Caverns of Dream: The Little Glass Bottle

“Heave to, there’s something floating to the leeward!”

And so we begin our odyssey of all things Lovecraft with “The Little Glass Bottle,” a short and fairly inconsequential story written in 1897. A sea captain and his crew recover a message in a bottle that directs them to a shipwreck laden with treasure off the coast of Australia. The excited captain charters a ship to salvage the wreckage, but the only thing they find is an iron bottle and note written by the same hand, informing the crew that they’ve been the victim of a somewhat pointless practical joke.

It’s not fair for me to judge this little throwaway in the same way I would judge Lovecraft’s later work, and I’m not going to do so. Since Lovecraft was born in 1890, he was no older than seven when he wrote this. It’s a cute little joke, and it’s effective. And that’s more than enough, really. There’s not much there that would suggest the author’s future career as a horror writer, save for burgeoning, New England-style obsession with the sea. There’s not much point in analyzing it much more closely than that. That being said, I don’t think I wrote this well when I was seven.

Anyone interested in having a look for his or herself can find the text for this one online.

Next up are a handful of other short pieces from prepubescent Lovecraft. I plan on getting through that ephemera in the next day or two, which will hopefully allow me to some real meat by the end of the week. Stay tuned for that.

On the bright side, we won’t need umbrellas….

Oh. dear.

I’m used to stupid, honestly I am. I see stupid all of the time. I’m lucky enough to neither live nor work in close proximity to stupid, but it’s not like I’m unfamiliar with the concept. For the most part, I try to let stupid just bounce right off of me, and pay it no heed. But every now and then I am confronted with stupid so profound, so earth-shattering, so… stupid… that I can’t help but feel slightly scared for the future of the human race.

Courtesy of FAIL Blog, one of the most concentrated sources of stupid on the Internet, I am once again faced with this level of stupid. Yes, stupid is hardly new to FAIL Blog, but this may well be one of the most staggeringly stupid examples I’ve seen there yet. Here is the link, so you all can look for yourself.

To summarize, the image is of a letter-to-the-editor from a Australian (I believe) regional newspaper. The writer laments that “when I was a kid, we never had drought after drought.” Lucky for us, though, he’s deduced the cause of this climate change. Global warming, perhaps? How about standard climatic pattern changes corresponding to long-term geological and atmospheric trends? Not in the slightest. The problem, he has realized, is daylight savings time! You see, “this one hour extra sun is slowly evaporating all the moisture out of everything.” It’s so simple! How could we have missed this?

I’m hoping, nay, praying, that the writer was making a joke. I’m much more comfortable with that than with the idea that there are really people that ignorant out there.

Highway to (Financial) Hell

Although I’m more or less indifferent to them, my brother’s been excited about the release of Black Ice the latest album from Australian hard rock superstars AC/DC. The UK newspaper The Guardian, however, is a little less thrilled with the release. And they have good reason, they argue: AC/DC is apparently one of the most reliable harbingers of British economic disaster yet devised.

Unconvinced? Lucky for you, the Guardian provides a handy timetable. To wit, AC/DC was formed in 1973, on the eve of the infamous oil crisis. Their most successful album, Back in Black, was released in 1980, and ushered in an era of 20% inflation and unprecedented unemployment rates. Their 1990 album, The Razor’s Edge, saw the start of Britain’s last major recession. And now we have Black Ice, and worldwide financial markets are in freefall. Clearly, Angus Young (guitarist, co-founder, and lead songwriter for the band) must be a undercover Marxist agent provocateur.

Caverns of Dream: My H.P. Lovecraft Odyssey

I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me.

- H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”

Over the past month, I’ve been rediscovering my interest in the works of H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). Lovecraft was one of the preeminent influences in the development of the modern horror and science fiction genres, and is cited by folks like Stephen King as the more important horror writer of the twentieth century. Though he was not as prolific as some of his contemporaries, his influence was all but unparalleled. Many people who’ve not read a line of his work are still familiar with his creations, including Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, and the Great Old Ones, Arkham, Massachusetts and Miskatonic University, home of one of the three surviving copies of the Necronomicon by Abdul Alhazred, insular, “decadent, smugly-rotting” Innsmouth, and so on. These creations have become part of the lexicon of modern science fiction and horror, and Lovecraft himself has been “adjectivized” such that we routinely see books, television shows, and movies described as “Lovecraftian.”

Beyond my interest in sci-fi/horror, though, Lovecraft appeals to me in certain other respects. First, he was at his most active during the 1920s and 1930s, which is coincidentally the same period I focused on while pursuing my master’s degree in American cultural history. His development of a quasi-mythology of aliens, monsters, and other nasty things appeals to the part of me that majored in religious history as a undergraduate. Arguably most importantly, though, is the fact that Lovecraft is fairly terse. His longest work of fiction, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, isn’t much more than a novella, and a lot of his material clocks in at only a few pages. Though I’m capable of reading fairly quickly, I frequently have trouble maintaining continuous interest in long-form works. So I find Lovecraft’s “bite-sized” short stories and novellas an ideal length.

With all that said, I’m announcing a first-of-its-kind project for me. I’m going to read, review, and (where appropriate) interpret all of H.P. Lovecraft’s prose works, collaborations, and revisions in chronological order (or, at least, as close to chronological order as I can reconstruct). I’m not the first to do this, and I’m sure I won’t be the most insightful, but I hope my opinions will at least prove interesting. I’m throwing a number of caveats into this, though:

1. I’m handling prose fiction only. Lovecraft wrote a huge number of works of verse, correspondence to his friends and fellow authors, and even a handful of nonfiction pieces studying the art and history of “weird fiction.” But I suspect that if I tried to handle these in sequence, they’d bog me down.
2. I’m including Lovecraft’s collaborative works (including posthumous collaborations) and ghostwritten pieces. I’ll probably mark these kind of works as distinct from everything else, but it feels wrong to pass over these.
3. I’ll be working chronologically from date of composition, not of publication. A fair chunk of material wasn’t published until after Lovecraft’s death, including some of his most significant work (like the aforementioned “Case of Charles Dexter Ward”). I’m relying on various online resources to determine the chronology, including Wikipedia and The H.P. Lovecraft Archive, all of which lean heavily on the work of Lovecraft biographer S.T. Joshi, who appears to be the recognized authority on Lovecraft’s life and work.
4. I’m making arbitrary exceptions where I see fit. I said I was only going to tackle prose above, but I plan on at least one exception to that rule: “The Fungi from Yuggoth,” a sonnet-form poem from 1930. In brief, it feels too important to leave out. I also intend on including at least two works not written by Lovecraft in any capacity: specifically, “The Shambler from the Stars” and “The Shadow from the Steeple,” both by Robert Bloch (of Psycho fame). These three stories comprise the first and final parts of a trilogy of which Lovecraft’s own “The Haunter of the Dark” is the middle segment. Since I don’t feel like reading the trilogy out-of-sequence, I’ll be tackling all three stories in order. Finally, when all is said and done, I may go back and look at some of Lovecraft’s poetic, non-fiction, and correspondence work and write up my thoughts as addenda: in particular, I want to have a go at Lovecraft’s nonfictional “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” and Lovecraft biographer S.T. Joshi’s The Ancient Track, a complete collection of all of Lovecraft’s poetry.

I don’t exactly have a set schedule for updates here, but I intend to make at least one update per week, and more wherever possible. As I mentioned before, most of this material is going to be a pretty quick read, and I’m not doing a dedicated scholarly analysis here. I want to approach this material as an average reader, not a literary critic. For the same reason, I won’t be doing much in the way of outside research when writing my reviews. Plenty of other writers, from S.T. Joshi to Robert M. Price to Stephen King, have done that sort of thing, and since I don’t believe for a second that I can hold a candle to their efforts, I’m not going to bother trying. But for anyone interested in a more scholarly approach to Lovecraft, I strongly recommend Joshi’s annotated anthologies and Price’s “Cycle” collections.

For no very good reason, I’ve decided to give the name “Caverns of Dream” to this project. It’s from a quote from “Hypnos,” a 1922 work that isn’t exactly one of Lovecraft’s best-remembered pieces. But I think it’s suitably catchy, and not quite as cliched as going with something like “Strange Aeons.”

Where’s Yoko when you need her?

A recent AP article about the infestation of the Asian Longhorned Beetle in New England has once more reminded me why I try to avoid the news. In brief, the beetle is a voracious, tree-eating machine that hitched a ride from China (probably) in shipping crates. Officials in various New England states are terrified of the li’l bastards because the regional economy basically relies on trees, either as a source of tourists, lumber, or maple syrup.

Now, on one level you’d think this shouldn’t bother me that much. I don’t live in New England, have no plans to visit, and, as a diabetic, I don’t consume much maple syrup. But it bothers me nevertheless. Things like this upset me more than they should. So I’m sitting here and crossing my fingers that plans to eradicate the beetle by pulping and burning infested trees this winter are successful. And, for some reason, getting an odd craving for waffles….

The game has changed

Those who know me are aware of my political leanings. As an avowed leftist, I frequent various left-leaning blogs and forums, including Daily Kos. Even when I disagree with its diarists and contributors, I usually find them thought-provoking.

Case-in-point, a recent front page article from Kos himself. He references Ben Smith’s (from Politico) recent writeup of an e-mail received from a Republican consultant. The consultant was running a focus group for a 527 attack ad against Barack Obama. Collecting the group’s reactions, two things became immediately clear to the consultant, to Smith, and to Kos. First, the ads were effective in casting fear, uncertainty, and doubt (or FUD, as we technogeeks know it) on Barack Obama. Second, it didn’t matter. No matter how bad the attack ad portrayed Obama, none of the group members were ultimately swayed towards John McCain.

Kos provided some commentary on the results, taking it as evidence that substance was (at last) triumphing over character attacks. I’d like to think that was true, but I’m not convinced. I think what is ultimately going on here is a little more prosaic: John McCain and the Republican Party cannot drag down Barack Obama to the point where he is seen as an inferior choice. They can dirty him and his reputation, they can rant and rave, distort and lie. It’s been in their playbook for years, and it’s working every bit as well now as it ever did. But that’s an only an effective strategy if they can position their candidate as better, safer, or more trustworthy. People, for whatever reason, could put their trust in Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and his spawn. They can’t do that with John McCain.

McCain’s campaign went into the closing month of the electoral season with two options: pull McCain up, or push Obama down. By adopting their “all attack, all the time” approach, they chose the latter, apparently underestimating the degree of antipathy or outright disappointment in McCain himself. It’s not that their attacks aren’t sticking, it’s just that it’s not good enough. And it may be too late for McCain at this point: the conventional wisdom is that when a candidate starts with negative campaigning, it drags his favorability down, albeit not as much as his opponent (assuming it’s done properly). At this point, McCain has dug himself deeper into his hole, failed to close the gap with Obama, and, barring a sudden event outside of his direct control (dead girl, live boy, or an airplane full of terrorists), he probably doesn’t have enough time before the election to undo the damage.

Then again, it’s not like I haven’t been wrong before. I thought Kerry was going to win back in ‘04, after all.

That is not dead that can eternal lie…

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.

My, my, my, where does the time go?

Well, here we are seven and a half months later, and I’ve completely blown my promise to keep to a more regular update schedule. In my defense, it’s been kind of a messy year so far. I’ve gone through an unpleasant phase, and I’ve only recently started to feel like myself again. I’ve also moved into a new apartment, bought a new computer, and learned a valuable lesson about not placing eBay bids as a lark.

I’ll tell you more about what I’ve been up to later on, but I thought I’d first post a few video gaming-related updates. Towards the end of last year, I wound up with both an Xbox 360 and a Wii. The former I wanted, the latter was the result of the aforementioned ill-considered eBay bid. I’ve gotten a fair amount of mileage out of the 360, actually. More than I had expected. I bought it primarily out of interest in two or three games (Eternal Sonata, Mass Effect, and Rock Band), but I’ve managed to find various other things to keep me playing. I still haven’t beaten Mass Effect, though. I made a good amount of headway into January of this year, but then I somehow managed to corrupt my user profile and lose my saved games. I haven’t been able to make myself sit down and start over as yet. But I’ve lived the Rock Band lifestyle, and I’m absolutely loving it. Harmonix and Activision’s devotion to making new content available online is great, and despite the higher-than-usual price tag for the whole set, I’ve never once felt that I wasted my money.

The Wii, on the other hand, hasn’t seen much action. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m primarily interested in role-playing games and turn-based strategy games, and neither is in great abundance on the system. The handful of Virtual Console games I’ve any interest in I’ve already played on the original consoles, and WiiWare’s original online content has been very slow to match the quality or quantity of material available on Xbox Live. I enjoyed Wii Sports, to be sure, Super Paper Mario was a decent little diversion, and I’ve been meaning to pick up the new Fire Emblem game, but not much else really excites my interest.

On the handheld front, I’ve played the rereleases of Final Fantasy Tactics and Disgaea for the PSP, and thoroughly enjoyed both of them, even if they weren’t particularly original. Jeanne d’Arc was fun, and I found myself enjoying Brooktown High more than I probably should have. At long last, I’ve started to feel that the DS is holding up its end of the bargain on the games front, with a succession of pretty good titles, including Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, Final Fantasy Tactics A2, Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja, and the remake of Hoshigami taking up much of my time. I also finally managed to snag a copy of the elusive second Phoenix Wright game, so I’ve been catching up on that front.

For the PC, I’ve been playing a great deal of Europa Universalis III and it’s quasi-sequel/spin-off EU: Rome, which are the sort of games-for-history-nerds that you never thought they actually made. I’ve also been playing a bit of the Total War series, and I’ve been eyeing my old discs of Planescape: Torment. It’s been almost a decade since I played through it the first time, and I’m having nostalgia pangs.

Anyway, that’s it for now. I’ll try to be back in a day or two, where I’ll share my springtime gardening experiences. That should be worth a laugh or two. In the meantime, swing over to Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog and support Joss Whedon’s (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly) first attempt at a straight-to-the-web musical comedy.

Feliz Navidad!

Not much to say at the moment other than merry Christmas and happy new year! Please enjoy the scariest Christmas carol of them all:

Smothered in hot sauce, Buffalo-style

Time was, I used to pick up any video game that look reasonably interesting whenever I went shopping. More recently, I’ve chosen to be a little more circumspect. The problem isn’t money, really, but time: I’m still sitting on a couple of original PlayStation games that I’ve not ever really had the time to tackle. If I never bought another video game in my life, I’d probably still have enough to keep me occupied until I retire. I still buy games, of course, but seldom with the impulsiveness I once did. On Black Friday, for instance, I bought Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja and Hoshigami: Running Blue Earth Remix for the DS based on a review from a friend and an gaming site I generally trust, respectively. Both games have been out for months, and I had a pretty good idea what I was getting into in advance.

I did, however, buy a third game that day, against my better judgment. It was a new release, and I’d not read a single review or even heard any word-of-mouth coverage of it. The game was Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, which goes to show you how much of a sucker I remain for the “Final Fantasy” brand. I knew it wasn’t a traditional RPG, and I’d been following some of the news of the Japanese release, but I was a bit nervous about blindly taking the plunge. But I was burning off my turkey-and-cranberry-sauce high from the day before, so I threw caution to the wind. Now that I’ve had some time to play, I figured I’d share my preliminary thoughts.

The game is actually a pretty impressive melding of Final Fantasy XII’s hack-and-slash gameplay with the RTS genre. You get a party of five characters to control, and each of those five characters gets to command his or her own group of disposable troops. The gambit system returns, in greatly simplified form: each of your five characters has his or her own special abilities, and you can set one of those abilities to be performed automatically. There’s also a resource-gathering element to the game, where the resources you gather are used to craft new equipment for your characters. The structure of the game itself, with mission boards and chapters, is strongly reminiscent of turn-based tactical RPGs like Final Fantasy Tactics or Disgaea.

As for the story, it’s a direct continuation of Final Fantasy XII, with appearances from most of the main cast of that game. I’m not that far into the game yet (third chapter), but the plot itself doesn’t strike me as particularly revolutionary. The script is quite good, though, with the same antiquated-English style. Visually, it’s about as impressive as one can expect from the DS, looking like a fairly early PS1 game.

My biggest complaint is the heavy use of the DS stylus. This is the first DS game I’ve purchased that actually requires the stylus for play: most games seem to stick stylus-support on as something of an afterthought (the Phoenix Wright games or Final Fantasy III) or just omit it completely (Izuna), but this game provides no way to control your troops without at least some use of the stylus. On one hand, I understand that doing the sort of things the game wants you to do with a traditional D-pad setup would be tricky, but on the other hand, I hate the stylus! It’s an awkward, uncomfortable control mechanism that becomes even more awkward and uncomfortable when you try to use it in the car or bus. Call me old fashioned, but I’m still a firm believer that a portable handheld system should be usable on-the-go. I can get used to using the darned thing for this game, but I’m far from thrilled about the situation.

Ultimately, I’m enjoying the game quite a bit. My inexperience with the genre and occasional frustration with the control scheme, however, make me worry that I’m going to hit a brick wall at some point before reaching the end. If I do, I suspect I’m going to put the game aside and forget about it until some indeterminate point in the future, like I’ve done with various other games. But there’s enough to like about the game that I don’t regret buying it either way.