Organize!

[athelstanent]

Two big things happened this last weekend. First is Bunny and I met with a mortgage broker. Looks like we are in a place we can afford a house. Now the hunt begins. My good friend gave me the name of a realtor to help us find that house. So if anyone knows of a house with a basement, a loft, and a few bedrooms for sell. Let us know about it. Second is my room was rearranged. My spatial ability is not that good, so I asked bunny how to arrange my room to do what I needed it to do. He did it and I'm so happy! The big thing is I now have a place I can read and listen to music in comfort. It's been too long since I could do that. I finished reading "Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" by Lovecraft. Great story, but a bit dense at times. I really enjoyed it but I hate books that describe things in terms that are unimaginable. I personally can not see a temple whose shape is such that only unholy things could be practiced there. I can picture an evil temple, but nothing like what Lovecraft can say.

Comments

[anthrorabbit.livejournal.com]

I actually find that to be some of the charm of Lovecraft's stories. Whereas Stephen King and Anne Rice describe things in such detail that you can't help but picture precisely what they picture, Lovecraft's open-ended descriptions let your imagination go wild.

If the author describes something scary in detail that just doesn't scare you, then it doesn't work. But if the author lets your imagination fill in something that does scare you, then it will work.

[athelstan.livejournal.com]

I agree with you. Leaving some details for the read to fill in is a good thing, but Lovecraft expects too much from his reader. My imagination breaks down trying to meet Lovecraft's descriptions. A good example are the ghouls from Kadath. He describes them having faces like gargoyles, vaguely dog like... so my mind came up with sexy cute gargoyles and had trouble walking. I could not see the horror. In many descriptions, your left to imagine inhuman horrors that make your soul shudder and give you a chill that you never recover from... I just can't imagine what that is like, nor can I imagine what that it is to feel like that.

[chtulie.livejournal.com]

Well, i doubt animal/human sort of Hybrids would have such a horrific impact on someone who has a sort of a dragon as an alternate self ;)

Some bits of the phrasing can also be misleading, like the winged creatures that tickle ith their sharp tails. Tickling doesn't sound to bad, until you imagine what it must be like to be tickled with something razor sharp, having someone tickle me with razor blades would definatly be the sort of stuff I hope to never encounter in my nightmares.
But that's kinda the thing, isn't it? It's written in a different age, and it describes dreams, which are strange things. Sometimes it can be hard to tell others how or why a nighmare was scary, an example I'm fond of is a nightmare of 'the feeling of terror of being at home but knowing everything is replaced with an exact duplicate'.
I'd guess that trying to communicate dreams is pretty damn hard, and a bit of hit and miss, but it's cool he tries, and it's a damn lot better then horror stories relying on blood and gore to try and frighten their audience, no?
(btw, 'Mock Man Press' published an excellent 5 issue comic adaption of Kadath)

[athelstan.livejournal.com]

You're right. Animal/human hybrids are a good thing in my mind. As much as I love Lovecraft, his works do grab a hold of me. I read them and enjoy, but I'm not a fan because half of the time as I'm reading I loose myself in his prose. So I go back a paragraph or a page to figure out what line I skipped had the one bit of information I missed. I guess that's why I work better with more modern writers. They are more verbose and that works better with my reading issues.

[chtulie.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't think it's so much a different quality of writing as living in a different world seperated by time and vast cultural, ideological and technological changes, and a different sort of vocabulary to mach (I think George Orwell was very astute with his Newspeak in 1984 with the connection between words and ideas).
It's diffucult to read 'cause you draw from a different world of common experience for communication as he did, mayhaps?

I love the idea/suggestion I once read that 'Lovecraft would've been shocked to his soul by a game like twister' (when the author of the quote explained the rather tame nature of Lovecrafts twisted fertility god/ess/thing)

[athelstan.livejournal.com]

Words and ideas do connect, and there is a big difference in culture. The big counter I have to your idea is Shakespeare. I love the bards works, and the more I studied them, the more I enjoyed them. I do have a block in my head with most victorian writers. It's just me, and many others find there works compelling.

The great thing is I don't need to understand it to appreciate it. }:-)

Just like hip-hop and rap. I don't get it and don't like to listen to it. But I respect it.

[chtulie.livejournal.com]

Well, it's different with poetry, where sound, tone and rhytm matter a lot beside meaning (not that different from music, as you've shown) and Shakespeare's work, written to be remembered and in Iambic Paremeter (iirc) does have that going for it. And the man has an unparalleled vocabulary (average oxford student 6.000 words, Milton 10.000 words, Shakespeare 20.00 words, iirc, it might be the oxford student would have only 3.000), of course, in his time there was no dictionary, so he got to invent a lot of words (that Shakespeare invented the word 'bubble' is one of the best stories I heard).
But I didn't really appreciate the depth of meaning in Shakespeares work until a teacher tought our class on 'McBeth', in full historical and cultural context over several months (which is now, so far, because of that, my favourite play of his).
But, Lovecraft's work isn't from a time like Shakespeare, when there were no clear boundries between the artforms as there are now and in the 20's, Lovecraft's work is pretty much just prose, and that requires understanding of meaning to see what's so good about it.

But hey,very few people can be compared with Shakespeare and come out allright (best to look outside of the english language for those sort of people), and Lovecraft certainly ain't one of them. He is the greatest of the English Horror writers of the 20th century though (Stephen King freely admitted Lovecraft being superior to him), the greatest since Edgar Allen Poe.

Too bad only one decent movie was made on his work, 'In the mouth of Madness', which is pretty much the only one of it's kind.

[athelstan.livejournal.com]

I think I understand Lovecraft, but it's so hard for me to figure it out sometimes that it does not make the reading enjoyable.

Lovecraft

[ghostbehr.livejournal.com]

I helped out on making a animated version of "Dream Quest of the Unknown Kadath" and have a copy of the film on DVD if you would like to borrow it.

Glad to hear that you have your space re-aligned to suit you. I desperately need to do that to my basement and a good chunk of the rst of the house :( Maybe I will get to some of it this weekend.

Re: Lovecraft

[athelstan.livejournal.com]

We got the DVD to. That's why I was reading the story. We should be watching it very soon now.

If you need some help moving things around. Let me know when I come over. I'll be more than happy to help out.