Just A Quick One . . .

RE Banned Books Week

 http://www.stabenow.com/2014/09/21/it-is-positively-unamerican-to-allow-anyone-to-tell-you-what-you-can-or-cannot-read

Excelsior! 

Strange Ululation: HP Lovecraft

Wherein the Writer discusses his Respect and Admiration for the creations of HP Lovecraft; touches on the Personal Faults of that Author, with an eye toward the Separation of Creator and what is Created; and the standard enumeration of the writer's Current Reading

My first Lovecraft was The Tomb and Other Stories. I found a very hip little paperback edition at a little book shop back in Marietta, GA - it had a super cool -cover and a keen, sinister feel to it. I had heard the author's name, so I bought it and read it at one of the comfy little reading nooks they had.

Call Samwise Gamgee, He'll Know what To Do

 I'll tell you a funny thing about Lovecraft. At some point when I get into a book I find myself deciding what the narrator sounds like in my head, and that becomes the voice I hear when I read. For example, I often hear comic novels in my sister's voice, or my mother's, or in Janeane Garofalo's. I can't read Stephen King without hearing the author himself. Audiobook narrator's often get in my head permanently - Harry Potter sounds like Jim Dale, every voice in Discworld sounds like Stephen Briggs.

And then there is reading HP Lovecraft, every word of which I hear in a voice that I did not create, a voice that is woven into the warp and woof of the writer's language. Its the creepiest, most subtle voice in the world. It scares me wonderfully.

HP Lovecraft is brilliant, strange, arcane, and vastly imaginative. He can be slippery and subtle, and utterly mysterious, then go in the opposite direction and turn up the volume on the weird until its painful. He is great at conceiving of elder gods and describing flavors of madness and arcane mysteries - human beings and relationships, not so much. He has a limited bag of tricks, and yet they get you again and again and again.

Oh, and the man pretty much created a genera. He took gothic horror, science fiction, existential literature, and New England regionalism, ran them all through his personal filters and created what he created. New in the universe, like an extraterrestrial invader whose logic and motivations are beyond our ken. The Mythos.

I started with The Tomb and Other Tales, and then it was Call of Cthulhu. Sometimes when you have deep understanding of an artist, you hate which work they are best known for by the layperson crowd. But I think that Call of Cthulhu is a fine representation of the artist. Its arcane, dark, and twisted. And when its all said and done the Great Old Ones are not defeated, but rather they are just off in the wings, waiting for the stars to line up once more so they can come and wander through the waking world once more. Call of Cthuhlu encapsulates one theme best of all - the horror of the forces beyond our comprehension interracting that can destroy us utterly without ever even knowing we exist.

Good stuff!

I love the Mythos. I am crazy about the Dream Cycle - especially The White Ship, a story that shaped not just my daydreams, but the way that I daydream. But the Mythos is as much a part of my imagination landscape as any unreal place I have ever visited - and, brothers and sisters, I have been to a few.

Before You Slip Into Unconsciousness . . .

Lovecraft's stories are so much of their time that not only do they read like ancient relics now, but I imagine readers of their time felt the same way. That is not accidental - Lovecraft carefully crafted this feel. I see it like this -  the man understands his own style. So he features hidden and secret ancient tomes throughout his Mythos stories: the Pnakotic Manuscripts, Cultes des Goules, and of course the Necronomicon. And when one of his characters finds one of these books, and starts to read it and loose his mind once faced with the unthinkable horrors they contain - well, that character is us, the readers, faced with the horrific relics Lovecraft created. The fictional manuscripts he invented, so much a part of that world, are a mirror of his creative process.
 
 Lovecraft is not everyone's taste, nor for every mood. But if you have the patience and fortitude to brave the strange worlds he has created, the reward is vast and very, very rich.

On The Other Hand . . . 

Lovecraft was a huge jerk.

Total racist, utter sexist, educational elitist. Big, huge jerk. Google "Lovecraft racist poem," I dare ya.

I remember discovering a passage in one of his stories, talking about an evil diety worshiped by "certain degenerate swamp folks." My eyes popped. I'm Irish-Creole. I, me, myself, am one of those degenerates.

Wheres the love, HP?

I do not require an artist be a saint for me to appreciate their art. If that is your requirement then your world will not have very much art, and much of it will be of the variety known as terribly bland.

So the creator doesn't need  to be a candidate for canonization for me to appreciate his work. But I do have a line.

Lots of super creative people are lunatics who you wouldn't want to spend time with. Its part of the creative package. But you draw a line. Sin beyond simple jerkdom and into the realm of the truly Evil and Uncool and I can't get into your art any more. I should say that I could, but I won't.

I give most of Lovecraft's works a pass, but not the man. He's a racist and a sexist, he looks down on the what he sees as the unimaginative rank and file of humanity - that would have included me and everyone I love, if he had ever met me. Lovecraft is like that freshman college self-styled genius misanthrope who hates on the jocks and cheerleaders and popular kids without actually knowing any of them.

I think the man was in a lot of pain. His father went mad,and the writer spent his life in fear of madness. Lovecraft is an outspoken anti-Semite, who turned around and married a Jewish woman. In my mind he is an individual in crisis.

Faced with those circumstances, a great man would have done the more difficult thing and risen above his pain and circumstance, used it to transform himself into a better person. Other artists of his era, the quote happy go lucky 1920's, did so brilliantly. But Lovecraft didn't do that.

So yeah -  not evil, but not a great man either. But what a writer.

Currently Reading

Evil Eye, by Joyce Carol Oates

During my time at Kennesaw State University, I vowed to take every 490 level Literature class they offered. A 490 level class focused on a single author. I took Shakespeare, Shakespearian Tragedy, Jane Austen, and Joyce Carol Oates. That last one was the very best of all. Joyce Carol Oates is a fantastic storyteller and craftsman, one of America's best novelists and storytellers. She is so precise its thrilling.

Okay, enough of that. Evil Eye is a collection of four stories. I am about halfway through the first eponymous one, and its great. Oates writes a lot of stories about dysfunctional relationships and quasi-dangerous men, and this one is a doozy. It has its hooks in me.

Current Audio Book

Self Inflicted Wounds, by Aisha Tyler

This book rules. I had great luck with every comedian written-and-read audiobook that I have done so far - Tina Fey's Bossypants, and Rachael Dratch's Girl Walks Into A Bar. And I love the Girl on Guy podcast, and Ms Tyler's standup, so I downloaded this one from Audible.

Self Inflicted Wounds an entirely different class of book than most comic memoirs. Self Inflicted Wounds is funny, like you would expect - often laugh out loud funny. But it is also a mission statement, a guide to life, and a alcohol fueled bildungsroman of epic scope and insight. I truly love this book, and want Aisha Tyler to be my Pai Mei.- like success, performance and home distillation coach.

Aaaaaand I Love You

I do love you. If you read my blog for whatever reason you have my love and respect. Thanks much. Until next time, be well and take care. Read and share.

Annuals, Perrinials, and Immortals

Wherein the Writer Describes his Special Relationship with certain books worthy of Re-reading, discusses such relationships in General, and Enumerates Specifics of his own Preferences 

You a big reader? Yeah, I figured.

Okay,  imagine this with me. Imagine that for every time you ever re-read a book, you instead had picked up something new. How many more books would you have read by now? Dozens? Hundreds?

Just chew that over for a minute. How many more stories would you have in your head? How many more worlds would you have visited? How many new loves, new heartbreaks, new laughs?

It doesn't matter, of course. The ones you love you revisit, I don't care who you are. Life without re-reading would be like limiting your romantic engagements to first dates only. Kind of.

I am a big re-reader. The biggest barrier to me being as well read as I would like is my going back to certain books constantly.

There are some books that I revisit so often that I have created categories for them in my mind: Annuals, Perennials, and Immortals.

Here is how I break them down, in my mind:

Annuals

I never realized that I had a real Annual list until New Year's Day, 2012. I woke up with a wicked hangover. I had an Alka-Seltzer, made coffee, then got back in bed. When the missus, similarly afflicted, woke up, I suggested that we just stay in bed and get into one of our most frequently watched movies, Tropical Thunder. "After all," I said, goofing, "we haven't seen it since last year."

Ba-dum-dum-TING!

Lying in bed watching one of our favorite comedies was a great way to spend the morning, so we went ahead and queued up all of the other favorites we watch all a time but had not, wink wink, yet watched in 2012. Oh Brother, Where Are Thou?, The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack, Monty Python's Holy Grail.

While we watched I broke out my notebook, now interested in all of the "once a year" things I'm into. I actually have a special box of once a year CDs, albums that I rarely listen to but like to check out once in a while.

(Just re read the above - am I obsessive? I don't feel obsessive).


Right now my annual list looks like this:

Lonesome Dove, although I stop before my favorite character dies.
Catch 22
Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrel, although I often start with Part II and one year I just read all of the bits about Stephen Black
The Diamond Age

Perennials

A Perennial is a book that I am always reading. 

Dune is my chief perennial. I have three copies of Dune in my home plus a less than satisfactory full cast audiobook. If I see it lying around and I'm not doing anything, I pick it up and read a bit, starting wherever my finger falls. One of my copies of Dune is so broken in that it automatically opens to one of my favorite bits - much like Dr. Yueh's copy of the OC bible.

"I'm Dean Stockwell and I approved this reference."

My newest Perennial is Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. I listened to the audiobook, fell in love (narrated by Will Wheaton!), and now I listen to it when I've got blues that need chasing away.

Likewise there are books placed strategically around my house for my constant perusal: Hannibal, The AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, my many HP Lovecraft collections. I can open them at any time and go right back in, no muss, no fuss.

Immortals

Okay, I admit that looks a bit grandiloquent there on my blog. But lets face it - there are some books that are truly Immortal, and you treat them differently than other works.

For example: The Fellowship of the Ring. If I get it in my head to read The Lord of the Ring's series again its not like picking up my copy of Dune once again and once again opening up to the scene where the Emperor introduces Baron Harkonen to his granddaughter, or flipping to to the part in Catch-22 where Yossarian gets the shit bombed out of him.

The Fellowship . . . that is something different. I take a re-read of The Trillogy seriously. I make special time for it. I don't go out for a cup of coffee with my book . . . I take Tolken. I am reading Tolken, it is a thing that is currently happening in my life. An event. 

The last time I did the whole series was just before Peter Jackson's first adaptation came out. You don't just want to jump right in to a movie take of a favorite series without reading it again, so you can add to the clamor of voices screaming about how you would have done it differently (NB - I thought the first movie trillogy rocked. The Hobbit movies are breaking my heart a bit, although Smaug is truly awesome when he isn't busy getting defeated by a giant gold jello mold some dwarves threw together in, like, four minutes).

"Shyeah, right!" "As if!"

Other Immortals: The Art of War, Stephen King's Christine (Oh, really? Its the classic American horror novel. Come at me bro!),The Tao De Ching, Middlemarch.

And that's it for this week. Good reading!

Why You Should Stop Hating on Mysteries with Cat Detectives

And by "you" I mean "me".

Hello all! Another quick one - sorry, I am guilty of horrible blog neglect but I suddenly have a lot of freelance work that is keeping me on the move. Spending two hours in a given week writing a good blog post has been out of the question. But I shall return - I have SO MANY BOOKS I want to tell you about!

Anyway, this is a great article from Salon that I hope everyone who loves to read checks out. Stop bashing other people's literary taste!

Currently Reading: Okay, I did a lot of books from the library in  a row but I am going to try to get back on mission. And in that spirit I am going to tackle one of my literary road blocks . . . John Updike! Details as they come.

Bonum lectionem!

Just saw this, loved it, sharing it

A great quote:

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. -Francis Bacon, essayist, philosopher, and statesman (1561-1626) 

Right??

Currently Reading:

HP Lovecraft and Others: Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

So remember my, heh heh, plan to read all the books in the house that we moved here from Athens? Ah, how young and innocent that seems now. What a dreamer!

You see, two weeks ago I got my Massachusetts drivers license. Which meant I could get my Salem Public Library Card.

Did I mention that the Salem Public Library is beautiful, decently stocked, and a ten minute walk from the house?

So consider my plan to read all the books we humped up here from Georgia derailed. Temporarily, at least. What can I say? I've been to the library almost every day since I got my card. I picked up a few How To books to help me with my job search, caught up on a few comic book characters with some wonderful graphic novels, and took out a good night time reads to help make October extra spooky.

My only complaint about the Salem Public Library that it is uncharacteristically loud - you actually have to go and sit on the floor in the stacks to find a quiet spot to read. But other than that its great, and a huge comfort to me right now while I'm dealing with some very sad issues in my little family.

So I am currently doing Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. This is a collection of short stories that all connect (at least tangentially, or thematically in some cases) with HP Lovecraft's famous horror mythos, centered on Yog-Sothoth and his wonderfully awful cosmic compadres. A gent I met recomended a story to me, The Return of the Lloigor by Colin Wilson. I have had a lot of bad luck with writers wandering into HPL's territory in the past, but this particular story is fantastic.

The key feature of the story is a scholar who develops an obsession with the Voynich manuscript, which leads him on a dark adventure and a terrifying discovery about the nature of man. Great stuff. And, as it turns out, the Voynich manuscript is a real thing. So when Wilson has his scholar adventurer discover the connection between the author H.P. Lovecraft's 'fictional' Necronomicon, and this real world mystery, it gives the narrative a sublime meta-textual layer. Its right out of the Lovecraft playbook and I love this story for it. 

And what a great read for the Halloween season here in Salem!

And that is all for me today on this sad Wednesday.

Happy Halloween all!

Ank-Morpork State Of Mind, Pt. 1

Wherein the Writer talks about his Fascination with and Respect Of the creations of Sir Terry Pratchett, Recounts his first Experience with said creations, Touches briefly on Fan Fiction, and lists his Current Reading material

Discworld, world and mirror of worlds

One evening in the early days of courting my wife, I told her about my current writing project: an epic level FRPG supplement that took place inside of a giant turtle floating through space. 

"Oh, you mean like Discworld?" she said?

"What?" I said.

Before Offler, Blind Io, and Annoya, I swear I had never heard of the Discworld before the day my wife-to-be told me about Great A'Tuin. Even as I type those words I realize that I do not believe myself. Me - hardcore gamer, serious reader, fantasy fan . . . and I hadn't even had a whiff of Sir Terry before 2005? Yeah right.

(But I swear its true. I stole the turtle idea from two sources - the video game Gauntlet, where you cross onto one board which is on the back of a giant turtle, and the famous "turtles all the way down" anecdote from Stephen Hawking.)

If you are going to steal, best steal from a genius in a wheelchair who has zero chance of kicking your ass.

That year, I tried three different Terry Pratchett books in a mad attempt to catch up with my wife-to-be on the reading front (file that little notion under Keep Dreaming). I tried Color of Magic and Light Fantastic - I didn't really get any traction. They were fun, they had some memorable characters and some extremely funny language and reveals, but I didn't "get" Pratchett right off. I was actually a little offended in places, being a long time fantasy reader (not to mention D and D kid). I felt like Pratchett was savaging a genre I truly cared about.

And then I tried Small Gods.

 Now, years and years and stories and stories later, I think I can actually put my finger on why I didn't get Discworld right away. Light Fantastic and Color of Magic have a built in problem - your main character is Rincewind, a determinately cowardly and selfish character. When he takes Twflower's gold and tries to flee the city in a brilliantly funny reveal in the The Color of Magic I just shook my head.

Axiom: It is difficult to support a character who you perceive as a lesser person than yourself. Rincewind eventually evolves into someone you actually like, but at first I found him a bit despicable and that made it hard to fall in love with the Discworld.

But Small Gods rocked my world.  

For the uninitiated, Small Gods tells the story of Om, a deity who decides to manifest himself in the Discworld, only to find himself a small, powerless, and very mortal turtle. Om discovers he can only communicate with Brutha, a kind of idiot savant that possesses a simple and heartfelt faith - he is the only member of the Omnian religion that actually believes. Om, angry and powerless, has to claw his way back to divinity.

Pow! Pratchett fan for life.

Small Gods is outside of the major continuity of the Discworld stories, but it encapsulates everything great and wonderful about that world, and mirror of worlds. Here is a great quote I lifted from Wikipedia:

Australian author Jack Heath described the book as "one of the 20th century’s finest satires," and added that "the gods are pompous, the worshippers cowed, and the priests violently closed-minded. Yet the tale is never heavy-handed, thanks to Brutha’s sincerity and some deftly comical plot twists, as well as all the levity that comes from picturing an angry God trapped in the body of a tortoise."

Mr. Heath nailed it, and just added himself to authors I have to read.

The Discworld books are social satire through and through, and if they were just that I wouldn't be very interested. But they are also laugh-out-loud funny. And they have brilliantly written characters - main characters and background characters in the wonderful hundreds. Add all of this to the coolest fantasy setting ever conceived by man and you have a wonderfully addictive gumbo of storytelling. 

As the Discworld series evolves you see a kind of wonderful gentleness towards the subject of Pratchett's satire, a really well balanced tone that speaks of a deep understanding of the reality of the human experience. Its rare to find a satirist who can come across as both deeply critical and deeply caring of his subject like Pratchett.

If You Have Not Read The Discworld Books

 . . . you should. Seriously, if you like fantasy, if you like satire, if you just like a great comic novel try them out. You could do worse than beginning with Small Gods, but to the newcomer I recommend Guards! Guards! - the Night Watch stories really tie the whole world together, and introduce you to some of the most compelling characters on the Disc.

Currently Reading

Rosemary's Baby

A friend of mine who used to live in Salem hooked us up with The Horrible Book Club, a horror novel discussion group, and last week we attended our first meeting at downtown Salem's venerable Old Spot. Our first book was Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin. First rate horror story! The missus and I argued it all to death before we even met with the group - could all the events be taking place just inside Rosemary's head, a la Turn of the Screw? Did the cult have real power, or were the events just confirmation bias? Once we met up with the crew the discussion got even better (and much, much funnier!), and a jolly time was had by all.

KK, I am now going to post the concluions I walked away from the group meeting with. SPOILERS!

My conclusion, carefully considered: Rosemary's Baby is an excellent novel of horror and suspense. The cult really does have magical power, and that power nudged (and drugged) Rosemary along into all of her increasingly bad decisions. She was raped by her husband, and her "oh well, la di day" reaction seems shockingly blasé to a modern reader, but I think its speaks volumes about the "enlightened" sixties, and how far those fools had to go.

 One last thing: At The Old Spot, I had my first Narragansett Lager which was a wonderful surprise - all my life I had thought Narragansett was a made-up beer invented by Steven King. Nope, its a real thing. Its kind of like a PBR with a Yankee stammer.

Current Audiobook

Save Yourself by Kelly Braffet


Grim. This is a dark book so far (I'm only a few hours in), but I am enjoying it. Somehow I thought it was a story of supernatural horror, but as of my last reading it's shaping up to be perhaps a kind of thriller? My mistake is giving me the chance to watch the book unfold without any preconception of what it might, ultimately, be about. That's a nice place to be in!

I am really enjoying the journey so I am avoiding reviews and spoilers. Looking forward to seeing where Kelly Braffet takes me.

Enough about Me . . . 

What are You reading? 

Moonage Bookdream!

David Bowie, one of the all time great pop artists and cultural trend setters and one of my personal heroes, has published a list of his top 100 books.

So, what are you waiting for?

Bowie's Top 100 Books

For the record, I have read exactly five of these. As of this moment, that is.