Амстердам: завтра (и рабочее-пунктирное)

В кои-то веки я (почти что) молодец: разослала авторам своего сборника рецензии с подтверждением их участия (повезло не всем, ну да что поделать) — корпела над формулировками весь день, но, наконец-то, все сделала.
А завтра, меж тем, Амстердам! А у меня еще конь не валялся и чемодан не собран. Но предвкушение Рембрандта, мельниц и каналов несомненно радует!

“Harsh Sentences: H. P. Lovecraft v. Ernest Hemingway”: a brilliant comparative essay from Deepcuts

TWIMC. Just a friendly reminder of how a picture perfect article in comparative studies must look like. Impeccably done: chapeau, Bobby Dee.

For H. P. Lovecraft, missing Hemingway would have been much more difficult—nor did he. Though they were very different in their fictional focus, output, and success, Lovecraft and Hemingway were still contemporaries, and there are a number of references to Hemingway and his works in Lovecraft’s letters. These mentions of Ernest Hemingway, who had not yet become “Papa” of later years, reflect more on Lovecraft than on Hemingway himself, but show Lovecraft both coming to grips with a Modern writer of very different style and interests and how Hemingway’s influence spread.

Trends come from deeper sources than what is written on the surface of literature, and the average domestic adjustments of 1980 or 2030 will not depend on the question of whether Ernest Hemingway is suppressed or encouraged in 1930.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Maurice W. Moe, June 1930?, LMM 267

“The Chronicler of Unhappiness” by Michael Dirda (The New York Review)

Brilliant Michael Dirda (many of my colleagues know him as a reviewer of Lovecraftian/Gothic/Weird fiction) about F.M. Ford.

Did we really “have it all” (meaning the best iterations of a classical novel) in the 20th century? Looks like it.

In truth, for relentless and layered tricksiness, only Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire can rival The Good Soldier. It employs the entire modernist playbook—a carefully orchestrated, almost fugue-like unfolding of the action, multiple time-shifts, a limited narrator, symbolic historical allusions, the speeding up and slowing down of narrative pace, foreshadowings and reversals, double entendres, and much else. 

In particular, the novel’s surface text, reliant on ambiguity, foregrounds the untrustworthiness of first impressions. Dowell’s wife, for example, likes instructing people about European history, so it’s only later that one begins to wonder about the statement “At that time the Captain was quite evidently enjoying being educated by Florence. 

HPL: 88th anniversary of death

Lovecraft died on this day 88 years ago.

He met his death stoically and was granted a peaceful departure from all his torments and the anguish of the final years of his life, filled with unbearable cancerous pain. It’s somewhat consoling to think that the 1937 Lovecraft was not the same as the Lovecraft of the 1910s or 1920s—he had become less and less rigid and deplorably prejudiced in his societal views than before, his milieu had got more diverse, but we will never know for a fact about the ultimate result of it all.

He was challenged by life yet persevered through his works: not exactly a cautionary tale for any resentful hypochondriac, but a complex (for the lack of a better word) story of a mighty talent that emerged and grew against all odds. And, of course, his own narration of what later was called by Ligotti “The Nightmare of Being” is a seminal continuation of Schopenhauer’s Pessimism, Mainländer-Nietzschean Deicide and “Menschliches, Allzumenschliches” frustration in the face of cosmic indifference.

I have seen the dark universe yawning,

Where the black planets roll without aim;

Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name. ©

Planets will roll; casting aside aloofness, we will remember.

“There Is No Happy Nonsense”: Mark Dery reviews “From Ted to Tom: The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey”

Oh dear, so what?

To be sure, Gorey could be cartoonish. The bell jar world of his cozy-sinister stories, set in the England of the Victorian, Edwardian, and Bright Young Things eras and populated by vamps, shifty-eyed vicars, doubtful guests, deranged opera fans, and, famously, little dears whose absurd deaths are played for laughs (The Gashlycrumb Tinies), threatens at times to tip into goth kitsch. Gorey’s style and sensibility are so instantly recognizable, yet so uncategorizable, that, like David Lynch, he’s earned his own adjective: Goreyesque. The trouble with becoming an adjective, of course, is that it flattens you out, reduces you to a checklist of stylistic tics and well-worn themes that can quickly become the straitjacket of cliché—or, worse yet, self-parody. ©

“The Multi-Dimensional Career of Weird Literature Editor and Book Designer David E. Schultz” by Katherine Kerestman

What a fabulous present for International Women’s Day! A great Lovecraftian scholar and a dear friend of mine, Bobby Dee, has a guest post in his legendary blog, “Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein”—“The Multi-Dimensional Career of Weird Literature Editor and Book Designer David E. Schultz” by Katherine Kerestman. Working with David on Lovecraftian Proceedings is a true honour.

I think I first learned of Lovecraft when I saw a paperback of his stories at a department store. The Colour out of Space from Lancer, with its ridiculous cover depicting a skull amid flames. It may be—I can’t remember—that I first heard of him when I read Bradbury’s “Pillar of Fire,” when in the future, all morbidness in life is gotten rid of. Cemeteries are destroyed, and the works of morbid writers are destroyed. He mentioned Poe, but the other authors he named . . . Lovecraft, Bierce, Derleth, Machen. Well, basically Bradbury was telling me “Go look for these authors’ works!” And so I did. Bierce puzzled me, because the book I found had stories about the civil war and a “devil’s dictionary.” But upon closer examination, there were some outré stories. Many years later, I prepared an annotated “unabridged” edition of The Devil’s Dictionary. ©

Review | “The story is old, but the horror feels fresh“ by Mark Dery (The Washington Post)

Love to see all my favourite things mentioned in one paragraph. And the artworks (illustrations, posters and such) made by Richard Wells aka Slippery Jack are highly recommended.

Folk horror was a literary genre long before it made its screen debut. “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1835), “The Great God Pan” (1894) by Arthur Machen, “The Wendigo” by Algernon Blackwood (1910), “The Dunwich Horror” by H.P. Lovecraft (1929), “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson (1948) and “Children of the Corn” by Stephen King (1977) are all folk horror. But three films known as the “unholy trinity” established it as a cinematic genre: “Witchfinder General” (1968; based very loosely on the murderous career of the 17th-century witch hunter Matthew Hopkins), “The Blood on Satan’s Claw” (1971) and “The Wicker Man” (1973; about a pagan cult that has survived, on idyllic Summerisle, into the mod 1970s). ©

“Creative Differences” by Tad Friend (The New Yorker, August 29, 1999)

I find this old article (from 1999) about Lynch and his usual whimsical search for making his perfect artwork (Twin Peaks first, then Mulholland Drive) very telling: mind you, it was written BEFORE the actual production was finalised, meaning that the author of the piece hadn’t seen it and the only thing he knew was that (unsuccessful) attempt to make it as TV series for ABC. Quite fascinating. (Apologies for over-quoting, but it’s worth it)

In January 4th [1999—E.T.], Lynch turned in a ninety-two-page pilot script to ABC. Like much of his work, “Mulholland Drive” was conceived as an oddball film noir, opening with some gruesome deaths and then introducing an ensemble of desirable women and baffled or misshapen men. Lynch had kept many of these strange men to himself at the pitch meeting, because, he says, Krantz worried that “getting into them would blow the deal.” The most important, in the completed script, was an edgy young director named Adam, who is forced by a pair of mobsters to cast a particular actress in his new movie. (Adam appears to be a stand-in for Lynch, who is known to fear creative interference of any form. When Lynch was living with Isabella Rossellini, he refused to allow cooked food in the house, lest the smell contaminate his work.) Adam smashes up the mobsters’ limo with a 7-iron, then hops into his silver Porsche and drives home to find his wife in bed with the pool man. He pours hot-pink paint in her jewelry box, gets cuffed around by the pool man, and must eventually take counsel from an oracular cowboy.

Reading about the last Poe’s wanderings around (as if Highsmith was personally invested in this sorrowful story), I was reminded of Hart Crane’s “Forgetfulness”:

Forgetfulness is like a song

That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.

Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,

Outspread and motionless, —

A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.

Forgetfulness is rain at night,

Or an old house in a forest, — or a child.

Forgetfulness is white, — white as a blasted tree,

And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,

Or bury the Gods.

I can remember much forgetfulness. ©

And here’s Highsmith’s description of Poe’s last days:

Very interesting post by S.T. about the publication of the works of Ambrose Bierce and H. L. Mencken (Sarnath Press) and an HPL associational item (a brief ad for Lovecraft’s revisory services that appeared in the amateur journal L’Alouette (edited by Charles A. A. Parker).

Sarnath Press continues its publication of the works of Ambrose Bierce and H. L. Mencken. Volume 29 of Bierce’s Collected Essays and Journalism has just been published. I was pleased to see that my friend and colleague Michael Washburn wrote an incisive review of volume 28, which covers the years 1896–97 (https://bookandfilmglobe.com/nonfiction/ambrose-bierce-muckraker/). It was in early 1896 that William Randolph Hearst, owner of the San Francisco Examiner, sent Bierce to Washington, D.C., to lobby against a funding bill that would have granted one of the most notorious of the railroad barons, Collis P. Huntington, a virtually unlimited period of time to repay government loans [wow!—E.T.]. Bierce wrote more than 60 articles attacking Huntington and the funding bill, and it was largely through his influence that the bill failed to pass.

My edition of Mencken’s Magazine and Newspaper Work, 1929 (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DT4M2XF7) constitutes the forty-ninth volume of his Collected Essays and Journalism. It is a lively volume, as all the others are. ©