Portland coming up today

The city’s a beauty, if you don’t know it.

In addition to the nice landscape and the animal-friendly, vegetarian-friendly lifestyle, another part of Portland’s appeal was that once Seattle became an unaffordable traffic jam nightmare, Portland was arguably the most livable big city remaining on the West Coast.

Potential long-term issue: that’s an active volcano you see in the background. Actually, on a clear day you can see three active volcanoes from Portland: Mt. Hood, Mt. St. Helens, and even Mt. Rainier.

Schurkenplaneten

That’s German for “Rogue Planets,” which is the new Circus Philosophicus-type myth I wrote for Ralo Mayer’s art catalog for Linz.

The piece is now being translated into German, but apparently (I didn’t know this) the catalog will be bilingual throughout.

For awhile I thought Palin might ruin the word “rogue” through overuse just as McCain eventually turned “maverick” into a joke. But it doesn’t seem to be happening as far as I can tell.

Incidentally, if you like a bit of expressionism with your tea, then Mayer’s show may be just the thing for you. Its overall title is the very Schoenbergian:

“Woran glauben die Motten, wenn sie zu den Lichtern streben?”

Or, “What do moths believe in when they strive towards the light?”

(“Lights” in German, but we’d say “light” in English.)

eeriest moment in Lovecraft

There are many from which to choose. But at present I favor the three-way radio conversation between academics in Antarctica in “At the Mountains of Madness,” with one of the parties just a few hours away from being lacerated and strangled by awakening pre-Cambrian animal/vegetable hybrids.

The most gruesome moment is probably in “Dreams in the Witch House” when Brown Jenkin tunnels into Gilman’s body, completely eats his heart, then tunnels out the other side. (Funny that this very atypical Lovecraftian monster –a tittering overgrown rat with a bearded woman’s face, tiny human hands for paws, and a “quaint” name– may be his scariest.)

The scariest story overall may be “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” The scene of the narrator being trapped in his hotel room while the unknown enemies with “slopping” voices (who turn out to be fish-frog-human hybrids) try to break into the room is one of Lovecraft’s few “action hero” moments, and he pulls it off surprisingly well. Ever since first reading that story, I’ve occasionally attempted to imitate the “shambling” gait of Innsmouth residents, but can’t quite get it. Maybe a professional dancer could give us something plausible. I also like it when the normal grocery boy in Innsmouth tells the narrator that the pastor in his hometown “urged him gravely” not to join any churches in Innsmouth. Good call, since all the churches there seem to be filled with shambling/hopping priests wearing horrid robes and freakishly oval-shaped tiaras.

Incidentally, my first bus driver in Malta bore a frightening resemblance to Joe Sargent, the Innsmouth bus driver in the story.

lottery failure

I failed in my first attempt to win the Illinois lottery so as to purchase Lovecraft’s “shunned house,” which would definitely be converted into OOO headquarters. No more than two numbers correct on any of the tickets.

I’m trying the Iowa lottery this week.

interviewed by Kris Coffield

Kris interviews me at fracturedpolitics.com.

HERE.

on ruination

In Venice we were discussing a particular sculpture, and I found it easiest to think about that sculpture and what it does by imagining possible ways of ruining it. What could the artist have done to make it worse?

We’re familiar with the idea that a statement is scientific only if it can be falsified (Popper). I’m tempted to make the analogous claim that anything aesthetic is better the more different ways it can be ruined.

It makes sense, if you think about it. If any object or utterance has some subtle total effect that achieves many different things at once, there should be multiple different ways to undercut it.

I’ve said this before concerning a nice line from Nietzsche with which most people are familiar. It’s this one about Shakespeare: “What must a man have suffered to have found it that necessary to be a buffoon!”

Though I seem to have lost the notes I once took on this passage, I once found about 20 different ways to ruin this nice little sentence, and gave each one the name of a stock figure who might be able to do the ruining. For instance…

The simpleton: “How happy he must have been to be a buffoon so often!”

The bore: “What must a man have suffered to have found it that necessary to be a buffoon! For while it might seem like the contents of Shakespeare’s writings should be a direct reflection of his personality, modern psychology teaches differently. In fact, what people write is often the opposite of what they are feeling inside. In Shakespeare’s case, it may be an effort to counterbalance painful personal experience with an outward show of good humor.”

The moralistic resenter: “What must a man have suffered to have found it that necessary to be a buffoon! Personally, I find it a bit pathetic that he was that needy and always trying to get as much attention as he did.”

I’ll write an article about this some time. But it occurs to me that one of the ways to show that Lovecraft is a stronger writer than many believe is to show how many different ways there are to ruin his sentences. In other words, they’re not already ruined.

thunderstorm hits Iowa City

Only worth noting because we almost never have them in Cairo, and I miss them sometimes. We get maybe one per year. Or maybe every two years.

The rain now seems to have largely stopped, but it’s still a spectacular electrical storm.