As long as I’ve worked on the apocalyptic in fiction, I’ve always considered it not so much as a set of plot items chronicling various stages of destruction and salvation, but rather a distinct way of giving structure to the plot’s timeline, a part of the story, but not necessarily of the plot. It’s a [...]
Now that you’ve gathered your flock: why don’t you count them?
Decay it is.
I made the point in my last post that decay in Lovecraft is, via Lovecraft scholarship, a purely physical thing, and I couldn’t possibly argue that it is not. There are obvious points to be made on breaking physiognomies whenever human characters approach too closely the forces from without. This term comprises more [...]
Wordherders, gather your flock
Speaking of Reich-Ranicki, I happened to see him on a talkshow. The motto for the evening was “Deutsch for Sale – Verraten wir unsere Sprache?” (“German for sale – do we give away [=betray] our language?”), and that was to put heaps of tragedy (the way that only Germans can turn even the pettiest thing [...]
10 Songs for your final seconds, or: can I take my iPod to hell?
WTMD features a list of “10 Songs for the Apocalypse” (via The Constructivist)…while it’s not altogether useless, it still reads like a mainstream radio jockey’s work template.
It needs more boom, I’d say. Here goes:
1) Kataklysm: 10 Seconds from the end
You can’t say that they aren’t warning you – cataclysm – and you sure [...]
Pledge my allegiance off
At The Literary Salon they make a case for that most obvious and still disputed of points of advice for the literary critic, academic or otherwise – namely, that any consideration for the author should not be a concern to the critic, whose allegiance is, by definition, with the reader alone. I feel [...]
Those who have been in the Grave the longest
Howard Phillips Lovecraft [August 20, 1890 - March 15, 1937]
I’ll take my obit for the day from Emily Dickinson, poem No. 691 -
Would you like summer? Taste of ours.
Spices? Buy here!
Ill! We have berries, for the parching!
Weary! Furloughs of down!
Perplexed! Estates of violet trouble ne’er looked on!
Captive! We bring reprieve of roses!
Fainting! Flasks of [...]
Unholy Mutations
Speaking of unholy mutations, here is the new Melvins video, the first one in over 10 years, a work of such grandeur that you’ll inevitably hoot for a timeout to stand back and wonder: Jeez! What humans can do! What the Melvins can do! I’m awed. Be awed…
The Horror at Red Hook (I)
Here’s the story. It gives us an episode from the life of investigator Thomas F. Malone (and his only appearance in Lovecraft’s stories) – he’s gone mad, of course, as have so many of Lovecraft’s protagonists, tumbled into madness, while the narrators preserve their last vestiges of sanity, expending them in the process of story [...]
Nautical-looking
In my next few posts I’ll look a little into how Lovecraft is inscribing race, religion , and horror into his stories, or more abstract, in genre terms: how productive race is as a topos for reading his prose as gothic fiction. That seems like the litmus test of Lovecraft scholarship, the way Emily [...]
Did you book that flight to Hades?
We’re seven days away from Lovecraft’s 70th anniversary in the confines of the Dead, he perished on March 15, 1937 – on the occasion, Brown University, his never-to-be-alma-mater, is holding the Pulp Uncovered Festival, (via this) with a kneynote performance by Joshi, discussing L’s legacy as integral to early pulp fiction. The man, Joshi, has [...]
