Our dog is Frodo, a plump and cheerful Welsh Corgi. He makes no trouble. I took him to Deering Oaks Park, found a bench in the shade and wrote four good pages on my new novel in the notebook I carry around. Frodo kept an eye on the ducks. Those four pages weren’t perfect — far from it — but they were words on paper, and they marched.
People walked past, and no one gasped, “Oh, look! That man is caught in the cosmic godhead fire of the writing life!”
Day: October 14, 2006
The New York Review of Books on H.P. Lovecraft:
In other words, he was a nerd. He was a nerd on a grand scale, though— a heroic nerd, a pallid, translucent, Mallarméan nerd, a nerd who suffered for his art. His art consisted exclusively of conveying horror, and in this his range was encyclopedic. As a setting for his horror he built a whole world—a whole universe, with a time-span measured in eons—which others could happily continue furnishing indefinitely. His horrors themselves are, with a few unhappy exceptions, described loosely and suggestively enough that in effect they present a blank screen on which the reader can pro-ject whatever visual imagery is most personally unsettling. This explains the seeming paradox of an exceedingly bookish writer enjoying a legacy that is to a very large degree extraliterary. As a supplier of instruments for the cultivation of horror he was custom-tailored for the suggestible fourteen-year-old boy, and the number of fourteen-year-old boys—some of them chronologically rather older, a few of them even female—is continually on the increase.
Via Backwards City.
Oh, and speaking of Lovecraft: the Random H.P. Lovecraft Story Generator. Via Homo Sum.
I’ve got to agree with Chris McLaren — this is a pretty amusing mental image:
Protesters greeted Florida Gov. Jeb Bush on his way to a campaign event for a Pennsylvania senator, and he briefly took refuge in a subway station supply closet to avoid the anti-Republican demonstrators.
If only we could keep him there.
Oh, and hey, also from McLaren: scientists have discovered the remains of a lost underwater city:
“There’s a huge chronological problem in this discovery. It means that the whole model of the origins of civilisation with which archaeologists have been working will have to be remade from scratch,” [Author and film-maker Graham Hancock] said.
Terry Jones extends George W. Bush an invitation to join the World League of Despots.:
Of course, your unstinting efforts to make torture an internationally accepted aspect of human life have surpassed everything we could have ever hoped for. I don’t think there is a single member of the league who could have imagined, six short years ago, that our activities in tormenting our fellow creatures would once again be recognised as acceptable, civilised behaviour, as it once was in the middle ages.
There was a time, maybe not even all that long ago, when this would have read like satire to me, if not outright hyperbole. Lately, though…
As Garrison Keillor notes, “Any young persons who have been inspired by Mr. Bush to take up public service should be watched very closely.”
Or, as Garry Trudeau puts it, “Bush’s success is weird in that it represents a total breakdown in the meritocracy that we imagine supplies qualified choices for president.
There’s a pretty good article in New York Magazine about Stephen Colbert…although my favorite part of it has to be the short quiz on the fourth page. Can you tell which statements were made by Colbert, and which were made by Ann Coulter? I couldn’t.
Also: One intern’s tale of working on The Colbert Report, plus Colbert’s own tips on how to be an expert on anything
Via Mark Evanier, TV Squad and Boing Boing, respectively.