"Against the Day" by Thomas Pynchon

I've spent over a month reading Thomas Pynchon's massive novel "Against the Day." I have lugged it from home, to work, to lunch counter, with little regard to the damage it was causing to my shoulder. I've gotten lost in it and become frustrated with it, I've gone back and forth to reread parts that I'd missed, I've visited Wikipedia to learn about Iceland Spar and the quaternions, I have struggled to stay awake and I have struggled to put it down, and I have thought "I am spending far too much effort on this goddamn book."

Now that I've finished it, I can sum it up by saying...well, it's certainly "Pynchonesque," and it's as complicated and annoying as everybody says it is -- an endless parade of major characters, diversions into dozens of apparently unrelated topics, too much movement from place to place, no real thread to hold it all together -- but it also has a greater proportion of Pynchon-gentleness and enlightenment than I've come to expect. The payoffs -- oblique as they can be -- are so bittersweet and human that you don't mind the coldly scientific obsessions so much.

Unfortunately, these "human" moments are all bundled together during the last 150 pages, and the more interesting and clear-headed moments are in the first 500. The 400 middle pages are somewhat tiresome, when you realize that MORE subplots are being introduced, one of which -- the onset of the first world war -- is a non-stop machine-gun of politics, places, and personages. It's simply too much to handle after the mathematics, strikebreaking, and empire-busting that you've already been through. The characters start to seem like bits of leaves thrown into world events and just blowing around, to Venice and back, to Venice and back, to Venice and back again.

All these criticisms could perhaps be applied to "Gravity's Rainbow," and I'm not sure if my less enthusiastic reception of "Against the Day" is due to the fact that Pynchon "already did it once before," or that "Against the Day" feels like a "Gravity's Rainbow" in which everything -- the paranoia, the dark-mystery-which-cannot-be-comprehended, the sexual escapades, the slapstick -- has been duplicated several times over to fill out an excessive page length, with all these things happening to multiple characters in sequence instead of just to Tyrone Slothrop.

Basically, my impression is that "Against the Day" is five or six novels that Pynchon started writing years ago, all subsequently linked together by unions, WWI, the drift from Victorianism to modernism, explosions, light, and the Tunguska event.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing. "Against the Day" is FULL of wonderful detail and characterization, and -- as I said earlier -- there's a growing gentleness to Pynchon's writing that is absolutely welcome. Whereas "Gravity's Rainbow" culminated in uncertainty and confusion, the characters in "Against the Day" seem to find comfort in companionship, children, and purpose, and the novel doesn't judge them; they did wild things and struggled for noble causes when they were young, and now they're settled down and are raising their children and getting a bit mellower. And that's pretty much The End.

When I was wallowing through 400 Pages of People Just Running Around Europe, I felt like I was reading a really crappy book. Now that I've finished it, however, I look forward to reading it again someday, so I can get a feel for what REALLY matters in the novel: the little moments like Cyprian's trajectory from hedonist to (I won't spoil it for you), the complex interweaving of the Webb and Rideout families, and -- floating high above it all -- the aging airship children who are struggling to find meaning when the "Boys Adventure Story" days are gone.

They Gave a New Thrill -- That's Why They Got There....So Quickly

During 1930, the cigarette manufacturers continue to aim their advertisements at the Gay Young Things. It was a market that Murad had long courted (by 1930 they were in the midst of a long and tiresome pidgin-French campaign), Lucky Strikes had graduated from flippant "Happy Go-Luckies" to paranoia about weight (a reaction to a candy manufacturer's campaign that told readers to eat candy instead of smoke), and Spud was still hammering the "Smoke a Spud When You're Freaking Out" storyline (after briefly flirting with bogus science).

What about Old Gold? Last time I mentioned them in this blog they were in the midst of a rickety vaudeville promotion, and since then they've continued with the "Not a Cough in a Carload" tagline by hiring John Held Jr. to create his signature Victorian woodcut cartoons (the joke is usually about a male Victorian stereotype being berated for his rough smoker's voice).

But I suspect they felt the need to capture the same flapper audience that the other manufacturers were targeting, so in September 27, 1930 there's a full-page advertisement with a new angle, which I paraphrase as Old Gold is a plucky newcomer who became instantly popular because of its exceptionality, just like This Famous Broadway Star!

I'm sure this is the first in a long line. This time the star is Marilyn Miller:

From her grandmother's cellar...to Ziegfeld's Roof...in just the twinkle of a toe. She really was the "Sally"...of the alley called Broadway.

How to explain the miracle of Marilyn's success?...Nature simply blessed her with a charm all her own.

The real interesting part of the advertisement, however, is the huge picture of Marilyn dancing in a dirty basement.


I've mentioned before that some design elements in The New Yorker reflect a shift from the "modern" 20s to a new 30s style. This is definitely one of them. As an added bonus here's the caption:

"Mar'lyn, chile, shake yo' feet!" Grandmother's kinky-haired old furnaceman was first to educate Marilyn Miller's feet. At those same feet, a few years later, old New York laid its heart.

Ah, the kindly kinky-haired drudge with his native rhythm. There's also a reproduction of the moment when Old Gold's supposedly first arrived in Waikiki, but the quality is so poor I won't bother posting it. Which is a shame because it looks really bizarre.

Scrutable Poetry Corner: "Anachronism" by Peggy Bacon

From the September 27, 1930 issue of The New Yorker, here's "Anachronism," written by a poetess with the rather unpoetic name of Peggy Bacon.

In the mummy-case the queen--
brittle toes and matted hair!
Her compelling portrait seen
on the lid, returns a stare.

Through millenniums enduring
as a relic, for a while
she was laughing and alluring
as a siren by the Nile.

Bead and bauble, tool and chattel,
symbol, amulet, and token,
effigies of sacred cattle
lie beside her, chipped or broken.

In the Bowery I meet
Sadie, similarly fair,
flashy sandals on her feet,
bangle, bead, and busy hair

(mummy-matted, tonsor twirled,
tinted with a dubious dye),
and a little serpent curled
in the angle of her eye.

Who was Peggy Bacon? She wrote poetry (and later fiction) for The New Yorker from the first month of publication up to the 1950s, and she even drew a few illustrations along the way:


You can find out much more online, starting here. She seems to have been a remarkable person.

Recently...

Many things have prevented me from blogging recently, not least my own laziness and ennui. My computer's hard drive totally died after my post about the importance of backups, requiring a trip to the repair shop (and then a total update of everything to Snow Leopard which does kick ass).

This misfortune was immediately followed by a five-day heatwave. Despite my perverse resistance to installing my window air conditioner -- and therefore many nights spent sweating buckets into my sodden bedding -- I learned two things about humans and heat:

1. When people who live in an extremely HUMID area -- like those of us in Southern Ontario -- complain about 35-degree temperatures that feel like 42-degrees due to the humidity, people who live in DRY areas say -- repeatedly and disdainfully -- "Ha! It's that hot here ALL SUMMER!" To which I can only say: try going out in that heat with a wet towel wrapped around your nose and mouth.
2. When people complain about the devastating heat, a subset of other people say "Ha! In the winter you complain about the cold, now you complain about the heat! You just like complaining!" This is like saying "You complained that you were thirsty, so you'd better not complain when I throw you in the pool and drown you!" However illogical it is to complain about the weather -- since nobody you complain to can actually change it -- it is NOT illogical to complain about temperature extremes.

I only mention this because people say these things all the time, and it's tiresome.

Anyway, I'm also living with a cat who is a bit like the Tazmanian Devil, only more hyperactive and noisy. She is a fearless destroyer of bookshelves. She has learned that the best way to send me leaping out of bed in the morning is to sharpen her claws on my mattress, which I imagine her doing with a big grin on her face.

As of this morning, Muffet is forbidden from entering my bedroom. This is difficult because I haven't lived with closed doors for over ten years, and also because I don't think she'll adapt quickly or quietly to this change. Her favourite window is in my bedroom, and so is the sock drawer. I foresee many challenging nights ahead.

Third obstacle: constant pain in my shoulders. Sometimes it's barely there, and other times it feels like my biceps and shoulders are being held together by old rusty rivets made out of bubbling lava.

When I told my family doctor that I was on a three-year waiting list to see a shoulder specialist, he had a fit of furious Irish passion and booked me for a series of examinations. Yesterday a delicate lady held an ultrasound paddle to my shoulders and we viewed the inside of my pathology: wavy lines of bone and fat surrounding ominous black holes of encysted fluid.

Then I crossed the hall to get some X-rays done. It was a much more respectable operation than the last place I went to, though it ALSO had a cupboard which emitted terrifying scrabbling sounds.

Most interesting was the woman who took the X-rays. She was brusque and businesslike, but every time she prepared to take another picture she'd say "Hold your breath!" in an incongruous sing-song way, like the way you'd speak to a mischievous child. I felt weird, standing there in my lead girdle, with this extremely professional lady buzzing around who would suddenly disappear into a booth and sing out -- as though she were offering me a popsicle -- "Hold your breath!"

In other news, I have joined the board for the condo corporation, which is a story I'll tell someday. I also joined the board for the Open Ears festival. I have added "The Toronto G-20" to the list of topics which must not be discussed in friendly company. I walked past my old apartment and saw that the vegetation grew back but the junker cars remain. I read "Babbitt" by Sinclair Lewis, "Day of the Triffids" by John Wyndham, and a beautiful book about undeciphered ancient scripts by Andrew Robinson. If I go on any sort of vacation this year it will hopefully be to Easter Island, because I want to see what their discos are like.

Cleon Throckmorton, Scenic Designer and Reverse Psychologist

While reading the May 31, 1930 issue of The New Yorker I ran across this advertisement, tucked into the corner of page 46. It was so small that I had to zoom in to read it.


What kind of guy relies on such a self-defeating advertisement, which doesn't even mention what he's advertising FOR?

An eccentric fellow with a high degree of name recognition, that's who. In this case it's Cleon Throckmorton, architect, set designer, and bohemian painter of spunky dancing girls. If you really want an eyeful, check out Erica De Mane's photographs of some of his works at Ristorante Volare.

Meanwhile, over at Shorpy you can also find this amazing 1921 photograph of "Throck" at work (go there for a larger version), along with additional information from amateur sleuths in the comments. Apparently that's his wife puffing on a stogie while modeling.

Eat Your Eskimo Pie with the Six Brown Brothers While Playing Tops and Anagrams: A 1930s Trend Retrospective

The New Yorker was in a tizzy about humanism throughout 1930, as the philosophy had suddenly come back into vogue and gained national attention. Thanks to Charles Francis Potter and the establishment of The First Humanist Society of New York, discussing humanism became a frequent pastime among the New York intelligentsia. You can't pick up an issue of the magazine during this period without reading stories and sly jabs about the debates, the propaganda, and the reactionary religious response to the movement.

In the May 31, 1930 issue, Donald Moffat wrote "The Crime at Mrs. Ward's," in which a young man -- fed up with all the latest fads -- actually SHOOTS the guests at a swanky party when they are unable to tell him what humanism is. This supposedly indicates that lots of people gave lip-service to humanism at the time, and they loved to talk about it, but none of them had the faintest idea what it was all about (which seems strange to me, frankly).

Anyway, the interesting thing about the story isn't the heavy-handed plot, it's the long list of PREVIOUS crazes that are presented. Want to know what the highbrow fads were in New York between 1905 and 1930? Here you go.

...my friend acquired a leather-burning set, and happily joined the nation in burning Indian heads on leather--he was too young for the first ping-pong wave. He shouted 'Uneeda Biscuit' to street-car conductors and cabbies, 'Get a horse' to stalled motorists, and said 'ZuZu' to the groceryman. He was among the first of the 1906 diabolo addicts, and as the years rolled by he similarly took to his bosom put-and-take tops, Eskimo Pie, mah-jongg, Coué, scofflawry, categories (or Guggenheim), Queen Marie, crossword puzzles, sex, anagrams, badminton, Yo-Yo tops, and backgammon, as each in turn came into fashion. He seideled to Hoboken and taxied to Harlem when those were the things to do, and wrote little pieces on the social, artistic, and economic significance of....Charlie Chaplin, the Six Brown Brothers, short skirts, Joe Jackson, Lillian Gish, Will Rogers, the return of the corset, Rudy Valée, 'The Well of Loneliness,' Amos 'n' Andy, D. H. Lawrence, Krazy Kat, long skirts, Paul Whiteman, and kindred modern phenomena. He returned from France last summer wearing a beret and espadrilles, and he'd thrown away the top part of his bathing suit.

Whew! Some of them are self-explanatory. Here are my thoughts on the others that require a bit more explanation:

• Uneeda Biscuit: I assume this was just a joke on the name of the biscuit -- "Hey, you need a biscuit" -- along the lines of other knee-slappers at the time like "Do you have Prince Albert in a can? Then you'd better let him out!"
• Zuzu: A ginger snap brand. Their advertisements said "For a bang-up time take five cents to the grocery and ask for Zuzu ginger snaps. You'll hit the mark every time!" I guess this was similar to the hordes of people who walk into Tim Horton's and say "Rrrrrroll up the rim to win!" It's the adoption of a catchphrase.
• Seidel: I have no idea what this means. A seidel was a glass of beer, but how this relates to traveling to Hoboken I don't know.
• I also don't get the "beret and espadrilles" and "threw away the top half of his bathing suit" references.

I love a good piece of culture-spew, and I also love a good mystery! Any insights?

The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen

In January I read an extremely positive review of Elizabeth Bowen's short fiction in a 1930s New Yorker magazine. Unable to find any of her short stories at the time, I instead read "The Heat of the Day," which I found tedious in its obsessive examination of people's thought processes. In short, I was impressed by her approach and her zeal but I found the book extremely annoying.

Now, after a long slog, I'm finishing off "The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen," which apparently contains all of the short fiction she ever wrote...and let me tell you, she wrote a lot. Many of these stories were ones that the New Yorker reviewer raved about. How has it been?

Complete collections of a prolific writer's short fiction should come with a big warning, which unfortunately I know I'd disregard anyway: "Do not read all these stories in a row. They were not meant to be read this way. They previously appeared in diverse periodicals and smaller collections. You have been warned."

So I'm warning you: just as the complete short fiction of Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges can drive you insane, so can the complete short fiction of Elizabeth Bowen. Not because it's BAD -- it's brilliant, in fact -- but just because there's too much of it.

And like the complete works of ANY writer I found myself noticing the trends in her work, most particularly:

• The trauma of moving to different houses, particularly among the upper classes. Her characters suffer the sale of the ancestral homes and the purchasing of newer, awkward, unpleasant homes which turn out of have sweaty plaster.
• The trauma of living off another person's charity, especially when the other person isn't charitable and -- in reality -- just keeps people around to traumatize them.
• The strange boredom of off-season luxury resorts.
• The thought processes of alienated, troublesome children.
• Aunts. Everybody's got an aunt who is the most significant secondary character.

These are things that you wouldn't notice if you read her stories occasionally, and they're entirely superficial to the plots themselves, but when you're reading them all in a row it's like "Oh yes, a new house, a strange aunt, now let's get to the heart of it please."

And the hearts of these stories are devastating, especially the ones written during the '20s and '30s. Most of them are about the slow, mundane grind of everyday relationships and the hidden compulsions that modernists so loved to write about. Bowen has a particular ability for troubled children who are so lifelike that you almost want to turn away. The precocious Maria (in the story of the same name) the crying little boy with his ducks (in "Tears, Idle Tears") and the absolutely doomed Hermione (in "The Easter Egg Party") are permanently stuck with me.

Bowen's style isn't one that relies on an all-encompassing statement to make its point; instead, the drama builds and builds through successive examples, leaving you squirming with the terrible, truthful awkwardness of it all. Here's a description of Hermione, viewed through the eyes of a pair of aunts who are trying a last-ditch attempt to integrate her with other children.

She shook hands with a rigid arm, on which all the bracelets jumped. She looked straight at everyone, but from a moody height: what was evident was not just fear or shyness but a desperate, cut-off haughtiness. In her eyes existed a world of alien experience. The jolly, tallish girls with their chubbed hair, the straddling little boys with their bare knees, apt to frown at the grass between their sandshoes, rebounded from that imperious stare. Either she cared too much or she did not care a fig for them -- and in either case they did not know how to meet her.

And that's before things get bad. You see, it's both normal and abnormal, expected and unexpected: it's the odd part of people and everyday life that you try not to look closely at.

Elizabeth Bowen writes almost all of her stories about these situations.

Then there's the other, somewhat less satisfying trend, the one that the New Yorker reviewer had particularly liked: the ghost stories. These appear from out of nowhere in the collection and they disappear just as quickly and bafflingly. Why did Bowen write about ghosts as often as she did?

Well, most of the ghosts are catalysts for the emotional outpourings of her characters, and likewise the reader is uncertain as to whether they're REAL ghosts or not...except in two stories, one of which (Green Holly) is surprisingly gruesome.

Unfortunately Bowen had an occasional tendency to doddle, in which case her longer stories end up in the same vein as "The Heat of the Day," seeming directionless, obsessive, and far too inward-looking. Her writing was at its best at ten pages or less. I found every story that was longer than 15 pages to be virtually unreadable (and believe me, I have a high threshold for this sort of thing).

Rather than tell you to go out and read the whole book (which I don't recommend) or tell you NOT to read her work (which would be a disservice), I suggest you pick up her Collected Stories and only read the ones from the '20s and '30s, and only the shorter ones. If you have a personal interest in the London Blitz then you should read the War-Time stories as well (and at least give "Mysterious Kôr" a try, which harkens back to her best creepy character studies).

If any Elizabeth Bowen fans read this, please let me know which novels YOU would suggest. I have another one lying around someplace but I don't think I can handle it right at the moment.

Scrutable Poetry Corner: "Life's Problems" by Patience Eden

Poetess Patience Eden nails it in this May 17, 1930 poem in The New Yorker: "Life's Problems."

When I was twenty-three I could
Discern the evil from the good;
I quickly knew which way to turn,
Which path to take, which path to spurn;
Not only this--I could decide
What all my friends should do; I tried
To steer them competently through
Their troubles...and they asked me to!
Responsible as traffic lights
I sent them to their lefts...and rights.

But now that I am forty-odd
I hesitate advising God
About a case of turpitude,
It somehow seems a little crude:
And furthermore I have no views
On bigamy or jazz or booze:
Quite recently I was beset
By problems in a kitchenette--
I could not choose the proper site
For dish-towels to dry at night!

Amen, Eden! How to explain this temperament that comes on many with age? Is it hormonal? Is it from so many years of negotiating with people of all different kinds? Is it a desire for comfort and easy socialization after scuffling with the world? Is it the cynicism of seeing all your sacred cows get tipped over -- one by one -- by their critical inadequacies?

I think it's all of the above. I still have the knee-jerk desire to bludgeon others with my opinions, but I'm learning when it's appropriate to do so, and also -- I hope -- blunting the edges of my criticism a bit.

Unless I'm playing the ROLE of critic, of course.

PS: Who was Patience Eden? Apparently her real name was Martha Thomas Banning, but other than that I can't find any biographical information. She was certainly one of the New Yorker poetry stalwarts, writing under both names from the magazine's inception and into the early '40s.

Meet the Happy-Go-Luckies

Oh wow, these things are ugly and weird.

It gives us great pleasure to present the twelve Happy-go-Luckies, the most amusing place cards that ever graced a sophisticated dinner table. Don't you like the way the cigarettes actually form part of the picture? Do you see that they make the legs of the little bathing girl below...and that a match makes her parasol stick?

As of April 12, 1930 the Lucky Strike company had made twelve varieties of these monstrous things, including what I think is a lady golfer and some jockeys jumping over cigarette-barricades. If we're lucky they'll print close-ups of the others in future issues.

Meanwhile, since they don't make 'em anymore, you can always build your own by centering the picture on your computer screen, taking a pair of gardening sheers, and cutting them OFF the screen, being careful to not disturb the other items on your desktop.*

If you don't want to cut a hole in your monitor, you can always hope to buy them at an online auction. Here's a lot of eleven that recently sold for $100.


Are you wondering what's on the back?


* Don't actually do this!

"God's Country: A Short History" by Ralph Barton

The New Yorker panned this book, but it sounded so interesting that I couldn't resist finding a copy: "God's Country: A Short History" by Ralph Barton, published in 1929. As you can see by the tag list for this post, it contains elements of pretty much everything I talk about in this blog.

Barton was a popular '20s cartoonist and caricaturist, and he seemed to be trying to establish himself as a writer before his manic-depression prompted his suicide in 1931. I'm not surprised that he killed himself two years after writing this book. "God's Country" is a bitter thing indeed.

It's a satirical, absurd history of the United States, beginning with Christopher Columbus and ending with a bizarre dystopia in which women have taken over the government, radio advertisers have inadvertently caused widespread looting and domestic terror, and poison gas has destroyed everybody except for eight criminals who -- following the intentions of the pilgrims from the beginning of the book -- set out to wreck everything all over again.

Oooo, it's nasty. Barton has equal loathing for Democrats and Republicans (known in the book as "Uniboodlists" and "Multiboodlists" for reasons I didn't understand), Presidents ("Misters"), businessmen ("Interests"), newspapers (who dictate "Public Opinion"), and the everyday citizens who allow the aforementioned to get away with everything they do, over and over again, throughout the entire history of democracy.

Is there anybody Barton doesn't hate? He appears to have sympathy for Native Americans, he finds few unpleasant things to say about Abraham Lincoln, and he goes out of his way to avoid lampooning African Americans, but for the most part "God's Country" is a relentless, snarky skewering of EVERYBODY. And that means you too, reader. And me.

You can imagine how tedious such a book can be. It's especially tedious to somebody (like me) who doesn't know the finer points of every President -- errr, Mister -- in American history. Barton goes through them all, giving them the names of monarchs ("St. Abraham," "Franklin the Debonaire") to highlight one going theme throughout the book: the American obsession with electing "jus' plain folk" who are -- in actual fact -- part of the social elite who have been carefully groomed to appear otherwise.

This obsession is one element of the book that still holds true today (see Palin, Sarah). Another element is the reliance on FEAR to manipulate public opinion, as formented by business requirements and amplified by the newspapers. We sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that the disgusting collusion of politics, business, and media is a relatively new phenomenon. "God's Country" will tell you different.

After 250 pages of spot-on satire, Barton comes to women's suffrage and temperance activism. I can only assume that he really, really didn't like women, as the book tips from "cutting satire" to "cruel stereotype" in the space of a few pages, detailing a world where women with "blacksnake whips" run around emasculating everybody and turning them into "ex-males." They conceive arbitrary rules and devise irrational schemes to enforce them, finally bringing about the downfall of the already-tottering country. It's ludicrous and leaves a bad impression, and is probably one of the reasons The New Yorker reviewer panned it.

But there are great moments, especially near the end when everything goes completely off the rails. The businessmen are discovered to have retreated into a secret society with its own language ("Six huh pcent a fi million dollas is thutty million dollas. Fiscal.") and in a mysterious desert pilgrimage they invent golf. This presentation of Big Business as a totally self-interested, self-contained, and illogical cabal is ominous in light of the subsequent financial collapse.

When the new breed of radio announcers start to amuse themselves by shouting demands like "Desire to see a prize fight!" and "Long to see a movie about Arabs!", the book provides an amazing insight into '20s popular culture. It's like reading a Readers Digest Condensed Version of The New Yorker between 1925 and 1929:

[They were] soon being ordered to deodorize, to smear mud on their faces, to hate New York, to play Mah Jong, to do cross-word puzzles, to ask each other questions, to bathe in violet rays, to develop personalities, to practice numerology, to adore the Russians, the negroes and aviators, to eat Eskimo Pie, to throw bits of paper out the window, to have themselves psychoanalyzed, to engage in Marathon contests, to eat liver and to perform a thousand other like obediences.

When "God's Country" is good, it's very, very good, but most of it is the 1920s brand of screwball, sledgehammer burlesque that leaves me exhausted, alternating with some surprisingly dry historical dissection.

More importantly, however, it is a clear expression of the immense disgust that an intelligent, educated, creative, and mentally-tortured man had for all the things he saw in the world around him. If he'd had a more balanced view of human nature then "God's Country" would be an easier book to read, but it never would have been written in the first place.

"The Call of Cthulhu"

Because I'm reading a big chunk of H. P. Lovecraft at the moment, I've been breaking the monotony by watching some of the adaptations of his work.

There are two good reasons for why most Lovecraft movies miss the mark. Since his stories are effective mostly because of their tone and their gradual accumulation of facts, it must be difficult to make a straightforward movie out of them, so the script writers tend to fall back on spectacle and totally new sex-and-slimy-monster subplots, all of which make the resulting film decidedly NON-Lovecraftian.

Secondly, as a result of this reliance on spectacle, these invariably low-budget movies tend to fail because they can't live up to their special effects requirements.

When the special effects DO succeed, you get movies like "Re-Animator" which have only a tenuous plot connection (and absolutely no thematic connection) to the stories they're adapted from. And when the effects DON'T succeed, you get total flops like The Curse or Dagon, which are basically eighty minutes of boring Hollywood-style subplot and ten minutes of cheap schlock at the end.

I haven't seen many movies which manage to REALLY capture the "Lovecraft mood," but oddly enough the ones I HAVE seen are the ones I've most recently viewed. I mentioned the wonderful-but-flawed "Cthulhu" back in May...

...but today I saw the HP Lovecraft Historical Society's version of "The Call of Cthulhu," and thanks to devotion, smarts, and a whole lot of luck, it's the most faithful adaptation yet.

I'd assumed that anything produced by such a society would be a half-baked, crappy mess of fan-splooge, featuring a bunch of doughy part-time Little Theatre types doing their level best to upstage each other. What I saw, however, was a totally effective no-budget film that succeeded in almost every way.

By shooting it as a '20s-era silent picture they avoided many of the problems that cheapo home productions face: no need to worry about dialog or sound recording, an easier time integrating effects, and probably fewer problems with set design and lighting. But what REALLY worked was that it managed to capture that elusive Lovecraftian mood in a way that a "talkie" never could.

How the HECK did they pull this off? A model boat pulled across sparkle-covered fabric becomes the perfect image to complement the story, in a way that REAL location footage NEVER would. Lovecraft didn't write about realistic images, he wrote about impossible angles and indescribable landscapes; a REAL cliff-face representing the lost city of R'lyeh would have appeared pedestrian and narrow-minded, but a cardboard-and-scaffold set built in one of the crew member's backyard is FAR more "right."

The acting, too, is brilliant. Nobody is being funny, and everybody manages to walk the fine line between "silent movie overacting" and "just plain camp." Here again the movie benefited from its silent-film conceit: no bad accents, no awkward dialog, no Little Theatre emoting-stereotypes.

All these things -- fantasy-sets, terrific lighting, dedicated acting -- combine with an AMAZING music score to make the best 45 minutes of film I've seen in a long time. Really, it's that good. I don't just mean "a good independent film" or "a good silent movie," I mean a legitimate mini-masterpiece.

And you know what? I think H. P. Lovecraft would have loved it.

PS: During the newspaper clipping montage, guess which city shows up amongst all the bylines? You're right: Kitchener, Ontario. How did that slip in there?

The Eldritch, Stygian, Cyclopean Horrors of H. P. Lovecraft

I have been slogging my way through a giant 1000-page collection of H.P. Lovecraft's better (or at least "more significant") stories. This is the first time I've read his work in many, many years.

I realize now that I actually didn't read as many Lovecraft stories as I thought I did, and that the ones I DID read I tended to skim. Patience, experience, context, and age are allowing me to better enjoy his strengths and tolerate his weaknesses...but I still have to restrain that skimming urge.

What have I learned so far? Lovecraft was far more creative than I ever gave him credit for. While he tended to use the same techniques over and over again, his actual IDEAS -- the "hooks" in the stories -- show a lot of variety.

I'm also surprised at how GRUESOME his work was. The stereotype of Lovecraft is that his protagonists always faint before they can fully describe the final horror (he even manages to turn Harry Houdini into a shrieking wimp in "Under the Pyramids"), but for the most part this isn't the case. Stories like "The Outsider," "The Shunned House," and "Cool Air" pull no punches when it comes to the climax, and "In the Vault" is one of the few stories I've ever read that has managed to shock me.

He was extremely creative, yes, and he doesn't entirely deserve the "tease" label he's been saddled with...so why is this compendium of stories so often infuriating?

A few reasons. Lovecraft's racism is well documented, and though his eugenic beliefs were more-or-less of his time, it's still maddening to read about the evolutionary and cultural "degeneracy" that his characters keep harping about.

Something else his characters harp about is the oh-so-scary "cyclopean masonry" in virtually every story. It comes up so often -- and is presented as so disturbing -- that I wonder if Lovecraft was confused as to what it actually WAS: big hunks of rough limestone built into a wall. Disregarding the fact that there is nothing intrinsically sanity-blasting about that sort of architecture, you really have to wonder how all his characters knew what the style was CALLED. Did YOU know what "cyclopean" meant? Did more people in the 1920s know what it meant? Somehow I doubt it.

Anyway, this ties into the prevalence of Lovecraft's lasting legacy: the ubiquitous Necronomicon, the supposedly-rare arcane book of evil and forgotten knowledge...which at least one character in each of his later stories has managed to read at some point. And we're not just talking about occultists and folklorists, we're talking about ORDINARY people. In "At the Mountains of Madness," both the geologist and the BIOLOGIST in the doomed Antarctic expedition have read the book cover-to-cover. Rather than provide atmosphere and depth, the constant citing of the Necronomicon just makes it seem increasingly pedestrian; who can be intrigued by a Book Of Forbidden Knowledge that everybody has read?

My final criticism only applies to two stories so far: "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Shadow Out of Time." While most of Lovecraft's stories contain a fair amount of movement and action ("The Shadow Over Innsmouth" in particular), those two stories appear to be flimsy excuses for Lovecraft to say "Look at this detailed biological and cultural description of these monsters I made up!" They're dull expository sandwiches: two thin slices of plot surrounding thick, fifty-page examinations of the life and times of creepy pseudo-vegetables. Somebody should have just given Lovecraft a sketchbook for his birthday.

I started reading this collection with low expectations, so despite some extremely long and dry sections I am pleasantly surprised by Lovecraft's work. I am particularly in love with "The Colour Out of Space," which I think is the perfect collection of all of Lovecraft's strengths.

But for your own sake I recommend -- as always -- that you do NOT read all of his work in a row. You may find yourself turning into a fish-monster, losing your sanity, and screaming "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!" in the night, which would be too much for even fearless Harry Houdini to bear.

Dr. Seuss and Flit: "An Optimist"

On January 4, 1930, Dr. Seuss gives us two tragically mutated Lovecraftian nightmares...AND a well-worn vaudeville joke!

This "What is an Optimist?" schtick was a big thing at one time, but it's hard to know whether it was passe by 1930.

I bring this up because throughout its first year of publication the fledgling New Yorker magazine peppered its pages with the same joke, over and over again:

Pa, what's an optimist?

A man who thinks he can do it in par.*

Sometimes, for variety, they'd reverse it.

A man who thinks he can do it in par.

Pa, what's an optimist?

This was obviously some New Yorker editor's 1925 idea of a joke, and the repetition was also supposed to be funny, but...well, I hereby admit that I didn't get it. Eventually it seemed like something they were doing just to fill the occasional half-inch of blank column.

* (I'm paraphrasing a bit because I haven't read those issues in several years, but the joke appeared so often that I think it's permanently engraved in my mind).

Newsreel Theatres

During late 1929, the Embassy Theatre in New York started a phenomenon: "The Newsreel Theatre." It was a massive hit, other theatres followed suit, and The New Yorker reporters -- though writing in their usual cynical way -- were obviously quite enchanted.

Whereas other theatres only played newsreels in between films, The Newsreel Theatre played them ALL DAY. They collected newsreels from all available sources and just kept playing them, morning and night, in ever-updated one-hour loops.

Radio had already been providing up-to-date news to listeners for several years, but this somehow struck a chord. Maybe it was the visual aspect, or the community feeling, or maybe it was the fact that it was the ONLY venue devoted entirely to news. The New Yorker, however, often mentions the simple joy of just dropping in at any time and never knowing what will come next: adventure stories, politics, opinion, debate, all put together without any logic whatsoever.

Interestingly, it wasn't long before smaller companies began shooting newsreels SPECIFICALLY for the theatres.

Anyway, in the December 28, 1929 issue of The New Yorker, here's a wonderful poem called "Recommendation" by Parke Cummings.

Shots of Mr. Hoover trouting,
Shots of weasels on an outing,
Speech by Czar of cruller-bakers,
Tricks employed by corset-makers,
Sounds of Bossy Gillis talking,
Sounds of albatrosses squawking,
Butterfly weighs sixty ounces,
Men in Denver take to flounces,
Crooning chants by Rudy Vallée,
Felines battle in an alley,
Clerk consumes, in South Dakota,
Twenty pies--his daily quota--
Kafir belles go in for blouses--
Here's to better newsreel houses.

If you're interested in learning more, Time Magazine wrote up The Newsreel Theatre here.

Impromptu Caption Contest With No Prize and No Declared Winner!

...

Everybody needs a great cartoon on a Friday morning.



(The cartoon -- from December 28, 1929 -- by Leonard Dove, a frequent contributor of covers and cartoons to The New Yorker until the early '60s. As is usual with artists and poets of the time I can't find a biography for him)

There's a Knox Store Convenient to Every Social Rendezvous

For several months in 1929 the "Knox Store" had been warning New Yorker readers about the folly of wearing the wrong hat. In these advertisements, the unlucky fellow would show up at a football game in a tophat, or at a piano recital in a bowler, the point being that only Knox can keep you stylish and "proper" for every event.

None of these ads have been interesting enough to post...until this one from December 21st.


Why is the child running away and crying?

Far better for the heirs to know at once that there isn't any Santa Claus than to render them permanent idiots by his sudden appearance in the Wrong Hat, just because you rather fancied yourself in the part.

So if you're playing Santa this year, make sure you wear the correct Santa hat...otherwise you'll turn all the little heirs into permanent idiots.

Beautiful!

Cold Coffee Makes Cold Hearts

The last time we joined the Edicraft company, they were saving marriages with easy-to-make toast. But apparently that wasn't enough.

She poured. He tasted. She smiled. He scowled. She wept. He left.

What is the latest sin of the 1929 bride?

And thus was another romance drowned in a cup of pallid coffee. Higher courts have ruled that grounds in the cup are grounds for divorce in every state of the Union...

Yes, the folks at Edicraft must have realized that divorces happened even for those who owned the Edicraft Speed Toaster! A new innovation was required to keep men from scampering at the breakfast table...

...the Edicraft Siphonator!


(Mistletoe not included, and best not put inside the Siphonator anyway).

"Electric, automatic in operation, massively-modern in design," the Edicraft Siphonator was...well, a coffee maker. The advertising copy fails to state why it's so darn great, except for mentioning that it has a "left-hand tap" which dispenses hot water for tea...or for diluting the coffee you've poured out of the right tap.

So on Decemeber 14, 1929, the Edicraft people had found a new way to keep marriages together. But what, I ask, of the undercooked pancakes?

Dr. Seuss and Flit: "Selfless Death"

Awwww, this one is truly sad. Not even the ubiquitous cat could bear to be in it.


From the December 7, 1929 issue of The New Yorker. Weep!

I Totally Understand

"Oh the rent--the rent! What about my career!"

(It's by William Crawford Galbraith, who did a lot of artwork for The New Yorker but appears to be otherwise forgotten).