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Post by Scott on Feb 7, 2020 13:58:57 GMT -5
10th grade is as precise as I can nail down my intro to Lovecraft. One my friends in school had recently discovered Lovecraft and overnight was a prophet of Cthulhu. Few days later I had some Lovecraft collection, no memories of which one, and the old paperback Necronomicon. While working at Eide’s (Pittsburgh comic, record, book store) I put together a pretty nice collection of hardback Lovecraft books, but I’ve since sold most of my book collection off.
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Post by GRWelsh on Feb 7, 2020 14:34:06 GMT -5
Another angle is the players being victims (or monsters at the end) doesn't add to the rpg continuance of the Chaosium view of investigators picking up (or rather putting down "the needle".) ala Sherlock Holmes. Transition to another character where the aware character "wins" and hands off to their next character? That's right, there should occasionally be a "Congratulations, you've made it to Y’ha-nthlei! You win the CALL OF CTHULHU game!" moment.
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Post by GRWelsh on Feb 7, 2020 14:39:28 GMT -5
It is only in recent years that I've been able to put together a nice hardback collection. My family wasn't poor when I was a kid but simply old school/middle class in the sense I was very limited what I could buy prior to getting a job. I probably bought my first Lovecraft book with money I got for my birthday or from mowing lawns the previous summer. I was happy to get paperbacks and trade paperbacks, and to this day nearly all of my books dating back to the early 80's are still in excellent condition. Although I read some of his stories in the 80's I don't think my true 'Lovecraft obsession' began until the 90's at the public library reading Arkham house editions. My second oldest Lovecraft book in my personal library is THE DREAM CYCLE OF H. P. LOVECRAFT: DREAMS OF TERROR AND DEATH (1995) with introduction by Neil Gaiman published by Del Rey. From then on it has been steady, unending purchasing of Lovecraft books, including the others Del Rey published and the annotated ones by S. T. Joshi and Peter Cannon that came out in the late 90's. They still have the Borders bookstore stickers on them. THE NEW ANNOTATED LOVECRAFT volumes 1 (2014) and 2 (2019) edited by Leslie Klinger are my most recent additions, and very nice!
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Post by Scott on Feb 7, 2020 16:11:00 GMT -5
As minuscule as I consider my book collection, just within the past week Liana complained to me that I have too many books. There was a moment where I felt like the White Guy Blinking meme white guy.
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Post by geneweigel on Feb 7, 2020 16:59:10 GMT -5
I hate when books that I was going to throw away, but were taken, trickle back with people's house clearing years later. "I left some books with Dorothy for you." etc.
About 15 years ago, I put a default books embargo for the whole house but then my wife's beloved uncle's house was sold and he had ten tons of manly type literature that I have to keep because he would have wanted me to have it. Let's just say its too bad I'm not running a BOOT HILL campaign. We are starting to look upstate and I want to have a modular work space with a hidden library.
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Post by GRWelsh on May 11, 2022 8:40:06 GMT -5
I've been reading H. P. LOVECRAFT IN THE MERRIMACK VALLEY (2013) by David Goudsward and I've been thinking of the CALL OF CTHULHU RPG again. As I was reading, I was listening to the old ambient music links I found on YouTube starting here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVzJONU4jDs&list=PL681BC8696848CA8B&index=1&t=128sThe topic has come up in the past about what sort of music Lovecraft enjoyed. I read an extensive biography on him by S. T. Joshi several years ago and should have written down some notes on the topic. As I remember, HPL took violin lessons as a child but just wasn't good at it and so he quit. He didn't have enthusiasm for classical music as I had guessed, but rather liked pop songs such as "Yes! We Have No Bananas!" and other songs recalled from his youth. I think he went through a period in his youth when he would sing, and apparently had a pretty good singing voice, but may have irritated his neighbors with the racket. I'll have to look up some quotes on that. I know he didn't like anything he considered foreign music, such as when he lived in New York. I don't recall reading of his attitudes to the jazz music of the 20's and 30's specifically. But what I like best about this "Cthulhu Music Ambience" series is how the jazz music warped by the ambient sounds and oddness perfectly captures that feeling that under the veneer of normal life is something unknown and terrible... Well, that is the sort of feeling I'd love to capture in a CALL OF CTHULHU game. Like that isn't really Annette Hanshaw singing "Love Me Tonight" to you... It's Asenath Waite!
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Post by geneweigel on May 11, 2022 10:29:52 GMT -5
On an aside, I was just looking at toy catalogs from the turn of the century (1800s to 1900s) and some of these toys are so outrageous in concept that you would literally feel them peeling paint off the walls if you had one in your home. If that is what they were selling to kids back then then this misconception of HPL as a lone fiend is a big mistake. He was selling stories to people who wanted to read them. I don't believe his legacy needs to come into the popular landscape to be judged by his failure to comply to modern sensibilities. When I was full blown deep in the mythos around the mid-80's I was half believing that there was a half-truth to "Cthulhu". I think he was cutting edge into questioning reality constantly cutting through polite society and that is why we see in his discourse with the fellow "Kalem Klub" the ugly tidbits of ultimate paranoia. Well, that and S.T. Joshi has actually been Nyarlathotep this whole time... The character of Lovecraft reminds me of my interactions with olde Connecticut traditionalist leftovers who were disgusted that I was from New York but eventually gave in that I was not rotten to the core (Like most of my family! ). PS I just recalled the other day that the supermarket in front of the high school in SPIDERMAN HOMECOMING (2016), I believe it also appeared in an episode of THE SOPRANOS(1999-2007), was a FINAST supermarket. Like the one in THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH (1931): That was the first thing that creeped me out. Maybe late 70's, I looked up from the story reading at the table in the summerhouse up in the Catskill Mountains and asked my great aunt Lillian, who was the wise old owl always seated at the table, was there a first national grocery chain and when she said, "FINAST!", it was like suddenly Cthulhu might be real. HPL's THE MUSIC OF ERIC ZANN (1921) always came off like he was emulating a trend for sales sort of like Poe's European set stories and maybe some of REH's historical pieces set in the real world seem to be in this mode as well, not that they stink or anything.
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Post by geneweigel on May 11, 2022 11:17:23 GMT -5
So many people, from that area Brooklyn-Queens, for years told me that I'm wrong there was never a "FINAST" there but in the 1970's I had been back and forth to that store with a cart for all the old people of the universe so many times when I was a kid. The logo was engraved in my skull. Going in there now, it has been an independent owned "C Town" since at least 1980, it is like a true Lovecraftian nightmare with the same 1970's FINAST refrigerator fixtures and the umpteenth level of urban ruin all around.
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Post by GRWelsh on May 11, 2022 15:22:24 GMT -5
It's to Lovecraft's credit that so many people think the Cthulhu Mythos is half-true. HPL said (I'm paraphrasing) that he wrote fiction with the care someone would take to conduct a hoax, although he readily admitted he was only writing fiction. The book I am reading now goes into how real places and people made their way into HPL's fiction. The case is made that Innsmouth is based upon the run-down aspects of Newburyport, while the Newburyport in the story is based on the quaint aspects of actual Newburyport. So he split Newburyport in two for fictional use. He visited Newburyport after he began visiting the Merrimack Valley and his correspondents who lived there, such as Charles "Tryout" Smith who was also into amateur journalism and published some of HPL's earlier stories, articles and poetry. So, there places where you can actually go and feel like you are in a Lovecraft story. In Providence, I saw a jogger go through the gate into the house of Charles Dexter Ward. I walked past the Shunned House several times. I walked from where 66 College Street had been across downtown and then up Federal Hill to the site of St John's Roman Catholic Church which was the real life inspiration for the Church of Starry Wisdom! If you go to Newburyport for the day, it's half-true that you spent the day in Innsmouth...
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Post by geneweigel on May 11, 2022 20:23:54 GMT -5
I dreamed clearly of a deep one while steeped in HPL around 1980 or so. It freaked me out but it was probably generated by my subconscious to make HPL quasi-real.
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Post by GRWelsh on May 15, 2022 12:45:34 GMT -5
I just reread "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and it was enjoyable in the context of having read about HPL's own antiquarian tours and economical travel habits (staying at the Y, visiting local libraries and historical societies, preferring buses over trains, etc.). There are quite a few autobiographical elements which contributes to the story's verisimilitude, and Innsmouth is richly imagined. Something that stuck out for me this time were the Cthulhu references. On his podcast THE LOVECRAFT GEEK, Robert M. Price speculated that the Lovecraftian entities Dagon and Cthulhu were two different names for the same being. I am skeptical of that, but it is an intriguing idea. If that were true, then the implication in this story would be that Cthulhu is an ancestor of all humanity... I don't think that was HPL's intention.
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Post by geneweigel on May 15, 2022 20:33:45 GMT -5
I guess you can say DAGON (1917) is an earlier version of the same story as CALL OF CTHULHU (1926). DAGON was based on a dream that he later reprocessed as another more elaborate dream of a dream in a dream then wrote a story CALL OF CTHULHU then by the time it was done considered the earlier "version" part of the mythos landscape then incorporating it all into SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH (1931) with the lineage of the deep ones coming from Mother Hydra and Father Dagon.
There is a story that I have never read that he mentions in SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE (1927) called A PLACE CALLED DAGON by Herbert S. Gorman that came out the same year (1927).
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