Libraries, later

I don't think of libraries nearly as often as I ought to anymore. When I was but a lad my parents had a system in place by which I had to read an amount of time equal to what I spent watching television and playing video games. The library was a regular destination then. I needed a constant supply of books to keep pace with my constant intake of video games. Normally I paid the reading forward, but every once in a while I would rent a game for the weekend and go on a four-hour jag that left me deep in the hole, frantic to get a big block of reading done before my OCD found me and broke my knees. The genius of the system, which I think surprised my parents plenty, was that it was mostly self-enforcing.

This was the period that I tore through series books: Choose Your Own Adventure, The Hardy Boys, and Fear Street were staples of my literary diet, and you can bet I never paid for all that reading. It was that era when I developed the tendency to never be "between" books.

Looking back, I think college, of all things, broke me of recreational librarying. As an English major I always had something to read, and it being college we were all expected to buy our books and write in them so the school could buy them back for cheap. My fiction and nonfiction needs were covered by academic mandate. When I wanted a book for recreation in college, it was probably a Dungeons & Dragons rulebook. These were reference materials, so even if the college library would have accommodated me (which I doubt), I really needed to own them. At any rate some of these books ended up in pretty sorry shape. A chair leg gouged a large hole out of the spine of my Dungeon Master's Guide. My general philosophy of tidiness at this time was that the floor was flat, and so were books, so it made more sense to walk on them than to pick them up.

After college I lived in the University District of Seattle, which is the land of the secondhand. The secondhand economy of Seattle's U District was not even remotely limited to books. Old furniture was abandoned on street corners--the garbage trucks ignored this; it was simply assumed that someone would want it and take it away. We furnished our house by harvesting the sidewalks at the end of every school year. Every summer I would find a propane grill that was slightly less broken than our current one, and roll it home. Half of the clothing stores sold artisanally marked-up secondhand clothes (in constant supply as people grew out of them every freshman year). At one point we took in newborn kittens for a local shelter, simply to ensure that the kittens were secondhand when they were finally adopted out.

Books were used in Seattle, and hence cheap, but in Seattle I also lived with a series of people who owned books I hadn't read. So what I didn't buy used I mooched outright. That situation continues to today, when I live in Maryland. Sometimes it is worth it to leave the house, but as I write this I can see literally years worth of reading material from where I sit, literally without turning my head. That's just how booky this house is.

So it's not that surprising that it's taken me this long to get anything out of my local library here in Hyattsville. I was, and remain, dismayed by the lack of bookstores in the area, but we have a nice library, which Girlfriend convinced me to look at.

The library is to thank for our recent watching of Shadows of the Vampire, which we couldn't find for love or (little enough) money through normal channels, at least not on short enough notice. The local library has a reasonably eclectic, erm, library of DVDs that beats the pants off of Netflix in terms of the wheat/chaff ratio.

Also, there are books. I actually find that I've forgotten how to browse a library. At least, I used to be comfortable with going into a library and not being sure what I would bring home, like some men are with bars. As I got older, and my tastes have become less forgiving, or more stodgy, I've gotten more used to setting out with a specific object in mind and subsequently being either satisfied or disappointed.

Considering that, it's nice to find intriguement (intriguedness? intrigual?) somewhere between satisfaction and disappointment, and to go with someone beside myself with the nerve to hand me a reprinted 19th-century book on secret societies. I don't know whether it will be good or bad, but it's almost certain to be worth more than nothing, and likely to be gristful in any event.

10 steps forward, 10 steps back; and you're 30 steps from where you started

I began this blog post preparing to share a particularly macabre dream I had last night, probably resulting from am overdose of politics and Lovecraft, late hours, and the onset of a cold. It may simply be best to spare you, on second thought. So I will. Spare you, I mean.

I have had a frustrating series of breakthroughs in my story 12, each of which required serious rewriting and deleting. At least the story is getting shorter, and I'm almost equally sure that it's getting better. It makes me wonder, though, if rewriting and unwriting are inexorably part of my "process," or if I'll learn someday to outline. Yet discovering as I write is part of what excites me, which I think means I will always be doomed to discover as I write that something I have written was wrong. And maybe I'm really just wishing I could get around the trouble of revision, which is silly of me.

Many of my leisure hours (though surprisingly few, compared to some people who write on the subject) have been consumed by Guild Wars 2. It's hard to know what to say about it except... it's really, really good. An odd thing that separates video games from almost any other medium is that direct sequels are so often better than their originals. Perhaps it's our varying expectations of originality. But it's something I noticed first with Halo 2, which was just... better. Something I probably would have noticed earlier if I had been older earlier.

It's been a week, and more productive than many, in spite of my worst efforts. I actually get a Sunday. Good for me.

"Old Bugs," and how to make a point badly

One thing I will say about Lovecraft,* he is good enough that his misses are educational. I keep coming back to a story I didn't like very much, as a good example of a sort of literature I don't like very much, that being the fictional polemic.

"Old Bugs" is a deviation from form for Lovecraft, being a fictional harangue about the evils of alcohol. Not being particularly interested in the American interbellum period, myself, I tend to forget about the temperance movement, Prohibition, and so on. So it came as a surprise, but shouldn't have, that H.P. Lovecraft, in addition to his other uptightnesses, was a teetotaler.

The story, written in 1919, takes place in the distant future of 1950, where alcohol is illegal and only available at the seediest of speakeasies alongside hashish and opium. The title character** is a thoroughly wretched drunk who is far fallen from prior respectability. The story is contorted a bit to give the impression of a major reveal, but the upshot is that in spite of being a lifelong thrall to the demon drink, Bugs heroically prevents [spoiler] from starting down the same dark path.

It's worth pointing out that, according to Wikipedia, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia (by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz) calls "Old Bugs" "a little masterpiece of comic deflation and self-parody."*** It may well be, although the humor went by me, and I think the sin Lovecraft commits is basically the same either way.

It's not the argument itself I want to talk about, although it intrigues me a bit to see how Lovecraft portrays drinkers as wretchedly addicted, to a man. Was the concept of alcoholism as something that some people are prone to and others aren't in circulation in the 19-teens, I wonder? Even uninterested as I am in recreational drugs, some of the imagery (men licking spilled whiskey off the floor in a bar where they're presumably already being served) makes me wonder if the excesses of D.A.R.E.'s rhetoric existed through the ages with its target changing with the circumstances.

I enjoy and appreciate arguing and making points. I don't like seeing polemical points made overtly through fiction.

Now, I was going to go off about my frustration with the practice--but then I remembered that tales as venerable as "Little Red Riding Hood," wouldn't I? What am I saying if I condemn "Old Bugs" for making a point through fiction but let stand stories that are genuinely persuasive or thought provoking.

There are two points I won't settle for from myself:
1. It's wrong to do it badly, but it's okay to do it well.
2. It's okay as long as you're making a point I like.

My conclusion is that fiction is useful for demonstrating "truths," but not for demonstrating "facts." If an author says "what if such-and-such?" and proceeds honestly from there, the reader will usually follow. True, the author may only have presented an intriguing thought experiment in this case, but that is the limitation of not using facts. If an author simply says "this is so" in the context of fiction, there is no argument. The author is simply saying "because I said so" and there is a very narrow range of subjects on which I will take a fiction author's word. It's a good habit not to trust a nonfiction author either if you can manage it.

* There are actually many things I will say about Lovecraft, but today I will say this.
** One also forgets that "Bugs" was once a "name."
*** It's also worth granting that this story was not published until after Lovecraft's death, so we shouldn't judge him too harshly by it. I hold it to be unfair to judge an artist by what they choose not to release to the public.

Remembering remembering September 11

The front page of every news site I look at today makes prominent mention of the anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I find myself asking, for the first time I can remember, whether remembering the attacks should be a yearly observation.

I try to remember a comparable event. Only John F. Kennedy's assassination comes to mind. Perhaps someone who knows can inform me: were there memorial observations a year later, on November 22, 1964? Ten years later, in 1973? In 1974?

My intent here is not to diminish JFK's death (if it turns out that we did not observe it so consistently afterwards) or suggest that we should lay off the 9/11 memorializing. I just mean to say that the way we have continued to mark the date, especially without it actually having been made an official holiday*, strikes me as unusual.

Last year I set down my memories of the day of the attacks. Today I went back and re-read them, to remind myself. These things do slip away if we don't mark them. As I get old enough to notice myself forget things that happened to me, I realize that memories are not self-sustaining. We mark what we choose to remember.

I remember that in 2002 I was already disappointed in how quickly we had lost what good had come of the attacks: a sense of unity and purpose, a shared conviction that America was worth protecting, imperfect though it was. People had sworn that "everything had changed" and then, largely, gone back to the way things had been before. Not everything changed, but some things did, and as might be expected of murder, the deepest changes have mostly been for the worse; but eleven years on I think that, when we said we would "never forget," we might actually have meant it.

* Correction: apparently it is. I confess that I had not known. Apparently "Patriot Day" was created on December 18, 2001.

Clayton astutely pointed out that Pearl Harbor Day (December 7) is the closest analog we have. By contrast, though, it was designated in 1994, almost 53 years after the attacks.

So, to be honest, I'm disappointed that September 11 was immediately made an official holiday. If it were not, I would suggest that it be made one now, and it would perhaps mean more. I would prefer a name that didn't taste so strongly of euphemism, as well. But perhaps it says something better about us that the events are remembered, while the empty words disappear. There are quite few mentions of "Patriot Day" today.

First impressions of the unnameable

I wrote this on Saturday (on time) and it turns out I forgot to actually post it...

Having developed an appetite from It, I've started working my way through the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, compiled for the world's behorrification by the Cthulhu Chick. (For free, by the way. Certain contemptible schmucks have taken this same ebook and attempted to sell it for a profit, but it started out free.) Besides being something I just felt like, it seemed like a needful step in my writerly education.

Like most people of a certain age and disposition, I felt pretty familiar with Lovecraft's work through derivative media. My first conscious encounter with the "Lovecraftian" was the video game Eternal Darkness, which scared the bejeezus out of me and my college roommates back in the day. I played Call of Cthulhu and had great fun, in spite of the terrible mechanics of the tabletop edition we had at the time. By the time I read Robert Howard's Conan stories, I could see the Lovecraftian influence without having ever read any actual Lovecraft.

I did not intend to read the entire collection, but each story has been at least imaginative enough to entice me to try the next. Lovecraft's writing surpasses his stereotypes but also embodies them shamelessly. More than once (most egregiously so far in "The Transition of Juan Romero") he does indeed resort to flatly refusing to describe the action. What he had in mind may be too terrible for the human mind to bear its description, but it's easier to think sometimes that he didn't have anything in mind at all.

There's also the racism. Lovecraft's attitudes as they appear in the story are more than dated; as the accounts run, he was intensely racist for his time. Actually, I'm inclined to say he was more pathologically xenophobic than racist in the mundane sense. At least the racism as such in the stories (so far) is not as appalling to the modern mind as some of what comes up in Robert Howard's works. Either way, it's something the modern reader just needs to get past, and it's worth the getting past.

That said, I am also repeatedly surprised by Lovecraft's imagination. It's not all academics coming slowly unhinged in the face of tentacled monstrosities. He has a broader range of subjects than his reputation, and commands a variety of terrors. I would give examples, but I worry that that would go to far toward spoiling whatever story I named.

Addendum: I am glad I hedged about the racism I found so far in my reading, because almost immediately after posting this the first time I encountered stories which might be referred to as the "meat" of the racism-based Lovecraft objection. What I will forgive, for the sake of my own reading enjoyment, is the oblique racism of "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" and stories like it. At his best, Lovecraft plays far enough afield of the recognizable world that it's not worth worrying about the possible origins of his terrors. (Is it really fair to say that he wrote about interbreeding between humans and monsters because he objected to miscegenation, or is it more likely that miscegenation disturbed him because it reminded him of much more terrible couplings which he could imagine?) What is probably too poisoned to be read for its own sake, however, is "The Street," which, it should be pointed out, is only slightly fantastic. Here we are treated to the quaint racism of a hundred-years-bygone America, when the eastern bounds of Europe were sufficiently alien to frighten a sheltered Anglo-Saxon. "The Street" was an interesting read in its own way, but not in the ways that Lovecraft must have intended it.