The title begs for details, it just does: why would the frontier pop up there in the first place?
The novel, The Confidence Man, is supposedly set in the 1850s, and it describes a voyage through territories – the Midwest and the Coastal Plains, or: the area wedged between the Appalachians and the Great Plains, or: [...]
The Frontier as Apocalyptic Place: Melville’s Indian Hating Revisited (V)
The Frontier as Apocalyptic Place: Melville’s Indian Hating Revisited (IV)
[ first posted by Farol, some rights reserved]
So, here I go to conclude that part of my investigation, the purpose of which is to evaluate how the concepts of race, frontier, and apocalypse go together in Lovecraft’s fiction. More precisely, the issue was race, and I tried to establish, and am still trying to, [...]
Indoctrination for Beginners
You couldn’t possibly start early enough with teaching your toddler the…oh, well…wisdom? grandeur? magnificence? …of great Cthulhu.
Here’s how to do it -
Tales of the Plush Cthulhu
(via Lovecraft Country)
Also, I will get the final part of my inquiry on Melville’s frontier apocalypse online this weekend. These last few days I’ve been a bit swamped with work [...]
The Frontier as Apocalyptic Place: Melville’s Indian Hating Revisited (III)
This is not so much a romanticized introspection into a patron-customer-relation, but rather a justification of a territorial expansion that was still rolling on when Melville and Bird wrote their novel.
Lovecraft never saw the Mississippi. Of course Lovecraft saw the Mississippi, in New Orleans (thanks to Kenneth Hite for the hint!). He never saw [...]
The Frontier as Apocalyptic Place: Melville’s Indian Hating Revisited (II)
I find the idea of the Fidèle as a theatrical stage a little tricky to maintain when the novel moves into the topic of Indian hating & killing.
I find it tricky – what position would it provide to the extended chapters on Indian hating? Would it make them a tragic interplay in an otherwise comedic [...]
The Frontier as Apocalyptic Place: Melville’s Indian Hating Revisited (I)
Some two weeks ago, after I had taught a class session on Melville’s The Confidence Man, I needed to do some grocery shopping, and who would I meet, right there at the register, if not a student of mine, who was just about to act a practical lesson in charity: a customer had run out [...]
Ménage à trois, premiere fois
It is possible to read these passages I quoted in my last post, from Moby Dick and Steppenwolf, as social critiques: in fact, how not so? They are positing their speakers in an unmitigated opposition to society, squarely, and for very similar motives: to escape the drudgeries of modern life, Ishmael and Haller take off [...]
Shall we trade monsters?
Upon the heel of the last scene, Melville and Lovecraft enter the blog, mutual benedictions on their lips.
I’ll add a few more words on Melville’s Moby Dick, will then segue the discussion into more theoretical waters, until it finally arrives at Lovecraft – Melville, of all people, as he is closer to Lovecraft in pace, [...]
Geek toy in inconspicuous wrapper
At metroactive, Annalee Newitz is giving an inside account of her rite of passage into Wikipedia editing, and witnesses an odd occurence, Lovecraft-impingent, as it were -
And then, while I was at it, I re-created another entry recently deleted for not being “notable” enough—that of Sonia Greene, a pulp–fiction writer and publisher of the 1920s [...]
That boar was a pig
I want a porkchop, real bad. And an assault rifle to defend myself against these unruly giant pigs that keep terrorizing the world. Sows like this one. A nine-foot-hog the shape of a sperm whale, minus the flukes and the sperm, and minus the size.
I can’t point out exactly just what is unnerving me [...]
