Landrum: Criticism and Theory.

I finally got through the chapter in Landrum on criticism and theory. He's amazingly talented at summarizing the work of others; the section on Todorov was particularly interesting because Landrum takes a wider view of it than I had before. The next chapter is on authors, and I plan to read only through the 1930s. I'll save the others for a different paper.

My notes continue to be solid though fewer than I've written before now. 

I HAVE GOT TO START WORKING ON THE ABSTRACT.

Day three of #The100DayProject.

I'm still reading Landrum, and it's still solid. He's led me back to three Jorge Luis Borges stories that I'd forgotten about, and he linked them to three Poe stories. All of this goes into the hopper for Lovecraft.

The current chapter is a review of literary criticism about detective fiction (today's video is pages of this chapter up through where I've read). Landrum has a gift for summarising a book in one sentence. Most don't realise just how difficult that is.

I've got to start drafting my proposal for NecronomiCon Providence soon. The deadline is 22 May.

Day two of work.

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.

Next chapter.

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.

Update: Peer reviewers' comments now in.

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.

Now to re-read a couple of stories and make notes.

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.

Finishing Ligotti.

About to finish the last section of Ligotti.

A photo posted by @mensan98th on Jul 18, 2016 at 4:24pm PDT

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.

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.