Lots of writing today. I began with a definition of the artist-investigator as first conceived by theater workers in San Francisco, then moved to an epistemology of investigation (via Richard Foley, "An Epistemology That Matters"). I examined how an artist-investigator approaches the necessities of investigation via an aesthetics of crime and redemption. I followed that with an aesthetics of criminality (this goes back to Jack the Ripper at the very least) and its corresponding aesthetics of redemption. The problematic nature of an aesthetics of redemption in the current day leads to the way that Cohle and Hart each differently approach the idea of redemption in True Detective.
I followed that with a brief examination of the aesthetic sensibilities of the investigator with specific regard to Chambers's narrators, HP Lovecraft's investigators, and Cohle and Hart in True Detective (this part is incomplete because it's the real meat of the presentation, and I need to work on it intensively). I looked over Chambers's narrators and examined how some of them encountered beauty through their artistic sensibilities, including the horrible beauty of The King in Yellow (the text-within-the-text). HP Lovecraft's narrators have similar encounters with the weird, with some of them pulled into their investigations by their artistic sensibilities ("At the Mountains of Madness," "The Music of Erich Zann"). "Pickman's Model" is an obvious choice. Interestingly, though, it is Randolph Carter in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath who is pulled along as much by aesthetics as he is by curiosity and determination.
My IG account (@mensan98th) has the video of today's pages. All hail Themyscira!
