|
Post by Captain Hygiene on Jan 27, 2009 22:54:52 GMT -5
Actually, I was just trying to be nice. In fact, even your breathing offended me morally and physically. And those sounds I assume you call "speech"...insipid and tiring. It's amazing other human beings even acknowledge you. ...Dad??
|
|
|
Post by mummifiedstalin on Jan 28, 2009 12:35:54 GMT -5
Actually, I was just trying to be nice. In fact, even your breathing offended me morally and physically. And those sounds I assume you call "speech"...insipid and tiring. It's amazing other human beings even acknowledge you. ...Dad?? Well played, sir. Well played.
|
|
|
Post by mummifiedstalin on Jan 30, 2009 20:27:31 GMT -5
I am...awesome. I really am. Why? Because I have created something wonderful here. Today, two people started new blogs. That validates my existence. No, it doesn't just validate my being, it proves to all doubters once and for all that my destiny will be greater than they ever imagined.
Sure, I stole the blog idea from Cinematic Titanic's forums. But I made it better! How? By putting it here. That was the "one step further" that would make forum blogs the new craze of the future. Goodbye, Twitter! So long, Facebook! Au revoir, MySpace! Welcome to...Magic Voice's Magic Blogs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
|
|
|
Post by Afgncaap5 on Jan 31, 2009 11:07:19 GMT -5
And yet, Magic Voice herself (or himself based on, like, one episode) hasn't yet started a blog. It seems...unusual.
|
|
|
Post by siamesesin on Jan 31, 2009 15:36:36 GMT -5
Actually, it's because he appealed to everyone's love of being able to talk about themselves.
|
|
|
Post by CBG on Feb 2, 2009 8:31:45 GMT -5
No, it's because he's awesome...read the blog.
|
|
|
Post by Afgncaap5 on Feb 2, 2009 17:35:04 GMT -5
Pff. You know very well that I can't read.
|
|
|
Post by mummifiedstalin on Feb 2, 2009 17:45:03 GMT -5
Pff. You know very well that I can't read. You're just a monkey in front of a computer with a LONG lucky streak when banging on the keyboard. Awesome! (Note: points if anyone can find the Bob Newhart in that...)
|
|
|
Post by Afgncaap5 on Feb 2, 2009 18:02:20 GMT -5
Not a monkey. An ape.
|
|
|
Post by mummifiedstalin on Feb 20, 2009 11:38:12 GMT -5
Lovecraft's Un-horrible Horror - 2/20/2009 Before going any further, let me say that I’m a HUGE Lovecraft fan. I’ve read most of his stuff, I think I own it all, and I even got into some of the Cthulhu mythos stuff that other people wrote after him back in high school. I have a friend who teaches a course on “Weird Fiction” where Lovecraft pretty much sets the stage, and I plan on stealing his syllabus and teaching that class sometime. Also, his nonfiction book horror fiction, Supernatural Horror in Literature, is a wonderfully thoughtful account of why horror is an attractive and not repellent kind of fiction. All good stuff. But I have a serious problem with him…or, if not with him, then maybe with the kind of horror he tries to inspire. The way I see it, there are two sources of literary horror. One is Lovecraft, the other is Poe. Most modern horror writers lean one way or the other. Poe’s horror is a horror of our own deep, dark underbelly, that repressed secret that haunts and ultimately destroys the House of Usher. For Poe, it’s human beings that contain their own horror, and it’s our own capacities for cruelty, insanity, and mistaking hate for love that make his stuff so memorable. Lovecraft’s horror is almost completely opposite. For Lovecraft, horror is the overwhelmingly alien. In his work, what usually happens is that someone begins to uncover a secret about the cosmos which suggests that all things humans think of as meaningful are completely insignificant. Thus, you get the return of the Old Ones, god-creatures so massively huge, powerful, and *different* from us that they hardly even recognize us. People aren’t pawns to be controlled in some kind of “take over the world” story – they’re just going to be casually tromped on. In other words, for Lovecraft, horror is the realization that the universe, far from being hostile towards us, doesn’t even realize that we are there. It’s a kind of utter displacement and vertigo. It’s the equivalent of learning that there is a God…but “it” never realized it created us and it couldn’t care less. So the stories are usually about the creeping realization of a universe slowly becoming completely alien. And that’s a fascinating idea. Some of the stories, like “At the Mountains of Madness” are really terrifying where we watch characters try to come to terms with what they’re discovering and seeing them ultimately fail and fall into madness. These are people who learn that just around the corner is something completely unnamable and unknowable, something so alien that it doesn’t just confound human beings – it destroys their sanity. But…my problem is that Lovecraft eventually started to put a name to this “unnamable” thing. The forces that are supposed to be so alien end up having a pretty recognizable order after awhile. They have names that reoccur, Cthulhu, Yig, Shub-Niggurath, and Nug and Yeb, and there ends up being an ordered history to the whole thing. Furthermore, it turns out that humans end up being pawns, some even get a modicum of power, and, in the end, these creatures of unknowable “otherness” are just big monsters. What starts out as a real kind of existential horror devolves into the stuff of MiSTied monster movies. Now that in itself can be fun, and a lot of the people who developed the Cthulhu mythos after Lovecraft were good writers of fun pulp adventures. But to me, it’s no longer horror, or at least not the original sense of horror that Lovecraft said he was shooting for. The best stories are the ones that never put a face or a name to the creeping terror that comes up on you. But I think part of the problem is maintaining that sense of the unknowable horror and still being able to tell a story. In a way, it’s not surprising that now you can go buy plush Cthulhu dolls. It was never Cthulhu the monster that was frightening. By himself, he’s just a bit ugly squid thing. I’ve seen pictures of real deep sea creatures more frightening than any image or description from Lovecraft’s writing. But it’s that about Cthulhu that we aren’t supposed to be able to comprehend that’s the real horror. In the end, though, Lovecraft seems like he felt compelled to show what couldn’t be shown. And, with that, he undermined his best idea.
|
|
|
Post by Captain Hygiene on Feb 20, 2009 11:56:02 GMT -5
I know what you're saying, and I agree on general principle - the unknown is almost always more horrible or mysterious than the known. As much as I want everything to be revealed in a story (whether it's written, a TV show, or a movie), in the end it's often a bit of a letdown. In works like Lovecraft's, I agree that the quality of the horror changes as more is revealed. I think this is even more the case with many of his followers who used the mythos in their works.
It may be a bit ironic that (as I've mentioned a few times) "Mountains of Madness" is by far my favorite work of his. At the same time as it depicts the characters dealing with these horrors, such as the unnamed thing at the end, it also does its best to place much of the mythos on solid ground (well...kinda solid, anyway). All those unnameable horrors? Sure, they're bizarre, but in the end, they're pretty much turned into more typical aliens from a science fiction story. Somehow, I still think the story is very successful despite rationalizing much of the mythology. Go figure.
Also, if you teach that "weird fiction" course, I'll commute over there every day to take it.
|
|
|
Post by Don Quixote on Feb 20, 2009 23:39:03 GMT -5
"My God! What is it?"
|
|
|
Post by siamesesin on Feb 21, 2009 16:10:17 GMT -5
I enjoy Lovecraft, but I come at it more from a sci-fi fan angle. I get the concept of the insignificance of mankind and an unknowable universe, so it never seemed really all that horrible to me. Some of his concepts unnerve me, not the least of which is some of his personal views as reflected in the writing. But his pacing, word choices, and the atmosphere his work creates is intriguing.
I lean towards Poe more as "scary". I actually find it worse when evil wears a normal human face. I guess it's less inspired by Poe then what also inspired him-real life horrors. It's as Mumms said-there's some pretty freaky looking ocean dwellers, but I don't think a single one of them could trump the emotions evil people invoke.
|
|
|
Post by mummifiedstalin on Feb 22, 2009 14:55:42 GMT -5
I agree with you on that. Nowadays, Lovecraft's approach isn't quite as novel as it was in the 20's, so the "horror" side of it isn't so horrible. Poe's stuff can still be terrifying because so much of it (barring the supernatural bits) is still possible.
As for the atmosphere of Lovecraft, I think you're right. He was able to capture that film noir feeling in a story about evil otherworldly monsters. Very cool.
|
|
|
Post by Mighty Jack on Feb 23, 2009 5:18:24 GMT -5
I liked reading that, well done sir.
With Lovecraft the horror feels. Oh, intangible, so it doesn’t really get inside of me and scare or creep me out. Modern example would be Stephen King’s “It”, the scary clown was eerie… that I can wrap my mind around. But at the end there’s this long, amorphous otherworldly unnamable, unknowable creature and it lost me. The horror no longer had solid mass. Maybe I have a simple mind? If it gets too vague then it doesn’t scare me.
Maybe Lovecraft knew that and that’s why he tried to name it - as a way of giving the horror real weight? But your right, sometimes not knowing, while frustrating, is more effective (ala Peter Weirs film, “Picnic at Hanging Rock”)
It goes without saying then that Poe resonated more strongly with me.
And a guy like Gaiman would be someone who straddles both areas, right/wrong?
|
|