I should know by now not to make any promises regarding regular updates to my blog. They always end up making me look like a liar. I know I never got around to writing about my gardening adventure, and I doubt that I ever will work up the motivation to do so now. The short story is that it went about as well as you would expect a city boy’s first-ever attempt at producing a garden plot to go. In other words, it was… somewhat less than spectacular. Even worse, I ended up moving away during the early summer, leaving my corn, beans, peas, and berries untended for over a month. A lot of things ended up growing in my garden, but relatively little of it was what I had originally planted. I’m not giving up, mind you, but I suspect I’m going to try for a less ambitious approach next year, probably with a smaller planter I can keep on my apartment patio. But more on that in the coming months.
The benefit of a low-key blog such as this is that no one seems to care that I struggle to post at least twice a year, because nobody really reads it to begin with. And since the WordPress account costs nothing, I’m free to leave it alone, collecting dust, until the urge to clean it up and try again takes hold of me. My plan, then, is this: I intend to make thrice-weekly postings (at minimum) to this blog until the end of December 2008. After that, I will decide where I stand, and whether or not I have any real interest in keeping this up as a going concern. By then, I hope I will have a better idea of whether or not my writing serves as a catharsis for me, and if it matters to me that I don’t have any regular readers (assuming that remains true through December). So consider this a rebirth, of sorts. A blog of the living dead, if you will.
And on the subject of rebirth and ghouls, I will awkwardly segue into the other thing I wanted to talk about today. In the past few weeks, I’ve gotten back into reading my collections of the short stories of H.P. Lovecraft. I don’t have much to say about Lovecraft himself that others haven’t already said at great length: he’s probably the progenitor of the modern horror story, and the cosmology and (anti-)mythology he constructed through two decades of short stories continues on through the work of those he inspired. I just finished rereading my favorite of his stories, The Shadow Out of Time, and it manages to cram in as many ideas in its 100 pages than many books five times as long ever manage. It’s getting a bit late to plan a Halloween costume, but I’m seriously considering putting together a quick-and-dirty Great Race of Yith outfit. Or a flying polyp. The only problem is, I’d have to explain it to most people before they’d understand it. Frankenstein never had that problem….
For those unfamiliar with the story, the Great Race originally hailed from a long-lost and forgotten planet from aeons before the creation of the earth. When their home planet began to wither and die, they used their immense psychic powers to cast their minds out to our world, taking refuge en masse in the brains of a race of “tall and cone-shaped” beings, “rising to a point with four strange appendages – two terminating in claws, a third in a ‘trumpet,’ and the fourth, a yellow globe which functioned as a sensory organ” that evolved during the early Triassic period. From these new bodies, the Yithians constructed vast cities and began to study the past, present, and future of their new home. They did this by projecting their minds forward in time, temporarily swapping consciousnesses with humans (and other intelligent beings) from various points in history. Eventually, the Great Race were driven away by their enemies, a race of interstellar parasites resembling flying polyps. They destroyed almost all evidence of their civilization and cast their minds forward into a race of human-sized, sentient beetles that evolved on the earth long after the extinction of humanity.
“The Shadow Out of Time” tells the tale of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, a professor of economics at Lovecraft’s fictional Miskatonic University, who loses five years of his life when his mind is supplanted by a member of the Great Race. After returning to his own body, Peaslee slowly begins to piece together fragmented memories of his time as a guest and prisoner in the Great Race’s capital city of Pnakotus, and comes to term with the insignificance of himself and humanity against the backdrop of the interstellar struggles of the Yith and their adversaries. It’s one of Lovecraft’s few stories to seriously explore how a man copes with the realization of his own insignificance, and it features one of the most compelling narratives of insanity and depression Lovecraft ever put to paper. Plus, y’know, it repeatedly refers to “flying polyps,” which (call me juvenile if you must) always makes me giggle.
