever needed one, I'm sure pal Jeff Barnes could read one over the phone from his collection. Still, 40% off ignited me to buy them this time.

Asimov and Analog seemed to have weak selections this time, not even an Allen Steele story. I passed. I did get Astronomy, as it discussed the Nashville astronomer of the late 19th century, and I thought I could reference it in my blog, and later in my Young Lovecraft book. HPL could have been an astronomer, but when he was crushed by fate in 1908, he just couldn't rebound enough.

Well karma. The big box mega-stores killed the little guys, and now e-books and bigger box stores (like Sam's Club) are killing Borders and BN. Me? More and more I am throwing in the towel, and embracing small Indie horror. For once, HPL may have been right. I really, really enjoy good amateur and entry-level-author horror.

Well, good luck Borders. I hope you make it.
____

Who are my very favorite Dorcester B-listers? Ed Lee, Gary Braunbeck, Brian Keene, Al Sarantonio, and Ray Garton. No offense to anyone else, as I read a lot - read the blog and you will see many, many names listed. I used to do lots of reviews at Horror Mall's forum before it was pulled.

Invoice to the Insane Hospital

2011-02-22T00:01:00.002-05:00

This is very real. One supposes that Lovecraft is about madness, and you may want to clone this or photoshop it for your gaming activities.

For Chrispy, it's about the historical context. Though this is 1880, it relates to moving Winfield Lovecraft from Chicago to Providence. Likely Whipple paid the transport.

From the Seller: from AJ Quinn for taking Mrs. Rourke from New London, CT
to the Insane Hospital at Providence, Rhode Island (probably Butler Hospital) and transportation involved in the trip.

Dated September 1, 1880.

8 x 5 1/2

Payment info on back...bill paid by City of New London.

Conspiratorial Horror and Steve Alten

2011-02-21T00:01:00.000-05:00

Perhaps the next new phase of horror is “Conspiratorial Horror”. In 1978, a disc jockey named Art Bell had a glimmer of the coming “Talk Radio” phenomena, and pioneered a new political call-in show. He noticed that the higest ratings tended to come with UFO-themed shows, paranormal discussions, or other then-fringe topics. In 1988, the new format Coast to Coast rolled out, and the show became a phenomenal hit on late night AM shows promoted heavily by word of mouth of truck drivers.

Bell also created a hosted show called Dreamland, which his friend and mega-author Whitley Strieber eventually hosted, and still hosts. Becoming fatigued, Bell tried fill-in hosts but ratings sagged until enthusiastic George Noory took the show's weekday helm in 2003. He has become a magnet for quirky stories of all kinds, and often conspiracy themes. As such, he has guests such as former and current rock stars, television and movie stars (such as show-fan Dan Akroyd, or Bill Mumy), and many writers including Steve Alten. The show has become a means to alternative news, some odd, and some very disturbing for our society.

Steve Alten is usually pegged as a science fiction writer, but this tends to be a type-cast catchall. Alten has made a career of very well researched stories, much as the late Michael Crichton, and recently has hyped the conspiratorial theme to red hot. While Alten's stories are sometimes based on oceanic life forms, and maybe vaguely reminiscent Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, they are less futuristic, and more horror based. His most recent block buster is Grim Reaper: End of Days which takes the paradigm of Dante's Inferno, the historic event of the Black Plague (c. 1350), and superimposes both upon Manhattan.

Alten is a student of antiquarian horror, and is studious of cabala - the ancient Jewish mystical set of writings.

In olden days, a type of horror-cypher was used to prevent censors from killing stories. When horror became too explicit, as with C M Eddy, Jr and H P Lovecraft's The Loved Dead (published 1924) cries of “filth”, violation of community standards, and worse was uttered. Even a "Comics Code" was created somewhat similar to the Hays Commission for the movies. Thus Dante encrypted his political commentary in the guise of a religious horror so he could lampoon contemporary Catholic hypocrisy. Even Lovecraft cleverly veiled his xenophobia so that even his closest friends did not fully understand some of it. (Loveman was later devastated, and burned HPL letters). Poe often spoke cleverly of being buried alive, an unspoken dread through the 19th century. Most recently, explicit horror confined Jack Ketchum and Edward Lee to B-novelist stature, though Ray Garton has usually been able to break through the censored ceiling.

Now, Alten has brought “fringe” to best seller status, and it's about time. Every thinking American realizes that something has went very, very wrong. The Presidency, Congress, and even the media have the lowest ratings in modern memory. Our way of life seems “broken”, and that concern – that “horror” if you will - is being played out in Indie Horror, B-list horror (notably by Brian Keene), and now by Steve Alten.

First his book, Loch (2005), proposed the very reasonable theory that if media did not marginalize reports of sightings of “The Loch Ness Monster”, the mystery could easily be solved by trained scientists. His theory that it may be a giant eel, seems to have merit, although the novel proposes this in a fantasy manner. Then his Shell Game (2008) took a piercing eye to Big Oil, the Neo-Con Fascism movement, and a New World Order, all perpetual themes of Coast to Coast AM's radio show.

Grim Reaper moves into the realm of bio-terorism, but spends a great deal of time discussing the irrationality of the West's, and specifically America's invasion of the Middle East and Near East, and purposely picking odd targets very far from real terrorist cells, but very critical for 21st century energy reserves (Oil, Lithium), and key to drug-cartel-international-monetary-institution lanes of traffic. It is as if some unnamed master organization is playing a game of money and power chess with our military.

This theme is not going away, and hopefully more horror based books are soon to explore this topic.

W. H. Pugmire

2011-02-20T08:10:00.002-05:00

Wilum reads part of his new work.

Shoggoth Alert! "'Nessie" Seen Again?

2011-02-19T08:05:00.006-05:00

Ok, so maybe it is a stretch to call Nessie a shoggoth. [ed. As comments below, it was not Loch Ness, but another lake, in England. I have corrected the header.] However, it is frustrating not to see Steve Alten's theory not taken seriously. If you don't know it, then I will briefly summarize it. In his book The Loch and in subsequent interviews and guest appearances, Alten promoted the idea that a species of large eel lived in the Loch. It is a known species that has perhaps become entrapped, or mutated to a very large size.

In any event, SOMETHING is there in that Lake.

Part of the news report below with a link to the rest.

The photograph, which shows an object with three humps breaching the surface of the lake, is said to be the best evidence yet of what some claim is a monster lurking beneath the depths.

It was taken on a camera phone by Tom Pickles, 24, while kayaking on the lake as part of a team building exercise with his IT company, CapGemini, last Friday.

Mr Pickles said he saw an animal the size of three cars speed past him on the lake and watched it for about 20 seconds.

He said: “It was petrifying and we paddled back to the shore straight away. At first I thought it was a dog and then saw it was much bigger and moving really quickly at about 10mph.

“Each hump was moving in a rippling motion and it was swimming fast Its skin was like a seal’s but it’s shape was completely abnormal – it’s not like any animal I’ve ever seen before."

“I only saw it for a few seconds but all I could think about was that I had to get off the lake.” More

_____

Steve Bump (circa 2006 - 2007)

"In summer 2006, I was on holiday at the Dower House at Wray Castle. It was the first Sunday of a week-long holiday around lunchtime. I was walking along the lake with my wife and two friends and we'd walked up to Watbarrow Point which juts out into the lake about 40ft above the water.

"... the lake was very quiet because the speeding ban had come in. The previous year it would have been full of people on jet skis, but then the lake was like glass. We just stood chatting and I saw it – similar to the classic three lumps that you get in the Loch Ness pictures; I could see a head with swirling water and then a grey lump, more swirling water, and another grey lump.

"But the most remarkable thing was that it was really moving. My jaw just dropped open and I said: 'Look at that!' My wife also saw it but very quickly it moved up the lake. I estimated it to be at least 30ft long. I wouldn't believe anyone else if they told me – but I saw it and I know what I saw."

Link

Houdini, Sonia, Lovecraft, and Satanism?

2011-02-16T04:13:00.000-05:00

Lovecraft is constantly being reinterpreted and reengineered. This is notably done by what may be termed occultists; those believing that Lovecraft somehow either channeled magic, or actually practiced it, but concealed that practice by some means. Here, in passing, several myths of that paradigm are mentioned.

. Sonia practiced magic.
. Sonia knew Aleister Crowley (not mentioned here)
. Houdini was a believer in magic (real, not illusion)
. Bess Houdini believed in magic
. Red Hook actually happened, maybe not exactly the way Lovecraft depicted it

_____

On 8 February 2011, Winter Laake, a self-claimed Satanist appeared on the George Noory hosted Coast to Coast AM radio program. I transcribed about a 2 minute segment of the interview that discusses briefly Lovecraft.

Winter Laake: There is an alien influence as well, but they cannot reach us in any grand scale, we are too far out, uh, the closest system being the Aldebaran system that 69 million light years away. Actually, no, it's not even million, it's 69 light years away. I believe. I could be wrong. That, that, proposes the only closest life entity near us, so -

Noory: Tell me about the Satanic Paradigm, what's it all about?

Winter Laake: The Satanic Paradigm is my treatise on what Satan is, how he functions in our world, uh, the energy of Satan, uh, goes into a series of rituals that can be conducted, satanic rites that are cutting edge in order to get closer to that power.

It touches on H. P. Lovecraft, being more than just a writer, and there is some Lovecraftian rituals in there as well, uh -

Noory: He was the science fiction writer, right?

Winter Laake: Correct. But he was more than that, especially when he was in New York City, uh, with Houdini, uh, he ghost wrote Under the Pyramids for Houdini, uh, they were practicing magic, and cult* things in an area known as Red Hook, which is in Brooklyn. And, uh, his wife, uh, Sonia Greene was very much into it, and so was Houdini's wife, but in the Satanic Paradigm I touch on some of that as well as innumerable other things.

I go into Anton LaVey, uh, his death and some of the recurrent themes that are on about people taking his name and, uh, its become so rampant. He's worshipped like a god, so its quite interesting what is occurring, uh, that is part of what the Third Wave is all about as well ...

* he did not say "occult" as I listened to this a few times to be sure.
_____

Link> http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2011/02/08

More on Laake if you are interested:

Lovecraft's Legacy

2011-02-15T00:01:00.003-05:00

This is a blog, and not a book, so it is hard to do a coherent narrative.

Overall, I hope the last 2700+ posts show that Lovecraft's life had a pattern. In about 1911, after a near-death disease, he gave up any efforts at a career in science. He hung out with a few friends growing more politically morose. In 1914, he happened across amateur journalism, and he took to it - as we say in Kentucky - like a hog to slop.

Along the way, he created in a master-stroke with Dagon, thus creating the "weird tale". He spent the rest of his life perfecting it, and advocating to his small clutch of followers how it might be best done.

However, by as early as 1933, a young guard was forming and the new wave in fantasy fiction was going to be scientifiction. At first it dredged up some mix of Burroughs, Verne, and Wells pandering to "ray guns and babes" readers. Between 1933 and 1937, Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith took it on the chin as they were the older of the writers (Robert Howard died in 1936) of Weird Tales, and while Smith wavered trying to fit into the new mold, Lovecraft waded in with verve defending the genre he essentially created. Still, one by one, his followers deserted to be published (or they would have perished) in the new style pulp magazines.

His death in 1937 should have been the end of his legacy. Eventually someone would have found a few of his old works, much like they did Melville in the 1920's, and brought them back.

However, the old gent of Providence was a kind man and his friends loved him. They rallied, and Barlow, Wandrei, and Derleth managed to salvage virtually all of his work from the dust bin.

First, Barlow thought he was "in", but with the influence of Smith and Long, Derleth and Wandrei circled the wagons and took most of the efforts to preserve Lovecraft. Then, Derleth's personality took hold, and it became a one man show.

Historians debate whether Lovecraft would have survived without Derleth. It will never be settled, but Chrispy will weigh in with a simple - No. There was absolutely no one with incentive enough, desire enough, or will power enough (and God, did Derleth have will power) to fixate on Lovecraft and push him into the history books. As Paul was to Jesus, Derleth was to Lovecraft.

Even so, and even with a panoply of paperback books in the 1960's, Lovecraft might have been a mere marginal cult figure. Cthulhu might be cool, but he was no Conan. Howard had a gift of story telling, and it made it easy for the Sword and Sorcery guys - de Camp, Carter, etc. Lovecraft purposely separated story from protagonist.

Derleth tried to repair that in his bullish way when he added to the Mythos, much as Paul pushed the Cross and less the Prophet. It didn't seem to work. Much as Peter to Paul, purists rejected the Derleth duality and pantheon by wanting to scalp him, and everyone outside wondered what all the fuss was about. Yawn.

When Derleth died in 1971, it might again have been the end of Lovecraft. Several reminisce that even in school or college, they rarely came across anyone else who knew what a Lovecraft was. Chrispy certainly didn't (undergrad - 1974-1979). This was despite hundreds of thousands of Lovecraft and Lovecraft-included paperbacks in circulation.

A young man, Mr. S T Joshi and his friends, decided to do something about that, and the second wave of Lovecraft exploded. Instead of spending all the energy to preserve Lovecraft, as Derleth had, they moved to solidifying the historic and literary-critical position of HPL. This was certainly not easy to do for a man who was essentially a pulp writer with no significant popular characters.

In the late 20th century, the public fixated on strong heroic characters. Fleming's James Bond was iconic. Sherlock Holmes and Dracula were constantly reinvented. The West, and especially America, became video-centric, and as atention-focused as a moth to a flame.

After all these posts, I think Chrispy can finally figure out how the "golden age" of Lovecraft became main-stream. Vincent Starett said it long ago, HPL was his greatest, strangest creation. Virtually the entire efforts of Lovecraft fans has been to promote the work by promoting the man - Lovecraft as character.

Now it is the 21st century. Right before our eyes, the entire world is changing as radically as it did in the 1960's, and few are alive now that remember what it was like then. (I do, though I was a child). We are fast moving from a 20th century video-centric world to a socialized-network world. What does that even mean? I don't know, but ask Egypt and the Middle East. It is a new world.

Lovecraft is poised to either go global, or become marginalized. He may also become morphed into an unrecognizable icon as HPLoitation is set to occur. Already it has become difficult to tell Fortean from Lovecraftian, and occultists have reengineered through reinterpretation much of HPL's New York years.

Chrispy has spent several years now dredging up images and elements from the period between Whipple van Buren's rise in the 1850's through the early 21st century. That's 150 years we've slogged through together. It has been a helluva ride, folks.

Along the way, I've tried to use the new tools available to trace the Lovecraft trajectory, and bring out as many of the noble researcher-fans that impacted that trajectory by their own egos and their own agendas. Yet, in the scheme of things, perhaps no more than 1,000 "names" and 10,000 lesser-known or unnamed collectors were involved. We actually can categorize and index virtually everyone involved in this thing. It would be a simple computer program to model. Maybe I am a single datum, too.

Remember, the world was literally a much smaller - less populated - place previously. With pushing 7 BILLION people, 90% who have been alive less than 20 years, it is a world we have never seen before.

In those mouldy oldy days, a handful of people frequently made a huge impact on societal sub-cultures, Lovecraft's legacy included. It happeened frequently.

Not to take anything away from the energy of Derleth, but it was far easier for Derleth to seize Lovecraft's work and promote it nationally and internationally through a small number of editors and colleagues, than say, someone to do the same thing today for a Karl Edward Wagner (1945-1994).

Thus we summarize what has went on before in the hundreds of small essays and blog posts I've done.

Now, onward to December !

James Blish (1937) "The Eldritch Goo"

2011-02-14T00:01:00.003-05:00

James Blish (May 23, 1921 – July 30, 1975) left the world much too soon. For Lovecraftians, perhaps his most important work was a lengthy pseudo-play of the King in Yellow, perhaps one of the most definitive post-Chambers interpretations. (Though Chrispy holds highly Brian Keene's ss The King: In Yellow).

For Blish at the ripe age of about 16, the era of scientifiction was fast upon the world. The Weird Tales crowd (H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and protege's August Derleth, Donald Wandrei, Robert Barlow, Robert Bloch, and Frank Long) were already being "put out to pasture" by the younger crowd. (They knew it, and to Lovecraft's dismay, they began to alter their writing style).

Forest J Ackerman (in Los Angeles)tended to lead the charge, but one can see young Blish had digested the old guard enough to parody them without mercy. The title is pure Lovecraft (The Eldritch Goo) and Lovecraft's long meandering sentences are harpooned. Despite only listing the "H", it is certainly the mature Lovecraft he goes after. In the mid-1930's Clark Ashton Smith was transitioning and writing what he passed off as scientifiction, but the young guard felt it was too old guard, and not enough "ray guns and babes" so to speak. Smith probably got the worst of the treatment in the letter columns of those days.

Clearly Smith and Robert Bloch were singled out in this one, too. Smith was known for his odd space-scapes, and all three were noted for their exotic made-up place names. Perhaps the most fiendish and brutal part of the satire is mixing in gothic with the weird tale parody.

Recently, a portion of this old story surfaced, and is reproduced below. It was first publsihed on cheap mimeograph with purplish ink (it may have been more blue in its original). It is typed, although the title and "author's signature" are hand drawn in for emphasis. It is called Grotesque #1 and dated at Spring 1937 (Volume 1 and Number 1). Historians believe there was only one other issue of Grotesque dated a bit after this one.

In 1937 HPL was now 47 (though near death). Smith was about 44, and Bloch only 20.

A little background. Blish was a teen aged member looking for acceptance into scientifiction, and he chose to do this in the middle of a feud between Donald Wollheim and Sam Moskowitz. Perhaps a few dozen New Yorkers and a few in New Jersey feuded like Hatfields and McCoys - among them were Frederick Pohl. Much of it was over left-wing vs. right-wing politics, and whether some flavor of fascism was an option. From this cauldron came The Futurians, and their influence was profound. Asimov, Hannes Bok, Damon Knight, Judith Merril, and Cyril Kornbluth all were members at one time or another.

Blsh would go on to become a significant influence in science fiction, and along with folks like Asimov, an actual "scientist" giving his work of the period solid scientific basis, and moving the genre away from the slap-dash "ray-guns and babes" of the pulps.

_____

Manuscript Found Under a Bed in the Ruins of the Bronx

The Eldritch Goo
by H. Ashton Bloke

The golden cliffs of Mneira hang over the tiny town of Arthrosep, and in the afternoon, their shadows fall on the heaving bay, and the water moans in its subterranean caves, and whispers of evil things.

Though Arthrosep has a history of only three centuries, there are queer, unspeakable things that linger in the stones and thatch. There are murmurs of an old war, waged by an ancient race against the modern usurpers of its homes. And there are many legends, lost in the dimness of antiquity. But their echoes chill the blood, and the pale rays of the sun, as they light the grim countenances of the natives, seem filtered through a veil of horror.

I climbed the crude steps cut in the jasper cliff one evening, meaning to watch the sun sink and swell, and drop behind the sea. Where the hewn trail rounded the edge of the bluff, I sat on a fallen boulder, looking out over the heaving water hundreds of feet below, out to the horizon, where the sun was lighting a silver ...

The Mound - Newspaper References (1925-1926)

2011-02-10T00:02:00.000-05:00

Moreover, what a monstrously exact explanation it gave of all the baffling phenomena of the mound-of the seemingly meaningless and paradoxical actions of diurnal and nocturnal ghosts, and of the queer cases of madness and disappearance! It was even an accursedly plausible explanation—evilly consistent—if one could adopt the incredible. It must be a shocking hoax devised by someone who knew all the lore of the mound. There was even a hint of social satire in the account of that unbelievable nether world of horror and decay. Surely this was the clever forgery of some learned cynic—something like the leaden crosses in New Mexico, which a jester once planted and pretended to discover as a relique of some forgotten Dark Age colony from Europe. The Mound, Zealia Bishop and H P Lovecraft [somewhat dated as December 1929 through early 1930]

Lovecraft reached back to a series of newspaper articles dating back about 4 years and paraphrases them nicely and succinctly.

PUZZLING "RELICS" DUG UP IN ARIZONA STIR SCIENTISTS
Purport To Chronicle The Arrival Of Roman Jews There In 775 A.D.
[New York Times, December 13, 1925]

TUCSON, Ariz., Dec. 12 -- After investigation by a number of scientists, first announcement was made here today of the excavation near Tucson of cast lead swords, crosses and other objects bearing Latin and Hebrew inscriptions which, taken at their face value, are held to mean that Roman Jews crossed the Atlantic in the Dark Ages, penetrated to Arizona and founded a kingdom which lasted from about 700 A.D. to 900 A.D.
...
Neil Merton Judd, curator of American archaeology of the United States National Museum, said he believed that no hoax or fraud was involved, but he thought the date later than that of the Spanish conquest of 1540 A.D.
...

The entire article has been conveniently transcribed at
http://www.conspiracybomb.com/puzzlingrelics.htm

_____
However there is more.

"An avalanche of newspaper articles about the lead artifacts, more than twenty-five in three months, began on Sunday, December 13, 1925, with a full front-page spread in the New York Times (fig. 32). Another six-column front-page story appeared there on December 14, and additional stories on December 15 and 20. The December 13 New York Times story reported extensively on the excavations, identified the people involved, and quoted a number of individuals, including Cummings, Judd, and the work by Laura Coleman Ostrander" [From Romans in Tucson? The Story of an Archaeological Hoax.]

The local newspapers began to sense a fake.

"Further evidence that tends to strengthen the probability that the alleged "Roman-Hebrew" artifacts found on the Silverbell road were really the work of a young Mexican student and sculptor named Odohui, was revealed today with the information that the young man, who resided with his parents at the lime kiln where the relics were unearthed, had in his possession an extensive library including volumes of the Hebrew and Roman classics.... (Tucson Citizen, January 15, 1926)"

"The Citizen Locates Man Who Confirms Leandro Ruiz's Story of Probable Origin of Leaden Relics Found Near City (Tucson Citizen, January 18, 1926)"

The NYT had a headline (SAY MEXICAN MADE ARIZONA 'RELICS') on this naming one "Timotio Odohui" and it is dated 20 January 1926

It seems probable that HPL had access to the NYT articles, or
their derivatives.

The Original Source of the John Willis Tale

2011-02-09T00:01:00.003-05:00

Chrispy understands that HPL used Skinner's book for his reference on John Willis. However, there were versions of Skinner's source circulating in Myths and Legends of Our Own Land. Skinner's original source has been located, or at least a reasonable version of it. It is below. In addition, a digest of this story circulated in wire services for some time, as it was found in "A Battle of Phantoms In The Valley of Death", Ellesmere Gauradian (NZ), Vol XII, Issue 1151, 24 May 1893, page 4. (Not reproduced here).

A few of Skinner's phrases are lifted whole cloth, and Lovecraft adds the enhancemens of an invisible army to set up an element of armored cavalry. This is not in either of the two renditions.

What is odd is that "part two" of that Mound paragraph contains some elements that seem not to be in Skinner, but in the original article.

First we will show Skinner, and then Lovecraft, and then the entire article.

Myths and Legends of Our Own Land
By Charles M. Skinner

A Battle in the Air

In the country about Tishomingo, Indian Territory, troubles are foretold by a battle of unseen men in the air. Whenever the sound of conflict is heard it is an indication that many dead will lie in the fields, for it heralds battle, starvation, or pestilence. The powerful nation that lived here once was completely annihilated by an opposing tribe, and in the valley in the western part of the Territory there are mounds where hundreds of men lie buried. Spirits occupy the valley, and to the eyes of the red men they are still seen, at times, continuing the fight.

In May, 1892, the last demonstration was made in the hearing of John Willis, a U.S. Deputy Marshal, who was hunting horse-thieves. He was belated one night and entered the vale of mounds, for he had no scruples against sleeping there. He had not, in fact, ever heard that the region was haunted. The snorting of his horse in the middle of the night awoke him and he sprang to his feet, thinking that savages, outlaws, or, at least, coyotes had disturbed the animal. Although there was a good moon, he could see nothing moving on the plain. Yet the sounds that filled the air were like the noise of an army, only a trifle subdued, as if they were borne on the passing of a wind. The rush of hoofs and of feet, the striking of blows, the fall of bodies could be heard, and for nearly an hour these fell rumors went across the earth. At last the horse became so frantic that Willis saddled him and rode away, and as he reached the edge of the valley the sounds were heard going into the distance. Not until he reached a settlement did he learn of the spell that rested on the place.

_____

Lovecraft, for Zealia Bishop, in The Mound

The commonest, and among the oldest, became quite famous in 1892, when a government marshal named John Willis went into the mound region after horse-thieves and came out with a wild yarn of nocturnal cavalry horses in the air between great armies of invisible spectres — battles that involved the rush of hooves and feet, the thud of blows, the clank of metal on metal, the muffled cries of warriors, and the fall of human and equine bodies. These things happened by moonlight, and frightened his horse as well as himself. The sounds persisted an hour at a time; vivid, but subdued as if brought from a distance by a wind, and unaccompanied by any glimpse of the armies themselves.

{CP added Paragraph >}Later on Willis learned that the seat of the sounds was a notoriously haunted spot, shunned by settlers and Indians alike. Many had seen, or half seen, the warring horsemen in the sky, and had furnished dim, ambiguous descriptions. The settlers described the ghostly fighters as Indians, though of no familiar tribe, and having the most singular costumes and weapons. They even went so far as to say that they could not be sure the horses were really horses.

_____

The Muncie Daily News
19 July 1892
Page 4, Col 2

. An Indian Scare

. Disaster Feared by Tribes in Indian Territory

. Traditions Which Presage Dire Trouble – Visions of Phantom Warriors in Deadly Combat Produce Consternation

Indians in the neighborhood of Tishomingo, I. T., are predicting a disaster of some kind. They say that something terrible is about to happen to their tribes or to the invading white men. The phantom tribe has been seen and heard in deadly conflict, and this is a sure indication that many dead men will lie on the fields. For years there has been a legend among the Indians of this territory of a phantom tribe which was supposed to be the ghostly remnant of a once powerful nation that was completely annihilated by an opposing tribe. This occurrence was so far back that it is now one of the traditions that has grown misty with age, and the Philadelphia Press says it has been many years since there has been any indication that there was a foundation of truth for the legend which attaches to a certain valley in the western part of the territory. In this valley, which is always shunned by the Indians of all the tribes, are many mounds, indicating where hundreds of people lie buried. In this valley, long ages ago, a great battle is said to have been fought, and in this battle one whole nation of red men was wiped from the face of the earth by a victorious invader, who thereafter possessed the land.

The traditions of the Indians are so strong that ages do not wipe out the legends, and where one or more Indians have seen uncanny things and tell of it, it becomes a part of the nation's history, and where a spot is found to be possessed of spirits the Indians never afterward question the truth of the story, but forever abandon the place. Such is the history of the little valley where it is said the great fight occurred long years ago.

In this valley, full of those little mounds, the Indians claim they have, on several occasions, seen the warring tribes in deadly combat, and closely following the ghostly battle came trouble to the Indians. Either pestilence, famine or war has invariably followed the apparition, and while the Indians have not heard of the phantom tribe for many years the legend is vivid in their minds, and now they believe they are again to be visited with trouble.

John Willis, a deputy United States marshal, is now responsible for the scare among the Indians, for he is the man who heard the deadly conflict between the phantom tribes. Willis did not know it at the time, and, while he is a brave man, he heard such sounds one night recently that he lay perfectly still. Willis was on the trail of a band of horse thieves, and was belated one night just as he entered into a little valley covered with small mounds. He had never heard of the phantom tribe nr of the battle which was fought in the valley. He was far from a house and picketed his horse and made his camp. He had been asleep for some time when he was aroused by his horse, which was snorting and jumping about in terror. Willis jumped to his feet, thinking he was attacked by a band of outlaws from the noise which was made. It was bright moonlight, but he could see nothing.

All around him there seemed to be an invisible host of men, some on horseback and some on foot, and these men appeared to be in deadly conflict. The noise of the trampling hoofs and rushing men could be plainly distinguished, while blows were struck so forcibly that the sound could be distinctly heard. Backward and forward the battle of ghosts seemed to rage for over an hour, yet all the while not a thing could be seen in the valley and Willis was almost convinced that the sounds were the results of a dream. His horse continued its frantic efforts to escape and at last Willis was compelled to saddle the animal and get away from the valley. Just as he got beyond the confines of the valley all the sounds ceased and he was tempted to turn back, but just as he entered the valley the war began again. He told his story to the Indians and then the story of the phantom tribe came out, and the Indians told of the disaster which was sure to follow the appearance of the phantom warring red men.

Mars Has a National Anthem ?

2011-02-08T00:01:00.004-05:00

Chrispy has been doing a lot of old newspaper researching. I have found a lot of things that are amazing, but this one pretty much takes the cake.

It does not appear to be a ruse, or if it is, many authorities looked at it with some curiosity. One seems to have been Arthur Conan Doyle, by then a convinced and credulous believer of all things psychic.

The "Mrs. James" seeems to be the key in this, and Mrs. Robinson was none too happy about the whole situation, as will be seen below. If there was sexual component to all this Martian moaning, the news was not forthcoming.

A little more digging, and the conclusion of this was pretty quick.

"Mars Remains Silent, After Radio Message. Dr. Mansfield Robinson of London Insists He Knows People Up There Who Want to Talk to Him.

"LONDON--Small ears and long antennae in England strained in vain Wednesday to catch a return message from the big eared folk of Mars, to whom a wireless message was dispatched early Wednesday morning.

"Dr. Mansfield Robinson, author of the message, who professes acquaintance with the Martians through telepathic means, clings stoutly to his faith in the possibility of interplanetary conversations. He admits that no response was received, but insists that his friends up yonder are anxious to exchange good wishes with him. ..."

"In the meantime Mrs. Robinson, wife of the doctor, remained an exasperated woman, shooing away reporters. ... She declared boldly that the experiment was nonsensical."

Source: Albuquerque Journal
Oct. 25 & 31, 1928

(http://weeklywire.com/ww/11-02-98/alibi_skeleton.html)

Howard Lovecraft and The Frozen Kingdom:

2011-02-07T09:25:00.003-05:00

The 2010 Eagle awards are open for voting.

This just in from Bruce Brown:

http://www.eagleawards.co.uk/voting/

I would greatly appreciate it if people voted for the team that did Howard Lovecraft and The Frozen Kingdom:

Writer: Bruce Brown
Artist: Renzo Podesta
Letterer: Shawn Despaquale
Editor: Dwight L. MacPherson.
Original Graphic Novel: Howard Lovecraft and The Frozen Kingdom

Just so you know, Howard Lovecraft & The Undersea Kingdom is already production! _____

Interview with Bruce! Click here!

A six year old boy, Howard Lovecraft, will soon stumble upon the legendary Necronomicon and be transported to a world inhabited by horrifying creatures.

Little Girl Allergic to Cold

2011-02-07T00:01:00.003-05:00

This is not precisely what HPL developed in his middle years, but it shows how his symptoms were not psychosomatic. HPL had what is sometimes referred to as poikilothermia. Thank goodness he wasn't allegic to ice cream ! Note that this poor little girl has a collateral fatigue symdrome, as did HPL.
_____

Priscilla can’t make a snowman or venture out on chilly, crisp winter mornings as the slightest cold could kill her.

Even having an ice-cream on a hot day is ruled out.

She suffers from cold urticaria which means she can rapidly develop hives and can even stop breathing should she get too cold.

Her parents, Colleen and Craig, have to monitor the temperature of their home in New York because the slightest drop can cause Priscilla to develop itchy hives all over her body.

‘There are times she gets upset, especially when she can’t go out and play with her friends or go swimming in the pool in the summer,’ said her mother.

'But if she goes out in the cold, eats or drinks anything cold or if her bath isn’t a certain temperature, she gets hives from head to toe, can start vomiting and has trouble breathing.

'The hives can last from just a couple of hours to up to three days at a time, and it’s not just the hives she feels ill and lethargic too.

'Her condition is so severe that if she doesn’t take her medication, she could die and that is always a fear in the back of my mind.

'We do everything we can to keep her warm.'

Read more: http://www.metro.co.uk/news/854625-the-9-year-old-who-could-die-by-eating-an-ice-cream#ixzz1D6BVo2ft

National Anthem, Lovecraft and Robert Ripley

2011-02-06T00:01:00.002-05:00

Many who are Lovecraft fans know that he had some quirky habits. One was to sing the National Anthem "tune" but the drinking song words. To anyone's knowledge, he never did it at a Rhode Island Reds game or elsewhere, so he was not decked or punched out.

A somewhat contemporary - the cartoonist Robert Ripley became well known by creating his "Believe It Or Not" in the 1920's. He got in quite a bit of hot water, when on November 3, 1929, he drew a panel in his syndicated cartoon saying "Believe It or Not, America has no national anthem."

Lovecraft was not a public person - people really had no idea who Lovecraft was in those days. Ripley, however, was quite well known and sort of a rock-star celebrity of the era. People were angry. The controversy raged, and while Ripley was correct, it took some time to get the ire of America under control.

In 1931, beloved John Philip Sousa published his opinion stating that "it is the spirit of the music that inspires" as much as it is Key’s "soul-stirring" words.

This got the political adrenaline flowing. For once Congress decided it could make a decision, and moved a bill up to the president. By a law signed on March 3, 1931 by President Herbert Hoover, "The Star-Spangled Banner" was finally adopted as the national anthem of the United States.

Lovecraft would have followed this story with a sly glee, but if he wrote of it, Chrispy does not know.

Lovecraft is Taken Seriously in Europe

2011-02-05T00:01:00.003-05:00

Julio reports:

I don't know if you guys know that a Lovecraft-based movie was released here in Spain last year. It's name is "La herencia Valdemar" (The Valdemar Heritage). It's based on the Lovecraft Mythos, going through diverse things like the Necronomicon or Cthulhu. The second part (and the last one) is going to be released in a few days, and we all can see Cthulhu in action!

[OK, a fellow that looks somewhat like HPL appears at 1:18, and Cthulhu appears at 1:18. I love the color schemes chosen. -CP]

2,750 !!

2011-02-04T10:13:00.001-05:00

Moving our way to 3,000 !
Stay tuned for more Lovecraft fun.

Planets!

2011-02-04T00:01:00.004-05:00

When HPL was very small he began to study astronomy. He learned about the known 8 planets, and as he closed into his teenaged years, he began to believe in a ninth planet - maybe more. He began to think of other people on other planets, maybe planets around other stars! Remember, in those days they had yet to fully understand that there was more than one galaxy - or even what a galaxy might be.

Now, we are there. Quintillions of stars, and maybe a googleplex of planets. And are there multiverses with their own stars and planets?

One thing I believe - the truth is stranger than we can imagine.

The Kepler spacecraft, launched in 2009, may have discovered as many as 1,200 new exoplanets, scientists announced today. They also shared details of a newfound planetary system with six worlds that have orbits closely packed together.

It's time for some ... Hillside Thickets !

2011-02-03T05:53:00.000-05:00

Lovecraft to C A Smith on Aleister Crowley

2011-02-01T16:26:00.004-05:00

About six months ago {Larry Roberts} purchased some 15 or so boxes of old pre 1970 fanzines and some Arkham House books from an estate sale. ... last night at nearly midnight I pulled out an envelope that held a postcard hand written by H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith. What an amazing surprise indeed! For the collector/bookseller/lovecraftian that I am it was the equivalent to hitting a jackpot.

more

Larry Roberts is publisher of Bloodletting Press, Arcane Wisdom, Miskatonic Books, and several other endeavors.

After posting this, Larry discovered that the letter contained a reference to Crowley. This is arguably the first reference ever to Crowley by Lovecraft that has been uncovered.

STJ and Larry Roberts: New Mythos Venture

2011-02-01T07:56:00.001-05:00

From S. T. Joshi's blog:

January 29, 2011

I'm excited to announce that Larry Roberts of Bloodletting Press and I are teaming up to launch a new series, the Modern Mythos Library, to be issued by one of Larry's sub-imprints, Arcane Wisdom. This series will publish vital and significant contemporary works of Cthulhu Mythos fiction by leading authors. Our first two selections have been chosen: Rick Dakan's splendid novel The Cult of Cthulhu and Jonathan Thomas's novel The Color over Occam. The latter is a loose sequel to "The Colour out of Space" and is one of the finest supernatural novels I have read in many years. I don't know the schedule of publication for these titles, but I hope they can appear this year.

My work on the Modern Mythos Library coincides with my withdrawal from the New Millennium Mythos published by Perilous Press. I hope that Perilous continues this worthy series.

You can read the full blog post by clicking here.

http://www.stjoshi.org/news.html

State of Lovecraft Studies

2011-01-31T00:01:00.001-05:00

Lovecraft's school mates and neighbors were far more influential than expected.
Whipple Phillips business career was very robust from timber, coal, zinc, gold, granite, and iron, to gas interests, inventions, electric mail systems, irrigation, banking, real estate, and even Cuban land speculation.
Some names of acquaintances, birthdates and at least one marriage date was wrong in popular circulated references.
Expanded backgounds and biographies of many Lovecraft acquaintances.

In addition, I receive emails that speak of other research that will soon bring new revelations.
New information about the lost years of Lovecraft.
New information on the life of Chester Munroe.
The location and exploration of the Great Swamp of Chepatchet.
Scandals involving members of the amateur journalism movement.
New information on John Dunn.
New letters from Lovecraft in 1905 and 1906.
New exegesis on Lovecraft's stories.

Sadly, there is almost no means for this information to get to other fans, since there is no easy medium to disseminate it.

I hope that soon there will be more electronic media that will adapt to getting historical research out to Lovecraft fans. A flood of new resources is coming at scholars, and they need to take advantage of it.

If I had my dream, it would be a collaborative encyclopeia with thousnads of researched articles on every year, and even every week of Lovecraft's life, and on every individual he ever met.

Maybe one day!

Holy Jumbalaya! Giant Crayfish Crawls Out of Tennessee !

2011-01-30T00:01:00.006-05:00

How in the world a 5" crawfish can hide for 250 years without being noticed is beyond me. Here is the story ...

A new species of giant crayfish, named Barbicambarus simmonsi, found in Tennessee, is pictured here in this image released to Reuters Jan. 20. The new crayfish at about 5 inches long, is huge -- twice the size of other species, the team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Eastern Kentucky University said.

"You would have recognized it as something really, really different and you would have saved it,'' Taylor added in a statement.

Taylor and Guenter Schuster of Eastern Kentucky University found their first specimen of the new species under one of the biggest rocks in the deepest part of a commonly explored Tennessee creek.

The new species, called Barbicambarus simmonsi, is about 5 inches long and has antennae covered with a sensitive fringe of tiny, hair-like bristles, called setae.

more

Gorilla Walks Like A Man!

2011-01-29T09:24:00.001-05:00

it is ..."unwise to rave of the living things that might haunt such a place; of creatures half of the jungle and half of the impiously aged city — fabulous creatures ... that might have sprung up after the great apes had overrun the dying city with the walls and the pillars, the vaults and the weird carvings."
Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family

Social Media: Broken?

2011-01-29T00:01:00.002-05:00

Chrispy thinks so.

I've been working an 8 year experiment of my own.

In the ancient days of the 1990's, Internet 0.0 was essentially text forums on specific topics. Alt Cthulhu dot com I stumbled on just as it began to slow down. It was a treasure trove of information to someone like me, a lurker, who barely knew what a Lovecraft was.

Then Internet 1.0 hit with lots of forums with visuals and avatars and flame wars. Mostly tech savvy A personalities mixed it up with seemingly more heat than light.

Internet 1.5 hit with a storm. MySpace, essentially a means to promote music groups, quickly became besieged with spam and noise. I hear it will die by June this year. Few people will notice if it does. It killed itself.

My greatest excitement was experimenting with the T-12, and learning how to write and garner reads by building whuffie. (IF you don't know what that is, sorry. Maybe later I can explain.) The end of the T-12 was painful for me and others, but you can't contain that many A personalities in one corral. Since then, most everyone has went on to capture awards, fame, and almost no fortune. That certainly applies to moi, sans an award. I don't think I shall ever win a Lovecraft award, but then I could care less about such things.

Then came Horror Mall, and Shane Staley's grand experiment. It seemed it was almost going to work. I met dozens, or maybe hundreds of people interested in horror. People were promoting themselves like crazy, and it seemed it was working - but not for Shane, sadly. He pulled the plug after he - I assume - hemorrhaged hundreds of dollars and thousands of programming hours. R.I.P.

It was killed by a little something called Internet 2.0 and Facebook. And Twitter. What's the verdict?

Twitter spawned a TV show. And it has become another techie thing. If anyone has figured out a way to make money, I don't know. I love Ray Garton's dry sense of humor in his tweets, and follow a few people, but I can't live 24/7 on tweets. It takes a special kind of person, and if that is you, then great! Many are calling for the death of Twitter by the end of the decade.

Facebook looked to have promise. It made a movie! Zynga, the their credit, figured out a way to take addictive psychology and make gaming a means of siphoning off money. By sheer will power they have not got a penny out of me. I think I am the rare person, though. Mrs. Chris has spent hundreds of hours locked up on Farmville. I've tinkered with Treasure Island, killed fish in Fishville (sorry Madame Scorpion!), and will probably get to level 2000 in Mafia Wars. Though I have no idea why I want to keep playing Mafia Wars, but ask Zynga's psychotherapy experts.

Facebook is user unfriendly. I have a page I set up, with no idea how I did it, and can't remove it. I want to set up the blog to autofeed, and after 30 or 40 tries I've essentially given up. There is almost no reason to post a real item because it is gone in 60 seconds buried by game feeds, and other traffic. No way to narrowcast that I can find.

Besides all that, Internet 2.5 is already here, and I can't fathom it. Since I don't use a $500 i-phone-droid-portatext-pad I am out of the loop. I don't have a YouTube TV channel. I don't have the time or equipment to do a podcast. How many of you do?

So, until someone invents a means for the common person to connect with people of like interests on a consistent and reliable consistency, social media remains broken.

And speaking of broken, if you are reading this (and I hope you are) I am not 100% sure that blogger isn't broken at this moment. I have set feeds on several levels that seemed to be working until recently. As soon as I noticed, I set a few new ways you can stay in touch in the margins. RSS feed me if you are interested.

I am still contemplating a move to a new platform. Don't worry, HPL and Blogger will always be here - if google allows. I also plan on going to 3000 posts which will take until at least December. That gives me plenty of time to decide something.

No Poe Show: Tradition Over?

2011-01-28T09:19:00.003-05:00

BALTIMORE – Telltale hearts beat with anticipation during a rainy, midnight dreary and beyond, hoping the mysterious visitor to Edgar Allan Poe's grave would return after a one-year absence.
...
Sometime in the 1940s, it seems, an anonymous man began the annual tribute at Poe's grave. It was first referenced in print in 1949 by The Evening Sun of Baltimore.
...
In 1993, the visitor began leaving notes, starting with one that read: "The torch will be passed." A note in 1998 indicated the originator of the tradition had died and passed it on to his two sons.

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Kappa Alpha Tau Report: Woman in Cat's Ear?

2011-01-27T09:29:00.002-05:00

Dark Haired Lady in Cat's Ear

I was goofing around one evening taking pics in my living room when my attention was called upon elsewhere. My cat, Pi, wanted some face time with the camera so I obliged her. I have a Sony Cybershot, 7.2 mega pixel camera. When we were done playing I was checking them out and when I got to this one, my attention was immediately drawn to her left ear (when looking at pic). A close-up of the ear is on the right.

--Jayna

[You have to look very hard, like one of those old "magic pictures" - CP]

PS: Coast to Coast AM rocks!

Kappa Alpha Tau Report: Cat Summoned For Jury Duty!

2011-01-27T00:01:00.004-05:00

Boston resident Sal Esposito has been called to jury duty, but there's one thing standing in the way of his ability to serve: He's a cat.

Massachusetts couple Anna and Guy Esposito received a jury duty summons for their feline ... Anna told local TV station WHDH. "I read the whole thing and I said, 'Oh my God, how could he go, he's a cat?'"

"I was shocked," added Anna's husband Guy, though he said Sal - a fan of crime shows - "knows right and wrong."

Read more:

Joe Pulver: Years Best Horror

2011-01-26T08:58:00.002-05:00

Lovecraftians, tune into Joe Pulver's blog The Yellow Madness

Joe is in good company, as you can see below in an excerpt from his latest news:

Monday, January 24, 2011
Ellen Datlow's The BEST Horror of the Year #3CONGRATS to ALL! !!

-30-by Laird Barron
...
Transfiguration by Richard Christian Matheson
...
The Folding Man Joe R. Lansdale
...

Just Another Desert Night With Blood by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
...
Black and White Sky by Tanith Lee

...
That is an amazing array of talent and I'm am delighted and over the moon to be lucky enough to be in this book.

Thank you, Ellen! !!

more click here

Mass Octopus Death in Portugal

2011-01-26T00:01:00.003-05:00

What is killing the octopus of Vila Nova de Gaia?

That question has obsessed the Portuguese city — located just across the Douro River from Porto — since Jan. 2, when 1,100 lb. (500 kg) of dead octopus were found on a 1.8-mile (3 km) stretch of local beach.

The following day, another 110 lb. (50 kg) appeared; later there was just one expired creature.

"It's very strange that so many should be killed, and in such a confined area," says Nuno Oliveira, director of the Gaia Biological Park, a nature refuge on the outskirts of Vila Nova de Gaia. "There's nothing in the scientific literature for this kind of mass mortality among octopus."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1951644,00.html#ixzz1BTp1GzVe

Two Bios of Addison P Munroe

2011-01-25T00:02:00.003-05:00

Below are some significant pieces of information. The birthdates of Addison, Chester, and Harold Munroe are not widely available and rarely published. Their links to DAR are not widely mentioned. In addition, below, you will see why Harold's middle name was Bateman (grandmother's maiden), and their marriage dates, and locations at a specific time. It's also pretty apparent why the kids bicycled to Rehoboth - it is the somewhat old home terrain of the Munroes.

Their birthdates are essentially confirmed in the 1900 census, when Addison was still a grocer.

https://www.familysearch.org/s/image/show#uri=http%3A%2F%2Fpilot.familysearch.org%2Frecords%2Ftrk%3A%2Ffsrs%2Fidgs%3A004120509.004120509_00915&hash=HloWXpZgU9zB10k5M56iYku8TUc%253D

_____

A History of Rehoboth Massachusetts ITS HISTORY FOR 875 YEARS 1643 1918
Rev GEORGE H TILTON
PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR 1918

MUNROE HON ADDISON P son of Philip A and Delana Pierce Munroe was born in Providence RI Jan 2 1862 As a small lad he attended the Harris School in Rehoboth but completed his education in the public schools of his native city after which he engaged in the grocery business in Providence following that until 1909 when he retired Mr Munroe has taken a prominent part in public affairs and ranks among the foremost Democrats of his city and state He was a member of the Rhode Island House of Representatives from Providence in 1903 serving on the committee on accounts and claims From 1911 to 1914 inclusive he served as state senator from the City of Providence being a member of the judiciary and other important committees He was the Democratic leader in the Senate and took an active part in legislation introducing many important measures and participating in all important debates In 1898 1899 and 1900 he was president of the Young Men's Democratic Club at that time the largest political organization in the state In 1913 he was his party's candidate for United States Senator receiving the full party vote in both branches of the General Assembly In 1916 he was nominated for Governor by the Democratic State Convention but as a result of the Republican tidal wave which swept Rhode Island in that year he was defeated He is a member of the state commission having in charge the armory for mounted commands of the state militia He is greatly interested in historical and genealogical matters and is a member of the Rhode Island Society of Mayflower Descendants and served as governor of that society in 191 1 1912 and 1913 In 1912 he was elected deputy governor general of the National Society of Mayflower Descendants and still holds that office He is also a member of the Society of Colonial Wars Sons of the American Revolution and of the Rhode Island Historical Society Addison P Munroe married Dec 22 1885 Annie Burnside Hopkins daughter of Nelson and Emily Greene Bateman Hopkins she is descended from a line of distinguished colonial ancestors and is a member of the Colonial Dames of America and of Gaspee Chapter Daughters of the American Revolution She was born in Cranston RI Aug 12 1861 The children of Addison P and Annie Hopkins Munroe are

Chester Pierce born in Providence Sept 1 1889 married 1 June 24 1912 Gladys Avis Rich 2 June 3 1917 Mary Doris Davenport He is chief clerk at the Grove Park Inn Asheville NC

Harold Bateman born in Providence Sept 11 1891 married Esther Louise Whipple June 4 1913 He is a deputy sheriff of Providence County State of Rhode Island

http://books.google.com/books?id=hyjMIY-vxX8C&pg=PA366&dq=addison-p-munroe&hl=en&ei=HXgyTbHmGoG8lQfeucDPCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false
_____

Distinguished successful Americans of our day -
CHICAGO ILL SUCCESSFUL AMERICANS 1912

ADDISON P MUNROE State Senator of Rhode Island Was born January 2 1862 in Providence RI He was educated in the public schools of his native city For many years he was engaged as a successful merchant of Providence but has now retired from active business He is identified with the democratic party in 1903 was a representative from Providence to the state legislature and was prominently mentioned as a candidate on the democratic ticket for governor for the coming November election of 1912 He is now serving his second term of 1912-13 as a member of the Rhode Island state senate and in his last election polled more votes than any other candidate of any party

Laird Barron and Larry Roberts: THE LIGHT IS THE DARKNESS

2011-01-24T10:15:00.001-05:00

Laird Barron and Larry Roberts Team Up on THE LIGHT IS THE DARKNESS
Jan 23, 2011 06:13 am | Larry Roberts

Infernal House, owned by Larry L. Roberts is proud to announce our fourth title THE LIGHT IS THE DARKNESS, a 200 page 42,000 word short novel by Laird Barron. This will be Barron’s longest work to date and is greatly anticipated by his large fan base. Cover art and interior illustrations are by acclaimed artist David Ho.

This book will be an oversized 8.5 x 11, signed, bound in Moroccan (goat) leather, custom endpapers, acid neutral paper and hand sewn binding, with a bound in silk ribbon bookmark. Each book will also come with a custom traycase made especially to house this exotic title. Each copy will be signed by Laird Barron and the illustrator David Ho. This edition is limited to only 174 copies.

These are already over half sold out! Reserve your copy soon as we expect these to go very fast.

Addison P Munroe Worked With Ronald Upham !

2011-01-24T00:01:00.000-05:00

If you have S T Joshi's Necronomicon Book H P Lovecraft: A Life, or any of its incarnations, you could turn to this passage, "Other friends were Ronald Upham, two years younger than Lovecraft, who lived at 21 Adelphi Avenue (about 3 blocks from 454 Angell Street) ..." Much more needs to be said than that.

We have seen in a previous blog entry that Upham actually lived at 51 Adelphi Avenue, and that 21 was some written error by Lovecraft all those years ago, or a misread of his youthful scribble. Researchers didn't have a chance, somehow, to double check this back in the day.

In any event, life did not suspend itself like an episode of the Twilight Zone for Ronald Upham. Howard went on to trials, triumphs, disease, and heartache. So, too, did Ronald Upham, but no one has grasped his ghost to tell his story.

Below is a tiny sliver of his life, including a sad moment in the history of Providence, R.I.
_____

We can determine from Mormon Genealogical postings that Ronald Kingsley Upham was born on 4 August 1892. In 1912 he lived with his father Clark/Clarke D Upham (b. 6 November 1864, Mass.) and grandfather Edwin Upham (b. 27 January 1827, Mass.), Mother Ada E H Upham (or Ada E A; nee Reynolds; immigrated England 1888) and brother David K Upham.(b. 30 April 1897). Other members of the family were: Adeline/Ada E Upham (b. circa 1900), Barbara D Upham (b. circa 1910), and an Irish servant Margaret E Kelley (age 26 in 1910). As late as 1920 (see article below) Ronald still lived with his father. (Margaret was still with the family). And as late as 1935, Ronald still resided at 51 Adelphi Ave, though in that Providence census his birth date slipped to 4 August 1893.

_____

For new readers, Lovecraft's best freinds were Chester and Harold Munroe, the children of democratic stalwart, legislator, and later State Senator Addison P. Munroe, a wealthy businessman, and civic minded man. In those early days, Providence was staunchly republican, and a democrat was hard to find. Yet, Munroe persevered and won many elections due to his strength of character. By the 1920's, everything had changed. The old guard had died off, or retired, and the minority old money democrats and immigrants combined to make Providence democratic - it still is now in the 2010's.

_____

Lovecraft once notably declared, "I am Providence".

Perhaps he was, in his mind, in his heart, and in his own way. However, it was not the same Providence of the roaring 20's with which Addison P. Munroe and Ronald Upham grappled. While Lovecraft sat in a quiet corner of College Hill, Providence had become an open city of vice of all sorts, and nothing seemingly could quell it.

In the Providence News of 18 September 1920, tucked back on page 15, the headline flashed,

Failure of City and Federal Authorities to Co-Operate Lets Profiteering Go Unchecked.

Only through vigorous co-operation between the city and the federal fair price committee, with the machinery of the legal department placed at the disposal of the City Council and the committee for the purpose, can the rent profiteering problem in Providence be solved. This was the belief of several officials who were asked concerning the situation in this city yesterday.

Failure of the City Council to take action of any kind, the fact that few ejectment cases have turned over to the city legal department this summer, and that the worst offenders are not deterred by publicity, are inscribed as the principal reasons for the alarming increase in the kind of twentieth century brigandage.

The absolute failure of the city or private individuals to take hold of the housing problem in a businesslike and progressive way during the four months since a public housing corporation was first proposed by Mayor Gainer has resulted in no help whatsoever being offered up to the present time.

Even should the corporation begin to function today, it would not be possible for it to materially aid in relieving the home shortage before winter sets in.

Profiteering landlords, mostly owners of apartment houses and the cheaper class of tenements have been having their own way disregarding the interference of the federal committee almost entirely, and writs of ejectment have been piling up in the Superior Court at an alarming rate in the last few weeks.

Today it was learned that even the feeble aid which the Federal Fair Price Committee has given may be withdrawn and that the office may be ordered closed by the Attorney General. The investigator of the local office, Ronald Upham, has been asked to resign because of the lack of more funds to employ agents for this branch of the Department of Justice. Federal Fair Price Commissioner Addison P Munroe, who is back on the job, said he had no definite information as to what would become of his office.

It has been suggested in the Providence News that the City Council has one strong remedy at hand by which rent profiteering might be curbed. That is by ordering the Board of Tax Accessors to increase the valuation of all property where rents have been increased excessively. Months ago it was pointed out that there is in the files of a City Council committee a resolution calling for a committee to investigate the advisability of doing just that thing. There is no need of even presenting a resolution of this kind, but only to report it out. Why it was so effectively killed no one knows.

It is the re-purchasing of houses for speculative purposes and the pyramiding of rent prices to increase artificial valuation, according to Commissioner Munroe, that has caused the excessive rent increases. Many of the complaints are against foreigners who have recently acquired property for the purpose.

- end

34,000 Year-Old Organisms Found - - Buried Alive

2011-01-23T00:01:00.000-05:00

"Looking back to our sensations, and recalling ... this monstrous survival from aeons ... I can only wonder ... In my case, ingrained scientific habit may have helped; for above all my bewilderment and sense of menace, there burned a dominant curiosity to fathom more of this age-old secret ... and what relation to the general world of its time or of other times so unique a concentration of life could have had."

At The Mountains of Madness - H P Lovecraft

"It was actually a very big surprise to me",said Brian Schubert, who discovered ancient bacteria living within tiny, fluid-filled chambers inside the salt crystals.

... "It's permanently sealed inside the salt, like little time capsules," said Tim Lowenstein, a professor in the geology department at Binghamton University and Schubert's advisor at the time.

... more ...

Poll: Pick Your Favorite Arkham House Cover From the List Below

2011-01-22T12:06:00.000-05:00

Poll: Pick Your Favorite Arkham House Cover From the List Below

Farnsworth Wright, Member of Amateur Journalism

2011-01-22T00:01:00.002-05:00

The Laurel from march of 1904 published and edited by FARNSWORTH WRIGHT. A recent Ebay auction. This time around the price was $150.00.

In Remembrance of JC Henneberger's Son

2011-01-21T00:01:00.004-05:00

An article from Google Archives ...

The blank areas were portions of an ad and an article about bus workers complaints that bled over into the text. I removed them.

In Search of ... J C Henneberger "John William Henneberger"

2011-01-20T00:01:00.003-05:00

Was this a missed opportunity for historians?

He was so small and young when Houdini passed on (in 1926), but he may have recalled stories of exploits between his father, Houdini, Lovecraft, or any number of close friends in that weird tales community. It appears that JCH held onto a portion of his Pennsylvania heritage for many years.

Below, only months ago is recorded the passing of John William Henneberger, age 86.

_____

May 30, 1924 - June 24, 2010

John William Henneberger, 86, died June 24 in Corvallis.

John was born in Chicago, Ill., to Jacob Clark Henneberger and Alma Katherine Schneidewind. He grew up on the Depression-era streets of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, N.Y., and spent summers on the family farm in Pennsylvania. After earning degrees in forestry from the University of New Hampshire and Colorado Agricultural and Mechanical College, he went on to a 30-year career with the National Park Service.

He married Barbara Bodine in 1952 in Yosemite National Park, Calif. For the next two decades, they and their three children moved around the West while John worked in various national parks and administrative centers. John coordinated wilderness studies for the U.S. National Park Service under the Wilderness Act of 1964, and he was later manager of the Denver Service Center.

His last position was as superintendent of the newly created Chattahoochee National Recreation Area in Atlanta, Ga., where he lived with his second wife, Barbara Griffin. In 1987, he returned to the West, spending his retirement years in Corvallis.

Throughout his life, John had a deep appreciation and respect for the natural world, and he shared that love with his family and many others. He had an intellectual interest in man's relation to nature and parks, and he was an avid mountaineer.

He is survived by his sister, June Henneberger of New York; daughters Diane Henneberger of Corvallis and Sally H. Mervin of Calistoga, Calif.; son Roger Henneberger of El Cerrito, Calif.; grandchildren John, Grace, Violet and Lewis; and longtime companion Moll Brett of Corvallis.

No service is planned. Memorial contributions can be made to SafeHaven Humane Society, Albany.

In Search of ... J C Henneberger Part Two

2011-01-19T00:01:00.004-05:00

Chrispy has traced two children of J C Henneberger, but before we get there, let's look at a few other early facts of Jacob Clark Henneberger's life.

Note that Henneberger was the identical age of Lovecraft (though I am unsure of JCH's birthdate).

In 1910, it turns out that as early as February 1910 he was member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity.

In 1913, Jacob Clark Henneberger received the bachelor of philosophy degree from Lancaster Franklin and Marshall College (PA). Notes at bottom of today's blog.

As I started the blog, I found two children.

In a public document I copy information about his wife, and his daughter from 1921.

Jacob Clark Henneberger (age 31, born Greencastle, PA) was married to Alma Schneidwind (age 24, Born Chicago) when their daughter Roma June (Jane, sic) Henneberger was born 22 May 1921.

Another son is a sad and missed opportunity. Tomorrow ... an obituary.

_____
History: Franklin and Marshall Academy was originally a preparatory department connected with Franklin College After the union of Marshall College with Franklin College this department was continued in immediate connection with Franklin and Marshall College and in 1872 was named Franklin and Marshall Academy when a new building was erected for its use and a separate faculty and management were appointed so as to make more ample provision for its efficiency and to enlarge its usefulness An additional building was recently erected at a cost of $100,000

Aim: The aim of the Academy is well expressed in the words used nearly forty years ago in the resolution of the trustees changing the preparatory department to Franklin and Marshall Academy It is to be in the best and highest sense a training school for boys who desire to go to college and also furnish a complete academical course for those who do not purpose taking a full collegiate course of study While seeking to develop right habits of study and accurate scholarship the school endeavors also to develop and mold the sound Christian character which is more important than scholastic efficiency

In Search of ... J C Henneberger Part One

2011-01-18T00:01:00.003-05:00

Lots has been written of Mr. Henneberger. 90% is in contecxt of the start of Weird Tales and his association with Lovecraft.

This has been a pet mission of Chrispy's. Who is this guy? What are his roots?

Well, I spent a little time and discovered he was the son of a farmer living in Greencastle, Pa. I could only locate two public documents, but one was a 1910 census, just a bit before he went to college - or he may have already begun and was commuting. I don't know.

He was a middle child, the only listed son with three sisters. Of interest, he may have been a "fraternal" twin, as his sister is listed as the same age. This is certainly not a 100% thing, as the "sibling" may not have been a sibling.

I list it below.

1910
Name: J{acob} Clark Henneberger
Birthplace: Pennsylvania
Relationship to Head of Household: Son
Residence: Antrim, Franklin, Pennsylvania
Marital Status: Single
Race : White
Gender: Male
Father's Birthplace: Pennsylvania
Mother's Birthplace: Pennsylvania
Family Number: 126
Page Number: 13

Household // Gender // Age
Parent Jacob O Henneberger M 58y (farmer, cows)
Parent Susan Alice Henneberger F 58y

Minnie B Henneberger F 24y
Elsie Grace Henneberger F 20y
Buela Pearl Henneberger F 18y
J Clark Henneberger M 20y

more tomorrow

Green Blob In Space

2011-01-17T00:01:00.001-05:00

This image is so eerie, and I feel Lovecraftian. The perspective makes it feel like a green batrachian thing is out to eat a galaxy.

This image by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, an unusual, ghostly green blob of gas appears to float near a normal-looking spiral galaxy. The bizarre object, dubbed Hanny's Voorwerp (Hanny's Object in Dutch), is the only visible part of a 300,000-light-year-long streamer of gas stretching around the galaxy, called IC 2497. NASA, ESA, W. Keel (University of Alabama), and the Galaxy Zoo Team

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is helping to demystify one of the strangest objects in space — a huge, glowing, green blob of gas floating near a spiral galaxy.

Hubble has uncovered delicate filaments of gas and a pocket of young star clusters in the giant object, which is known as Hanny's Voorwerp ("Hanny's Object" in Dutch). Hubble's new photos provide the sharpest view yet of Hanny's Voorwerp, researchers said, and reveal a star-birthing region in the object.

...more ...

To Wordpress or not to Wordpress?

2011-01-16T00:01:00.000-05:00

I think a web log is supposed to be a stream of conscious thing, at least in its original conception. So I'm just going to turn loose today.

Chrispy is thinking of finishing off his 3000th post this year, and in 2010 moving to Wordpress. Pros and Cons!

First, Blogger is speedy and easy. Wordpress is css, and I barely know html.

However, I am easily bored. A new challenge may be what I need.

On the other hand, I hate to slow down on the blogger established crew. You guys have come to depend on this.

But, I could simultaneously post on both for a while. Fran Friel did this for a long time.

Yet, the times are a changin'. Things need to be facebooked easier. Blogger is a little slow about this. Probably because Google competes with Facebook.

So, here's what I'm probably goin' to do. As you can see, above, I'm working a little with Larry and Esteban on their sites. I did some with Dark Recesses and learned quite a bit doing that gig with pals Bailey Hunter and Boyd Harris.

In mid-2010, I thought the world was going to explode with cutting edge Lovecraft sites like mine. However, it turns out, no one is as rusty and musty as Chrispy, and so onward I go blogging about Antiquarian Lovecraft stuff. Others are doing comics, movies, videos, and radio shows, but not on HPL's history. So I guess I is unique.

I do want to revive the fun of the Antiquarian Thread, and with the demise of the Horror Mall vast forum enterprise, I miss it. So, I'm talking with folks, and emailing friends, and I hope that HPLblog 1.0 will morph into HPLblog 2.0 with a vaster scope of antiquarian horror.

Most people don't know about my other interests, so I have added back the connectives at the top of the page. I actually have a Houdini blog but it does not post publicly yet. It focuses on what Houdini did between 1922 and his death in 1926, specifically timed to the interactions of Houdini, CM Eddy, Jr, and HPL. I did this because it was another planned book I never wrote.

I don't feel too bad being behind on writing books. The amount of work I do in articles and blog work probably equals three or four novels a year, and I get much more instant happiness doing the blogs and articles than I would trying to find a publisher, and sweating that I could not promote a book like I should, since I really don't travel much. Just too tied down.

Lovecraftian?

2011-01-15T00:20:00.003-05:00

I love this new Mafia Wars icon. It is quite eerie.

Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled an universe of terror and decay to excite our jaded sensibilities. ... There one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen ... The Hound, H P Lovecraft