Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Kenneth Hite's LiveJournal:

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Monday, November 23rd, 2009
4:05 pm	Smattering Happens * Imagine my surprise when the Chicago Public Library actually had Cherie Priest's two monster novels, Fathom and Those Who Went Remain There Still, sitting on the shelves like they belonged there. When they so clearly belonged on my shelf, but in lieu of that I checked them both out and read each one in one sitting. Those Who Went Remained There Still took about two and a half hours, or just about the time it took to roast a 7-lb. pork shoulder, and it is a pure and beautiful Kentucky bug hunt of a novel flashing between Daniel Boone vs. the World's Worst Harpy and the feuding descendants of one of his men vs. Well That Would Be Telling. Priest had me at "Daniel Boone," but even those who fancy themselves immune to his frontier charm will likely fall for her "Manly Wade Wellman, Only Scarier, And With Better Narrative Control" tale, a veritable crick-and-holler Beowulf. Fathom, meanwhile, felt like Tim Powers. There are some writers, Powers towering among them, who can deploy actual history and make it sound like the finest spun fantasy fiction. Despite knowing nothing of Bok Tower Gardens or indeed Edward H. Bok, when he entered the story I somehow immediately knew that Priest hadn't made anything up. Possibly including the earth elemental. That's hard-core fantasy writing, there. The rest of the book becomes a mounting proxy war between said earth elemental and the "water witch" Arahab, who wants to awaken Leviathan. You heard me. The monsters are their proxies: the (fictional?) pirate Jose Gaspar and two cousins captured in Thirties Florida. Priest's hand with setting, meanwhile, is almost as good as her hand with history. Wellman and Powers is a hard enough mix to handle without her stirring Lovecraft into the mix. Somebody please tell me that her Eden Moore novels aren't quite that good. * Speaking of elemental proxy wars, my Nobilis campaign is officially off the ground. It's based around the concept supplement I pitched to James Wallis Way Back When, called "American Dreaming." (In my mind, the cover is the same as the Nobilis Big White Book, except the half-face statue is the Statue of Liberty.) The players are the Powers of Entropy (no relation), Hope, Apocalypse, Secret Knowledge, and Texas, under the Imperator Croatoan. Their Chancel? Warehouse 23, of course, just where John Dee and Walter Raleigh built it, on Roanoke Island. It should be fun; if anyone has any really good Nobilis resource Web pages to point me at, I'm happy to look. * For robin_d_laws and any other interested parties: My Cthulhu 101 chat is finally up at vocalo.org. Forty minutes of excellent talk with Luis, on Cthulhu, iconic modern horrors, and scary movies. * I also checked out a swath of early Eric Ambler novels, having finally read A Coffin For Dimitrios this summer only to discover the missing link between E. Phillips Oppenheim and John Le Carre. * Upcoming posts will dissect the new and unsatisfactory Prisoner series, the works of spy novelist Alan Furst (which I'm one book short of finishing), recipes for pork-shoulder-bone-enabled rice and beans and for harissa-enabled North African eggs-in-purgatory (if successful), and the process behind (and lessons ahead of) Tehran: Nest of Spies, my new release for The Day After Ragnarok. So watch this space! (21 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 16th, 2009
1:30 pm	As the Wise Moose Says, "This Time, For Sure!" I hear, as by the voice of the wind itself, that copies of Cthulhu 101 are now present at Third Coast Comics (6234 N. Broadway, Chicago). Which means, yes, that's right, the Signing Is On. I'll be on hand to sign and chat and do comic-store things on Wednesday, November 18 from 6:00 p.m. until Whenever. And who knows? There might be copies of the elusive Complete Idiot's Guide to U.S. History, Graphic Illustrated. Or even Where the Deep Ones Are and The Antarctic Express, for all your young-and-squamous gift-buying needs. Can such things be? Only Dagon can say -- and you can ask his representatives in the world of delightfully illustrated irreverence on Wednesday. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
1:33 am	Crawling Toward Chaos; Inverting Lovecraft * Surely, you've all been listening to the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast, right? Two Santa Monica film guys bust each other up and talk Lovecraft, story by story, in an engaging and often illuminating fashion. Plus, their narrative and incidental instincts are knife-keen, as befits film guys. If you haven't made a habit of listening, may I recommend the perfect jumping-on place? As those who know me may have suspected by now, it's the one featuring me as a guest: Episode 18, on the prose poems "Nyarlathotep" and "The Crawling Chaos." They've promised to have me back on, and I am eager to return. Plus, they regularly cite Tour de Lovecraft: the Tales during their show (though not during this episode), and they gave me a very nice plug for Cthulhu 101. So listen up! * In other, non-meta-plug news, mollpeartree and I watched The Ruins tonight, part of my "flood the Netflix zone" plan to make sure there were plenty of horror movie options for Halloween. It's a pretty terrific horror movie, which (like many great horror movies) makes the characters wreak at least as much horror on themselves as the horrors do. Like Lovecraft, it values verisimilitude (even moreso, given the aforementioned character-driven realism), and presents a horror of the Outside come up from Below. But interestingly, the swarthy natives who live Where Horror Dwells are the ones staunchly committed to fighting it; it's the white Americans (and German) who are decadent enough to let the Outside come In.1 Add a nice eco-noia monster-thing and some excellent sound design and atmospherics (I'd like to see the same production team try and tackle "The Willows," come to think of it) and you got yourself a fine 21st-century weird tale. 1] There's elements of that formula in "Shadow Over Innsmouth," of course -- the Pacific Islanders slaughtered the Deep Ones, while white Obed Marsh married them -- and in "Haunter of the Dark," in which the non-WASP Italians and Poles keep the Haunter at bay while white-bread Robert Blake communes with it. But these stand out as exceptions, and "Shadow" is plenty racially fraught, for all that. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
10:07 pm	No Signing Wednesday Just an update for people expecting to see me at Third Coast on Wednesday, Nov. 4 -- once more, Diamond made a hash of the shipment, so there's no copies of Cthulhu 101 for people to buy. I'll announce the re-re-scheduled signing in this space once Third Coast has some books in hand. Ho, for the glamorous life of a writer! (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, October 23rd, 2009
3:56 pm	All I Need Is A Little CIFF Well, the Chicago International Film Festival is behind us once more, "us" in this case being almost entirely his_regard and myself, although gnosticpi managed to see one flick with us. It would probably have been more if I'd jumped right into the planning process the instant the schedule got posted online, instead of waiting for a week and a half for my paper version to arrive. Next year, CIFF 2.0! Win one for Gaia! This was a pretty darn good year for us, and likely for the Fest as a whole -- they don't always track, but more often than not they do. It was a year of weird parallelisms: two East Bloc Rock'n'Roll movies, two Boy Meets Girl Meets Lorax flicks (both from Southeast Asia, even), and two Letter-Perfect Genre Retro Tributes. But specifically, here's our haul, broken down robin_d_laws style: The Best Mother (Bong Joon-Ho, South Korea) Hey, who knew that the South Korean film, directed by the guy who did The Host, would be the best film of the show? Everyone. And they were right. Tense, brilliantly directed crime story follows the mother of a mentally handicapped man as she tries to clear her son of a brutal murder. Bong plays with class, family, and genre conventions as easily and cleverly as he did in The Host, while adding a whole layer of unreliable narrative and noir onto the top. Red Cliff (John Woo, China) Originally released in China, Kill Bill style, as two linked movies (which is to say, as one four-hour movie), we saw the "international release cut," which is a mere 146 minutes. After about ten minutes of narration and introduction of our host of characters, the story starts rolling down on you and never lets up for a second, as you're drawn into the siege of Red Cliff by the evil mandarin Cao Cao. Woo hasn't butchered his film so much as resculpted it: it's still terrifying, brilliant, and -- in the literal sense of that ill-used term -- epic. Reminiscent of Homer and every great kung fu film you've ever seen, it's a kick in the face to all those horrible Hollywood "sword and sandal" flicks of the last few years. Tomorrow at Dawn (Denis Dercourt, France) This was the sleeper; we saw it because it was about Bonapartist historical re-enactors in France, but it turned out to be an utterly badass conspiracy-game thriller with crackerjack swordfights and the rich fat Hussars from across the lake. Great, understated character work is the secret key to this perfectly crafted 96-minute film. Recommended Cropsey (Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman, USA) "As I grew older, I realized the story of Cropsey was just an urban legend, a way for our parents to keep us out of the woods and for us to understand our own fears. Then Jennifer disappeared." Riveting documentary about a rash of child abductions in Staten Island centered on the old abandoned mental institution ... where they say a lone figure lurks in the tunnels. Really. All this plus Satanic cults, true crime, and (as his_regard put it) "crowd-sourcing your witch hunt." With just a little more attention to the urban legend/social ritual angle, it would be up there in "The Best." Spy(ies) (Nicolas Saada, France/UK) Perfect retro-70s spy thriller -- our unwilling hero even has Warren Beatty hair. The clothes, story, music, and everything else were perfectly assembled for a modern spy film (set in modern Paris and London, featuring the Evil Syrians led by Dr. Bashir from DS9 as villains) that feels like the Seventies' best -- there's even an old, cynical British spy named "Palmer"! (heathey, if you somehow see it, tell me if they got the luggage as perfect as they did everything else.) If you've seen enough of the source material, you'll know what's going to happen, and you won't mind a bit. Made in China (Judi Krant, USA) Glorious story of naive entrepeneurship meeting jaded schemers throws a young Texas would-be novelty king in with an Irish fixer in Shanghai (played with great brio by first-time actor Dan Sumpter). Krant shot in fine guerrilla style in Shanghai, giving the film an infectious energy despite numerous jumps in the narrative. The Fest program book, not always reliable, has this one pegged: David Mamet meets Wes Anderson. Just Walking (Augustin Diaz, Spain/Mexico) This one, then, is Russ Meyer meets Jules Dassin -- plot-wise, if not casting-wise. A gang of Spanish female heisters take on the Mexican mob, whose babyfaced triggerman doesn't kill women. It doesn't quite fulfill all its promises, and clearly the flamenco-gown rappelling sequence was just put in because someone liked the look of it, but it's a heckuva gangster film with a pretty great caper flick inside it. Hipsters (Valery Todorovsky, Russia) In 1955 Moscow, a few privileged youths dress up like swinging Yankee hipsters, play swing jazz, and take American nicknames. The keys to a good musical are song and scene, and both work great in this one: the art direction perfectly pits Stalinist drab against Sinatra snap. Fortunately, the key to a good musical isn't the plot, because this one -- young commissar-in-training becomes seduced by the scene -- runs out of steam where a fourth act should be. Admittedly, what could the fourth act be, and leave it a comedy? Khrushchev performing the Secret Speech to the tunes of Xavier Cugat? Instead, there's a big musical number. House of the Devil (Ti West, USA) Tells the tale of an innocent babysitter imperiled by a Satanic cult during a lunar eclipse with pitch-perfect fidelity to the high-water mark of American horror film: the Eighties. It's set in the 80s, which helps, but not nearly as much as the loving recreation of the genre: even the credits font is true, while the soundtrack manages to evoke both Carpenter-style electronica and the string-heavy Herrmann-wannabe stuff that surrounded it. It's even shot on 16 mm! All it's missing is John Saxon as a cop. The story isn't actually that much of a muchness, but one can't have everything, and the feel is both real and repro. Good Women in Trouble (Sebastian Gutierrez, USA) Too much tonal shifting bumps this flick down to merely "Good," although if you like the thought of Emanuelle Chriqui and Adrienne Pawlicki dressing up for an escort gig whilst exchanging crunchy, Mamety dialogue, it's probably "Recommended." Carla Gugino is better than her source material -- she plays a porn actress trapped in an elevator (and in the less interesting story line) -- and the rest is Tarantino-inspired "lots of stories interconnecting, plus porn jokes" fun. The Revenant (Kerry Prior, USA) Iraq War hero wakes up in his grave, hangs out with his best friend, and they fight crime and feed on criminals. Is he a vampire or a zombie? Is it horror or comedy? He's a "revenant," and it's a farce. A funny, scary, well-made farce. Who's Afraid of the Wolf (Maria Prochazkova, Czech Rep.) Little girl obsessed with "Little Red Riding Hood" begins to recognize that her family is acting ... different. This sweet little flick tries on a number of hats (hoods?) before settling down to "kid's eye domestic drama," which is a shame, because "modern fairy tale" was a better idea and stays in swinging almost to the end. The child actors are actually good, which is astonishing. Nymph (Pen-ek Ratanaruang, Thailand) Insanely good editing and sound design forcibly drag this otherwise iffy supernatural love triangle up from the bottom of "Okay." You know the old story: "girl cheats on boy, girl and boy go camping, boy falls into the power of a dryad, dryad sends fetch to girl, girl falls for fetch, confrontation resolves nothing, ending cops out." But man, the editing was good. Satyajit Ray good. Okay Made in Hungaria (Gergely Fonyo, Hungary) The other "East Bloc Rock" flick on our list; this one is a musical biopic of Miklos Fenyo, Hungary's answer to Jerry Lee Lewis. Amiable and bouncy enough, it suffers from the same problem as Hipsters -- how do you end a musical comedy about "rockers vs. the Man" when the Man can throw you in a labor camp? This movie is much more interesting than it is actually good; our hero "Miki" has not only the local commissar to worry about, but a rival rocker, Rone, who is far more authentic than Miki (being an actual criminal, ladies'-man, working-class hero, and auto mechanic). But Miki takes over Rone's band and wins the big talent contest -- so that he can become the Party-approved rocker for the next 30 years. Yay? It's as if John Lithgow lets Kevin Bacon run the youth choir, or if Delta House hosts Homecoming for Dean Wormer -- after purging Blutarsky, of course. Best of the Hugos (CIFF Staff, USA) The CIFF apparently also offers awards to commercials. Many of them are quite entertaining. Buy Bud Light. But hey, it was free. Green Waters (Mariano de Rosa, Argentina) A great job of establishing a paranoid mood comes badly unstuck by the failure of any of the rest of the film to cohere into anything much or go anywhere or mumble mumble. Harassed patriarch has to worry about his wife, his son, and (most of all) his teen daughter on a vacation trip, where they meet a motorcycle-riding stranger. Worry, worry, worry. Plus more worry. The decision to make the protagonist something of a figure of fun helps the character but badly weakens the film. Rapture of Fe (Alvin Yapan, Philippines) Some CIFF films wind up being "research films," films to watch to get an idea of their setting, or of a subculture. I can now write better games set in the Philippines. That said, there are one or four moments in this film of genuinely superb creepiness: the horse-drawn carriage just before dawn is especially well-done. But once more, it's a tiresome triangle of man-woman-tree ogre, with two adulteries and some nice Filipino brujeria for spice. But not enough. Not Good Coffin Rock (Rupert Glasson, Australia) Most "stranger danger" movies -- Stepfather, Poison Ivy, Single White Female, the entire Lifetime Network -- begin with 45 minutes of the stranger looking innocuous and our heroine looking paranoid. Then OUT COMES THE KNIFE and there's 45 minutes of chasing around. There's a reason you do this: if you're not Charles Laughton making Night of the Hunter, the story goes flat if you spend all 90 minutes with an obvious psycho. Glasson pulls his punches even on the things that might have made this film interesting -- the pregnancy, the Fisher King husband -- while letting his psycho rant and rave and kill joeys and generally chew celluloid. For 89 minutes. (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
1:49 pm	Next Wednesday Is Kednesday I'll be at Third Coast Comics (6234 N. Broadway, Chicago) at 6 p.m. next Wednesday, October 28th, signing Cthulhu 101 and getting up to R'lyeh knows what kind of fun. Be there or be consumed in terrible agony when the stars come right! And just before that, at 4 p.m. Central Time, I'll be talking Lovecraft and Cthulhu on my old haunt WBEW-FM, with my pal Luis! Streaming live, as always, at vocalo.org. Speaking of which, Luis' and my Civil War discussion (our last Complete Idiot's Guide to U.S. History, Graphic Illustrated talk -- so far) is up -- I come in at 62:20 or thereabouts. I briefly confuse Winfield Scott with Winfield Scott Hancock, and (less forgivably, but also only briefly) the battles of Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg, and I think I get Meade and Hooker out of order, but otherwise it's pretty sound. Again, I do these without notes, people! (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
12:24 am	A Whitman Sampler The only downside of TiVo is that when a commercial is genuinely interesting, you still miss it. It was at gnosticpi and bigstokes80's that I finally saw the Levi's commercial featuring Will ("Grampa Walton") Geer's voiceover reading of "Pioneers! O Pioneers!" by Walt Whitman. And apparently, there's another one featuring a wax cylinder recording of Walt Whitman his own self reading "America." Leaving aside the weird appropriation of Communist imagery to sell blue jeans (in your face, Uncle Karl!), there's the even weirder use of Walt Whitman to sell blue jeans. Or is it weird, so much as forgotten? (And how much of the "Old, Weird America" is just forgotten, but truer and straighter than what we dare to remember?) After all, the great democratic poet fits the great democratic garment like ... well, like blue jeans. I encountered Whitman in high school English class, which is probably the wrong time to encounter Whitman, Dead Poets Society notwithstanding. There is nothing less cynical, less self-preserving, less guarded, than Whitman. Or maybe, it's just the wrong time to read Whitman if you're leading-edge Generation X, holding ironic distance as a shield before you. Perhaps the Millennials are as thrilled and energized (en masse, of course, or should I say "well in order") by great barbaric yawps and bodies electric as we were embarrassed and disdainful. Maybe that's what Wieden + Kennedy (the mad ad men behind this campaign: and what do you think that meeting sounded like? "Blue jeans ad? I know; let's macedoine some socialist-realism and some cinema verite and set it to Walt Whitman.") think, anyway. Be that as it may, I suspect that I haven't played entirely fair with Whitman since then, for all that I've grown out of being a high-schooler, if not a leading-edge Gen-Xer. (You know who else could use a little love from the masscult? Vachel Lindsay. But I've said enough.) So what else about Whitman? Well, he and Bram Stoker were BFFs. No kidding. Fervent pen-pals since 1876, Stoker met Whitman in America in 1884. In its trusting way, Wikipedia says that Dracula is meant to be Stoker's "ultimate male principle," meaning "Walt Whitman," and a still more excitable Web page goes into loving detail on the Dracula-Whitman parallels, such as they are. I'd be more likely to buy (though I haven't had time to read the original journal article) David Thiele's argument: [T]he character Quincey Morris in Dracula is a version of Whitman's "friendly and flowing savage," who stands "in stark contrast to his English and European counterparts," and that "in A Glimpse of America Stoker can be seen to have adopted Whitman's belief that America was both closer to nature and more highly evolved than the rest of the world, including Britain," generating in Dracula a "continuum" with "the degenerate decadence of Dracula's world at one end, the mostly modernized and civilized but still somewhat constricted, arrogant, and decadent culture of the English in the middle, and the highly evolved, primal virtue of Quincey Morris's Whitmanic America at the other end." "Have you your pistols? Your sharp-edged axes?" You'll need 'em to kill vampires. In your blue jeans, O pioneers. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
4:38 pm	Calling All Sherlockians! With Cthulhu 101 under our belts, righteousfist and I are beavering away at Sherlock Holmes 101. But the problem is that while I've read about 70% of published Cthulhu Mythos fiction (and probably 90% of good Mythos fiction), I've read only about 30% of the published Holmes pastiches, which means maybe 65% -- 75% tops -- of the good stuff. So here's what I've got so far: BEST NON-CANONICAL STRAIGHT SHERLOCKIAN STORIES Richard L. Boyer, The Giant Rat of Sumatra Michael Chabon, The Final Solution Nicholas Meyer, The West End Horror Michael Hardwick, The Revenge of the Hound Michael Doyle, “The Legacy of Rachel Howells” Kingsley Amis, “The Darkwater Hall Mystery” Larry Millett, Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon Vincent Starrett, “The Adventure of the Unique Hamlet” Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr, “The Adventure of the Wax Gamblers” Ronald A. Knox, “The Adventure of the First-Class Carriage” Stephen Fry, “The Adventure of the Laughing Jarvey” Jane Rubino, “The Case of the Notorious Practitioner” Peter Wood, “The Case of Lady Sannox” Caleb Carr, The Italian Secretary Note that this list does not include cameos (LoEG, ONitLO), crossovers (Holmes vs. Dracula! Holmes vs. Fu Manchu!), SF or fantasy Holmeses (Holmes in the Mythos! Holmes on Mars! Holmes in Hell!), alternate narrators ("as told by" Irene Adler, Inspector Lestrade, Professor Moriarty, Billy the page), knockoffs (Solar Pons!), or (with one exception) famous guest stars (Houdini! HPL! Karl Marx!).1 I also left off the burgeoning Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper subgenre, because it will have its own list. It's just a list of great, recognizable Holmes stories. Ideally, it's a list of the best such. Now, my bleg, my plea: If I've left off a favorite of yours, or a great work, tell me about it! I had to add one or two titles to the Mythos lists we did last time, and I know the Mythos way better than I know the Holmes penumbra. Thanks for your kind attention. 1. The one exception being The West End Horror, which has a rotating cast of London's theatrical district as guest stars. This is because I really wanted to put that book in this list, and because unlike most such novels (including Meyer's more famous Seven-Percent Solution), the guest stars don't take over the book from Holmes and Watson. (20 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
2:50 am	Hour Four, With Special Guest Interruptions More of me on WBEW-FM! Hour four! This week, my stint co-incided with a Vocalo-wide "How-to-a-Thon," so after I come in at 64:00 or thereabouts, we get the Mexican War and then two guests who, shock of shocks, don't want to talk U.S. history, graphic illustrations be damned. Rich Logan talks enlightenment and good-humored balderdash in equal measure, and then Mike from The Expired Meter shows up to talk Chicago parking, which was actually a lot of interesting fun. Then we get Luis' regular 6:00 caller Dave, who sets Luis up to ask about alternate history of all things, so we briefly talk about "What if the Revolution had failed?" Then, just because, we talk about the superb Jerry Seinfeld documentary The Comedian. Finally, Luis tacks 20 or so more minutes onto my segment, taking us from 1846 to 1860, through my all-too-brief Tribute to Zachary Taylor, with the Civil War looming on the horizon at last! I'm back again this Friday, WBEW-FM, 5:00 Central, streaming on vocalo.org. Errata and Clarifications -- I'm sure there's more than this, but I'm a bit rushed: The Dred Scott decision was 1856, not 1850 (contrary to the impression I leave). We paid $15 million for California, not $20 million. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 28th, 2009
3:17 pm	Hite On TV! No, this is not yet another lament for the vanished glory that was Veronica Mars, or even an expression of anarchic glee at It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. This is (gasps, murmurs) a plug! I'm apparently going to be a guest on Chicago Tonight tomorrow (Tuesday the 29th), airing at 7 p.m. Central Time on Chicago's public TV window to the world, WTTW, Channel Eleven. The topic? You guessed it: The Complete Idiot's Guide to U.S. History, Graphic Illustrated. Set your TiVos, and remember: I am made possible by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and through donations by viewers like you. And by the publicity department at Penguin Books, which I have to say is beginning to impress me not a little. (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 25th, 2009
10:41 pm	Clash of the Idols I suppose it was inevitable that something like this should happen. I finished up Avram Davidson's novel Masters of the Maze today, but not before flinching at this paragraph: He descended level after level, like someone in a bad dream or in a (bad, ex officio) story by Merritt or Lovecraft. The latter, at least, he recalled, had been obsessed with unpleasant odors. And with cold. The former had merely cultivated a large, country garden consisting entirely of poisonous plants. And Lovecraft had also been obsessed with the theme of humans lending themselves or selling themselves to the service of alien creatures. Like Major Flint. In fact, Nate reflected, Lovecraft might have gotten along quite well with Major Flint. Their social views had much in common. Context: our hero, Nate, is descending into a foul-smelling, freezing cavern full of horrid aliens called the Chulpex who are allied with Major Flint, a schismatic Freemason who wishes to use them to wipe out foreigners and restore American virtu. "Merritt" refers to A. Merritt, author of "The Moon Pool" and other weird tales, which are not as good as Lovecraft but are certainly not "ex officio" bad. Note, by the way, how very, very excellent that paragraph is. While it tears out my heart and treads on it. The novel, by the way, is quite good, although not Davidson's best. But it does have a parallel-world-spanning Maze, Ambrose Bierce, schismatic Freemasons, and a hero who writes "men's adventure" articles with titles like ... oh, let Davidson have the last word: He knew the style, craft, and market. Love-Starved Arabs Raped Me Often. Communist Crocodiles Raped My Wife. Man-Eaters of the Malayan Peninsula. Man-Hating Women Pirates of Polynesia. Women-Eating Arabs of the Crocodile Coast. Get the guy up on the cliff. Leave him up there. Explain how he got there. Then get him off of there. Down off, up off, it made no difference. Rabid Bats Devoured My Wife. Woman-Eating Crocodiles of Wild Bokhara. Rasputin Raped My Aunt. He had written such pieces a hundred times before, each under a different name (only sometimes he forgot and used some of them over again, so that poor Pierce Tarraval, to name but one, had lost wives to fates worse than death on three different continents), each provided with a pseudonymous affadavit attesting to its authenticity -- and each had sold promptly. I'd discuss it further, but I have to get back to work on Women-Eating Cultists of Secret Whitechapel. I mean, Book-Hounds of London. (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
3:16 pm	Hour Three of Me Talking! Can Such Things Be? My third appearance on WBEW-FM is up now. I come in at 45:00 and we spend a little while talking about history and Ken Burns until the hour mark hits, when we get back into U.S. history. This time, we get from 1812 to 1846, with a few detours into the history and nature of American slavery, the "three-fifths clause," and even a brief alternate history moment! I think I got all my facts straight this time, so no errata. I'm scheduled for one more appearance, this Friday at 5:00 Central, as always on WBEW-FM or vocalo.org. This one may be the big Civil War show, unless we spend a lot more time on the Mexican War than I think we will. Seriously, I do intend to post something other than radio-show updates in this LJ -- I've got some Sherlockian lists I'll want your input on, for example -- but I'm cranking hard on Book-Hounds of London and fighting off some kind of approaching crud, so I don't have much spare energy for, say, defending my appreciation of Jennifer's Body. (But seriously, I like Mamet, Lovecraft, and Shakespeare -- Diablo Cody's highly stylized writing holds no terrors for me.) (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
3:51 pm	Hour Two of Me Talking! My second hour of talking American history on WBEW is up now. I come in a little after 65:00, and we get from 1787 to 1812. Errata and Clarifications: Andrew Jackson was the seventh President, not the eighth. As a clarification, Washington was inaugurated in April of 1789 (which means I'm correct when I say Inauguration Day was initially set in April), but the date was moved to March 4 for his second term, and remained in March thereafter until 1933. William Eaton, who led the march into Tripolitania, was not technically the consul in Alexandria, but what we would today call a "naval attache." The Louisiana Purchase cost $15 million, not $20 million; 3 cents an acre, not 8. And $15 million in 1803 would, per Wikipedia, be worth $213 million now, not the $2 billion I speculated on air. We put $3 million down in gold, and the rest was, as I said, on credit. (Credit extended to us to enrich Napoleon, hilariously, by Baring's Bank in London.) And, of course, the Purchase predated Jefferson's embargo by four years, which I didn't get wrong, but I did perhaps confuse matters on the topic by covering the Purchase out of order. Other than that -- and my foolishness in almost forgetting the Louisiana Purchase in the first place -- it's all pretty solid. And in my defense, I do these shows without notes; without even a copy of The Complete Idiot's Guide to U.S. History, Graphic Illustrated. You, at least, can avoid such a fate. I'm scheduled to do two more appearances, this Friday and next Friday, same bat-time (5 p.m. Central), same bat-channel (WBEW-FM or vocalo.org), should you care to lay a gentleman's bet on my chances of getting to the Civil War before the leaves fall. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 10th, 2009
2:31 pm	An Anatomy of Horror Now this is an interesting piece of horror criticism: Nicholas Seeley's "The Dragon in the Time Machine: A Gross Anatomy of Horror." Riffing off Stephen King's Danse Macabre, with its "Tarot hand" of Vampire, Werewolf, Thing With No Name, and Ghost, Nicholas Seeley seems to be trying to do for horror what Northrop Frye was doing for Story, or Fiction, or Poetry, or whatever term you choose to use for that thing that verbal art forms are all doing. (And I think the title shows that Seeley is definitely in on Frye.) In very basic terms, Seeley's Vampires are "horrors from outside," Werewolves are "horrors from inside," Nameless Things (archetypically, Frankenstein's Monster) are "horrors of creation" (or "of entropy"), and Ghosts are "horrors of death," or perhaps "of survival." Dracula, thus, with its concerns about sexuality and transformation (as embodied in Lucy Westenra), is midway between Vampire and Werewolf story. (He also tries, less successfully, to assign darkness to the Vampire, light to the Thing, and twilight to Werewolf and Ghost. But it's probably worth more examination than he or I give it.) Seeley calls Alien the ideal type of the Vampire story, American Psycho the ideal type of the Werewolf story, Frankenstein (or the Pandora myth, or "The Cold Equations") the ideal type of the Thing story, and actual ghost stories (a la "Resurrection Mary") the ideal type of the Ghost story, in which the mere presence of a ghost is the horror. Seeley says most zombie stories are halfway between the Ghost (the pathetic, rotting human shell) and the Vampire (the horror from the dark that wants to eat you), and so we come full circle, just like Frye between the Ironic and the Mythic, or between Satire and Comedy. One good, long example of Seeley's critical theory at work: Take Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House. Many people would say this is close to the ultimate Ghost story, and I would agree—if for no other reason than the relentlessly cyclical logic of its first and last lines. Few passages in literature so elegantly sum up the inseparable veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead, between present and past, than those few phrases. "Whatever walked there walked alone." In its themes of tragedy and downfall, Hill House has all the elements of a ghost story. But it's not just a poignant reminiscence. Something in that house is very definitely malevolent, and when the lights go down it comes after the hapless "scientific investigators," banging on the doors, trying to get in. The fact that we never know what's out there in the dark only helps to make this a great Vampire story, as well. But the Werewolf is here too, to be sure. Jackson is a master at creating "unreliable narrators," and we can never be sure if what seems to be going on in Hill House is a real haunting, or just a product of Eleanor's fevered imagination. Even worse: if the supernatural presence is "real," what is it? Is it the ghost of the malevolent old woman who once lived there? Is it the house itself? Or is actually caused by Eleanor, a kind of poltergeist manifesting her wild, stifled desire and sexuality? If Eleanor is a poltergeist, or even just mad, then where does the responsibility for the terrible events in the house rest? Is it with her, or with Dr. John Montague, the "creator" whose strange (some would say irresponsible) psychological experiment opens up the Pandora's box of Eleanor's psyche? Montague goes looking for ghosts, and he finds them—or does he create them himself? Light and darkness blend, and we are left unable to tell whether the evil comes from within or without, or even if it's what we would call "evil" at all. But finally it doesn't matter whether Eleanor is the creator or the creation, the predator or the prey. The one bright line in Hill House is the line between life and death, and in the end she crosses it. She walks alone. The circle is complete. Seeley argues that the real greats are the stories that travel the whole wheel, or play all the cards from the Tarot. He argues that At the Mountains of Madness is in the middle between Vampire (crinoids gonna vivisect you!) and Thing (entropic shoggoth creation), and I think adding the Ghost is trivial, given that Kadath is nothing but a giant haunted house. Holding a different card back, but staying in Antarctica, one can say that John Carpenter's Thing combines the Vampire (alien gonna shloop you up!) and Werewolf (it's inside us!) with a big dollop of Lovecraftian Ghost (the alien is the sole survivor of the crash; both camps are destroyed with a horrific remnant remaining). The Gothic classically plays all those cards as well: the "unnatural survival" at the core of the Gothic is halfway between Seeley's Thing and his Ghost, an entropic revenant; the Dark Foreign Seducer is the Vampire, and the heroine's doubts or weaknesses hint at the Werewolf story. Some Gothics play fewer cards than others: Wuthering Heights pretty much ignores the horror of creation, for example, for all that Heathcliff and Catherine make great Vampire-Werewolf hay together. If I have more time, or you have any interest, I may come back to this and try to tie Seeley and Frye together somehow. With more Lovecraft. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 3rd, 2009
12:35 am	Pacificon Reminder! For those planning to be in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area this weekend, but who don't yet have plans for the whole weekend, why not come out to Pacificon a.k.a ConQuest? I'll be there as a Guest, doing Something Unavailable At My Clearance At This Time, but it's sure to be fun. Plus, the legendary ConQuest Flea Market will surely have some Osprey books in it. Lovely, lovely Osprey books. Better yet, the legendary Keith Baker a.k.a. gloomforge will be there, now 4.0 compatible! So come on out and see what exactly it is we'll be doing. Edited to Add Schedule! We now have Schedule! Friday 5:00-6:30: Gamemaster Tips Workshop Saturday 1:00-2:30 Trends in the Indie RPG Industry Saturday 3:00-4:00 Q&A With Guest of Honor Keith Baker (I'll apparently be providing moderation, and Q) Saturday 7:00-8:00 The State of the Game Industry And I may well show up univited to: Sunday 7:00-8:00 How to Get Your Game Published, with Aldo Ghiozzi (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, August 31st, 2009
4:43 pm	Two Hours Of Me Talking! Contain Your Excitement. For the curious and the doomed, I've got two long-form audio links to share: * My WBEW interview is up here. I come in right around 61:00, and host Luis Perez and I talk about The Complete Idiot's Guide to U.S. History, Graphic Illustrated and about American history from 1754 to 1787 for an hour. Hopefully, they'll have me back and we can get to the 19th century next time. I should mention that I had a brief blackout on Henry Knox's first name -- I think I called him "Benjamin" for some reason. So, it's "Henry." Luis also let me plug some games, too, so that was neat. * macklinr also let me plug some games on our traditional "wrap-up" final podcast at GenCon, this time incarnated as the last episode of This Just In ... From GenCon 2009, guest-starring podcaster emeritus ptevis. In my pre-emptive defense, it was 1 a.m. on GenCon Monday, and we were all drinking. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 30th, 2009
5:36 pm	[RECIPE] O Polenta! Velut Luna Statu Variabilis While yukon_jack and the lovely A. were here, we ate at Enoteca Roma, a remarkably good north-Italian restaurant where the specialty, they informed us, was the polenta. Only mollpeartree took them up on it, and she was unanimously declared the winner by conquest, especially after we all tried tiny morsels of her meal and then savored our own choices with the bitter tears of regret. Previously, I have been familiar with polenta mostly as a boat for other things, such as the 'mazing Gruyere polenta I had beneath my pork chop with righteousfist at whatever that place was in Alexandria, VA a few years back. But the Enoteca Roma experience made me decide -- nay, vow -- to make polenta worth eating in its own right. And then to pile it with something really good just in case I was wrong about my polenta-making skills. A quick page through Bittman's The Best Recipes in the World, suitably adjusted for Enoteca-worthiness, and I felt ready to court the goddess Fortune, in her guise as cornmeal. Short answer: I was not wrong. ( The long answer, coquettishly hidden beneath the cut... ) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, August 27th, 2009
12:35 am	And Another Eleven Things ... As swell as my (and Shepherd Hendrix, mustn't forget the actually talented partner in this biznai) Complete Idiot's Guide to U.S. History, Graphic Illustrated is, constraints of narrative and space meant that some completeness (and even some idiocy) had to be left on the cutting room floor. This list doesn't include the Single Most Important Thing Nobody Ever Mentions About American History, King Philip's War, because the editor wanted to begin in 1776, not 1492 or 1607 or 13,500 B.C. Which also robbed posterity of my great opening joke: "The first Americans immigrated here from Asia across the Bering Land Bridge around 13,500 B.C. We know they were Americans because they immediately invented a super-weapon, killed everything in sight, and gorged themselves on meat." At any rate, here, in chronological order, are the Eleven Most Important Things I Omitted From My Book: ca. 1800: An unknown American genius invents the cocktail. 1825: Joshua Purdy creates the first circus held under a canvas tent; circuses become itinerant, national entertainment rather than features of a single city or small group of cities. 1837: Horace Mann begins the invention of the American public school system. 1846: William Morton demonstrates surgical anesthesia. 1861: The Greenback becomes America's first fiat currency. 1869: John Wesley Hyatt invents the first practical plastic, celluloid. 1871: The Treaty of Washington recognizes Canada, settles the Alabama claims, and establishes the bedrock of the Anglo-American alliance that would define the 20th century. 1887: The Michelson-Morley Experiment disproves the ether, and begins the process of undermining Newtonian physics that Einstein, Planck, and Heisenberg will complete. 1911: Thomas Hunt Morgan invents the modern science of genetics by demonstrating that chromosomes carry genes and proving that Mendelian heredity works via Darwinian selection. 1924: Edwin Hubble discovers that the Andromeda Nebula is the Andromeda Galaxy, and revolutionizes astronomy by going Copernicus one better. 2005: The U.S.-Indian Nuclear Deal clears the decks for America's most significant alliance of the 21st century. More grossly, painting and sculpture really take it in the neck in my book -- I don't think I wound up mentioning a single American painter or sculptor. I remember trying two or three different ways to work in Edward Hopper, for instance, and it never worked. In my defense, I concentrated on the arts Americans either invented or pioneered: comics, jazz, blues, television, film. Neither RPGs nor video games made it, though. Perhaps I can make up for it by mentioning one or two of them in my upcoming radio interview on WBEW-FM, Chicago's secret public radio station, streamed on vocalo.org for your streaming needs. I'm scheduled to do 40 minutes or so this Friday at 5 p.m.; I don't know if they'll put the interview up on the site afterward. If so, I'll link back here then. Update: The link is here. I come in right around 61:00, and we talk about the book and about American history from 1754 to 1787 for an hour. Hopefully, they'll have me back and we can get to the 19th century next time. (21 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
4:47 pm	Gen Con, My Gen Con Everyone's Gen Con experience is different and the same. Fan or pro, there's the moment of reorientation into ritual space -- the Indianapolis Outside Time, where it's always mid-August, and you can't quite remember where you left the Omni. There's the joy of seeing friends you see once a year, and the pain of knowing there's more you didn't get to see this time because of your cowardly need for sleep. There's the contact high off new games you anticipated, and off the ones you didn't know you anticipated, and even off the ones you didn't care about but you're just so glad to see everyone else caring about because they're your tribe and they're happy. There's games you couldn't afford, and games you wound up with anyway. There's meals you shouldn't have eaten, and meals you should have lingered over. There's the possibility of hooking up -- with a new friend, with a new partner, with a new contract, whatever -- and the thrill of making it happen, and the esprit d'escalier of the one that got away. There's the way that the Best Four Days in Gaming subtly expands into six -- the induction the day before, the benediction on the return trip. So what made my Gen Con special, specific, this Gen Con? At random, ten things out of a hundred: * Being the guest on Inside the Game Designer's Studio. I do hope that macklinr can defeat the gremlins in his recorder, because the last forty minutes was even better than the first twenty. Perhaps it was the Scotch. Those of you who attended in person know I speak the truth. Until then, enjoy my appearance on This Just In ... From Gen Con! * Triumphant success in the task simonjrogers assigned: find another good seafood place for the Pelgrane dinner. I can recommend the Oceanaire, as can the Pelgranistas. (Also, in getting Rough Magicks done in time to see it move briskly off the tables at the show.) * Lunch with jachilli, and the discovery that drinking Jägermeister with a shot of au jus improves the taste of Jäger considerably. Which is to say, masks it. * Dinner at St. Elmo's steakhouse with Owen. St. Elmo's is the reason to go to Indianapolis, even if you're not there for Gen Con, and the New York strip was, if anything, better than their normal this time around. * Learning that Nathan Paoletta (designer of Carry and Annalise) is now a Chicagoan. * Forcing robin_d_laws to stay up way past his bedtime on Saturday -- only his fatigue-spawned admission that he was actually trying to make me miss the White Wolf party got me to call shenanigans and let him go to bed. I only got to hear part of the last hour of Justin's set, but once more there was no AC worth mentioning at the White Wolf party venue, so I find it very hard to consider Robin the bad guy in all this. * Lunch with roninevil, this time not on our familiar theme of "Our Employers And Their Darling Little Faults ... Not Even Faults, Really, More Like Cute Offhand Mannerisms ... That Only Make Us Love Them All The More," but mostly on the theme of "Horror Movies You Should Have Seen And Why." * Seeing The Antarctic Express and Cthulhu 101 piled up -- and then considerably less piled up -- at the Adventure Retail booth. And signing them for all who asked. * A surprise appearance by spookyfruit, late of my Monday game, there to have a meeting and (as it happened) to buy me lobster. * Breakfast with jtidball on Sunday. People kept asking me "Why?" I would explain, "It's penitential." And they would only look confused. Should I count ptevis coming up two days early, for Hot Doug's and wargames? Should I have put all the meals in the same bullet point, so I could mention new discoveries like Venus 2141 and Blackmoor 4e and Emily Care Boss' Sign in Stranger and Joe McDonald's Ribbon Drive and ... Should I have mentioned drunken discussions of old-school comics art with White Wolf art staff at a cigar bar I didn't even know existed last year? The Diana Jones Awards party, and a long good talk with Monica V. of Flames Rising? How about stuff I somehow didn't learn at the show, like that Catalyst Games has released their new RPG Eclipse Phase under a Creative Commons license? Too much for one post. Too much for four days. I'm glad I saw all of you. I'm sorry I didn't get to see as much of you as I would have liked. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, August 10th, 2009
12:52 am	Attention Other Magazines Less than a year after adding my name to their masthead, Weird Tales has won the Hugo Award. Just sayin,' is all. (Congratulations are properly due to stephenhsegal and Ann Vandermeer. So, congratulations!) And should you not be aware that I'm writing the "Lost in Lovecraft" column for Weird Tales -- excuse me, for the Hugo-Award-winning magazine Weird Tales -- consider this a much-overdue plug. *** And speaking of Lovecraft, and plugs, and me, I will apparently be participating in some fashion in the annual H.P. Lovecraft Memorial Ice Cream Social at 57th Street Books, 2 p.m. on August 22, Lovecraft's 119th Birthday, Observ'd. (6 Comments |Comment on this)