• Location: Nilus Dorsa
• Mood: okay
• Music: Moby, "Into the Blue"

"She hung her gown from the pear tree And watched it swing..."

Sunny today, wide carnivorous blue, and the humidity finally released us from it's moldy clutches. Only 49% at the moment, and 77˚F. I would say it's autumnal out there, but I don't know from New England seasons, clearly. It's pleasantly warm in my office. The window is open, and my little desktop fan is whirring.

Yesterday, I was a slacker. Instead of writing, we went Outside. To the Providence Art Club (Dodge House Gallery) and the Athenaeum. We went to the former to see Ars Necronomica, the exhibit of HPL-inspired artwork, organized in conjunction with Necronomicon. Some beautiful pieces. Storms were bearing down on the city, and it almost felt like a Southern summer day, just before a big thunderstorm breaks. When we were finished at the Dodge House, we stopped by the Athenaeum, where aliceoddcabinet kindly gave us a tour through their HPL exhibit, which includes some wondrous examples of his own manuscripts, letters, postcards, and other documents culled from the forty boxes of his papers in the collection of the John Hay Library. You see these things, and you begin to get a feel for the actual human being behind all that time and writing. On the way home, a terrific downpour began. There are photos, behind the cut:





The stop-motion model used in the HPLHS's Call of Cthulhu, a little worse for wear.







Joe Broer's rendering of the Cthulhu idol, based on HPL's own drawings. I ordered one of these sculptures, in a moment of weakness. Someone got the eyes right!



Close up.















On back of the Lovecraft bust there is a secret encoded – and hardly anyone knows this – which Bryan Moore took me aside at the unveiling and commanded me to decipher. So...now I must. But I'm not posting the whole code online (someone else may have done so already).





All photographs Copyright © Caitlín R. Kiernan and Kathryn A. Pollnac



The storms did some damage in Cranston (a flooded apartment building that displaced 75 people, 29 families). In Warren, there was either a microburst or a tornado may have occurred, uprooting and shearing apart huge trees and bringing down power lines. There was hail.

I am determined that I will, this True Autumn, make up for a lost summer. Well, one can never genuinely buy back lost time, but....

I've been reading Volume One of Fantagraphics collected Pogo strips (I'm up to 1950), and Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero's Abominable Science, and rereading "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." And spending far, far too much time playing/RPIng in The Secret World (seven hours last night!!!!).

Now, I have to go do that last bit of work I might ever do for Dark Horse Comics, as I've just been informed they've allotted me one desperately needed extra page for Alabaster: Boxcar Tales, which is all Maisie, here at the end of the tale. I need to be done with this.

Bittersweet,
Aunt Beast