Illustration for Green Mansions by Keith Henderson circa 1930; via Thomas Shahan.Merperson by Viola Renate.
Yesterday I wrote a blog post just for the sake of writing something. Now I feel weird about it. The itch to type and hit “Publish” was present and strong, but I didn’t have any intellectual substance to offer the world. (By which I mean you, my few and treasured readers.) If only I had the self-control to refrain from distributing useless thoughts. Even better would be the ability to conjure up worthwhile sentences at any time, on demand.
I used to think a good writer could make any subject interesting whenever they were called upon to do so. Now that idea seems naive — no person can competently tackle every topic, especially without doing research or interviews. You can’t just spout off and have it be instantly fascinating. Maybe there are rare savants who possess this ability, but I suspect it’s uncommon.
Anita by Keith Henderson, for The Purple Land circa 1930; via Thomas Shahan.
I just finished reading The Old Man and the Sea and I resent Hemingway for being such a superb prose stylist. He constructs his statements very simply — never afraid to reuse a noun or a verb if he deems it right — and the result is highly impactful. I get the sense that Hemingway didn’t produce material just for the sake of expression. Maybe he grew out of the tendency, or disciplined it away. Maybe I can too?
I’m semi-watching an awful movie called Get Hard, in which Kevin Hart teaches Will Ferrell how to survive in prison. Yes, that is the premise of a mainstream film. I don’t even wanna consider how much money someone spent on this production.
There are wayyy too many rape jokes — in fact, the opening sentence of Roger Ebert’s review is: “If you love rape jokes, ‘Get Hard’ is your movie.” Ebert’s whole take is brilliant. As he emphasizes, there is also plenty of homophobia and debatable racism.
Poster for Get Hard.
And yet… Get Hard is kinda funny. For instance, right now there’s a great scene where Kevin Hart plays a bunch of different prison stereotypes in a ridiculous turf dispute in the yard. Sure, it’s bigoted in several ways, and misogynistic, but I’m not gonna lie and say I never laughed.
The USA Today blog Entertain This lists “You’re not easily offended” as the #4 reason to see Get Hard despite its problems, elaborating: “Instead of being a clever satire, the movie mostly presents rude and over-the-top jokes. Once in a while, however, the gags are funny. Like, laugh-out-loud funny.” Welp, yeah. Basically.
My body feels confident when I climb river rocks. I inhabit my limbs the way I want to. Weight shifts with each step and I can predict where it will fall, where the momentum will push me. Light sweat on my shoulders as I crouch to watch the bubble shadows cast by river skeeters’ feet. The insects dart across the surface and their expanded silhouettes glide along the grey-green algae at the bottom of two feet of clear water. Each round, dark shadow is ringed by a thin yellow halo of sunshine.
When I was about ten my dad taught me how to climb river rocks along the Tuolumne River. We scrambled over boulders, watching the water. He told me, “Three limbs on the rock, always.” This principle is called “three-point contact”. His lessons stuck in my head: Test your handholds. Don’t commit your weight before you’re sure that the rock is solid. Dad also counselled, “Never turn your back on the ocean,” but that was another time.
Nature doesn’t care. We personify this amalgamation of thermodynamic forces and biological phenomena, but actually what we call “nature” is too vast and complex to have predictable moods. Sure, the patterns are measurable, but a day-hiker can’t guess when the old tree across the stream will crack — not without particularly astute intuition. Nature has power beyond your imagining, and you have to maintain the kind of respect entails a lot of fear.
Even when I feel most in control of my physical self, scaling dusty boulders on the way to a waterfall, I’m scared because I know how much it would hurt to fall. I remove my shoes right away; I need to feel where I’m stepping and grip with my toes. I pay close attention. Avoid the wet rocks, slick with algae slime. Otherwise I could break my neck — or my collarbone, or my ankle. Any of those would be excruciating.
Of course, the risk must be what makes the river exciting. Would I be able to relish the feeling of bodily mastery if I wasn’t also contemplating the loss of it? It’s impossible to see without contrasts. You can’t distinguish anything.
River hikes are on my mind because I’m vacationing with my family on the edge of Fallen Leaf Lake, near Lake Tahoe. The area is beautiful — much more lovely than the photo above, despite the hyper-saturated sunset. You can’t imagine how many trees are here (unless you live in a similarly forest-adjacent area). The air smells piney — it makes me want to quit the city. I suppose that’s how you always feel until you get back home to reliable internet and urban debauchery.
I have a ShopSense account. They’ve rebranded as “ShopStyle Collective” but whatever. This entity, regardless of name, is a pay-per-click affiliate-linking thingamajig. Back when I was fashion-blogging I made $88 dollars using ShopSense. I can cash out when I get to $100, and I kinda want the money. So… here’s some art (there’s a precedent for me posting art!) because if you click on the links I’ll make $0.02 or whatever.
I rewrote an HP Lovecraft quote to be simpler to read:
“It’s easy to imagine an occult force that sustains itself by sucking the life out of normal living beings — a parasite, possibly one without physical presence. This parasite may even commandeer the host’s body. It might be malevolent or it might be more like the tick I found on my dog yesterday: just hungry. Regardless, any entity of this kind is unnatural. We all have a responsibility to get rid of it.”
Lovecraft: very suspicious of the unknown. Shirt for $19.99 on Sigh Co.
The original:
“One might easily imagine an alien nucleus of substance or energy, formless or otherwise, kept alive by imperceptible or immaterial subtractions from the life-force or bodily tissue and fluids of other and more palpably living things into which it penetrates and with whose fabric it sometimes completely merges itself. It might be actively hostile, or it might be dictated merely by blind motives of self-preservation. In any case such a monster must of necessity be in our scheme of things an anomaly and an intruder, whose extirpation forms a primary duty with every man not an enemy to the world’s life, health, and sanity.” — “The Shunned House” by HP Lovecraft
Lovecraft’s style is exhaustingly baroque — to be honest, I’m mainly reading his short stories because my boyfriend likes them — but his ideas are fun. They complement The X-Files well. Like Agent Fox Mulder’s investigations, Lovecraft’s plots end in sinister mysteries unsolved — sometimes even unseen.
It’s ironic that the paperback I’m reading has Dali-esque tortures on the front cover, because Lovecraft’s specialty is obliquely describing horrors that his characters claim are beyond comprehension. The author is happy to depict the action, but only up to a point. There are certainly never spikes in anyone’s eye sockets.
For example, in a story that he ghostwrote for Harry Houdini, Lovecraft’s protagonist encounters reanimated mummies with animal heads spliced on top of their bodies. Relatively tame stuff, right? It probably felt scarier to his contemporary readers in the 1920s and 1930s. Anyway, later the poor fellow sees a creature whose attributes he feels completely unable to verbalize.
Many Lovecraft heros can’t communicate what they’ve endured, only the events that preceded the tautologically unspeakable occurrence. Or they go mad after witnessing it. The protagonist is rarely physically injured, although side characters die sometimes, as in “The Shunned House” (which I quoted at the beginning).
The word “abyss” is the sort of vocabulary that characterizes Lovecraft’s prose. Deep dark eldritch depths, etc. To his credit, Lovecraft established some of the cliches — he was hugely influential; watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and it’s obvious. I object to his roundabout wordiness but I like his obsessions. The aesthetic is enjoyable, and although Lovecraft usually can’t frighten me, he scratches a particular creepy itch. All the best horror writers know, what is not revealed is much more interesting than what’s laid out in clear photographic detail.
So, how does rehashing well-known Lovecraft themes relate to the quote at the beginning? His moral assumptions are so… antiquated. (Let’s not even talk about the racism. Zoe Quinn and The Awl can handle that.) In “The Shunned House”, he — well, his character, but every Lovecraft protagonist is a front for the author — asserts that the occult parasite is evil, acting contrary to the rules of the regular world.
But predation is the most normal of all normalcies. Organisms devour other organisms. Noxious spirits leach energy away from nearby humans. Whatever.
Life varies. But nature is nasty, brutish, and perpetual in its cycles. Lovecraft clutches an idea of biological order not based in history or simple reality. I suspect that Lovecraft is worried by what he can’t control… which is relatable. He doesn’t tap into my specific id when extolling his fears, but he must be sourcing from someone’s. I do wonder if Lovecraft genuinely feared the phenomena he wrote about, or if he was conjuring plotlines based on subconscious impulses.
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