Wow.

I haven't updated in a few days.

You might think this means I've been outside, doing things with my life other than sitting around, making yet another pot of coffee and wasting time on-line like usual.

Maybe you might think that instead of updating my blog, I've been doing scholarly research, lifting weights, fighting bulls, wooing fair maidens and putting the finishing touches on my novel.

Come to think of it, anyone actually thinks that should by all means continue to think it.

#

In between the activities just mentioned, however, I went out to see "The Prestige" on Friday night.

It's fantastic.

Go see it.

Definitely one of the more intelligent, emotionally complex, ocassionally quite nasty and frequently tremendously fun science fiction movies I remember seeing in the theatres in quite some time. It does, I'll grant you, have that whole "Sixth Sense"/"Usual Suspects" sort of plot structure to it, which might take something away from enjoying it on repeat viewings, but its done in a very clever and sutle way, and the overall quality is good enough that even if you see where the plot's going, you'll probably enjoy the ride enough to want to go there with them.

#

Three years after reading his book in Barnes & Noble, I turned in a paper to Colin McGinn this week.

Which is kind of weird.

#

If I gleaned my self-understanding from the results of on-line quizzes, I suppose that this might worry me.



I'm still not sure how they got all that from questions like how I eat my breakfast cereal and which Lord of the Rings character I'd want to be. (Out of the extremely limited menu of options available, I picked Sauron, so I'm sure I lost some moral fiber points there. It just sounded like more fun than being Frodo, and there always seemed like something a bit off about Legolas somehow, like when he isn't busy fighting orcs he probably spends way too much time in front of the mirror worrying about how his hair looks.) Oh, well.

#

Spent the day doing SFSFS stuff in Ft. Lauderdale yesterday. I actually admitted to a couple of people at a party that I just finished a story that I was planning on having ready to be critted at the next writer's group meeting, meaning that I'd submit it to the e-mail list for everyone to download in about a week a half. I even admitted in a general sense to what the story was about, meaning that I can't just substitute an older story.

So I really should get on those revisions sometime soon.

If I can get a better ending written based on the first round of crits, I might even be able to trick these people into thinking that I'm a good writer.

#

The New York Review of Books has a piece on Lovecraft by Luc Sante.

While Sante doesn't have anything interesting to say about Lovecraft, he is pretty good at fulfilling the primary function of this sort of piece, which is to express in the most dryly clever and cute way possible the superiority of the writer (and, by extension, the reader) to the people who like that sort of trash. Now, done well enough, this sort of thing can generate fun one-liners, e.g. Sante on the growth of Lovecraft's influence on popular culture:

"As a supplier of instruments for the cultivation of horror he was custom-tailored for the suggestible fourteen-year-old boy, and the number of fourteen-year-old boys—some of them chronologically rather older, a few of them even female—is continually on the increase."

Now, that made me laugh, even though I'm firmly in the category of people being made fun of. The following, by contrast, sort of irritated me:

"He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering—the things that did not frighten him would probably make a shorter list."

As Paul Park once memorably asked someone in workshop at Clarion, "that was easy to say, but is it true?"

I don't think it even makes very much sense, but the point is that in this sort of review, what you say doesn't have to make sense, as long as it *sounds* clever and funny.

Which is a shame really.

Saying that Lovecraft was frightened of brittle textures, gelatinous textures, old books and monumental architecture because those things come up a lot in his horror stories makes about as much sense as saying that Laurel K. Hamilton is afraid of sex.

Two basic points here:

First of all, there are few things sillier than trying to read an author's actual view of the universe out of the thoughts of his characters.

The difference between being afraid of something and having any other emotional reaction to it is often a very slippery one. It's like that writing exercise where you try to portray the least sexy thing you can think of in the most lush, sensual terms possible. It's relatively easy to write a passage like that about a strikingly beautiful woman rising out of a swimming pool with water dripping from her hair. It's much more difficult to write it about, say, a piece of fungus scraped from something in the refridgerator.

Similarly, it's easier to portray a vampire in a frightening way, but in the hands of a good horror writer, a stuffed teddy bear can be made to sound scary as hell. The ability to pull it off well doesn't mean that the writer herself is afraid of stuffed teddy bears, any more than the ability to pull the fugus thing off means that the writer is personally into fungus.

Now, even aside from that first point, the second point is that it's even sillier to think that every image, impression or subject that comes up a lot in scary contexts in Lovecraft supposed to be itself scary.

This is the "like thinking that Laurel K. Hamilton finds sex scary" point. Horror, or a certain kind of horror, when done well, tends to be done at the visceral, concerete level. That means that it plays on all sorts of other images, impressions and reactions that have nothing to do with fear, per se, but help bring the reader into the story on a sensuous level, build atmosphere, etc.

That's why horror movies typically feature the same elements over and over again (i.e. the mandatory vaguely risque scene), elements that have little to do with fear, but have to do with all sorts of other reactions in the same spectrum--lust, anger, excitement, adrenaline, whatever--that rope people into that state of mind, reacting to things at that very concrete, visceral level.

With Lovecraft, in particular, anything that's even mildly *weird*, that takes people outside of their day-to-day experiences, builds the right sort of atmosphere, even if those elements themselves aren't remotely scary.

Of course, if you're going for is inspiring a quick laugh, it's easier to just say that Lovecraft was afraid of non-Euclidean geometry.

Easy to say, but probably not true.