Thomas Ligotti’s horror aesthetic mirrored by — Rob Zombie?

Rob Zombie

My readers know it’s no secret that I’m compulsively fascinated by the work of literary horror master Thomas Ligotti. As I’ve explained here in the past, I’m also compulsively fascinated by horrorific musical icon and now horror cinema auteur Rob Zombie, for reasons that are more obscure to me. The two fascinations would seem to have little in common, other than the almost accidental crossover value of their both being centered on practitioners in the horror genre. Ligotti’s ultra-luscious prose and uber-philosophical approach to the writing of literary horror fiction is, on its surface, light years from the ultra-grunge and uber-gore of Zombie’s musical and cinematic universe.

And yet I’ve long suspected that maybe there is indeed more than just an accidental connection between these dual interests. Sometimes Ligotti’s stories deliberately invoke a sense of stylistic and spiritual grunge that resonates with typical Zombian themes, and sometimes Zombie appears to aspire to, and occasionally attain, something more profound than, or maybe more profound within, the delirious creepshow carnival he creates with his sounds and pictures.

Thomas Ligotti

So when I stumbled across a highly literate and balanced review of Zombie’s almost universally reviled Halloween II, in which the author makes a compelling case for the idea that Zombie, despite some serious weaknesses in execution, really does possess a dose of real filmmaking talent and really is pursuing his own distinctive filmmaking aesthetic, and then found the author drawing an extended comparison to Ligotti’s work — well, color me interested.

The review is titled “You, the Horror: Halloween II (2009).” The author is Jaime N. Christley. The Website is The House Next Door. The relevant excerpt is as follows:

Like the work of horror writer Thomas Ligotti, who put the image of “gas station carnivals” into our minds, Zombie’s rot and degradation feels continuously, stubbornly vital—if “alive” isn’t quite the word we’re looking for here. Ligotti, a Michigan-born writer unknown even to most fans of horror fiction, doesn’t share much with Zombie in terms of agenda or style. His protagonists, luckless as they often are, are frequently the dregs of urban and/or academic spheres, educated but wearing second-hand coats, obsessing over myths or disreputable objects. (He would not feel at home valorizing a redneck band of outlaw cannibals.) The back-alley pharmacist’s assistant in “The Clown Puppet” cannot get over himself and his unique lot in an incessantly phantasmagorical life even when he intuits correctly that he’s just a bystander in someone else’s nightmare. Yet, connecting strands abound.

Zombie’s version of Loomis shares with Ligotti’s author character, Alice (“Alice’s Last Adventure”), a deep sense of entitled, bourgeois discontent, as they are both impatient with the scaffolding required to keep the gears of their financial liquidity in motion, drawn perhaps not unwillingly back into the abyss to which they truly owe the debt of their success. Most horror writers and aficionados are familiar with the concept that fear isn’t fear, and horror isn’t horror, unless the attraction is as strong as the repulsion. In terms of setting, physical and spiritual, the careworn shop at which Laurie Strode is employed is precisely the kind of “not quite a coffee shop, not quite a vintage bookstore” setting we might expect to find in Ligotti’s “Teatro Grottesco,” “Gas Station Carnivals,” or “The Bungalow House.” And there’s the small matter of her nightmares pursuing her into daytime.

Zombie’s elevation of the Myers killer into the supernatural is prime Ligotti. The vehicle of Laurie Myers-Strode’s fate appears in one Ligotti story after another, as device, conclusion, casual offing, or theme: not merely to be haunted by familial blood but to be subsumed utterly by it.

I urge fans of literate film criticism to click through and read the review in its entirety, because it really does an excellent and elegant job of finding the gold within Zombie’s grime. It was only three months ago that I finally watched the first of Zombie’s Halloween movies, and after the long buildup of negative reviews and anecdotes from disappointed viewers, I was quite pleasantly surprised with the thing. It was flawed, yes, with the first half being manifestly better than the second, during which Scout Taylor-Compton’s staggeringly annoying performance as Laurie proved an almost insurmountable obstacle to enjoying whatever charms the film had to offer. But overall the movie was dark and disturbing and extremely effective at inducing cringes (the right kind) and holding my attention. Now Christley’s review leads me to think there’s more of the same in store in the sequel. It also launches my thoughts in some interesting directions that spin out equally into Ligottian and Zombian territories.

Many thanks to Christley for the intellectual and affective stimulation. Now I just need to rent a copy of Halloween II.

I’m compulsive fNowascinated by the Ligottian universe, of course. I’m also compulsively fascinated by Rob Zombie for some reason. So when I stumbled across a highly literate and balanced review of Zombie’s almost universally reviled Halloween II, in which the author makes a compelling case for the idea that Zombie really is pursuing his own distinctive filmmaking aesthetic, and then found the author drawing an extended comparison to Ligotti’s work — well, color me interested.Title: “You, the Horror: Halloween II (2009)“
Author: Jaime N. Christley
Website: The House Next DoorRelevant excerpt:Like the work of horror writer Thomas Ligotti, who put the image of “gas station carnivals” into our minds, Zombie’s rot and degradation feels continuously, stubbornly vital—if “alive” isn’t quite the word we’re looking for here. Ligotti, a Michigan-born writer unknown even to most fans of horror fiction, doesn’t share much with Zombie in terms of agenda or style. His protagonists, luckless as they often are, are frequently the dregs of urban and/or academic spheres, educated but wearing second-hand coats, obsessing over myths or disreputable objects. (He would not feel at home valorizing a redneck band of outlaw cannibals.) The back-alley pharmacist’s assistant in “The Clown Puppet” cannot get over himself and his unique lot in an incessantly phantasmagorical life even when he intuits correctly that he’s just a bystander in someone else’s nightmare. Yet, connecting strands abound.

Zombie’s version of Loomis shares with Ligotti’s author character, Alice (“Alice’s Last Adventure”), a deep sense of entitled, bourgeois discontent, as they are both impatient with the scaffolding required to keep the gears of their financial liquidity in motion, drawn perhaps not unwillingly back into the abyss to which they truly owe the debt of their success. Most horror writers and aficionados are familiar with the concept that fear isn’t fear, and horror isn’t horror, unless the attraction is as strong as the repulsion. In terms of setting, physical and spiritual, the careworn shop at which Laurie Strode is employed is precisely the kind of “not quite a coffee shop, not quite a vintage bookstore” setting we might expect to find in Ligotti’s “Teatro Grottesco,” “Gas Station Carnivals,” or “The Bungalow House.” And there’s the small matter of her nightmares pursuing her into daytime.

Zombie’s elevation of the Myers killer into the supernatural is prime Ligotti. The vehicle of Laurie Myers-Strode’s fate appears in one Ligotti story after another, as device, conclusion, casual offing, or theme: not merely to be haunted by familial blood but to be subsumed utterly by it.

Collapse goes mainstream: MSM attention to new film COLLAPSE is attention-worthy itself

Mike Ruppert in COLLAPSE (2009)

I started reading Mike Ruppert about five years ago. As is true for many other people, the man played a major part in my personal introduction to peak oil theory and its global implications — “global” both literally and metaphorically, not only in terms of PO’s worldwide and cross-national scope and impact but in terms of its all-encompassing significance for the likely future of the human race. True, I never bought his 2004 book Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age Is Oil, nor did I pay for a subscription to his newsletter From the Wilderness. But then, I didn’t have to, because he provided an avalanche of information and analysis at his From the Wilderness Website. (Sorry about that, Mr. Ruppert. I’ll always opt for good, free resources when I can find them.)

This being the case, and in light of the fact that, naturally, Ruppert and his theories have always inhabited a fringe position relative to the mainstream media, I and the rest of the peak oil-aware community are fairly astonished to see the new documentary film Collapse, which consists mostly of Ruppert sitting in a bunker-like basement and explicating his dire prognosis for the near and far future of industrial civilization, receiving major — as in, really major — mainstream media attention.

New York Times reviewer Jeanette Catsoulis says the film “is not just sobering; it’s a full-on assault,” and then elaborates: “Lucidly and with weary conviction, he cites evidence for a declining global oil supply (like costly offshore drilling in Saudi Arabia) and demolishes hopes pinned on substitutes like ethanol (‘a complete joke’) and clean coal (‘no such thing’). His well-rehearsed rhetoric is shockingly persuasive, and since the majority of his premises are verifiable, any weakness in his argument lies in inferences so terrifying that reasonable listeners may find themselves taking his advice and stocking up on organic seeds” (“Single Focus: An Outsider with Doomsday Vision,” Nov. 6).

A Wall Street Journal interview with Ruppert — the mere existence of which is a marvel — provides the spectacle of America’s most revered financial newspaper giving space to statements like, “Money is useless without energy and money has no respect for power or ideology. We have to reconnect with the requirements that we’re living on a planet that’s falling apart. And we have to maintain some relationship that’s separate from the illusory power of money. Clearly, the power in this country is not in Washington, it’s in New York, with the Fed and with Wall Street. . . . Until you change the way money works, you change nothing. The current economic paradigm calls for infinite growth, from fractional reserve banking to compact interest. So Wall Street needs to somehow help us find an economy that works without requiring more and more consumption” (“Sounding an Alarm on Oil,” Nov. 4).

Owen Gleiberman in his November 6 review of Collapse for Entertainment Weekly — the touchstone print publication for all-things-mainstream pop culture — asserts that “You’d be hard-pressed to find a movie that channels the anxieties of our time with the power and terror of the documentary.” He also counsels that “you’d better believe that you’re sitting up and listening when he starts to talk about ‘peak oil,’” and concludes that “You may want to dispute Ruppert, but more than that you’ll want to hear him, because what he says — right or wrong, prophecy or paranoia — takes up residence in your mind.”

NPR offers a cautious assessment: “Ruppert states things that are clearly true, makes claims that are fairly plausible and delivers predictions that no viewer without a time machine can adequately evaluate.” It also follows the lead of the documentary’s director, Chris Smith (of American Movie fame), in criticizing Ruppert for his de facto discounting of any possible grounds for optimism, and for “see[ing] everything through the prism of failed policies and near-obsolete technologies” (“Michael Ruppert, Explaining the Coming Collapse,” Nov. 5). But the headline is in the subtext: Mike Ruppert is being talked about and taken seriously on freaking NPR.

It’s probably difficult or impossible for somebody who hasn’t been following the peak oil story for the past several years to understand the depth of the “Holy crap” feeling that many of us are experiencing right now. A large part of that feeling comes simply from the fact that, as I’ve mentioned here before, lots of things appear to be playing out according to the long-forecasted “plan,” including, most prominently, the expected development in which oil-and-energy issues have moved to the forefront of public discourse. Of course that has nothing, or at least not much, to do with the question of whether peak oil is actually “real” — a word that raises the need to distinguish between peak oil, the geological phenomenon, and peak oil, the theory that ties oil’s fortunes to the very survival of growth-based economies and industrial-technological civilization. In our ever-intensifying age of 24/7 digital linkage and global conversation, it’s impossible to ferret out how much of what we’re collectively thinking and feeling comes from reality itself, as in, the reality outside the media web, and how much is simply a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

What’s incontrovertible is that we’re right now living through the giddiest age of apocalyptic cultural ferment that any of us have ever experienced. I think it’s safe to say that it tops the ones that accompanied the turn of the 20th century, and the advent of World Wars I and II, and the Depression era, and the social and cultural upheavals and meltdowns of the sixties and seventies, and the turn of the 21st century. It even tops 9/11, although in fact it incorporates the 9/11 feeling of an imminent breakdown in everything. Maybe the only thing that equals it is the nuclear terror of the Cold War era. Because now, as then, the fear isn’t just of a national or international breakdown or some such thing (although obviously that one is currently in play, too) but of a show-stopping calamity that would write “The End” on the last page of the book that is the human race, or at least on the book that is civilization as we have known for at least a century or two (since the full implementation of the Adam Smithian economic growth model and the rise of technocratic industrialism). The ecological term “die-off” has gained currency. The word “collapse” is on everybody’s minds and lips.

Over the past two or three or four years, this arch-awareness of a possible impending doom has dominated the collective attention of an increasing segment of the population at large. Now it has thrust its way into the prominent collective conversation that’s mediated by our official cultural gatekeepers, as seen in the MSM coverage of Ruppert’s/Smith’s movie. In an age where our ability to loop our collective obsessions back at ourselves with obsessive frequency and thoroughness has been perfected — via television, talk radio, blogs, Websites, iPhones, etc. — we’re able to, in effect, skywrite the idea of collapse across the expanse of our very awareness. How this will play out is anybody’s guess, but it should be, to say the least, interesting to watch, let alone to experience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_%28film%29

Zombies, Digital Media, and Cultural Preservation in the New Dark Age

“How secure is our civilization’s accumulated knowledge?”

That’s the question posed in a recent essay by Richard Heinberg, one of the most consistently brilliant, reasonable, and nuanced writers about the ecological and cultural-civilizational ramifications of peak fossil fuels and economic calamity.  In “Our evanescent culture and the awesome duty of librarians” (Post Carbon Institute, Oct. 7), he offers a detailed discussion of the ins and outs of cultural preservation in the age of digital media, which, as he points out, have become the basket into which we citizens of industrial-technological civilization are collectively putting all of our cultural eggs, and which depend entirely on electricity for their continued viability. If the lights go out, he observes, this all vanishes instantly. And the chances of the lights going out by century’s end, not only in developing countries around the globe, where rolling brownouts and blackouts are already becoming more common, but in the industrialized nations as well, is very real.

“Ultimately,” Heinberg writes,

the entire project of digitized cultural preservation depends on one thing: electricity. As soon as the power goes off, access to the Internet goes down. CDs and DVDs become meaningless plastic disks; e-books become inscrutable and useless; digital archives become as illegible as cuneiform tablets — or more so. Altogether, digitization represents a huge bet on society’s ability to keep the lights on forever . . . . It’s ironic to think that the cave paintings of Lascaux may be far more durable than the photos from the Hubble space telescope. Altogether, if the lights were to go out now, in just a century or two the vast majority of our recently recorded knowledge would be gone or inaccessible.

This would all obviously constitute a disaster of the first order, since we denizens of industrial society have been engaged for roughly a century in the project of forgetting how to live without our electrified technology, and in the event of a blackout we would lose not only this technology but access to the digital media in which we have taken to storing so much of the very knowledge and skills that would enable us to survive. And that’s not to mention the loss in purely artistic and spiritual terms.

But there’s an ambivalence to the issue that Heinberg also notes in his essay, since, to put it bluntly, not all cultural knowledge is worth remembering. “The contemplation of electric civilization’s collapse can’t help but provoke philosophical musings,” he writes. “Perhaps cultural death is a necessary component of evolution — as is the death of individual organisms. In any case, no one can prevent culture from changing, and many aspects of our present culture arguably deserve to disappear (we each probably carry our own list around in our head of what kinds of music, advertising messages, and television shows we think the world could do without).”

And this is what leads me, perhaps not too incongruously — especially in light of the present prevalence of zombies in mass media culture — to flash on horror film auteur George Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985), the third installment in his celebrated Living Dead series, which at one point grapples provocatively with the very issue that Heinberg raises, albeit in a slightly different context.

An epitaph that nobody’s gonna bother to read

In Day of the Dead, a dozen or so humans, the only apparent survivors of the zombie apocalypse that started in 1968’s Night of the Living Dead and continued in 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, live in a vast  underground military bunker while the zombies rule the outside world. In a key scene, a character with the appropriately apocalyptic name of John chides another character, a scientist, for continuing the obsessive quest to understand the zombie plague, since the bunker is already, effectively, a vast treasure trove of industrial civilization’s accumulated knowledge that nobody will ever know or care about:

Hey, you know what all they keep down here in this cave?  Man, they got the books and the records of the top five hundred companies.  They got the defense department budget down here, and they got the negative for all your favorite movies.  They got microfilm with tax return and newspaper stories.  They got immigration records and census records, and they got official accounts of all the wars and plane crashes and volcano eruptions and earthquakes and fires and floods, and all the other disasters that interrupted the flow of things in the good old U.S. of A. Now what does it matter, Sarah darling? All this filing and record keeping? Who’s ever gonna give a shit? Who’s even gonna get a chance to see it all? This is a great big, 14-mile tombstone with an epitaph on it that nobody’s gonna bother to read. And now here you come with a whole new set of charts and graphs and records. What you gonna do? Bury them down here with all the other relics of what once was?

When the other character, Sarah, responds, “What I’m doing is all there’s left to do,” John comes back with,”Shame on you. There’s plenty to do, so long as there’s you and me and maybe some other people. We could start over, start fresh, get some babies — and teach them, Sarah. Teach them never to come over here and dig these records out.”

The conversation relates back to an earlier exchange between the two characters, in which John similarly criticizes the scientist’s attempts to explain and fix the apocalyptic situation. Upon being told to shut up because he has no alternative solution, he says, “Oh, I’ve got an alternative: Find us an island someplace, get juiced up, and spend what time we got left soaking up some sunshine.” When Sarah says with disdain, “You could do that, couldn’t you? With all that’s going on, you could just do that without a second thought,” he replies, “Shit, I could do that even if all this wasn’t going on.”

And obviously, this all relates back to Heinberg’s observation in his article that we can all name aspects of contemporary information culture whose loss we wouldn’t lament. Then again, as he also notes, the loss of many other things would be truly tragic. He says it so beautifully, and lays out the competing strands of the dilemma so elegantly, that I’ll quote his final paragraphs in toto:

Civilization has come at a price. Since the age of Sumer cities have been terrible for the environment, leading to deforestation, loss of topsoil, and reduced biodiversity. There have been human costs as well, in the forms of economic inequality (which hardly existed in pre-state societies) and loss of personal autonomy. These costs have grown to unprecedented levels with the advent of industrialism — civilization on crack — and have been borne not by civilization’s beneficiaries, but primarily by other species and people in poor nations and cultures. But nearly all of us who are aware of these costs like to think of this bargain-with-the-devil as having some purpose greater than a temporary increase in creature comforts, safety, and security for a minority within society. The full-time division of labor that is the hallmark of civilization has made possible science — with its enlightening revelations about everything from human origins to the composition of the cosmos. The arts and philosophy have developed to degrees of sophistication and sublimity that escape the descriptive capacity of words.

Yet so much of what we have accomplished, especially in the last few decades, currently requires for its survival the perpetuation and growth of energy production and consumption infrastructure—which exact a continued, escalating environmental and human toll. At some point, this all has to stop, or at least wind down to some more sustainable scale of pillage.

But if it does, and in the process we lose the best of what we have achieved, will it all have been for nothing?

Burn it all

Having said and quoted all of the above, I’ll close by pointing out what I suspect many of my readers may have noticed as well: that even though there are veritable continents of cultural treasures whose loss to a new dark age would be an awesome tragedy, in light of the galling and garish nature of so much of our contemporary cultural dystopia with its digital media circus, its economic bloat, its ecological devastation, its human injustice, etc., it’s pretty damned difficult to deny the mythically charged attraction of the “Burn it all!” solution as expressed so enticingly by Romero and others. And that’s even though we rationally know the full-on disaster that such a “solution” would inevitably entail in human terms.

N.B., for more about cultural preservation in the face of a new dark age, see, for example:

• John Michael Greer, “The End of the Information Age” (May 19, 2009), “Cultural Conservers” (May 21, 2008), and others. “I’d like to suggest,” says Greer, “that one crucial need of our present predicament is the rise of a movement of cultural conservers — individuals who choose, for one reason or another, to take personal responsibility for the preservation of some part of the modern world’s cultural heritage. That’s a tall order, not least because the crises inseparable from the decline and fall of a civilization will leave many of us scrambling for bare survival in the face of soaring death rates and increasingly harsh conditions.”
• Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture (2000). Berman talks movingly, in a tone that’s partly businesslike and partly elegiac, about the need for a class of “new monks” who will preserve and perpetuate treasured cultural knowledge not only in the midst of a future dark age brought on by industrial collapse (a theme upon which he touches only tangentially when he touches on it at all), but in the midst of our present cultural dark age of economic, political, educational, societal, and media-based madness, where hype and life have merged, and where the ever-expanding border of technocratic consumer culture and American imperialism encompasses a darkly dystopian reality. Importantly, he stresses that a) a new dark age is inevitable, so we’re not talking about “saving” what presently exists but preserving and planting the seeds of a future renaissance that none of us will personally see, and b) these new monastic efforts may need to take a different form than simply the writing of books and so on, since, unlike the original Dark Ages, when Western monks conducted their scribal work in an information-starved cultural environment, “This time around, we are drowning in information; hence, what is required is that it be embodied, preserved through ways of living . . . . I am not talking about putting the Great Books on CD-ROM, eventually to be buried in a time capsule, I suppose), or on the Net; these things have already been done, and they don’t amount to much, because the Great Books program is really a way of life, not a database.”
• Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953). Obviously, this one has become a kind of Ur-text that defines the very lines along which we think and talk about the question of a new dark age. We shouldn’t forget the novel’s passionate endorsement of something like Berman’s “new monasticism” in its description of the tramps and hobos who traverse the fringes of a future totalitarian-dystopian society and preserve books whole in their memories, in the hope of one being able to recite them and write them down again when books are no longer outlawed. We also shouldn’t forget one character’s important and insightful declaration about the relative value of books themselves: “Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical about them at all. The magic is only with what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment.”

Lovecraft’s Longing – Part Two (final)

My two-part article “Lovecraft’s Longing,” which I wrote for Art Throb, and whose first part I announced in a previous post, is now finished and published. In Part Two I explain how, in the words of the introduction,

Lovecraft was “about” more than just the horrors of bodily corruption and cosmic monstrosity that cling so tenaciously to his reputation, and the failure of some critics to recognize, understand, and/or accept this fact may be injecting a falsely negative and one-sided view of him into the collective cultural conversation. Furthermore – and of particular interest to the Art Throb audience – one of the chief places where one can find the kinder, gentler Lovecraft on display is in the man’s emotional relationship to the natural and man-made landscape of Massachusetts (and more generally, New England) itself, which, as we’ll see, was for him not only a locus of Gothic darkness but a source of poetic longing.

Full Website now live

MattCardin.com is now live. Many thanks to Cesar Puch for his excellent design!

MSNBC explains how Goldman Sachs stole billions from U.S. taxpayers with government help

Unbelievable. Not the news that Goldman Sachs used its no-strings-attached government money from Hank Paulson’s bank industry bailout last fall to earn inconceivable amounts of money in a titanically underhanded manner, but the fact that mainstream media heavyweight MSNBC would feature such a raw exposé as this one:

The quick version (quicker than watching the still-quick seven-minute video, that is) is this: The video shows Dylan Ratigan, the former host of MSNBC’s Fast Money, who prominently left the show last March in a very public and controversial row, and who announced right about the same time that he was planning to do some deep investigation of Goldman Sachs’s activities during the financial meltdown, appearing on the network’s Morning Meeting show about a week ago wearing a cape and top hat and bearing a magic wand, and presenting a segment titled “Do you believe in magic?” in which he explains how Goldman Sachs performed the “magic trick” of making over three billion dollars in three months.

He opens by announcing, “What we are going to attempt to do today, through magic, is to show how a single investment bank can make three billion dollars in cash in three months’ time and create absolutely no value as unemployment skyrockets, foreclosures soar, and the dollar collapses.”

Near the end he paints Goldman Sachs and also the U.S. government in explicitly criminal terms when he describes last year’s $700 billion bank bailout by saying, “The crime that was committed was committed, in my opinion, by Treasury Secretary Paulson and then-Fed Governor Geithner, who as custodians of America’s wealth made the decision to allow the use of that wealth, the gift of that wealth, to one investment bank, so that that investment bank could accumulate power over all the assets in America, and they themselves could perpetuate the system that they benefit from. . . . It is black magic. That’s how they did it. And we can stop it by simply distributing the truth to everybody in this country and demanding clawbacks for the money that has been stolen from us.”

Yes, this distinctly echoes Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story, and also, in its hints of an economically promethean motivation behind Goldman Sachs’s actions, Rolling Stone’s astonishing takedown of the bank earlier this year. But I’m still reeling from having heard such sentiments expressed so forcefully on MSNBC.

I’m also grateful for it, and am hoping that this televised channeling of the real truth and its proper attendant outrage doesn’t prove to be just another helping of bread and circuses courtesy of the Great American Spectacle Machine.

Lovecraft’s Longing: Article for Art Throb

A few months ago I wrote a post about the launch of Art Throb, a Web-based arts initiative headed by my Salem-based sister that chronicles the creative life of the Massachusetts North Shore. Now I have become one of the writers for this venture.

Dinah, my sister, invited me a couple of months ago to contribute a post about Lovecraft, since she knew that 1) I’m a devoted fan, or perhaps a fanatical devotee, of the man and his work, and 2) the entire North Shore is the proverbial Lovecraft Country that HPL seized upon to create the gothicized New England geography of his fictional universe, both by referring to real-world buildings and town names in his stories and by fictionalizing the whole region in a series of made-up towns that have become the stuff of modern myth: Arkham, Kingsport, Dunwich, et al., referring to Salem, Marblehead, and others.

Then there’s 3) the fact that Halloween is Salem’s Mardi Gras (an observation that’s almost clichéd at this point), so it’s a perfect time for talking about Lovecraft on such a site.

I ended up writing a two-parter titled “Lovecraft’s Longing.” Part One was published today. Part Two will follow sometime between now and Halloween. The first part explains a little about who HPL was and why he’s significant to the North Shore. The second part will present my argument that Lovecraft is very much misinterpreted by much of mainstream literary opinion, and that his famous reaction of aesthetic bliss to the architecture and general atmosphere of the North Shore counts among the factors that demonstrates this. Anybody familiar with my paper “The Master’s Eyes Shining with Secrets: The Influence of H.P. Lovecraft on Thomas Ligotti,” and also my blog post about Lovecraft’s experience of sehnsucht or “autumn longing,” might know where I’m going with this.

MattCardin.com and Dark Awakenings both imminent

Three very topical news updates:

1. Work on MattCardin.com has been proceeding very well. Web designer and fellow horror author-and-editor Cesar Puch has done an outstanding job with the site design. The content includes excerpts from Dark Awakenings plus a full story from Divinations of the Deep; streaming access to the full Daemonyx album along with extensive notes on the music’s inspirations (and an order form to buy the album); information on the professional writing and editing services that I offer; a biography and bibliography; and more. The launch is imminent, and the timing feels quite good: It looks like the site will go live right here in the run-up to Halloween 2009.
2. Dark Awakenings has entered the final stretch. Today I approved the final galley. The verdict: 332 pages (including front matter) of fiction and nonfiction exploring the intersections between religion and horror.
3. I’ll have a new story, titled “The New Pauline Corpus,” in the anthology Cthulhu’s Reign (DAW, April 2010), edited by Darrell Schweitzer. This is a themed Lovecraftian antho with a twist, in that it jumps way ahead in the usual Lovecraftian cosmic-apocalyptic storyline to feature stories set after Cthulhu and the Old Ones have already reawakened and repossessed the earth. I was asked to write a tale that would somehow reconcile Judeo-Christian theology with Lovecraft’s cosmic nihilism. Unsurprisingly, I found the task richly rewarding.

9/11, writer’s block, and creative rebirth

In a July column for NPR about the enduring meaningfulness of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 for her life and work, Alice Hoffman revealed the following:

After 9/11, I experienced serious writer’s block. Like so many, I had lost faith in the future. If our world was so perilous, if buildings could tumble and planes fall from the sky, what was the point of writing? (“Bradbury’s Fiction Reignites an Author’s Faith,” July 30, 2009)

The column as a whole is arranged as a recounting of how her early love of Bradbury’s book later reemerged as a saving grace when she revisited it while she was blocked and found that it inspired her all over again (and was instrumental in giving rise to her 2003 post-apocalyptic opus, Green Angel).

This is all quite striking to me, since I, too, have a personal story of creative block and anguish related to September 11, 2001. My Divinations of the Deep was well into planning and production with Ash-Tree Press when 9/11 happened. Moreover, on the day the towers fell I was three weeks into my high school teaching career, and I spent that day and the next few weeks dealing with the general fallout among my students and the school community (as well as among my family, friends, and everybody else; we were all shell-shocked, as I’m sure you were, too).

I distinctly remember sitting in my empty classroom during my lunch break on that fateful day, having been occupied all morning by my upset students and my own horror at the televised carnage, and experiencing a sinking sense of futility about my authorial endeavors. Of course I had been quite pleased for several months to have my first book in the works, but the impact of the unfolding horrific events shattered my little emotional bubble like a cannon ball shot through a glass house. Thinking about, and watching the ubiquitous footage of, all that death and destruction in Manhattan and at the Pentagon, and feeling my petty personal concerns dwarfed by those awful events with their equally awful magnitude,  made me feel pretty damned useless and silly for having put all that personal emotion into such a pitifully trivial thing as writing horror stories.

A better recipe for creative death cannot be conceived. To feel even for a moment that your artistic inclinations — not your actual work, which may well be minor and/or in need of substantial revision, but the very seat of your creative drives and passions — is useless and trivial is the surest way in all creation to send your unconscious self, which is of course identical with that artistic center, plunging into a self-protective coma from which it may well never awaken.

So I, like Alice Hoffman — like, I’m sure, legions of additional writers — suffered from writer’s block in the wake of 9/11. I couldn’t begin to write fiction, or even, for awhile, nonfiction, without feeling instantly wretched, dried out, and vaguely sick. Pretty soon the phenomenon moved inward, and began affecting even the birth of ideas in my psyche, which all emerged stillborn. I lost what could have been several good stories that way.

(In the “additional writers” category, consider David Guterson, author of Snow Falling on Cedars, who after 9/11

just sat there, stumped, for unproductive days that dragged on into unproductive weeks and months.

“I became paralyzed as an artist with writer’s block,” Guterson says outside a Bainbridge cafe. “I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn’t find my way into the fictional world. . . . When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts. It was a real struggle. I lost a whole year, and it was not a good year. . . . I assumed there were other people, other artists in a similar state. (“David Guterson emerges from post-9/11 writer’s block,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, September 27, 2003

Then consider the case of K.D. Lang, who told an interviewer just last year that “Yes, 9/11 did actually have an impact on my writing. It was just so hard to fathom writing pop songs at that point.”)

Ms. Hoffman got over her block more quickly than I got over mine, as witnessed by the fact of Green Angel’s 2003 publication date. My own fiction writing activities went dead for a period of years (and it wasn’t for lack of Bradbury, who has always been a front-and-center presence with me).

Lately, over the last year and two, the inner fiction works have sputtered back into motion, for reasons known only to my secret self, which has apparently decided it’s okay to lift its head again and have a cautious look around. Maybe it will share some of those reasons with me some day. For now, “Hello, world,” as they say. After a several-year hiatus, who knows where this might lead.

Those who love life do not read

Morgan Freeman as Easy Reader smiles in the face of existential dread -- because he reads!

From “The Myth Maker” (Guardian, June 4, 2005), an edited extract of the English translation of Michel Houellebecq’s H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (which, I can attest, is an astonishingly powerful and moving book):

Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.

Ponder that for awhile. Is the enjoyment — let alone the making — of art truly the preserve of those who are terminally dissatisfied with the world as it presents itself  in existential immediacy? I have often suspected so. This is a matter fit for much prolonged reflection.

At the very least, it imparts an entirely subversive context to all of the saccharine good intentions of the television public service announcements and teacherly admonitions that many of us grew up with. And what of poor Easy Reader from The Electric Company? Was he really just a disguised Camus peddling his existential dread to unsuspecting children?