More reading in Landrum today. Not so many notes as last time, but the ideas are solid. I discovered an important parallel between hard-boiled detectives and Lovecraft's narrators that should prove fruitful.
I may read more tonight, and if I do, I'll post that tomorrow.
It's #the100dayproject again, and I'm working on the next paper for Necronomicon Providence (this August) and the next chapter of the book. Yes, I should speed up things.
This chapter is on HP Lovecraft and detective fiction, and I'm reading a book by Larry Landrum called American Mystery and Detective Novels: A Reference Guide. AMAZING work. The reading is slow going because there's so much to write and think about.
I'm not sure that I agree with Landrum's distinction between mysteries and detective fiction, but I'm going with it to see where he ends up. It may well be useful to talk about how Lovecraft bridges the two ideas with in his stories. No matter what happens with that, just the introduction and the first section of the first chapter have been fruitful for me.
And the good news is that they've requested only two things, and they were things I was going to do anyway as I wrote the chapter on Lovecraft and detective fiction. The news was both a relief and a validation.
Also, I'm partway through the Scrivener tutorial. They weren't kidding about it taking a couple of hours. It's detailed enough that reading tales of cosmic horror is a relief. Having said that, it's going to be exactly the right thing to help with this project. I'm glad I bought it.
My plan is to finish the edits and get the revised manuscript to the editor by 14 September.
I'm on the final section, "Autopsy on a Puppet: An Anatomy of the Supernatural." We should get into some fiction writers now. I've been able to mark some passages that relate to True Detective, so I'm hoping that this will get me something helpful on Lovecraft.
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.
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.
I was flattered and honored to be invited as a guest on auticulture.com to talk about True Detective season 2 (with many references to season 1, because you can't completely separate the two). Here's the link to the podcast and write-up. Jasun Horsley is a gracious and skilled interviewer. We covered a mind-blowing amount of territory as we discussed the many ideas presented in season 2. His approach is from a perspective that's pretty different from mine, but we had many observations in common, and we teased out some really interesting things as we compared notes. The short version is that we are both fans of season 2 without being brain donor cheerleaders. Next... I've written 41 pages since my post here of 7 July. Today's project: Complete the slide set for the presentation at NecronomiCon Providence, which is going to be on Friday, August 21, as listed here. My talk begins at 10:30. One of my drinking buddies is presenting during the 9-10:15 session: "Lovecraft and Folkloric Methodology," Ken Van Wey, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia
Ken is both a gentleman and an expert on Edgar Allan Poe, and I'm looking forward to hearing his thoughts on Lovecraft.
Onwards and upwards, as always. I'll see about uploading the slide set here when I get it done.
