books

Graham Harman's book on H.P. Lovecraft, Weird Realism (mentioned earlier), merits a look. Not so much for its philosophy of "speculative realism" supposedly inspired by HPL, which remains underdeveloped, but as literary criticism. The meat is 100 passages of close reading where Harman delves into the granular mechanics of how, precisely, Lovecraft peels back our comforting notions of reality, revealing a higher, lower, or in any case much scarier plane. More than the eldritch beings or old dark house plots the key is in the language: careful phrases that are part concoction and part hedge. HPL alternately teases the imagination with greater possibilities bred from insufficient information (the classic horror writer trick) and occasionally, for effect, overwhelms it with a glut of what Harman calls "Cubist" detail. In describing, say, a dead creature from the stars pondered by appalled Earthly investigators (see "The Dunwich Horror"), Lovecraft keeps piling on the physical attributes and sensory impressions, many of them contradictory, until the mind is disoriented and overwhelmed. The latter strategy is sometimes considered a flaw but Harman makes the case that its judicious use is a legitimate, even powerful, means of jarring the reader.

The book is an extended reply to Edmund Wilson and other literati who think HPL is a hack. That's much appreciated but perhaps a lost cause for people congenitally incapable of suspending disbelief. Also, on some level we hardcore fans don't want HPL explained lest his weird insights evaporate. Better to continue thinking lizards rule us. Excellent as Harman's analysis is, it necessitates that you hold intact in some part of your mind the inspiration you got before you learned all the H.P. Stagecraft.

Harlan Ellison loves to quote Sturgeon's Law that 90% of everything is crap. Mental Floss (a magazine of "fun facts" that surely belongs in that percentile) dug up what it claims is the source of the actual quote:

Science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon wrote a defense of sci-fi* in the March 1958 issue of the sci-fi* magazine Venture. He wrote, in part...

I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud. Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other art forms.

*The true heads of the '50s and '60s called it "sf," loathed "sci-fi" as trivializing, and must have vomited over "SyFy." Mental Floss claims (without source) that Sturgeon was the model for Kurt Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout, which is pretty cruel if there's a shred of truth to it. Sturgeon being one of the writers who helped raise sf out of its literary ghetto, not through ukases such as the above but through superlative writing, without ever abandoning the field that also gave us Vonnegut. Have always assumed that Trout was an avatar of Vonnegut's self-loathing and will continue to think it, with or without Mental Flossing.

The most devastating critique of sf to me is that it's "men's literature" in the same way Harlequin romances and other bodice-rippers are women's.

Longstanding and painstaking H.P. Lovecraft editor S. T. Joshi wonders what in the netherworld is going on with Oxford University Press's single-volume Lovecraft edition, recently praised in the Los Angeles Times (via Salon) as an overdue "short form, one-volume critical edition" when we are awash in one-volume Lovecrafts (including Library of America's) and the meaning of "critical edition" is elastic enough to include using pulp magazine texts rather than the author's typescripts, as this Oxford edition does.

The ordinarily calm and collected Joshi bounces off the catacomb ceiling in a review to be published in an upcoming Lovecraft Annual:

[Roger Luckhurst, author of the Oxford volume] tries to justify his use of the Astounding texts by declaring that he wants to “retain some of the pulp energy that Astounding Stories wanted to inject into Lovecraft’s tales.” This is, I humbly submit, blithering idiocy. The only reason Astounding chopped up the long paragraphs in both stories is that, in the two-column format of the magazine, the paragraphs would seem even longer than on an ordinary printed page, and therefore would presumably be intimidating to the brainless sods who would be reading the stories. And if Luckhurst really wanted to give present-day readers a taste of “how they [the stories] were first encountered by their audience in the Golden Age of science fiction,” he should have printed the Astounding version of At the Mountains of Madness intact, without [August] Derleth’s restoration of the paragraphing and of the passages omitted toward the end.

Library of America, Joyce Carol Oates, and Derleth's imprint Arkham House all used Joshi's texts, based on comparisons of the magazine versions with Lovecraft's typescripts. If Lovecraft "belongs in the canon," as the LA Times belatedly suggests, a logical step in that process might be to have some agreement on what constitutes a definitive text, rather than having random professors chasing after pulp energy.

Speaking of pulp-to-canon, Joshi's blog also points to a philosophical movement inspired by Lovecraft:

...Graham Harman [, in an article] in the Spring 2012 issue of New Literary History, “The Well Wrought Broken Hammer: Object Oriented Literary Criticism” ... writes of a relatively new philosophical movement called speculative realism. Harman remarks: “The speculative realists have all pursued a model of reality as something far weirder than realists had ever guessed. It is no accident that the only shared intellectual hero among the original members of the group was the horror and science fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft.”

Harman has put these ideas in book form in Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Zero Books, 2012). Looking forward to perusing this.

Read and unread - but mostly read

Silvio Lorusso and Sebastian Schmieg, 56+10 Broken Kindle Screens
C. J. Cherryh, Deliverer
Doris Piserchia, Doomtime, Earth in Twilight, The Dimensioneers, Earthchild, The Spinner, Spaceling
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed
Michael Swanwick, Stations of the Tide, The Dragons of Babel
A.A. Attanasio, The Dragon and the Unicorn
Jack Womack, Heathern, Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Terraplane
Charles Fort, Lo!
Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train, Ripley Underground, Ripley's Game
Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons

Update: Corrected spelling of Sebastian Schmieg.