Reading the Weird: Lovecraft, Irwin, Ray

"The Dunwich Horror," 1929, H.P. Lovecraft -- As a kid, I read almost everything by H.P. Lovecraft, except for perhaps a few of the ghost writer jobs and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward... and my reading of The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath was partial.  Ward struck me as boring, Kadath as overwrought.  I might go back and read the latter due to my love of The King of Elfland's Daughter, which inspired Lovecraft's Dreamland tales.

Again I'm thinking back to that kid I once was who loved Lovecraft, but hated The Dunwich Horror.  As I do now.  What is it about this story?  Spoilers <River Song voice>.

What is it about this story?

Is it that finally, breathless reveal? Yeah, that struck me as silly and anticlimactic on first reading, and now simply tiresome.  But The Whisperer in Darkness has a similar reveal at the end, and that story worked for me. Have I lost something required to appreciate a tale like this? No. I love a good monster story, a creepy tale of weird history and uncanny goings-on.  Hell, I read the two Star Wars zombie books.  Not because I like reading Star Wars; not because I read a lot of zombie fiction, but because the books were Star Wars PLUS zombies.  The undead and light sabers: Yes Please!

I do most of my reading these days on my Nook Color, but at the top of my physical stack of books-to-read is the Michael Moorcock Doctor Who novel.

I am not without pretensions, but I dig genre stories like nothing else.  And while it is common these days to bag on Lovecraft due to the problems inherent in his text (racist, misogynistic, and otherwise) it is a mistake to dismiss his influence in weird fiction in pursuit of a more inclusive and gentle revisionist history.  Lovecraft matters because he influenced so many writers of his time and those who followed; he matters as an early voice taking the uncanny out of the gothic cliches and into the world of science and greater understanding of the universe; he matters because he was racist and misogynistic.

Any field is an inflection of the culture that birthed it. And culture is almost exclusively the story of privileged, dominant, majority members and their relationship to subcultures lacking privilege and dominance due to their minority status.  Our civilization loves to hate the Other, and excels at conflating otherness with wickedness.

Many of Lovecraft's stories expose his views toward minorities and folks he considered sub-human in ways that work for the tales at hand.  When we read about the worshipers in The Call of Cthulhu, some of the passages are cringe-worthy, but the narrative remains internally consistent.  We disagree with his characterization of whole classes of people, but the reader is able to buy into the wickedness of the characters. Lovecraft is just describing occult worshipers through the lens of a bigot.

Conversely, in The Dunwich Horror Lovecraft wants to have it both ways.  He looks down his nose at these backwoods inbreeds, but he also needs the family at the center of the story to be sophisticated enough to know about scholarly subjects, the University, and ancient tomes.

I've never bought the premise, and find the execution flawed.  Add to this, despite its admitted popularity and stature, the fact that it is one of the most un-'Lovecraftian' of his tales in terms of a plot in which the antagonist bungles things and the good guys win the day thanks to their perseverance (and, admittedly, luck.)  Perhaps if one were reading an anthology of Lovecraft, Dunwich would read like a breath of fresh air against his more nihilistic tales.  For me, Lovecraft is best with vast cosmic indifference threatening to crush humanity in passing.  Otherwise, he just reads as antique, bigoted, and trite.

Readers feeling less cranky will enjoy the Lovecraft tale.

"The Book," 1930, Margaret Irwin -- An effective ghost/possession story in which the reader understands through inference and the reactions of other characters what the protagonist fails to grasp, or eventually fails to care about as other motives take hold.  A chilling tale that is complemented by its mundane tone and accumulation of details.

"The Mainz Psalter," 1930, Jean Ray -- The author was Belgian and this is another tale translated into English.  I am unfamiliar with the William Hope Hodgson ghost pirate stories mentioned in the introduction, but mysterious goings-on at sea type tales are fun, as is this one--if it does venture into a bit of phantasmagoria.  I enjoyed The Mainz Psalter and have to say that stories of folks accidentally (or via malevolent intervention) venturing off into another world are like crack to me.  And the concept of sailing into an alien sea is downright awesome.  Various aspects of the story reminded me of other stories, but the whole proved to be maybe a penultimate weird tale at sea.  Reads a bit like a black and white movie from the fifties--or that might be a trick my brain played on the text--that serves up a tale told from a few perspectives so as to reveal a final, falling action that concludes the story.

Next up is another tale by Ray, then Clark Ashton Smith and other big names just a few stories away.  Despite loving the Fafrd & Gray Mouser tales, and having purchased anthologies with Smoke Ghost in the TOC on more than one occasion, it is a Lieber tale I've not ready, so I'm looking forward to that one.

BB

Lethal Enlightenment Devices (#NaPoWriMo 2012) by Brandon H. Bell

Introduction follows TOC:
View all NaPoWriMo entries HERE. Or click on individual entries below:

1. cactus land
2. untitled (NaPoWriMo #2)
3. killing unicorns
4. Bakhara's Song
5. Detritus 
6. the burning man
7. Rage, rage
8. untitled (NaPoWriMo #8)
9. Humet
10. the best chicken in the world
11. God to a Gossip
12. empty words
13. grammar lesson
14. Seasons in Sheol
15. 1997
16. hypothermia
17. Kindness Level Two Civilization
18. Lovecraft vs. Kafka
19. electing presidents
20. Bahrain
21. In Saudi Arabia, In America
22. TLE
23. 8 lines
24. Loving Monsters
25. Superwind
26. contrary monsters
27. On A Plain
28. insomnia
29. Shanama Sea Shanty
30. skylight

Author's Note:

Poets Say What?

I am not a poet.  It's a cop-out that says: you know, I think I can do this, but I'm not going to accept any responsibility if I'm wrong.  Yet, there it is.  I know folks--people who trade conversation with me and others that I don't really 'know' but since we're being colloquial, we'll let the distinction ride--who are poets.  They do something quite fantastic with a few words leveraged against the concerns of their hearts, and less celebrated but just as significant, their minds.  See that: 'hearts' and 'minds'? Already we venture into poetic license.  It comes naturally.

And that is the 'why' behind NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month,) at least for me.  In all the projects, causes, and extended assertions I've expended energy upon, ever present is a populist sentiment that I have sought to convey.  The idea that these wonderful devices of the mind are not the province of other people. The arts and all other intellectual endeavors are your homeland.  Your birthright.  In this spirit I set out to write a poem a day along with other poets of all talent levels, and here I've compiled my results.

The Experience of #NaPoWriMo

I will never do this again! The experience was downright irritating, but I am glad I did it, at least this once.  There are a few poems here that I think I could have refined into publishable material.  I knew what I was doing, posting the poems.  Decided I would do this so thoughts of publication would not interfere with what came to me.  Maybe I would do it again, but not post the poems so they'd remain publishable.

Twitter was the best place to be a participant, with #NaPoWriMo just a search box away.  It was nice to browse the concise comments there from other authors sharing their day's effort, and click through to see what they created.  Many followed daily prompts from various sources.

Lethal Enlightenment Devices

I was surprised how quickly I was able to write something i genuinely liked. cactus land and untitled (NaPoWriMo #2) were fumbling, but day three's Killing Unicorns worked out well.  I tried to contrast the human characters caught up in their various relationships with fay and magic, and that of the elfland king to whom that magic is base to the point of being bodily in nature.  Bakhara's Song and Shanama Sea Shanty both are derived from my Elegant Threat universe.  Judgement's still out on the shanty, but Bakhara's I like.  Count the burning man, Humet, Loving Monsters, and On a Plain as riffs on existing or planned stories, and weather they work as poems or not, the writing of them was useful.

Rage, rage starts playing with some ideas that I don't think I get really honest with until skylight, which I like a lot.  Pulling in subject matter also from TLE and the language of the Lotus Sutra, skylight is one of the poems I enjoyed writing the most.  Maybe because it was the last, too!

Where hypothermia through In Saudi Arabia, In America are probably the highest sustained quality poems I was able to do in the month (diarrhea reference aside,) entries like 8 lines and empty words were more 'fulfilling the commitment' for the day than anything particularly inspired or poetic.  Short poems aren't without their merits, though, as I hope untitled: #NaPoWriMo #8 demonstrates.  Toward the end of the month a few of the poems became more personal than I intended, and that's fine.  If we're not digging deep, what's the point?

Lethal Enlightenment Devices is a play on words from one of the lines in Bahrain, and captures the threads of Buddhism, intellectual curiosity, politics, and flights of fantasy various of the poems express. All are presented here with a cc-by-sa license which means you can do anything you want with them, but include my name as the author along with a link back to the blog, which will serve as attribution.

BB

skylight: #NaPoWriMo Day 30

       
            the Buddha in the great assembly gestures

and describes this

simple partial seizure

but it is not mine

(i am the seizure)

strobed light and lost voices

thunderheads, dark outlines, eternal azure

(tonic-clonic lightning cracks

the universe into shards--

upon occasion)

ephemeral gilding at emergence and descent

upon brainsky cumulus fragments hinting at

cloud animals

no, this sky belongs not to me

(i belong to no one; i am everything)

but the plaster, paint, sheet rock, and glass

offered as presentation about the glimpse

of innumerable kotis of kalpas

this is not mine

(nor is it part of me)

gristle as substrate

i vow nothing

i own nothing

i do not return

i am owned

except diminished

by both meat and mind

(there is no Bodhisattva but the one at one's

seizure-quaked core)

one more illusion

i have consumed and swallowed

mortal versus venial

another demarcation: fractured

the skylight lets me peer down

into the tiny life i dream to be

the problem of pain slips from the fingers

sky-spangled simple partial echoes

(i fear to go out)

lay the gristle upon the tiles

stare up into the square of sky

the square is too bright

(to see, to understand)

the brokeness reassures me

I am not Indra, incarnate first in this great kalpa

alone with the madness of my own creation--

i am

merely a tumbling 

in vastness aware.

Shanama Sea Shanty: #NaPoWriMo Day 29

the seas are calm

it won't be long

'til high tide comes

and we must begone

so varyon slicks, varyon now,

varyon for orbit

when huntin' kelpies sees low seas

it only means a single thing

the deeps will grow so very deep

and we must begone

so varyon slicks, varyon now,

varyon for orbit

once met a ship's mum what braved the deep

most 'er slicks and cap'n an' ship did sink

down into the bulge where the mermen sleep

'cept if you fail to begone (she imparts!)

so varyon slicks, varyon ye please,

varyon for orbit

insomnia: #NaPoWriMo Day 28

we are all disatisfied with our childhoods.

even now, I struggle against moments lost

memories not created

time wasted

I feel everything slipping away

and I'm afraid at all the pictures I've not snapped

the words unsaid

times when I could not be bothered

we know not to be the parent who never says

I love you

but what if the words are uttered into meaninglessness--

screens before our eyes: shows and games, work and play

days slide past and I fret and I fear and sometimes I hope

that their childhood is less filled with

disatisfactoriness

that they are better equiped than I was

to know happiness

to feel happiness

to recognize it

and to understand themselves deserving--

I don't care about the words and words and words

nearly as much

as their once-tiny hands

and that they recall me in the full of their days

as a loving dad...

On A Plain: #NaPoWroMo Day 27

on an incline
we run forever
these women and men
ahead of beasts in the tide of darkness
we may camp for so long
tend to children
mend the wounded
on must we run
ever upward toward the pinnacle
where we might rest
and know something of our homeland--
when we came upon the old fortress of stone
some fancied the respite
it offered
and the fools stayed behind
walls of stone against predators and night
on an incline our parents tell us is not eternal--
we faithful kept on
until the day when the incline
surged beneath us
down then forward
leaving us tumbling in air
then upon the surface--
when the slopequake ceased
our incline had lost its cant
become a plain
we could see the stone enclave in the distance
still ahead of the coming terminator
there we wounded trudged
on a plain--
with no direction to call
upward
on a plain
in this place
we joined our fellows
barred the gates
and waited for that
most feared
to fall upon us.

we found night not eternal
beasts as mortal as men
when the world ended
heaven's direction lost
children still laugh and play
and love and loss remain
the lot of
us all...

contrary monsters: #NaPoWriMo Day 26

clowns are not contrary monsters
true too of children's dolls and human-shaped
playthings
true of animate statues and snowmen
of evil trees, infernal offspring, and predatory fay...
contrary monsters fester dangerous and frightening
when the luster of familiarity falls away
bleeding mundanity
and emerge into an uncanny valley
where we perceive them as
new creations
new cancers
in the corpus of the day-to-day
blights we did not suspect
grown beyond useful reaction
so as we stare into and recognize
what should not be a face, pair of eyes, smile
understanding blooms
into dread
as the contrary monster seen
sets to its purpose.

Superwind #NaPoWriMo Day 25

bloated red corpsestar
self-devourer gives rise to
superwind mystery
returning its mass to the void
altered and destined to etch away
at nebulous gasses
coalescing into orbital bands around greater gravities
themselves growing
in the superwind
with the grains
until protoplanetary masses form like phantoms
from stardust
silent sentinels of the protostar's birth
--ignition--
infancy to mainline to nova
stellar life progressing toward
the kalpa winter of an ever-expanding
universe.

the long view fails due to scope
misses the infintesimally small observers
flora
fauna
sentience
arising from star corpses
observers yet of skies filled with the waning and waxing
of higher element production engines
in the short view
in the eternal now sentience inhabits
the potentiality of a time of starshine
and of life
and an eternity as figurative
as it is sufficient.

Reading The Weird: Akutagawa, Stevens, Kafka, Grabinski, Arnold

When I was in my mid-teens I discovered a series of anthologies from Marvin Kaye, each featuring a vague supernatural theme.  I think there was a Devils and Demons, one focused on ghosts.  The best of these anthologies was Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural, which presented stories based on quality first, and type second, breaking the TOC out into titled sections.  While most of the stories in the book were worthwhile, the section that most deserved the label 'masterpieces' was called something like 'Gods and Other Horrors.'

This is where I first read 


The Night Wire, 1926, H.F. Arnold

How much did I understand of pulp fiction or weird fiction at that age?  It's odd to consider.  And, when I read The Night Wire I instantly understood it to belong to both these loose categories.  It is popular these days to scorn such labels, and perhaps ironic as I read the essays collected in Mr. VanderMeer's Monstrous Creatures wherein he too notes with chagrin the arbitrary and often useless--often ignorant and presumptive--demarcations between genres, and then switch over to read a few more tales in this collection, The Weird.  We might desire to eschew genre labels in favor of good writing and tales well told, but the market demands something easily understood.  And: readers like signposts.

I loved the 'Gods and Other Horrors' section of that old anthology (I still recall the book cover, with art by Edward Gorey) and I loved The Night Wire.  It remains a story with very definite charms.  Then, like in The Weird, the story suffers a bit from its proximity to works of a wholly different caliber.  In Kaye's anthology it was a Dylan Thomas prose poem called The Tree and Leonid Andreyev's Lazarus redaction.  These two works were viruses in my young brain, changing my landscape.  By contrast The Night Wire was a creepy but lesser story.

It may be that I am too jaded, or that it is the type of story that really only works its charm on first encounter, but I was largely nonplussed on this reading.  Based on my past experience, and moreover based on its wide acclaim, this may prove a highlight story for most readers.

The Hell Screen, 1918, Ryunosuke Akutagawa

A newly translated story by 'the father of the Japanese short story' The Hell Screen unsurprisingly does not feature the phrase 'Once upon a time' and yet retains a cozy atmosphere of an old tale retold, promising early: treacherous paths to navigate and kindnesses and follies to be repaid in kind or otherwise.  It is a story that deals with the depths of evil within a man's heart, obsessions, lust, art, artifice, rumor, and retribution.  In the end, the reader, like the characters, come to understand something of both heaven and hell.  And it features the most loyal little monkey ever.  I liked this story.

Unseen--Unfeared, 1919, Francis Stevens and
The White Wyrak, 1921 Stefan Grabinski

Stevens, 'the woman who invented dark fantasy', was an unknown to me prior to this story.  It is another first person narrative that feels... antique.  And this mode works well here despite an awkward paragraph toward the beginning that lists several ethnic groups, noting that they struck the protagonist as '...merely revolting.'  Protag goes on to explain:

"They were all humans, and I, too, was human.  Some way I did not like the idea."

Later developments might explain this revulsion as artificial in nature, but I wasn't totally clear if that was the case or not.

Stevens story features a plot we see echoed years later in Dan Simmon's Metastasis, but with the uncanny elements revealed by light passed through a special filter.  Saying more will ruin the tale, which I found to be creepy fun all told.

Grabinski, the 'Polish Poe' or 'Polish Lovecraft' gives us a creature tale that is appropriately detailed and full of foreboding as chimney sweeps sent to a certain old brewery fail to return to their benevolent employer.  He sets out with the narrator to discover the cause for the disappearances.  A tale such as The White Wyrak is significant as a well-told tale from a non-English culture, and specifically for introducing readers to the specific myth.  Others may be familiar with the wyrak, which means tarsiers (a small, large-eyed primate) in Polish, but this was new to me.

Grabinski presents us with a lord of the chimney sweeps who is a learned man fond of books and reading, who has traveled and reveals knowledge of the occult as the story progresses, pinning down the exact beast forming from evil sentient collections of soot.  Think of a less jolly and more singular version of Miyazaki's soot creatures, coupled with the sick whiteness of Mieville's whale.  It is a neat encounter with an unusual incarnation of the monster story.  It also felt slight.  I imagined the creature slinking down at night to pull the family living in the brewery from their beds and up into the chimney. As it is, the story's merits are sufficient to come away a satisfied reader.

It occurs to me that with weird stories of a certain type, the more pulpy or old-fashion, those depending more on a very particular trope... they benefit from inclusion in a magazine or a collection like The Weird, where perhaps no one of such stories is a Lazarus or The Tree, but contribute their virtues like singers in a choir.  I didn't intend to comment on the anthology as a whole this early in my reading, but it's worth noting that in this light, what might seem a one note tale, adds a clarion note to the chorus, thereby adding to a whole that would otherwise be lacking.  One momentary encounter in a dark, confined space with something white as snow and torpid with blood.  That's certainly what The Weird is about, and so considering, Grabinski's story delivers.

In The Penal Colony, 1919, Franz Kafka

Like The Night Wire, I've read this story before, but found myself drawn into the story more personally this time.  The nuance at work in Kafka's tale is spectacular, and where as a young man who would refute any biblical themes to be read in the story and therefore interpreted it a simple tale of a torture device and ill fortune justly found, I'm older and more political and able to find the value in religious allusions that fall outside my own belief system, so that the story strikes me as more expansive than I could understand when I was younger.  I also enjoy the quiet humor at work in what are dire circumstances overall.  The interactions between the Condemned Man and Soldier in particular were captivating and I appreciated the growing sense I had of their mutual ensnarement in a system of someone else's design.

One might suggest that if a writer's story may be interpreted in any number of ways, the writer has failed to communicate effectively what he intended to be the interpretation.  Kafka's work, as much as we might want to just read it and appreciate it 'as readers,' cries out for interpretation, but I disagree with the idea that there should ever be one proper understanding of any such tale.  This is one of Kafka's most well-regarded short stories (it is actually quite long) and it has been dissected often enough that I have nothing insightful to add to that pantheon.  Suffice it to say that in 2012 America, my reading of the story was wholly political.  Ultimately a sobering and sad story, with hints of a new order struggling to be born from older wretchedness that the characters nonetheless cling to.  If for no other reason than that it defined each of them in a role they might understand and fulfill.  Perhaps the old, political order must give birth to a new social or religious order if those old roles, limitations, and evils are to be overcome.

But there I go, trying to interpret the story.  It is a grand tale, maybe the best story so far.  Yeah, I'd say that about Kafka, but it is also true.  One to read and understand on your own behalf.  Don't listen to anyone else tell you what it 'means' until you do.

Next up: Classic Lovecraft, a slew of folks I'm not familiar with, then Clark Ashton Smith. Woot woot.

BB

Loving Monsters: #NaPoWriMo Day 24

abide no vampire
capable of love
only fleshy thin
or gnarled gargantua
thanatonauts
wreathed in viscera and woes
driven by lusts grounded in
ethics alien to human passions
the rakshasa may smile
may profess a code of conduct
may even imply kinship
but the rot is ever present
worms turning in
smiling cheeks--
note the predator gleam
in eyes, teeth, musculature and
demeanor.

and, in kind, monsters
abide no love
but might be loved
a terrible affection
in final moments
when pathos and ethos
evacuate
like piss from the bladder
bloodflow stills
and the human victim
realizes
the mistake
of loving monsters.