Derleth Skate Park: Nearing Reality

Sauk Prairie Eagle Skatepark to be located in August Derleth Park.

"It's so pretty and looks so neat that I think the people who live there are eventually going to like it," said Vicki Gullickson, who helped start the most recent push for a public skatepark in Sauk Prairie.

More here.

Whipple's Providence of the 1870's

As a few of you know, Chrispy has spent months accumulating data on Whipple van Buren Phillips. Why? Even I don't really know, but the man was incredible. This is not the venu to do a lot of sharing just yet, but one must pause to think.

Lovecraft became increasingly nostalgic about old Providence. However, he seemed to purposely leap frog past Whipple's Providence, to the Georgian era. To him it was a particularly fascinating era, and he often daydreamed himself there.

The Whipple-era Providence was bustling, growing, and a bit gritty. Providence blew past Newport to become a top 20 American city teaming with immigrants. They were the fodder for the industrialization of America, and much of Whipple's business fed timber and coal to that hoi poloi.



There was no EPA, and Whipple would have been appalled by sch a thing. Pollution was the lubricant of business, and business was all to the tycoons of the gilded era. Where Thoreau might have seen the rape of Nature, Whipple would have seen progress. Lovecraft would have seen Juan Romero and some monsters lurking. But that's another story. heh.

These are typical stereoscopic and sepia images, the forerunners of viewmasters. And if you are too young to recall the power and glory of viewmaster, think of them as 3-d holograms. These are the Providence that Lovecraft did not see, as they are dated to the 1870's. He saw the same places 25 and even 50 years later, but they had been upgraed, torn down or become more delapidated as the case might have been.

Whipple apparently flitted back and forth between western Rhode Island and Providence as he variously created enterprises, went in and out of bankruptcy, fought numerous litigations, and finally settled permanently into Providence hesitating only briefly before he decided on his obsessive, final and fatal conquest and terraforming of Idaho's Bruneau River valley.

His story is a worthy one, and the famous (to Lovecraftians) Idaho adventure was but the finale of an incredible career that has yet to be fully excavated by historians.

James Morton on Lovecraft (1920)

In a recent auction, this item's descritpion appeared.


THE STRAY ONE, May, 1920
Published by James F. Morton

Now it's interesting to read current critical analyses of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, but it is FAR more interesting to read what his contemporaries had to say about him!

James F. Morton was one of H. P. Lovecraft's earliest and greatest friends amongst Amateur Journalists, and they remained friends until HPL's death. Morton like Lovecraft was an intellectual, like HPL he served as President of the National Amateurs, and also like HPL published his own "AJ". But Morton was also a severe critic and be ye friend or be ye foe made no difference as evidenced by his appraisal of HPL's poetry..."...with reference to the poetical work of Howard P. Lovecraft. To many of us it does not seem that the Queen Anne period in English literature was that from which the finest inspiration might be drawn. There is a heaviness and stiltedness of phrase in all but the very best work...and modern imitations ring somewhat hollow. "

But regarding Lovecraft's prose, Morton was equally honest..."His gift in the construction of tales of fantastic and terrible marks him out for a coming master in this restricted but fascinating field of literary endeavor. Already much of his work displays a craftmanship and a genuine creative power scarcely inferior to the those of the recognized geniuses in this department...."

I will not divulge the entirety of this lengthy paragraph, that is reserved for the privilege of ownership, but Morton summarizes......"If Mr. Lovecraft has not fully mastered the secret known to the author of 'Dracula,' he is well on the road to such mastery"

A most worthy offering as an associational item on its own, but much much more!

Folded for mailing, with a few short splits closed with clear tape.