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Gods, Monsters and H.P. Lovecraft’s Uncanny Legacy - The New York Times

Gods, Monsters and H.P. Lovecraft’s Uncanny Legacy - The New York Times

Gods, Monsters and H.P. Lovecraft’s Uncanny Legacy - The New York Times

Posted: 07 Aug 2020 12:00 AM PDT

"Lovecraft Country," premiering Aug. 16 on HBO, follows a Black family entangled in eldritch phenomena. Based on Matt Ruff's 2016 novel, the series is a sideways look at the terrors of Jim Crow America that nods to and reframes the work of H.P. Lovecraft, the widely cited if narrowly read pulp fiction writer from the early 20th century.

Broadly — and with plenty of exceptions — Lovecraft's stories suggest huge and unfathomable horrors lurking just beneath the surface of the mundane world. Filled with miscegenation, tentacles and unspeakable dread, his works often begin with ordinary or ordinary-seeming men drawn into extraordinary and otherworldly situations. Almost no one gets out alive or sane. His brand of weird is gooey and misanthropic, with an insistence that the universe is at best indifferent to human life and at worst antagonistic.

To adapt a Lovecraft work is to reckon with a troubled and troubling legacy — blatant racism and sexual phobias blight much of his work. Still, he remains influential, with his sinister, squishy qualities still felt across media — television, film, fiction, comics, video games, role-playing games, visual art, plushies — and multiple genres. The stomach monster from "Alien"? Extremely Lovecraft. That giant squid from "Watchmen"? Lovecraft again. The devouring Shoggoths from the "Lovecraft Country" pilot? A squelching tip of the hat.

If you don't know your Yog-Sothoth from your Shub-Niggarath — good! Run while you can! But if you hold your sanity lightly, here is a brief guide to the man, the monsters and the popular culture slime trail his works have left behind.

Born in Providence, R.I., in 1890, to a well-off family who quickly tumbled down the social ladder, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a precocious child who became a deeply strange adult. (When both of your parents die in the same psychiatric hospital, two decades apart, maybe that's not a huge surprise.) After leaving high school during his senior year, a move precipitated by a nervous collapse, he began to write short stories indebted to Edgar Allan Poe, and dabbled in amateur journalism as well as racist and xenophobic poetry.

He devoted himself to horror fiction just after World War I, creating unsettling and often interrelated stories, many of them published in the pulp magazine "Weird Tales." He married, briefly, and spent a few years living in Brooklyn, a period that inspired stories like "The Horror at Red Hook." When his marriage ended, he returned to Providence, where he expanded into novellas like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and "At the Mountains of Madness."

Many of his stories, which favor abstruse language and archaic spelling, take place in an invented region of Massachusetts that his disciples would later christen Lovecraft Country. Lovecraft's fiction reveals strange preoccupations — slime, crustaceans, the revelation of forbidden knowledge. A profound discomfort with sex runs through several stories; others display a deep-dyed racism, with nonwhite characters used as examples of barbarism. His fiction and ghost writing paid poorly and Lovecraft died in poverty in 1937.

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Credit...Dipper Historic/Alamy Stock Photo

Lovecraft created a genre of his own, cosmic horror or "cosmicism." Think nihilism, with occasional cephalopods.

The basic idea: Humans are an irrelevancy within the greater universe, a cosmos governed by forces so alien and terrifying that our tiny minds cannot encompass or bear their knowledge. Most characters who glimpse it promptly go insane. Cosmicism's big bad is Cthulhu, a winged, octopus-like ancient god. But Cthulhu and his associates aren't so much evil as indifferent to pesky human life.

As pantheons go, Lovecraft's cosmogony is fairly imprecise, with much of it enfleshed by his immediate disciple, August Derleth, and other writers. There are Great Old Ones, the Outer Gods, the Elder Things and assorted monsters like the Shoggoth, a slave race of many-eyed, protoplasmic amoeba doodads. These gods are occasionally humanoid, but more often sluglike, piscine, crustacean, gelatinous or a lose-your-lunch buffet of unnamable horrors. Lovecraft typed these beings as explicitly extraterrestrial, though some are former rulers of the earth and still lurk within its depths and reaches. (So no more expeditions to Antarctica, OK?)

Gods to know and then run from in crazed terror: Dagon, a sea monster god; Nyarlathotep, a malign shape-shifter god, who appears sometimes in the form of a pharaoh and sometimes as an upsetting bat thing; Shub-Niggarath, a cloudlike lady god sometimes called "the Black Goat of the Woods With a Thousand Young"; Yog-Sothoth, the "All-in-One and One-in-All," a collection of glowing circles, but scary.

If Lovecraft remains a prized writer, that has more to do with the atmosphere his stories evoke than with the turgid prose. His pacing can be slow, his dialogue stilted, his humorlessness suffocating. But for a taste of his crawling chaos, here are some ghastly places to begin.

'At the Mountains of Madness' (1936)

Dr. William Dyer, a professor of geology at Miskatonic University (think Harvard, but eerier), joins a trek to Antarctica in this harrowing novella. His team discovers frozen prehistoric life-forms. Then mayhem begins. Dyer uncovers the remnants of an ancient alien civilization, a race of Elder Things and intimations of an even greater evil waiting nearby.

'The Call of Cthulhu' (1928)

This twisty story follows a man piecing together various writings left behind by his recently deceased professor uncle. Had his uncle stumbled on a series of cults devoted to the worship of an Elder God? He had! Note Cthulhu's big debut: "It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway."

'The Colour Out of Space' (1927)

A surveyor assigned to an odd corner of Arkham, Mass., discovers that a fallen meteorite has poisoned the local floral and fauna in this short story. The meteorite, which produces a color unlike any on the visible spectrum, affects humans, too, driving one farm family to depredation and death.

'The Dunwich Horror' (1929)

In this story set in Dunwich, Mass., strange things are afoot at the Whateley farmhouse. So strange that Wilbur Whateley tries to break into the Miskatonic library and steal a copy of the "Necronomicon," an ancient spellbook. With Wilbur thwarted, an invisible horror begins to roam the countryside.

'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' (1936)

A novella dripping in genre elements, this odd tale stars an unnamed 21-year-old college student who stops off in Innsmouth, a dumpy, insular fishing town. Our narrator notices that the locals have narrow heads, bulging eyes … and hey, are those gills?

Credit...Empire International Pictures

Though Lovecraft's influence echoes throughout popular culture, his works often resist successful adaptation. Disturbing and prim, his corpus demands adventurous artists who can embrace his sinister ambience while also cracking it open to allow fresh perspective and tone.

'Alan Moore's The Courtyard' (2003) and 'Neonomicon' (2010-2011)

A gallimaufry of murder, conspiracy, bad drugs, worse sex magic and forcible impregnation by an alien fish thing, these limited series comics by the graphic novel genius and sometime magician Alan Moore have a staggering nightmare-per-page ratio. Moore also concocted the short story, "What Ho, Gods of the Abyss?," an unholy and delightful mash-up of Lovecraft and P.G. Wodehouse.

'The Ballad of Black Tom' (2016)

Like Ruff's "Lovecraft Country," Victor LaValle's novella re-evaluates Lovecraft's deeply racist preoccupations. This retelling of "The Horror of Red Hook," centers a Black protagonist and particularizes Red Hook's lower-class, immigrant denizens. Its dedication reads, "For H.P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings."

'Color Out of Space' (2019)

If you want to communicate the sheer, unreal horror of the universe, choose an unreal actor to do it. Nicolas Cage stars in Richard Stanley's film adaptation, playing an alpaca farmer (just go with it) whose life goes awry when a meteor lands. "Stanley and Cage," Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in The Times, "leap so far over the psychological top that they never come back to earth."

'Meddling Kids: A Novel' (2017)

What if Scooby and the Gang grew up and faced Cthulhu? In Edgar Cantero's allusive, inventive comedy-crime-horror pastiche, three young adults and one trusty dog return to the haunts of their youth to confront an old — like, Great Old Ones old — enemy. Zoinks!

'Re-Animator' (1985)

A film adaptation of "Herbert West — Reanimator," set in a 1980s-era Arkham, this horror comedy centers on Herbert West, a medical student with some funny ideas about the Hippocratic oath. A shock-a-minute gore fest, the movie became a cult classic. Here's Pauline Kael's take: "The bloodier it gets, the funnier it gets."

'Winter Tide' (2017) and 'Deep Roots' (2018)

Like Ruff and LaValle, Ruthanna Emrys also works a reclamation of the Lovecraft legacy. These two novels focus on Aphra March, a former Innsmouth resident who recently survived an internment camp. Because the U.S. government does not trust gill people. Emrys's work humanizes Lovecraft's monster, laying his xenophobia bare.

What Ray Bradbury Can Teach Us About How To Cultivate Creativity - The Federalist

Posted: 29 Aug 2020 03:44 AM PDT

In 2013, British writer Neil Gaiman wrote a story entitled "The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury." It was about exactly what the title says: A man, losing his memory, tells the audience that he can only vaguely remember a writer who hailed from Waukegan, Illinois, who wrote wonderful and macabre fairytales of space and the otherworldly. Gaiman's story is closer to home than what we might care to remember because, on the century of his birth, the world at large has forgotten Bradbury, who died in 2012.

This isn't to say we all have mentally scrubbed who he is. People more than likely know his name and remember titles such as "Fahrenheit 451," "Something Wicked This Way Comes," "The Illustrated Man," and "The Martian Chronicles."

Movie buffs might remember that he wrote a number of screenplays, such as for the 1956 John Huston adaptation of "Moby Dick," and television aficionados might recall "The Ray Bradbury Theatre," which dramatized for the little screen many of his stories, as well as the work he did for "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and "The Twilight Zone."

For all this, however, Bradbury has stopped being a person and has become shorthand, a reference for weird fiction many would call science fiction. Even this is insufficient. Bradbury's stories — even when they did deal with science fiction, such as "The Golden Apples of the Sun," "R Is for Rocket," and "The Rocket" — were not, technically speaking, science fiction, certainly not the sort that was being written by Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov.

Who Was Bradbury?

The worlds Asimov created felt like they could work on a technical level. For example, he used his knowledge of science (he held a doctorate in chemistry) and history to make future places with backstories and their own rules. It created the illusion that a place like the Foundation or Solaris might exist in the future, whether in 50 or 500 years.

Bradbury was different, as he would attest. The ins and outs of the worlds and places he created were never really explained, largely because his worlds were meant to be experienced, much like a Greek myth or a Grimm's fairy tale is supposed to be experienced, not intellectualized. Bradbury even described himself as a teller of fairy tales. More often than not, his stories explored ideas that could have been dissected only in a fairy tale.

His story "The Murderer," for example, looked at what would happen if people became cocooned by and umbilically dependent on technology, and how society would react when a person tried to break out of that shell. "Punishment Without Crime" took a similar theme but approached it from a different angle, raising the question of what makes a human being when he cannot be distinguished from a robot. "The Haunting of the New" took what would be called today a Puritan lens to the idea of sin and its consequences, and "The Blue Bottle" examined contentment and desire played out on the face of a dead Mars.

Since we can't remember what type of stories he wrote, it's no surprise we have such a vague idea of who Bradbury is despite his name still being a presence in the hall of American fiction. We are poorer for that ignorance, dangerously so.

While he might have been a writer of gothic fairy tales, which like the pulp stories before them were seen as of lesser quality than stories by "serious authors," Bradbury stands alongside people like Flannery O'Connor, Graham Greene, and G.K. Chesterton, who used their fiction to elucidate the world, both of the dangers it faced and of the path it should take. As civilization crumbles around us, Bradbury and his fiction offer several primordial lessons we would be prudent to reconsider.

Nature of Knowledge

The first one might be entitled: A piece of paper does not confer knowledge. With China's coronavirus still plaguing the world, and two-thirds of a million people dead around the globe because of Beijing's lies, the American education system is still in a state of quasi-hibernation, with many schools announcing they will remain closed until next August.

This has the conservative movement ironically lambasting this decision and calling for the immediate opening of a system it has spent the last few decades constantly (and rightfully) criticizing as centers of propaganda rather than education. We're told the schools must open this fall or children will fall behind academically and intellectually. Furthermore, they won't learn to socialize or will lose socialization they had learned.

Bradbury would ask us why are we so desperate to have our children, and ourselves by extension, enslaved to a structure that wants to teach our kids lies instead of truth, filling their heads with ugliness instead of beauty and hedonism rather than love, especially when we do not need it. Bradbury in multiple interviews and essays throughout his life stated bluntly that after graduating from Los Angeles High School, his formal education stopped.

The keyword is "formal," since his actual education never ceased. Instead of college, he raided the libraries in Los Angeles and gorged himself on books of all kinds, fiction and nonfiction, by all sorts of authors and in all sorts of genres. His advice for writers was an adaptation of this: Read one short story, one poem, and one essay every night for a thousand nights, at the end of which you will be "stuffed" with ideas and knowledge, most of which you would never get in a formal classroom.

There is no reason why this cannot work for us as it worked for him. While schools are closed, libraries are open. Even if your local library is closed, there is the internet.

I'm fairly sure Bradbury had a low opinion of the web and an even lower opinion of the iPhone (he viewed cars as mechanical Jacobins). But he might admit, however begrudgingly, that a silver thread running through both creations is the fact that practically the entire compendium of human knowledge can be accessed through "smart" devices. He would probably tell us we have an entire university in our pocket if we stopped using it to watch TikTok videos and scroll through Facebook.

Importance of Imagination

The second law might be put in a cartesian way: I am, therefore I must imagine. If Bradbury lived by one word, it was "imagination." That might seem an obvious observation; writers have to be imaginative to continue their craft. The day a writer's imagination evaporates is the day he dies and is reincarnated in another profession. Bradbury did not limit the imagination to writers, however. He maintained that imaginative power was essential to every human being.

In an interview with James Day, Bradbury said imagining, or "fantasizing" as he put it, was essential to survive and grow. The most important part of a child's day was the time right before he went to sleep, when his imagination received the whole range of his mind, allowing him to dream himself into becoming something.

Imagination didn't simply help the person who imagined. Imagination was a line of dominoes, which, once activated, would set off a chain reaction that could inspire who knows who or how many people.

For example, Bradbury described his friend Walt Disney's idea for a perpetual World Fair (what would become Orlando's Disney World) as a "Schweitzer's centrifuge" — a place "where you can figuratively 'spin' people (such as a theme park or a world's fair) and inspire them, ignite their curiosity, stuff their heads with ideas, and send them whirling out into the world to build brand-new dreams."

This might be a difficult message to accept, especially by people who have as their mantra, "Facts don't care about your feelings," but it is one we must accept to make any genuine progress. Very few people are convinced by facts or change their worldview because of a string of syllogisms. If the facts were as good at converting as people say, the stories of Candace Owens or Brandon Straka or Dave Rubin would be a dime a dozen.

The fact that all three have made following the facts a cornerstone of their personal brands testifies to how rare an occurrence this is. C.S. Lewis encapsulated this law perfectly when he wrote in a 1932 essay, "Reason is the natural organ of truth, but imagination is the organ of understanding."

Necessity of Art

The third law might go like this: Man requires art. It is a logical extension of the second law. Today, left and right has boiled much, if not all, of life to the political. Glued to our phones and pads, we constantly devour podcasts, YouTube videos, and articles on the Russian collusion hoax, climate change, free speech and freedom of religion, abortion, and the latest outrages of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Cardi B.

This is not all a waste of time; it is essential to know what your enemy is saying to counter it. The political, however, as Edmund Burke said, is concerned with the problems of the now. It is impotent against the problems of tomorrow that haven't yet arrived.

Because politics is only one aspect of life — and in a sane world, it would be a small aspect — it can't interpret life satisfactorily on its own. Trying to do so is the same as Karl Marx trying to make all human experience rooted in economics and brings the same results.

This is why we need art — not only because art can address the problems politics can't, such as problems of the soul (see Bradbury's story "A Piece of Wood"), but also because art, in a real way, strips away the material to reveal the real. This is why in his lecture "On Fairy-Stories," J.R.R. Tolkien said the ogre's castle was more real than a lamppost. The latter was just a glob of fashioned metal; the former was an incarnation of true malevolence. Bradbury attested to this when he stated after Disney's death that Disney had done more for good in the world than most of the politicians who had ever lived, because he had created art, both in his films and his parks.

Birthdays always necessitate gifts, and the more the birthday celebrant has given us, the more meaningful our gift should be. If Bradbury's ghost could come back on his century, he would likely say the best and greatest gift we could give him would be to stuff ourselves with ideas and metaphors to fuel our imaginations in order to create. In that way, he would say, we could really be alive.

100 best movies based on books | Entertainment | wkuherald.com - College Heights Herald

Posted: 28 Aug 2020 09:00 PM PDT

e, no small percentage of which are likewise based on previous ideas and formulas. "Art is theft," as Picasso reportedly said, but at least Hollywood dispenses credit every now and then.

Without exceptional books there would be far fewer impressive films. Just ask directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Francis Ford Coppola, all of whom based some of their finest films on novels. Each talented director delivers their own take on the work, often to the author's chagrin. Look no further than Stephen King's openly critical stance on Kubrick's adaptation of "The Shining."

In other cases, the directors stay impressively true to the source material. Some examples might include Luchino Visconti's "The Leopard" or the Coen brothers' "No Country for Old Men," to name just a couple. It still goes to show, however, that the mere visualization of a novel can affect how the content might be perceived. What was once the stuff of personal imagination has now been made flesh and the indelible images might prove hard to shake. And who wants to shake them when they come from masters of the craft?

Putting the printed page up on the big screen is a tradition as old as cinema itself. To honor that tradition, Stacker compiled data on all top-rated movies to come up with a Stacker score, i.e., a weighted index split evenly between IMDb and Metacritic scores as of July 8. 

To qualify, the film had to be based on a book, including novellas, comic books, and short stories; have an IMDb user rating and Metascore; and have at least 5,000 votes. Ties were broken by Metascore, further ties were broken by IMDb user rating, and final ties were broken by user votes. Going from great to greater, here are the 100 best movies based on books. 

You may also like: 50 movies that address the history of racism in America

Universal Pictures/Amblin Entertainment

Catching Up: St. Catherine's graduate Wagner making her name with a camera - Journal Times

Posted: 30 Aug 2020 05:00 AM PDT