For reasons that will probably be clear in retrospect, I have begun listening to the Doors again recently, especially their final album. The popular wisdom has it that L.A. Woman, despite having the worst of all the band’s album covers, was a powerful comeback that ranks among their best. Which, considering they only had six,… Read More The Lord is a New Creature – On Jim Morrison’s Poetry
I mentioned a few weeks back that the infamous Eye of Argon has had some expansion added to it recently. There was Grignyr the Ecordian, a edited re-telling of the original, and there was The Eye of Argon and the Further Adventures of Grignr the Barbarian. Post-holidays, I acquired both. The guy who wrote this… Read More Cry of Argon: Reports from the Grignr Mythos
Criticism, for all we elevate it, amounts to the imposing of a narrative on a work. It is a non-fiction encounter with a text, gussied up to a universal statement about its meaning. This is fine when it is acknowledged. Often, however, critical reads become a kind of low-effort meme, repeated without actual consideration. They… Read More On the Death and Return of Gandalf
H.P. Lovecraft is primarily known as a writer of “weird” horror fiction, but his role in establishing Mythos is perhaps even more significant. Among the Mythoses he is credited with building structure for are True Detective, Reanimator, and My Little Pony. H.P. Lovecraft was born in 1890. His father Winfield Scott Lovecraft, was a man… Read More Important Information About H.P. Lovecraft
I don’t mean to be a Tolkien fanboy here, but I am tired of Twitter dorks with shallow intellects and electronic-addled minds pretending that they have anything useful to say. To be fair, Tolkien’s influence on the genre can be a touch overrated, and can lead to people ignoring other seminal writers. I myself only… Read More Everyone Who Says Fellowship of the Ring is Boring Should Go Back to Reading Books With Pictures
Provocative idea found in an old Zero HP Lovecraft essay in The American Mind: What does the divine care for “new paradigms,” for gay portrayals of “the human condition?” Art which has Man as its object is folly, and this is the reason for its permeating ugliness; Man without God is ugly, and the only… Read More The True Audience of Art is God
Varney the Vampyre, or the Feast of Blood, is everyone’s favorite example of a Penny Dreadful: a horror novel that goes on for the length of a Bible because the author is paid by the word and doesn’t care if it all adds up when it’s put into one volume (you know, kinda like George… Read More Vampyre Varney’s Voloptuous Vivisection
I had forgotten that Wheel of Time was being made into a TV Series by Amazon. I assume it’s going to be lame and full of “epic” tropes, so I probably won’t watch it. If it’s as good as Witcher, I will count that success. Long before I was disappointed in George R.R. Martin, I… Read More The Wheel Keeps on Spinning: Robert Jordan, Prologues and World-Building
Summer is an odd time. I should be filling the blog with posts, but somehow, other projects take precedence. To be fair, I’ve definitely fallen from my 10-post-a-month threshold I was hitting in the fall and winter. That means something, but I’m not sure what. The point is, I’m behind on posting stuff. It happens.… Read More Unnamed Journal, Caligula and Punk Rock: Big ‘Ol July Update
When I was composing the initial draft of The Meditations of Caius Caligula, I followed a pattern from the obvious namesake The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: in its Chapters. MoMA has Books rather than chapters, and the chapters are numbered for the sake of quotation. There are about 12 Books, and each of them is… Read More Caligula Edit Update: The Aurelian Structure
Content Blues 