Today's reading: "The Parents of Howard Phillips Lovecraft."

I'm still in the Schultz/Joshi collection and am finishing Kenneth Faig's essay on Lovecraft's parents. It's interesting and a good read, not something I'd necessarily quote in my own work (at this point, anyway), and I recommend it.

The most interesting thing about it is something that isn't obvious at first. We know much, much more about Lovecraft's mother than we do about his father, which is not how these things normally go. My understanding is that, for example, Victorian women's obituaries would quickly turn to details about their husbands or fathers. The fact that we have so many details about Susie Phillips Lovecraft is both interesting and a boon to our understanding of Lovecraft himself. Winfield Scott Lovecraft, his father, was a traveling salesman and thus left little in the way of a mark on the world.

I doubt either of them would have fully understood the mark their son left with us.

#100DayProject

This year, I'm doing the #100DayProject, as I did last year and in 2016. It's going to be more reading and, possibly, another chapter developed.

I've read some of the essays in here in other collections. The introduction is a fine one, written by Joshi. More to come.*

*I tried posting this from the Blogger app last night but no luck. It's my day one post.

Much reading.

I finished Landrum and am almost all the way through Ascari.

Both books have been good sources of ideas, but now I've got to start working on the abstract. May 22 looms.

So much to catch up here.

Many pages of notes and much reading since my last update. #lovecraft #kinginyellow #truedetective #chambers

A video posted by @mensan98th on Jul 13, 2016 at 4:48pm PDT

Catching up...

• My paper went swimmingly at NecronomiCon Providence 2016 (link goes to the updated page for 2017), and I'm pleased to announce that it has been accepted for publication as part of the proceedings. It's gratifying to have all the work I put into it rewarded. I'll refrain from posting it here, given that it's essentially in press, or will be as soon as I hear from the peer reviewers and address what they assure me are minor revisions.
• Reading: Lovecraft and the Gothic (Sigurdson 1993); HPL, Poe, and Bierce (Wheeler 1990); and an exegesis on hands in HPL (Waugh 1988), all in respective issues of Lovecraft Studies.  Joshi's Four Decades of Criticism, with numerous useful essays by Faig, Joshi himself, Mabbott, and Leiber. Leiber's essay "A Literary Copernicus" is widely cited and rightly so. Leiber especially got me thinking about Faulkner and the Southern Gothic. I took more lengthy notes on Lauterbach, Mosig, and Cannon as well.
• Rene Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Yowza, what a text. It's a book-length conversation among Girard and two to three literary critics about his previous book, Violence and the Sacred, and how those ideas affect the status quo in sociology and anthropology. Difficult reading because I hadn't read Violence. 
• Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred. I totally see where later writers took Girard's ideas and applied them to detective fiction. His notions of mimesis and the spread of violence are fascinating. Not an easy book, but not so hard as Things Hidden.
• Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti is erudite, and he wants to be sure you know it. His argument is based on a chain of reasoning, which is perfectly valid, and if you accept his premise--that "everything is not all right"--then what follow is one path of a logical derivative. I'm not yet done with this one. It's much easier going than any passage in Girard. Ligotti is a poet primarily; to my knowledge, this is his only work of nonfiction.
• I've got three books waiting for me at the UPS store, one of which is Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction by Christopher Pittard. That is the book that connects Girard with detective fiction. 

After I finish Ligotti, I think I'm going to work on the chapter on Lovecraft and detective fiction. My plan is to make it do double duty as the NecronomiCon Providence 2017 paper, if accepted.

And onward.