Tag: HPL

The Privilege of Horror

Cameron Kunzelman via Twitter recently reminded us all of a thing:

Zoe Quinn’s Twine game is very good, and does precisely what I think she intends it to do — to demystify the strange fandom cult that Lovecraft accrues through a rigorous application of Godwin’s Law.  What I think is great about the game is how well it forces one to evaluate their principles with regard to Lovecraft by demonstrating that he was not just “some racist” in the way that nearly anybody 100 years ago (or today, as a matter of fact) would be susceptible to systemically and structurally inculcated racism.

HPL was the sort of racist who went out of his way to be racist, to think up ways to be even more actively racist than any white person living in the 1920s was on a day to day basis. Obviously Lovecraft’s racism is something I’ve known about for a long time, due to my familiarity with his work. It’s something I’ve developed thoughts on, but weirdly enough it wasn’t until replaying Quinn’s game last night that they all came bubbling out in a multi-tweet series. 

 

This was probably what did it, really.  My realization was that I know Lovecraft so well that I can actually sense the man in his racist statements devoid of context — both through his prose, and through the logic of his racism, the assumptions that underpin his scientific materialist worldview.

I got a perfect score on the game.

 

 

 

 

 

 

But I suppose this is as good a point as any as to make clear my stance, however half-formed.

Horror is about being afraid — and I believe this is valuable.  It was valuable to me when I fell in love with the genre, because I was a very anxious child in a very unhappy environment and stories about monsters told me that it was okay to be afraid, because there are indeed things to be afraid of.

The cosmic despair of someone like Lovecraft is a luxury.  It is a result of his race and his socioeconomic class that he could survey all of creation, pronounce it barren and hostile, and then amuse himself by populating it with phantasmagoric projections of anyone who was different from and thus upsetting to him.  For Lovecraft the decline of humanity was synonymous with the decline of a certain type of rarefied whiteness, inevitably a result of miscegenation and the embrace of the unknown.

If horror has an ethical dimension, then it is this: to remind us that there are things to fear.  To remind us that we don’t always win.  That many humans on this planet did not win: they were mowed down by regimes of exploitation, oppression, and hate far greater than they could comprehend.

HP Lovecraft Goes to an Anime Convention

You who consider yourself enlightened may still yet laugh at me, but I say to you again: the mind of man, in his Troglodyte infancy, has never dared to imagine the terror I experienced during my two days and three nights wandering the foetid catacombs of the local convention center.

At every turn a new grotesque assailed my eyes: from shimmering diaphanous wraiths with silver hair, to abnormally corpulent beings whose very bodies seemed unnaturally imbricated in the bounds of our sublunary space, and also their homemade Sailor Moon outfits.  My relief at spotting, in the undulating mass of terror, a pair of fuzzy cat ears turned quickly to extremest nausea when I saw they belonged not to a cute little kitty but a squamous youth protesting loudly to the price of a certain table’s merch.

I retreated to the balcony to recompose and it seemed, for a moment, as if a noxious cloud hovered over the entirety of that hideous scene, a condensation nearly visible in its dank iridescence.  The cries of those foul creatures echoed up the columned walls, ululating cries for such incomprehensible entities as “huggles” and “glomps” — and even, in some tenebrous corners, were the hushed, mad whispers of “yiff!”

“Eh, you must be a stranger in these parts,” murmured a voice to my side and, turning, I saw a slight, yellowed old man who by his attire I recognised as a custodian.  “Happens every year.  Olways a young man not much dif’rent than yeself shows up to this here convention, not knowin’ what he’s in fahr.”  His eyes regarded me with a lizardlike intelligence that inspired in the pit of my being a wordless unease.  “‘T ain’t so bad onct yer used ta it,” the custodian continued.  “I’m rememborin’ way back in Ninety-Eight when we began hostin’ this deal…. Wal, Sir, you can believe thar was a lot o’ outcry at the noise an’ the mess.  I was one o’ them!  But after some years had gone by and by ye start to git used to perty much anythin’, ye reckon.”  He chuckled loathsomely.

“Anyhaow,” he said, shaking the leathery head when he saw my horror was not assuaged, “what it was fer me, was I seen ’em at their meals.   This stuff called… ah, ah, Pocky, ye ken?  Can’t tell ye ‘zactly whut makes it whut it is… a kinda… cookie dipped in… dipped in whatever one might imagine, d’ye see?  An’ I saw ’em with it, monchin’ and snarfin and snackin’ and I jus’…. got a cravin’…. Queer haow a cravin’ gets ahold on ye, eh boy…?”

My mind pushed to the very limits of exertion, I made to flee for good.  Yet the convention center maps, posted to the walls like horrid, unremembered glyphs, are all but unreadable and after more than one wrong turn I realised I had furtively stumbled into the very nexus of that maelstrom: the Screening Room.

That thing — that terrible unnameable thing — towered above me, projected through the fuliginous aether of that room to proportions unnatural, though it was dimly and reluctantly understood that even unprojected it was a being wholly disproportionate to any known body: its eyes hovered like gibbous moons, iridescent like pools of ichor suspended whole, against the natural laws of physics, in a malformed skull, while about it splayed in non-Euclidean angles, in a shade of the most decadent purple, structures that might have been in some perverse evolutionary perspective homologous to hair.  Before I could leave the room that thing began to gambol, to the amusement of its wretched audience, and began to gibber in its alien tongue: “Onii-chan!  Onii-chan! Itai!!!”

And then came the tentacles.

Itai!!!

 

Touching base.

I have been very, very busy, going on a vacation of sorts!  I was trundling around New England for a few days and in that time managed to drop by and visit Lovecraft’s grave.  Isn’t that something!

While I was in New England I also managed to catch a performance of All’s Well That Ends Well, and it happened to be the Boston Commons production, so I have a handily prepackaged review written by the dude over at Shakespeare Geek.  It’s a pretty spot-on review, I think (even from the same night I saw the play!), and Duane is a good Shakespeare guy.  He’s a lot less heady and academic than I can be, so it’s good to read him and make sure I’m not disappearing up my own ass.  (If you like Shakespeare maybe you should read his blog! I do!)

The only things I would add to his take are some personal notes, namely, that I have (gasp!) never read this play before.  Yes indeed!  Despite my love of the problem plays this one had escaped me, so it was my first experience with viewing Shakespeare as performance-only.  Everything I knew about the play beforehand I’d absorbed through osmosis.

That said I have a bit of a problem seeing why All’s Well is classed as a problem play, or problem comedy.  It actually seemed remarkably straightforward to me — a young boy without a strong father figure latches onto a braggart, then learns a valuable lesson about humility and self-sacrifice when that braggart is cut down to size.  This was probably also an effect of the staging, I admit, and when I eventually get around to the text I’ll probably find some of the weirder elements of the play that were elided or cut, but until then: I ain’t got a problem with you, All’s Well.

I am also in the process of packing up to move to grad school, and also reading A Dance With Dragons, so you can imagine how busy I am.  So busy, guys!

But because that’s never stopped me before, I will now make veiled allusions to a project of mine on the horizon, a project design specifically for this blog, a project that will happen dammit because I paid money to set it into motion.  But again, given how incredibly busy I’ve been and will be, I have no idea when I’ll actually be able to initiate this project.  Suffive it to say, I think it should be a lot of fun for you and me.  (if it ever happens)

However, if you’re desperate for something to read today, something of substance, you could do worse than Blake Butler’s piece on American Psycho over at HTMLgiant.  Note this:

The way that Bateman copes with the building distortion between his inner want, however buried, and the continuing nothing his life has filled with is to break with himself underneath himself and do violence. The book goes on building further and further levels of intricately imagined scenes of rape and torture, which late into the book begin to take on a kind of ingenuity otherwise absent from his life. All throughout this, Bateman famously maintains for the most part the same copy-voice he uses in making dinner reservations or trying to impress women he wants to fuck. The narration’s sheen is perhaps what most upset readers ofAmerican Psycho early on, in that such acts were being put on with such apparent detachment that the book was “violence for violence’s sake,” which while I personally don’t have trouble with, I don’t think is the case at all here. This is not a book, as has been claimed, that sees the dark of the world and wallows in it. This is a book that in some way wanted more. This is true for Bateman, I think, as a character, if one that never definitely admits it, or changes, though there are certainly moments where the sheen begins to crack, if not in the face of it itself, but in the face behind the face: Bateman visiting his mother in a home and his odd silence there, while still not emotional; his weeping at sitcoms on TV; and even in the exuberant tone he takes describing pop music, which is of course written in a brilliant flat and media-inherited way, but also, in its reiteration, to me reflects not nihilism, but an even deeper burning for there to be something good in the world; something perhaps misplaced but to Bateman joyful, even in the multi-cloaked levels of how blank to some something like Huey Lewis, for instance, is. His wanting, where it lands, seems stilted, misplaced, but that doesn’t make it any less sincere, even when deployed as a passage turned from murdering women violently; in fact, it’s more poignant that way, if you ask me. There seems to be a big idea in literature and even all of entertainment that for something to show heart, be heartfelt, it must have light; that the moments must exhibit some kind of “human element” in order to make it relatable, and therefore somehow validated. This was Wallace’s big problem with this book, and it’s something you hear a lot. I’ll argue, though, that by leaving that sheen up, by complicating the borderline redemptive qualities of Bateman, and feeding his only out into a pathos that is terrifying in its operation in hurting other humans, is actually even more human, more honest; it does not have to bare itself in order to realize where it is. If one’s belief in humanity is founded on the idea of love, then why is that the element we continue to question? Do we really need to reach a moment in every work to remember light and love to know it exists? That the job requires you coming back to this by default seems to me a weaker pose than knowing already it is in there, or can be, and what of it. Depending on that requirement seems cheaper in spite of itself, actually less human, and less sure of the human than one who assumes it, or, holy shit, on paper, lets it go.

Opening lines to short stories I have never finished (yet?)

  • On the day my brother and I were to meet our wives I found the aluminum crutches in the attic over the library, and thus was cast backward into memories of our childhood.
  • “Ouch!” cried the man in front of the firing squad. “Ouch, ouch, ouch!”  Then he fell to the ground, dead.
  • “Is this your first time in the UK?” asked the magician, which was always the question people here asked Sharpe after they’d talked to him long enough to pick up on his accent.
  • Ginger Sparkleshine’s eye is three hundred feet wide.
  • “Gentlemen,” said the scientist, “we have a situation: Google is haunted.”
  • Time is a strange thing — it makes all the difference between a mass murderer and a serial killer.
  • Sarah was on her way home from the library when she first realized there was a clown following her.
  • Ralph Dutch was born on a sunny summer’s day at the age of eight.  The affair was a mess for all involved, particularly Mrs. Dutch, who refused to have children again.
  • We were just across the Vermont-Massachusetts border when my sanity began to crumble and these huge lobster-bugs came swooping out of the hills and flying around the car.  “Holy hell!” I shouted.  “What the fuck are these goddamn things?”
  • Rosemarie Ashfield lay in her bed and watched the dust motes back-flip in the blades of light that filtered through the lace curtains.  She was not entirely sure what year it was, but she knew that outside on the lawn it had to be 1948.
  • Hello my Friend I am writing you about your account in the Auxiliary Christian Bank of Nigeria.
  • One morning Martin woke to discover that, much to his dismay, the entirety of his iTunes library had been converted to black metal.
  • Elizabeth’s first instinct, when she realized her family’s new apartment was alive, was to let her parents discover and deal with the fact on their own time.  But then it ate their cocker spaniel.
  • My wife emitted a high, thin whistle much like a tea kettle, and also like a tea kettle, continued to do so until I took her off the stove.

 

Arcane magazine – OUT NOW!

Hey dudes — do you like stories I write???  Do you like spooky Lovecraftian monsters?  Do you like Southern Gothic?  Then you will probably LOVE my short story “In the Place Where the Tree Falleth”, available in the first issue of Arcane magazine and on sale now!

For the low price of $3 you get an eBook featuring my story as well as several other entertaining weird tales of various tenors and tones, and $8 will net you a hard copy.  This is around 40,000 words of material — that’s half a long novel!  Or all of a short one!  So please, head on over to Arcane and check it out.

Lovecraft on stage

Because I realize it’s sort of dumb for me to keep links to neat articles in a pen until Friday, why don’t you all saunter over to The Economist, where there’s a great little article about Lovecraft, theater, and the nature of horror:

These theatre artists appreciate what Lovecraft understood: that the essence of horror is mystery and an actively wandering mind. No film director has made monsters with as much creativity and innovation as Del Toro, but if he directed “At the Mountains of Madness” he would give shape to its creatures, which would in turn domesticate them. As horrible as they looked, they could not approach the terror of what they might have been. Dormant, the project will receive an arguably happier fate, as fans can only imagine what they missed. The perfect cult film is the one never made. Lovecraft would surely understand.

Here.

HP Lovecraft: August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937

For Lovecraft, scientific materialism is the ultimate Faustian bargain, not because it hands us Promethean technology (a man for the eighteenth century, Lovecraft had no interest in gadgetry), but because it leads us beyond the horizon of what our minds can withstand. “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the mind to correlate all its contents,” goes the famous opening line of “Call of Cthulhu.” By correlating those contents, empiricism opens up “terrifying vistas of reality” – what Lovecraft elsewhere calls “the blind cosmos [that] grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness”.

From here.  If you’re off-put by the half-credible occultism in the article, know that I linked it just for insight and information.  I personally don’t truck with such ridiculousness, and besides, Garl Glittergold in my homeboy.

We talk with goblins, owls, and sprites.

I promised a Comedy of Errors review last week, but honestly I really don’t have much to say about the production I saw.  There is not much to say about Comedy of Errors at all, anyway, and so in one way this isn’t surprising.  Needlessly to say it was a good production, it succeeded as a farce, and the actors I met at the talk-back were nice.  It was a repertory company, incidentally, which is the first of those I believe I’ve ever seen.

This repertory business led to some strange decisions, mostly w/r/t blocking, that I’m not sure would carry to all traveling actors or what: but like, the characters would just line up during crowd scenes and step forward to speak.  I can understand if you’re on a different stage every week and can’t manage to keep your blocking consistent why this would happen, and really, in something as flimsy as Comedy you’re not going to break suspension of disbelief by lining up.  It makes me wonder what these guys do when they perform tragedies, though.

Now take a look at some other things!  Hayley Campbell, world-famous twitter enthusiast, has a blog up on fear (the best emotion) and The Woman in Black, a play I saw in London and reviewed here.  I imagine Campbell seeing it at what was probably not a matinee filled with shrieking schoolgirls helped her dig it slightly more than I did, and I admit that though my opinion of the play in that review is slightly critical, in retrospect I’ve grown rather fond of it.  Especially now that a film version with Harry Potter is in danger of destroying everything I find compelling about the original play.

On the front of Lovecraft news, I want to take a moment to point out Cthulhu Chick, who knits Cthulhus, but also has put together a version of HPL’s complete works for your ereader of choice.  And it’s  free!  I should point out that this isn’t technically complete, because it has only his short stories and novels but not his oodles and oodles of terrible poetry.  But that’s me being a pedant.  Something else of note Cthulhu Chick did was this list of Lovecraft’s favorite words, just in case reading them each a good couple dozen times in every story was too subtle for you to figure out how to write your next pastiche.

Friday reading

In case you’re not into A Serious Game, Samehat‘s tumblr recently brought to my attention Tokyo Scum Brigade’s fantastic writeup on the history of Lovecraft in Japanese literature and pop culture.

…June 2010 saw the stars quake in ecstasy with the dual release of My Maid is an Amorphous Blob, the tale of a boy and his blob cosplaying Shoggoth, and The Magickal Girl R’lyeh Lulu, a return to form for tentacle rape and youth erotica.

Read it read it read it read it!