plaster

Where is the one place you don’t want to see a lot of plaster fall from your ceiling? How about right on the pillow on a bed! This was in the normally unused guest room, and it was a fairly small amount of plaster, but that’s about the creepiest place for it to fall.

In my downtown apartment several years ago, the entire kitchen ceiling collapsed due to sloppy work on the place above. Luckily, I was not in the kitchen at the time. But it was catastrophic enough that I found myself screaming curses at the guys above, and they seem to have heard one or the other, because the work immediately stopped. I’m not sure how serious my injuries would have been if I’d been in the kitchen, but all of the fluorescent lighting came down with a crash as well.

recommended

Alberto Toscano, The Theatre of Production. Its been around for a couple of years now, but deserves even more discussion than it’s received so far.

some thoughts on Joshi

Joshi is witty, perceptive, and a seemingly scrupulous researcher.

However, I am finding his judgments of specific stories to be the opposite of my own in an increasing number of cases. (Not that this matters to anyone else, but it does sometimes make me wonder if we’re reading the same author.) I’m certainly in agreement on the excellence of “Charles Dexter Ward,” but do not agree that “The Rats in the Walls” is a masterpiece and “The Horror at Red Hook” an abomination; in fact, I much prefer the latter. And Joshi is awfully hard on “The Dunwich Horror,” which I think is a masterpiece (though a few aspects of the conclusion are a bit hard to swallow).

A larger problem with the biography is that it tends to level Lovecraft’s productions too much. In these 600+ pages, his greatest stories occupy only a small proportion of the account. I’ve learned an amazing amount from this book, but I think I much prefer Houllebecq, who does oversimplify some of the biography, but who in many ways comes closer to capturing the essence or nectar of who Lovecraft was.

I have a Kafka biography in German that does something similar, focusing on just a few key years of Kafka’s career rather than trying to cover the entire life. That might not be a bad idea for biographies, in fact… If it’s true (as I always suspected and as Clement Greenberg stated in words) that no one has more than about 15 years of peak originality, it might be interesting to write more biographies focusing on just a few key years in any given career.

Oh yes, I have a similar biography of Einstein in my office that focuses only on the years in quest of general relativity. In a way it makes things highly readable, since there’s no sitting through tedious accounts of what the grandparents did for a living. Einstein is already a fully formed adult from page 1, he simply has another big discovery lying ahead of him, and we see him get there.

another strange parallel biography

And while we’re at it, here’s a parallel biography I will definitely never, ever write:

Casanova: 1725-1798
Kant: 1724-1804

That’s about as different a pair of animals as you’ll ever find, despite the near-total overlap of birth and death dates.

What on earth could these two have talked about if they had met? It’s possible for us now to appreciate both of them for what they were, but they’re as weird a match in their own right as Popeye and HAL.

But here’s an interesting question… If you had put the two side-by-side as newborn babies, little difference would have been discernible. At age 5 also not. So, at what age did the paths of Casanova and Kant first diverge so greatly that they reached Popeye/HAL status as completely unmixable?

another Chandler/Lovecraft contrast

As Joshi rightly observes, characterization is the “weakest” aspect of Lovecraft’s fiction. I put “weakest” in scare quotes only because I think Lovecraft’s stories would be ruined by detailed psychological portraits of his narrators. Houllebecq is right to say that the function of Lovecraft’s characters is merely to observe in disbelief the horrors unfolding around them. Hence any quiet, nervously fragile academic will work as well as the next in any Lovecraft story. I’m not sure that Poe’s characters are any better in this respect.

By contrast, Chandler’s writing is almost nothing but its central character– detective Philip Marlowe. Whenever I pull a volume of Chandler off the shelf for another reread, it’s because I feel like spending time with Marlowe.

Since there’s already that “Scream for Jeeves” parody combining Lovecraft with Wodehouse, maybe just for fun I’ll try a short parody of Philip Marlowe investigating a gambling house in Bay City and uncovering unspeakable cosmic horrors.

Yeah, that’ll be my hobby for the next few months. A 20-page Chandler/Lovecraft story. If it works out well I’ll post it here somewhere. Maybe “Farewell, My Eldritch Lovely” or something along those lines.

Rory sees an upside

On the whole I’ll try to avoid getting into posting responses that come by e-mail… The burdens of the former blog included not just all the crap I’ve already complained about, but also the need to respond to a number of good comments per day. If someone sends a truly thought-provoking comment, you naturally want to post a response to it, but then the blog quickly becomes a full-time occupation. It can’t be that; the blog will only work for me if it’s primarily a one-way medium where I can post whenever I feel like it. (There are other places in life for intellectual interchange.) The number of work commitments I have is great, both to my own work and to the university-related duties that I very much enjoy.

However, Rory took the trouble to respond, so I’ll post his comments here and let them stand as they are:

“I don’t know if it’s an ‘upside’ of the Puritan attitude to criminals, but it’s probably true that (to put it more broadly) the Christian concern with the soul of the criminal has different consequences than the aristocratic indifference. If, as Tocqueville describes (as Nietzsche does too) that the criminal is just an object that must be dealt with harshly, with no concern for his personality, the Christian legacy leaves two opposed attitudes: the Puritan one, as described; and what we see in Europe and in American liberals. That is, a concern with the soul as the possible site of reform. The aristocratic attitude was very prevalent in Europe, for example, when people were deported to Australia from Britain and Ireland, because they were considered a nuisance (tool-breakers and possible revolutionaries). And I think Puritanism is concurrent with liberal reformism. (There is of course the whole other ballgame of objective forces leading to criminality, but we could be here all day.)”

a book I’ll never write

One of the books I’d like to write, but never will, would be a parallel biographical study of Lovecraft and Chandler. The reason for the link is partly just the personal coincidence that I picked them both off the same Library of America rack at the same Iowa City bookstore, three years apart. But it’s also a very interesting contrast.

Chandler: born 1888
Lovecraft: born 1890

They’re from the same generation. Both were writers of first-rate literary caliber who were somewhat pigeonholed as pulp fiction writers– Chandler in detective fiction, Lovecraft in the weird.

Although Lovecraft seems like a late bloomer in many ways, his best work was already finished by the early 1930’s, and he was dead in 1937. By contrast, Chandler didn’t even publish his first pulp story until 1933, and his first novel not until 1939, when Lovecraft had already been dead for two years.

Both married beautiful older divorcées. But there the similarity ends– Chandler was a smooth ladies’ man, a heavy drinker, and an adulterer, while Lovecraft was almost hopelessly inhibited.

Both tried to enlist for WWI. Lovecraft was rejected due to nervous disabilities, while Chandler, a healthier specimen all the way around, participated in trench warfare in France.

Lovecraft never made it to Europe, but Chandler grew up largely in England (he had an Irish mother). [ADDENDUM: Poe also grew up partly in England.]

Lovecraft died poor and obscure. Chandler died well-known, and to some extent a Hollywood icon.

Lovecraft idolized colonial New England, while Chandler was most at home in Los Angeles.

Both are unusually powerful as letter-writers. Chandler can’t match the prolific rate of Lovecraft as a correspondent (who can?) but Chandler’s letters still rank among the most thought-provoking I have ever seen.

What would these two men have had to say to each other if they had met? Probably not very much, even though it’s not impossible that they might have read a few of each other’s pulp stories. If Lovecraft had met Chandler in the early 1930’s, he would have encountered a heavy-drinking oil company manager with literary tastes but no literary track record. I can’t imagine that their personalities would have meshed well.

But the end of Lovecraft’s career merges so perfectly with the beginning of Chandler’s own that it’s almost as if they shared a single muse passed from one to the other.

They are perhaps the only two fiction writers whose works I compulsively reread. Every couple of years I feel like rereading all of Chandler’s novels (I’m unable to stomach his pulp stories so far), and as for Lovecraft’s stories, I’m rereading them all the time.

this makes my day

From p. 447 of Joshi’s biography. During Lovecraft’s period of separation from Sonia, pre-divorce, he was making a number of independent journeys in the eastern United States. And of course I was delighted by the following passage:

“Lovecraft was going to go directly from Baltimore to Washington [after seeing Poe’s grave in Baltimore], but the colonial relics of Annapolis proved a fatal temptation; and they were no disappointment. He spent only one day (July 12) there, but saw much of the place– the naval academy, the old state house (1772-74), St. John’s College, and the abundance of colonial residences.”

The image of Lovecraft walking around the St. John’s campus, even in July with no one there, is fabulous.

Of course, it wasn’t then the St. John’s we know today. Though very old among American colleges, it was really just another failing college destined not to survive the Great Depression, and needed to be taken over by the liberal arts fanatics who made the college what is today, from which I and thousands of others have since benefitted. I can imagine many possible alternate lives for myself, but don’t enjoy any of the possibilities in which I studied anywhere else than St. John’s.

Oddly enough, one of the faculty members during this earlier incarnation of St. John’s was James M. Cain, author of the noir thriller The Postman Always Rings Twice. And the most famous alumnus of the whole pre-Great Books era was Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

on upside

m writes:

“I’ve been struck for a long time by the same attitude toward criminals in America that you mention in your post, as lurking around every corner and infected with ‘evil’, etc.

To me, it’s very obvious what role this attitude towards evil plays here, what the ‘upside’ is. There’s at least two. First, it serves to solidify social bonds. For instance, for people watching an American television show tracking down ‘child predators’ and bringing them to justice, these people, scattered all over the place and fragmented, can now for a brief moment feel that they are part of the community of the good. So the upside here is that this attitude towards criminals serves as a kind of glue, a way of strengthening the social bonds of the ‘good’ by symbolically tightening them and excluding the ‘evil’.

Second, the Puritan attitude towards criminals, especially when used by the police or government officials, serves as a way for them to justify (to themselves and their communities) their own roles and actions, which can often be quite coercive. Which is not necessarily to say that this is a pure form of manipulation or propaganda.”

This all seems true, though I meant something a bit different and probably wasn’t clear enough. All of the above sounds more like “social payoff” then like true upside.

What I really meant is something like this… Normally, when any analysis is done among intellectuals about the differences between the United States and Europe, the unspoken background to such analyses is: “yup, America is just as stupid and vulgar as I thought.” This tendency is merely intensified by American intellectuals in the humanities, who tend to be the biggest America-bashers around. We tend to be Europhiles in this line of work. This isn’t entirely bad… Raymond Chandler, the literarily fine detective novelist, wrote about how any good American writer will need to be someone of fundamentally European tastes, and I take his point. However, this can also degenerate into Europhilia as embarrassing as leaving home in Wisconsin and going to write your next book in Sils-Maria, or at a higher level, T.S. Eliot from St. Louis adopting as many English affectations as he could carry.

Tocqueville is refreshingly free from such judgments, and does a nice sympathetic job of seeing the upside and downside of the emerging American culture.

To sum up, the knee-jerk intellectual response would be: “Ha! Americans are too hung up on sex, criminals, and good vs. evil.” But it shouldn’t be forgotten that America is a great civilization, whatever its numerous downsides. Numerous important literary, scientific, political, and industrial figures have emerged from the United States. Try to look back on this country with the eyes of a historian 1,000 years from now– the United States landed people on the moon, the least talked about amazing achievement of the past half-century. Atomic energy, which may destroy us but could also proliferate our species to other stars, was also nurtured in the United States.

So, I think it’s important not just to take the European side automatically on every Europe/America cultural difference. And that’s what I meant by “what’s the upside of investing the criminal with evil power?” We shouldn’t assume that the American attitude toward crime is only Puritanical hysteria. Or if that’s all it is, then we should also look for places in the culture where Puritanism has genuine intellectual benefits that Europe can only dream of. What I am asking for is a balanced assessment, and I do think we get that from de Tocqueville on most issues.

Notice also that the American Left falls into the same sort of trap precisely by always criticizing the United States as evil, which is just the inverse of Dick Cheney viewing it as good. The CIA must be responsible for unspeakable evils everywhere, etc. As a European friend of mine once sarcastically described the attitude of two hysterical America-bashing Americans she knew: “America must at least be the worst if it’s not the best.”

concerning Puritans and criminals

The preceding post reminds me of something insightful that Alexis de Tocqueville said about the different attitudes toward criminals in Europe and the United States. In Europe, he said, criminals are simply viewed as wretched or unfortunate types who need to be cleaned out of the way (along the lines of what Machen’s Ambrose holds). But in the United States, surely due to the Puritan influence, the criminal is viewed as a blazing flame of evil in our midst who must be hunted down with torches and pitchforks by all good citizens. As late as age 21 or so, I lost sleep after entering a convenience store near a mysterious bridge in Annapolis and seeing a flyer with a sketch of some child abductor. You couldn’t escape those things for the longest period of time, and they just gave me the deepest sense of human futility.

And it is true that to some extent we grow up in the United States horrified by criminals as if they were demons from another plane, rather than simply maladjusted or failed and dangerous humans. The “FBI 10 Most Wanted” flyers in American post offices were always among the most frightening objects of my youth, as were those ubiquitous sketches of suspected child abductors, and even the sketches of the abducted children themselves. It felt as though evil was everywhere in our midst, like devils at the breakfast table. It is well know that there’s a bit of this attitude in American foreign policy as well.

It’s easy to see the downside of this attitude. A more interesting intellectual challenge would come from the following question– what’s the upside to it?