Tag: HPL

Howard Philips Lovecraft, 1890-1937: “That is not dead which can eternal lie / And with strange aeons even death may die.”

Ageless Speech

SPEAKING OF H.P. LOVECRAFT, as I was in the prior post, it’s easy to dismiss him for what some have called his “overly purple prose.” He can, I admit, become extremely flowery at times, but as mentioned here and elsewhere, the man was a true poet at heart: his writing is evocative, and justly so – its literary power is derived from the consent of the reader to simply and happily wallow in it. By way of illustration, I offer the following sonnet from a collection of same on weird topics titled Fungi from Yuggoth. It speaks to me, and deeply; I hope it does the same for you.

XXXVI. Continuity

There is in certain ancient things a trace
Of some dim essence—more than form or weight;
A tenuous aether, indeterminate,
Yet linked with all the laws of time and space.
A faint, veiled sign of continuities
That outward eyes can never quite descry;
Of locked dimensions harbouring years gone by,
And out of reach except for hidden keys.

It moves me most when slanting sunbeams glow
On old farm buildings set against a hill,
And paint with life the shapes which linger still
From centuries less a dream than this we know.
In that strange light I feel I am not far
From the fixt mass whose sides the ages are.

Why He Writes

My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature.
— H.P. Lovecraft, “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction”

“…And Just Exactly What Is A ‘Buopoth?'”

“MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT the quaint and lumbering buopoths native to the Exilic Lands and other curious places – but to this day, little remains understood about the shy beasts beyond the proverb that ‘they will haul all day on a fatberry-cake and a kind word.'” — from Road Bound

That’s the in-universe explanation from one of my Prosatio Silban stories. Outside the stories, it’s a different matter entirely…

According to H.P. Lovecraft‘s 1927 novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (a ripping good read if you’re so inclined):

In former dreams he had seen quaint lumbering buopoths come shyly out of that wood to drink, but now he could not glimpse any.

Continue reading ““…And Just Exactly What Is A ‘Buopoth?’””

Why I Love: H.P. Lovecraft

IT’S THE WAY HIS PROSE wraps me up like an amorous and itchy octopus. It’s the slow building of his narratives. It’s his quaint and dark sense of humor. It’s his search for literary identity (“There are my ‘Poe pieces’ and my ‘Dunsany pieces’ — but alas — where are my Lovecraft pieces?”). It’s his backward politics, which he eventually awoke from. (It’s also that he awoke from his antisemitism.) It’s his sense of atmosphere. It’s his malign genius. It’s the joy he took in corresponding with budding horror writers. It’s his love of cats. It’s his love of cheese (“How can anybody not like CHEESE?”). Continue reading “Why I Love: H.P. Lovecraft”

5 Thoughts: Why (and How) We Write

HANGING BY OUR COMPUTER IS a sheet of paper I look to for inspiration. Sometimes it inspires me, sometimes it depresses me, but always it gets me back on the horse. It’s called “Why (and How) We Write.” If you too find it useful, please hang it by your computer.

1. Do it for the buzz.
— Stephen King

2. Finish what you start. Keep submitting until it sells.
— Robert Heinlein

3. a) Fanaticize yourself
b) Fanaticize something greater than yourself
c) “Sheer delight in what you are doing.”
— Robert Anton Wilson

4. a) Arrange events in linear order
b) Now arrange them in narrative order.
c) Write the story.
d) Revise the story.
e) FINALISE.
— H. P. Lovecraft

5. “Most of the characteristics which make for success in writing are precisely those which we are all taught to repress … the firm belief that you are an important person, that you are a lot smarter than most people, and that your ideas are so damned important that everybody should listen to you.”
— Robert Anton Wilson, reprise

(BONUS: this little tip, courtesy of Anne Lamott, for which I am axiomatically grateful.)

First Graf: The DQ of UK

THIS TITLE DOESN’T REFER TO either German nobility, soft ice cream or the British Isles, but the first paragraph (“graf” in news-speak) of one of my favorite novellae, H.P. Lovecraft‘s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Though mostly famous for his don’t-read-at-3-a.m. Cthulhu Mythos tales, the Old Gentleman’s most lyric imagery is to be found in his stories of The Dreamlands: a sort of “collective unconscious” vaguely surrounding Earth and accessible to it at certain points. Lovecraft is often accused of unreadably purple prose; I like to think he writes more for effect than for accuracy (like a Brian Eno composition, Lovecraft’s words are best enjoyed by letting them wash over you like a salty, warm, faintly ichorous sea). Thus, and in the hopes of spreading the Old Gentleman’s visions as far and wide as possible:

THREE TIMES Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvelous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles. It was a fever of the gods, a fanfare of supernal trumpets and the clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountains; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things and the maddening need to place again what once had been an awesome and momentous place.

(Eh? EH? THAT’S what I’m talkin’ about.)

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