Changes and apologies

Hey, crowd.

Just wanted to drop a brief note to reassure you that you’re not going crazy (probably), I have changed around the theme of the blog significantly. While I liked the old skin, it had two problems that annoyed the web designer in me: a fixed-width layout and a sans-serif font scheme, both of which are no-nos when you’re trying to design a site for readability. My thanks go out to Stefan Nagtegaal and Steven Wittens, designers of the Garland WordPress theme that I’ve adopted and modified into what you see here.

Second, I apologize for letting myself go so long without adding a new Lovecraft review. I haven’t forgotten about it, but other things have distracted me enough to keep me from my self-appointed task. I’m not going to put my foot in it again by promising to have the next piece up by a specific date, but I certainly hope it will be sooner rather than later, and that I can keep to a less punctuated schedule from here on out.

Caverns of Dream Errata: Merry Christmas to All

The cottage hearth beams warm and bright,
     The candles gaily glow;
The stars emit a kinder light
     Above the drifted snow.

Down from the sky a magic steals
     To glad the passing year,
And belfries sing with joyous peals,
     For Christmastide is here!

– H.P. Lovecraft, “Christmastide”

Sorry I’ve been so slow with the updates, but I did warn you back at the start. In any case, I still need to get cracking on “Dagon,” which I’ll hopefully be able to do during my holiday break. In the meantime, I figured I’d tide you over with one of Lovecraft’s holiday-themed poems, seen above. And while I may not technically consider myself Christian, I can’t help but get into an atheistic holiday spirit. Woo!

Besides, I love Christmas songs, and I only get one month a year to publicly indulge in them. I especially like Christmas carols concerning nameless horrors that Man Was Not Meant to Know™. Like, for instance, this one, courtesy of YouTube and the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s A Very Scary Solstice album:

In all seriousness, check out the HPLHS. They’re good people, and they do excellent work. They did a truly amazing silent film rendition of The Call of Cthulhu and are working on an early-1930s-style film version of The Whisperer in Darkness. Plus, they’ve done a number of period-style radio dramas based on Lovecraft’s stories, including At the Mountains of Madness, The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow Out of Time, and, most recently, The Shadow Over Innsmouth. If you liked the above song, they’ve got the lyrics and a free downloadable MP3 available here.

My electoral college is a party school

Today is the day that members of the United States Electoral College meet to cast their votes for president. That means that, barring an upset of unprecedented and earth-shaking proportions, today is the day that Barack Obama officially becomes president-elect, and Joe Biden officially becomes vice president-elect.

I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for a electoral upset, but in case you are interested, may I suggest Wikipedia’s excellent articles on both the Electoral Collage itself (did you know that the Constitution forbids electors from holding federal office?), and faithless electors (electors who don’t vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged). Faithless electors are rare, but not unprecedented: one of Washington, DC’s electors abstained from casting her ballot in 2000 in protest against DC’s “colonial” status, and a rogue Nixon-pledged elector in 1972 cast the first ever electoral vote for a woman (Theodora Nathan, vice-presidential candidate on the Libertarian Party ticket, in case you were wondering).

An unfortunate victim of Pac-Man fever

Courtesy of FARK.com and Kotaku, here’s something I don’t know how to react to:

Tattoos on BodyMod.org

I mean, on one hand, it’s actually a pretty good tattoo, even if (as someone on Kotaku pointed out) it’s not clear how there can be uneaten dots behind Ms. Pac-Man. On the other hand, tattoos freak me out in principle, and head tattoos doubly so. I’ll assume that the unfortunate-looking bruising and rash surrounding the ink will fade over time, and it looks like the subject (AileenFritz, apparently) has her hair pulled back for illustrative purposes and that the tattoo would normally be at least partially covered. But, even so, as much as I enjoy Ms. Pac-Man, I can’t see myself mutilating my forehead to express that love to the world.

On the other hand, I couldn’t if I wanted to: my diabetes-weakened immune system ensures that no reputable tattoo artist would agree to tattoo me if I bothered to ask. So I’m hardly the best person to ask when it comes to tattoos.

Caverns of Dream: The Tomb

“It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience.”

Jervas Dudley is a introverted, imaginative young man who, from an early age, has been fascinated by an abandoned crypt near his home. The crypt once belonged to the Hyde family, whose old mansion was destroyed centuries ago in a fire. Eventually, Jervas finds the key to the old crypt and spends much of his time there, and his personality changes rapidly as he adopts numerous habits and eccentricities of a bygone age. One day he explores the ruins of the old Hyde mansion basement, where he experiences a vision of a party hosted by Jervas Hyde two centuries earlier. The party, and the vision, ends horribly as a lightning strike burns the mansion to the ground, killing Jervas Hyde and destroying his body. The vision concluded, Jervas Dudley’s father has his son institutionalized, insisting that the Hyde family crypt has been untouched for half a century. A faithful family servant, though, assures Jervas that his vision of an unoccupied grave in the Hyde family tomb is real, and Jervas Dudley vows that he shall be buried within it.

Written in 1917 and published nearly five years later, “The Tomb” is an odd little piece. As with the best of Lovecraft’s work, it raises more questions than it answers. Unlike, say, The Call of Cthulhu or At the Mountains of Madness, however, the narrative itself feels somewhat disjointed. For me, though, the biggest problem is that the narrator and protagonist, Jervas Dudley, doesn’t so much descend into madness as plummet headlong into it, without much buildup or rationale.

Clearly, Jervas Dudley is mad, but it’s not clear how much of his experiences in the tomb and the destroyed basement are real, and how much are his delusions. The postscript where Jervas’s loyal servant confirms his visions muddies the waters further. Presumably, then, Jervas Dudley has some sort of psychic connection to Jervas Hyde, and this seems to be confirmed by the suggestion that the former’s personality is gradually supplanted by the latter. All of this is well and good, and presages, in some respects, later Lovecraft work like The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. The problem is, what’s the point of it all? What does Jervas Hyde want, if anything? Is there anything other than “pitiful monomania” behind Jervas Dudley’s obsession? The story feels rather slight and inconsequential, which seems at odds with the portentious language that is Lovecraft’s trademark. If anything, some of the language employed here is even more over-the-top than I expected from Lovecraft.

On the other hand, if the language is overwrought in places, it does result in some lovely images. The eponymous crypt is memorably described as “the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets,” for instance. And there’s several pieces of “Eighteenth Century bacchanalian mirth,” or, if you prefer, drinking songs.

By no means one of Lovecraft’s better works, “The Tomb” isn’t exactly bad, so much as disposable. But we’re still dealing with his early material, and the best is yet to come.

A failure to communicate, or Darkftar Rifing

I don’t use eBay very often. Once or twice a year, at most. I don’t have the patience to get into bidding wars, and on the few recent occasions I have dipped my toes in, I’ve wound up with an acute case of buyer’s remorse: I wound up with a Nintendo Wii that I didn’t particularly want last January because I placed a bid that I didn’t expect would actually win the auction. That’s nobody’s fault but my own, of course, but it illustrates why I generally pay little attention to online auctions.

With the holiday season here, however, and my finances tighter than usual, I figured I’d dust off my old account and see if I could locate a few deals in order to check some people off my gift list. I logged into to my old account (after several failed attempts at remembering my old username/password combo), and immediately noticed that the e-mail address I had on file was defunct. For going on three years. No problem, I thought, I’ll just update it and be on my merry way.

Not so fast! Apparently, eBay thought my e-mail address was too similar to my user name (seancdaug), and wouldn’t let me proceed. So I changed my user name by tacking on my birth year, which is what I’ve done for a few other sites (seancdaug1981). What eBay’s errors messages didn’t tell me, however, was that this was still too similar to my e-mail address. Only now, I was at an impasse: eBay only allows user names to be changed once a month, and if I waited that long to update my e-mail, I’d miss the holidays entirely.

So I had the choice of setting up a sock puppet e-mail address for the express purpose of receiving eBay announcements, or phoning eBay’s customer support and getting them to resolve the issue. I chose the latter, and eventually got through to a helpful woman who did manage to resolve the problem, after a fashion.

The problem is, she had a pronounced accent, and I’m apparently not as clear over the phone as I’d like to think that I am. The solution we devised was to have her manually change my user name, after which I would (at last) be able to update my e-mail address. In search of a suitable name, I went with my secondary fallback, “wildfire-darkstar.” Only she didn’t hear “wildfire-darkstar,” even after a somewhat humorous spelling attempts (”fish indigo rose epsilon,” and so forth). And so, for at least the next 30 days, I shall be known to eBay merchants and bargain hunters as “wildfire-darkftar”! I can’t help but think of the pre-1800 tendency to typeset “f” in place of “s” (e.g., “Congreff” instead of “Congress”).

Honestly, I’m more amused by anything else. As I said, I don’t use eBay often enough to care whether or not my user name makes any logical sense, and the most important thing was to get my e-mail address working properly. And the support woman was, despite our communications problem, so helpful and conscientious that I didn’t have the heart to inform her of the typo. The only real complaint I have is that eBay should’ve made it more clear in their account management interface how dissimilar the user name and password needed to be.

Caverns of Dream: The Alchemist

“May ne’er a noble of thy murd’rous line
Survive to reach a greater age than thine!”

In medieval France, a count wrongfully kills an elderly wizard for the kidnapping of his son. The wizard’s surviving son, Charles Le Sorcier, subsequently curses the count and his descendants for his action. Centuries later, twenty-one year-old Antoine, the last surviving descendant of the accursed count, discovers that he is doomed by the curse to die shortly after his thirty second birthday.

Determined to make the last eleven years of his life worthwhile, Antoine spends his days studying black magic and exploring the ruins of his family’s ancestral castle. One week before his predestined death, he comes upon an ancient tunnel in the foundations of the castle, where he discovers an elderly man who threatens to fulfill the curse by killing Antoine. Defending himself, Antoine throws his torch at the man, setting him aflame, and ending the curse once and for all.

Written in 1908, when Lovecraft was eighteen, this is his first extant work of supernatural horror. It’s rough in a number of respects, of course. Most notably, the showdown between Antoine and the alchemist is goofy, James Bond-style villainy, with the alchemist stopping to explain his oh-so-nasty plans to Antoine. I’m also left feeling that I’m supposed to be shocked, or at least surprised, by the final line, revealing the identity of the sinister alchemist. The problem is that the revelation was strongly signposted during the first encounter a page and a half earlier. Perhaps I am being a bit too harsh, though: I have the benefit of experience with a century’s worth of horror storytelling that makes this kind of surprise familiar to me. Even so, it’s not a hugely impressive denouement.

On a more positive note, this story definitely showcases Lovecraft’s emerging skill at establishing mood. The ancient, rotting castle is almost a character in its own right, and it’s described in almost loving detail. There’s a palpable sense of loneliness and isolation running throughout the narrative, as Antoine is at first prevented from seeking the company of others, and later chooses to fully isolate himself to ensure that the curse dies with him. If the plot itself isn’t much to talk about, the atmosphere certainly deserves a mention.

All in all, “The Alchemist” is clearly the work of a young Lovecraft, still trying to find his rhythm. But for a freshman effort, it’s an impressive work.

Out-bop the buzzard and the Oriole

My honorary hometown baseball team, the Baltimore Orioles, have just announced that they’re changing their road jerseys to read “Baltimore” on the front for the first time since 1972. The jerseys previously read “Orioles,” since the franchise considered parts of southern Pennsylvania, Delaware, Washington, D.C., and Virginia their hometown market in addition to Baltimore and its Maryland environs. I’m pretty sure it’s no coincidence that the last time they dropped the “Baltimore” name from the jersey was in 1972, immediately after the second and final Washington Senators team relocated to Texas following the 1971 season. Now that the Washington Nationals are on the stage, I guess that competing for DC metro area fans is no longer as important as it once was to Orioles owner Peter Angelos.

There’s a bit of a history between Baltimore and Washington regarding the baseball team issue. Traditionally both cities have been considered to be part of the same baseball market, and since 1972 the Orioles had zealously guarded their exclusive rights to that market. This naturally annoyed many DC residents and old-timer Senators fans, who remembered that the owners of the original Washington Senators waived their exclusive rights to the region to allow the St. Louis Browns to relocate to Baltimore in 1954. During the various MLB expansions during the 1990s Washington was always at the top of the list of cities to receive a new team, and it was always scuttled by the Orioles office.

When it became clear that the Montreal Expos weren’t going to be able to stay in Montreal, Angelos announced his opposition to a proposed move to DC. MLB commissioner Bud Selig obligingly did everything in his power to prevent the move. First, there was lots of talk about how cruelly inappropriate it was to “steal” a team away from its hometown (not, of course, that this stopped St. Louis from losing the Browns, or Washington from losing two teams in ten years), even when it was clear that the hometown wasn’t actually interested enough to buy tickets. Then, there was talk about moving the Expos to Puerto Rico: during the teams last two seasons as the Expos, in fact, they were treated as a dual hometown team, playing half of their home games in Montreal at Olympic Stadium, and the other half in San Juan at Hiram Bithorn Stadium. It was clear, though, that San Juan was not as lucrative a market as Washington, and so the next idea was contraction: dissolve the Expos outright, along with one other team (either the Minnesota Twins or the Tampa Bay Devil Rays) thrown in so as not to be too blatantly obvious. Never mind that this new idea was in open contradiction of the League’s earlier horror at depriving a city of its hometown team, mind you. Anything to keep the Orioles front office happy, I guess.

Eventually, though, they ran out of excuses. The League gave up and bought off Angelos, and the Expos moved to Washington as the Nationals. The Orioles and the Nationals even have a joint broadcasting venture, the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN), which broadcasts all of the games of both the Orioles and the Nationals. MASN is, of course, majority-owned by the Orioles, and the network has a slight, but noticeable, bias towards the Baltimore team.

So I hope that this decision to redesign the away jerseys to emphasize the Orioles’ status as the home team of Baltimore is part of a broader effort to get over their sour grapes regarding the fact that they’re not the only player in town any more. New York gets along just fine with two teams, after all, and the combined Baltimore-Washington market is plenty big enough for both the Nats and the O’s. My father is still a proud season ticket holder for the Orioles, despite have fond memories of the old Senators teams from his childhood. I don’t hate the Orioles by any means, but I wish there was more of a “live and let live” attitude there.

Caverns of Dream: “The Mystery of the Grave-Yard” and “The Secret Cave”

Like “The Little Glass Bottle,” both “The Mystery of the Grave-Yard” and “The Secret Cave (or, John Lee’s Adventure)” were written by Lovecraft some time in 1898. Again, I don’t think it’d be right to offer scathing literary criticism of the work of an eight year old, so don’t think of this an actual review, so much as my brief thoughts and reflections.

One day a young man rushed in and exclaimed “The secret Is revealed!” and was gone.

“The Mystery of the Grave-Yard” is clearly inspired by Victorian-era detective fiction like Sherlock Holmes. The hero of the story, named King John, is a detective called in to investigate the disappearance of Mr. Dobson. Dobson disappeared during the funeral of a Joseph Burns while following the late Mr. Burns’s instructions to descend into the tomb before interrment and drop a ball onto a spot marked “A.” After a John Bell appears to demand ransom for the return of Dobson, King John arrests him and and his accomplice. At the trial, Dobson makes his dramatic reappearance, having escaped from his prison by making a wax impression of the key (and thereby doing a respectable McGuyver impersonation a good eighty years before anyone had even heard of McGuyver). Dobson reveals the mastermind of his kidnapping, Francis Burns, the brother of the late Joseph Burns, both of whom had plotted to do harm to Dobson for years for reasons unrevealed. The villains are punished, King John marries Dobson’s daughter, and the rest live happily ever after.

Truth be told, I had a hard time following this little tale, and I suspect few people actually managed to make sense of the above summary. But it’s definitely an ambitious little story, and shows how clever and imaginative Lovecraft was even at this young age. As I mentioned above, there’s a definite Sherlock Holmes vibe to the story, and it shows an affinity for the pulp fiction Lovecraft would later make his name writing. We still haven’t gotten any real horror fiction from him, but the appearance of the titular “grave-yard” is a good sign.

“Now be good children” Said Mrs. Lee “While I am away & dont get into mischief”

Next up is “The Secret Cave,” another pulpish adventure story from grade-school-age Lovecraft. Mr. and Mrs. Lee go out on the town and leave their two children, the ten year old John and the two year old Alice, to amuse themselves. John and Alice find a hidden passage in their cellar and decide to go exploring. In the passage, they find a mysterious sealed box, a boat, and an obstacle. Too curious for his own good, John removes the obstacle and unleashes a torrent of water that drowns his sister and almost drowns him. To show that the universe isn’t wholly without pity, however, John opens the sealed box after Alice’s funeral and finds a chunk of gold worth $10,000 “enough to pay for anything but the death of his sister.”

Well, “The Secret Cave” is certainly easier to follow than “The Mystery of the Grave-Yard,” but, wow, is that ending dark or what? The “box full of money” ending is essentially the same twist as we saw in “The Little Glass Bottle.” In both cases, the money is insufficient to fully offset the loss incurred obtaining it, even if it does take a bit of the edge off. It’s a bit morbid, but it’s not horror.

Incidentally (and apropos of nothing), I was curious enough at the $10,000 figure to go and do a calculation regarding the comparative purchasing power of $10,000 in 1898 and today. Apparently, $10,000 in 1898 money is equivalent to $257,888.06 in 2007 (which is the latest year available for the calculations at Measuring Worth).

Well, that concludes our brief look at Lovecraft’s “juvenilia.” It took me longer than it should have, and I suspect it wasn’t all that interesting to read my non-reviews. Next up I’ll be looking at “The Alchemist,” written in 1908, and the gloves are coming off. I’m looking forward to it, and I hope to have my review up by the end of the week.

I Baracked the Vote

Sorry, no Lovecraft review today: things have been a bit hectic. I spent most of my morning in line at my local elementary school to cast my vote. This was by far the longest time I’ve ever spent waiting to vote, but, then again, it’s the first time I’ve voted in Prince George’s County. Maybe people are just more politically motivated here.

Not much else to say, really. I expect most of you can tell from the post title who received my vote for president. Other than that, if you’re an American citizen, registered to vote, and you haven’t done so yet, what are you waiting for? Hurry up and get out there: you’ve only got a few hours left!