Lovecraft/Poe

Really looking forward to Venice, but also to post-Venice so I can get to work on the Lovecraft project (had hoped to do so right after Oxford, but too many smaller-scale commitments appeared and had to be dealt with).

Poe will play some role in my Lovecraft book, though Poe deserves a book of his own. Lovecraft and Poe do have a lot in common, but it has less to do with scary content than with their rhetorical craft, and their manner of equipping first-person narrators to experience shock and surprise on behalf of all of us.

I agree with Houellebecq that it’s foolish to call Lovecraft a bad stylist. He was an amateur and so there are unpolished moments where an editor should have helped (for example, I think the whole first paragraph of “The Whisperer in Darkness” damages the story, which should have begun with the second paragraph).

At the moment I’m toying with the idea of using parody as a method more extensively in this book. I did write the one short piece of parody in my Lovecraft/Husserl article, but parody may be deserving of becoming a more mainstream philosophical method.

But once this book is done, I doubt there will be any further questions as to why Lovecraft is of any relevance to philosophy. It should be easy to close the case on that point.

Incongruously enough, Venice is the place where I first read “At the Mountains of Madness.” There could hardly be a less appropriate place to read that horrific Antarctic tale (which for its part, is damaged by being about 40 pages too long).