fear and hp lovecraft

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is Fear of the Unknown. – H.P. Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft was the forefather of modern horror fiction. His guiding literary principle was what he termed “cosmic horror”, the idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally alien. Lovecraft’s protagonists usually achieve the antithesis of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality and the abyss. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity.

But what led an Old World, xenophobic gentleman to create one of literature’s most far-reaching mythologies?

LOVECRAFT: FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN is a documentary that chronicles the life, work and mind of the man. I haven’t watched the whole thing yet because, to be honest, it’s been a long day and Lovecraft just doesn’t sit well with long days.

daughters of shiloh

Laura Jean Puckett was fourteen years old when Angus Mullins walked up to her and asked “Where’s your shoes?” She was playing a child’s game on a child’s bench outside her parent’s boarding house. And it was the first time she had ever met the short man in the newsboy cap who smelled like he’d just been delivered from the side of a still.

“I ain’t got none,” is what she said.

“Well,” said Angus, “I’m gonna buy you some. Then I’m gonna marry you.”

And that’s exactly what he did.

He said he had already asked her father, which was all a man needed to do in a holler in West Virginia in 1922. So right then and there, when 24 year old Angus met 14 year old Laura, he took her by her arm and he took her away and she never thought a thing about it for sixty years.

a little flesh. a little breath. aurelius.

I love the writings of Marcus Aurelius. Even my mother, not a fan of stoicism, calls him heavy. I own four copies of his meditations and can’t really justify buying another. But I’m tempted because The Puffin is doing beautiful things with paperbacks these days.

and in the end, despair

“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.” – C.S. Lewis

Yesterday was the first day I ever thought it. Something horrible.

She knew. She must have known.

We never spoke about it. Just didn’t seem the thing. Out of respect? That’s what we told ourselves. Denial? Some of us did that too. We never said its name.

But maybe she wanted to. Maybe she needed to. Maybe we were the ones who couldn’t cope so we told ourselves she couldn’t either.

Where’s the comfort in that?

malcolm gladwell. advice to writers.

Malcolm Gladwell on The Big Think: This I think is true, not just of writers, but of anyone who is in a creative space, that you have to reverse the normal human tendency, which is to edit. So a lot of… and occasionally this is, I think, a source of a great deal of frustration that exists between people in creative and non-creative universes, which is that creative people I think are trying to… their lives and their brains, their brains are messy. Their imaginations are messy. Why, because they don’t want to throw anything out. Why don’t they want to throw anything out? Because they believe on some level that there is always something of interest or value in whatever they encounter. They know enough about how mysterious and serendipitous and unpredictable the creative process is that they realize that it’s dangerous to kind of make too hasty a judgment about the value of anything that they come across.

People in non-creative universes have exactly the opposite relationship to information—or to experiences is a better way of putting it. They’ll see something and they’ll say “Is it relevant to what I’m doing?” And if it’s not they should push it aside and focus on what they’re kind of task is. If you’re at Proctor & Gamble and you’re the head of Ivory soap you’re job is to sell more soap and if you get distracted by some interesting, but ultimately marginal subsidiary issue you won’t sell as much soap. And that is an extreme example, but that’s a world that demands focus. If you’re a surgeon and you’re operating you cannot let your imagination wander about some idiosyncrasy of the operation. You have to kind of zero in. So I think that is a kind of… That embracing of messiness and understanding its contribution to the creative process is something that writers and creative types, artists, whatever have got to cultivate, have to learn to be comfortable with. Because it goes against a lot of our kind of instincts and training as kind of educated people. December 16, 2010

saroyanesque

Try to learn to breathe deeply; really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell.

- William Saroyan, Advice to a Young Writer

On Christmas Eve I received a parcel from California. There was no name on it and I didn’t recognize the address. Inside was “The Whole Voyald and Other Short Stories” by William Saroyan, 1956, First Edition, Little Brown and Co. The sender included no note, just a holiday postcard postmarked December, 1919.

I’m very touched by every bit of it – the book, the mystery, the little card addressed simply to Miss Clara Durham, Whitehall, Mich. She doesn’t own to it, but Saroyan was a contemporary of Fante and speaks to me of Flynn. It’s possible, but it’d be a tremendous coincidence if it were from anyone else.

Saroyan was an Armenian-American dramatist and author from Fresno, California. His stories celebrated optimism in the midst of the trials and tribulations of the Depression, although his approach to autobiographical fact contained a fair bit of poetic license. Saroyan endeavored to create a prose style full of zest for life and seemingly impressionistic, that came to be called “Saroyanesque”.

mark twain. the trilogy.

The more things are forbidden, the more popular they become. – Mark Twain

There’s a photo of me unwrapping Christmas presents, hands to head, squealing in excitement. I remember being tickled to death at my gifts but if The Euro had not caught it on camera I would have sworn he exaggerated. In addition to a new “Christmas Carol” illustrated by Coralie Bickford-Smith, there was Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom”, Roberto Bolano’s “2666″ – which I can never manage to check out from the library long enough to finish – and “The Autobiography of Mark Twain” (Volume I).

For the few earthly individuals who don’t already know, when Mark Twain died in 1910 he left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs together with a handwritten note not to publish them for at least a century. The Manuscripts have been held in a vault at the University of California, Berkley, and until now only academics, biographers, and members of the public prepared to travel to the university’s Bancroft research library have been able to read it in full. The first volume was released in November and most bookstores, Amazon included, sold out as soon as.

Scholars are divided as to why Twain wanted 100 years between himself and his memoirs. Some believe he wanted to talk freely about his views on politics and religions. Others, that he didn’t want to offend any of his friends. And still others, that he liked the drama of it all and didn’t want us to forget him. “When people ask me,” said Robert Hirst, who is leading the team at Berkeley editing the complete text, “‘did Mark Twain really mean it to take 100 years for this to come out’, I say ‘he was certainly a man who knew how to make people want to buy a book’.”

The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words.