The King of Eldritch Horrors

Staying up late, though not troubled with an academic-induced affliction of insomnia, but rather nowadays with my own private, self-driven wont for solitary escape and musing (a nice, convoluted way of saying when the mortal coils of everyday worries are unclasped from my brain for a few hours), I considered writing some brief notable reflections about King's storytelling based on Cujo.

The appealing thing about Stephen King, like Ramsey Campbell, so far compared with the cultic high-brow, literary efforts of a predecessor like Lovecraft, is how much more palpable and terrifying the horrors he evokes feel in his writing. His fear is something grounded in real life, psychologically tangible and fearfully possible, like murder and child abuse, if that makes sense, and not hinged on some awry escapist fantasy or spectacle. Mr. King seems to have no need to imagine or search for twisted, unimaginable horrors outside of the human race, let alone the Earth, but rather enjoyably turns Lovecraft on his head. First, he simply looks carefully at our present, real existence and picks carefully objects or crimes of everyday existence. Second, he introduces these many elements in his imagination to that paranoid vision or formula used so aptly by horror-writers that I still struggle (using Frye) to describe. And finally, third, he weaves into a basic plot every deep, unimagined psychological horror, fear and other repressed emotion that erupts from time to time so easily and tangibly from within when something goes awry, leading to worse and more eldritch horrors.

As usual I've managed to say so little with far too many words.

Dora The Explorer For Adults

A good, expiating day it was yesterday, returning to work a cash shift at Chapters after two weeks away and discovering not only that the detested Manager called in sick for lack of a babysitter, but also horrific portents about the store itself which I had predicted months ago were coming true. Timely, needless to say, is my gradual, befitting withdrawal from working there alltogether. After nearly four years of travelling downriver with this harrowing bookstore company, now I'm beginning to read and see for myself the damaging emotional and psychological state of mind and environment Kurtz inhabited in Conrad's Heart of Darkness when he groaned, "the horror, the horror!"

In fact, amidst my shift, probably inspired by true understanding, I picked up and started reading my first Stephen King book: Cujo. After studying and writing about one of the original twentieth-century horror-meisters, Lovecraft, I can appreciate and understand what is so tangibly appealing about King's stories.

A few hours after my shift was done, my fiancée and I, as well as her brother and his two friends went to see The Da Vinci Code. The movie was a pulpy mix of intriguing, controversial pot-boiler and rushed thought-provoker: nevertheless involving the audience, who participated in what my fiancée was calling "Dora The Explorer for adults."

The Blasphemous Finger

That cruel man [Aletes] undid the pouch and shook out his mantle and--"To mortal war (he said) I thee defy"--and said it with gesture so impious and fierce that he seemed to open the closed temple of Janus. When he opened the pouch it seemed that he drew from it insane rage and discord fierce, and that the great torch of Alecto and Megaera burned in his dreadful eyes. Such perhaps was that giant of old who raised against Heaven the lofty structure of error: and with similar gesture watched Babel lift up her façade and threaten the stars.

Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered

Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly in black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven.

Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan

Exciting News

I'll admit: my last post was dull and bookish.

The good news is: my fiancée went over to the travel agency today and booked our flight to Trinidad for August 10 - 24 of this year. I haven't travelled outside of Ontario or Quebec, Canada or North America, quite honestly, and sadly, in over a decade.

Our visit won't entirely be a vacation: aside from meeting my soon-to-be extended Trinidadian family, my fiancée and I will also be scouting out things for our upcoming wedding next year.

The Dark Ages

Once again returning with faithful duty to a lost and forgotten classic, Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), and a forgotten genre for that matter, Italian Renaissance epic romance, I still wonder why no one ever teaches it. The obvious excuses are: inaccessibility, length, and warmongering or politically incorrect plots.

Then again, thinking back, as an undergraduate student with a voracious literary appetite I was most perplexed when I asked one professor (a certain professor of Shakespeare) "Why?" He, who evidently had taught a course on the "Renaissance Epic" once upon a time, insisted Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso aren't important other than as mere footnotes to more notable English poems like The Faerie Queene.

I guess I shouldn't care anymore. No one cared then, and no one cares now.

Blue Alert

Writing once again following a late night of work, this time a twelve hour shift, which started yesterday at 3 PM and finished today at 3 AM, and Cohen's velvet paramour, Anjani's CD Blue Alert is playing in the background. I bought this acclaimed album as a Mother's Day gift for my own mother but not before first clandestinely ripping a copy onto my computer. Every song is crafted with a refreshingly adult maturity, originality, thoughtfulness, beauty, frankness, heartfelt incisiveness and wit, instead of the usual pyrotechnics and chagrin of most immature pop albums these days.

As for books I'm reading Suskind's original, sardonic novel called Perfume, about a twisted, murderous loner's demonic Grail quest to create the greatest, most spiritual perfume in smelly eighteenth-century France.

Blah, Blah, Blah

Caught up spending time with my fiancée, working and reading, and every other miniscule going-on left out in between that is part of my new daily working routine has left me with little time to sit around and write about it. This week I've been especially lazy, sleeping until noon, somewhat tired (with a gyre of the usual accompanying grogginess, insolence, lethargy, indifference, and shrugging weltering behind this, too) adjusting in mind and body to a post-university routine, before I have to work in the evening from 3 in the afternoon to midnight.

And unfortunately, after sitting here staring blankly at the screen, I just want to go to sleep. That's my short, but as usual, inadequate summary with plenty of the usual gaps and lacunae.

Anansi Boys

Yes, it seems I've become one of those 9-5 individuals (except I work 8:00 to 4:30) who are always struggling (or just too pooped) to be active following work. Since my first day of the weekday grind I've been rather lethargic, if not lackadaiscal, aside from the usual reading (Neil Gaiman's new book Anansi Boys) and loafing in front of the television watching shows like House, Survivor, Amazing Race, American Idol, when I'm not, occasionally, like tonight, over at the Vixen's Den, slaking over an entire channel like The Food Network. Though I'm persevering, striving quite tenaciously to spend as much time with Vivian, trying to maintain some good, old habits, and adapt at the same time, it's going to take a while to acclimatize to this new way.

That's about it for tonight. I'm heading off to bed in an hour or so.

Work, Work, Work

It's official - I landed a full-time job working for a company called CDTI on a contract for Bell Canada. Starting Monday I'll be working from 8:00 AM to 4:30 PM as a 'Material Handler', which, I'm told, means data entry, receiving and order picking. Apparently typing swiftly without looking down at the keyboard, calculating arithmetic properly in my head, and working with a program called SAP at Chapters got me the job.

The best part is I get to slum it at my new work - jeans, t-shirt and steel-toe boots - instead of dressing up for a stingy corporation like Chapters. I'll still be working for Chapters but with a very ideal 'limited and scant' availability for hours that I hope won't get me regularly scheduled during the weekdays, only Sundays.

My first work week: Monday to Saturday, 8:00 to 4:30, and 4 hours overtime!

Outage

My apologies, first of all. The main computer of the household went on the fritz, self-immolating, and burnt out a few days ago. Our wireless high-speed network to our bewilderment, but always pleasant surprise, has continued to operate independently and without handicap from the smoldered obsolete PC set-up to host the network. I am working from a fairly modern laptop (now in the living room) that was recently forsaken by my mother for a newer and more advanced one.

Soon I'll provide more updates. However, I'm off today and heading this morning to a job placement centre to find better paying and more reliable, hours-wise, job than the current, pitiable Chapters.

The Kingdom of God is Within You

It's hard trying to keep your head up always, not only when you're struggling economically, but also when you're reading gloomy literature about Russia lately, such as Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (translated by the unmatched duo Pevear and Volokhonsky). When my fiancée reads this, no doubt, she'll be shaking her head at the computer screen and wondering, "Didn't I tell him Russian literature gets him depressed. So why does he read it?" The reason: I've never before read the book and I have quite taken to Tolstoy as a writer ever since I took that 19th century Russian lit course. And now that university is over, until I move out, I'm keeping myself busy at home with reading (when I'm not performing other perfunctory household functions like cooking, cleaning or laundry).

Oddly enough, and perhaps there is some danger here, this balance of high-brow reading and menial household work is becoming an agreeable routine.

Thinking of the Key, Each Confirms His Prison

I haven't written anything of interest for this blog lately, and, unfortunately, nothing exciting in terms of my daily life at home. I am still living with parents, although it is becoming harder with each day to stave off the obvious, deafening message: my parents want me out of the house. Their plan is (supposedly) to fix-up, tidy and sell the house in about five years (or less) - and I would gladly acquiesce - except the financial means aren't presently available. My plan is to find a full-time job that will allow me to live on my own: paying for a car and a place of my own to live, and of course a wedding, down the road. The only problem: our plan is the direction my fiancée, Vivian, and I, want to take,and my parents are, without concession, intent on following their path without aiding us, period.

It's sad to say, but I get the feeling that my university degree never mattered to my parents, that it was some indulgent dream-fulfillment wish. Now, as my mom likes to say sardonically, "you have to wake up to the real world now," as though my fours years of university were just some wasteful dream, which I have been ejected from, and now it is my role in life to accept, without question, her somnambulistic view of life.

Strange Brew

Here's an amusing factoid about that second famous Strange Brew (Coffee) compliments of Janet and Greta Podleski's entertaining Eat, Shrink and Be Merry, a cookbook by the ladies who wrote Looneyspoons:

Feeling a little weak in the bean after your third cup of coffee? No wonder. In nature, caffeine is designed to cause confusion in the brain. It's true about the brew! Caffeine is actually used by the coffee plant as a pesticide--a nerve-warfare chemical that wards off predators. Caffeine inhibits the nervous system and the memory of the coffee plant's enemies (insects) so they lose their art of camouflage, become less alert, and less able to protect themselves against their own predators (animals). We humans harvest the same caffeine-containing coffee beans, brew them, and drink them for pleasure. Are we stunned?

On The Road

My Nephew: Kamdyn

Lettuce Help

Original Link : SNL lettuce clip Uploaded by: bryantchoung

Ferreting Out These Past Few Days

Losing track of time lately. I finished reading McLuhan's dissertation. Evidently Philip Marchand (as promised) wrote an article for The Star about the debate - my fiancée and I participating as McLuhanites - we had as an assignment for our 4000-level McLuhan / Frye class over a month ago. I worked five days last week, and a meagre three days this upcoming week. These last few (late) nights, or (early) mornings, picking up my fiancée, who is bartending into the wee hours, and, incidentally, now making more money than me. Sleeping in late to noon. Cooking simple, easy-to-do meals like meat-loaf cupcakes and marmalade-glazed chicken. Watched the movie Spy Game starring Robert Redford and Brad Pitt, this afternoon. Killed some dandelions in the front- and back-yard with diluted vinegar earlier. Let our two ferrets - Tyson and Squeeky - loose for an hour to scamper around the house while I shaved, which is a special skill especially as these creatures are playfully nipping at your toes. Washed dishes twice - once when I woke up, then later after cooking. And finally: started re-reading China Miéville's Perdido Street Station for the second time, but this time, after reading Frye, Peake and Lovecraft, it's starting to make sense.With plenty of free time I managed to track down most, if not every of those hilarious SNL Digital Shorts: (1) Chronicles of Narnia rap (2) Close Talker w/ Steve Martin (3) Laser Cats (4) Natalie Portman rap (5) Young Chuck Norris and (6) Lettuce Help.

And yes, the ferret on the left (in the side photo) has a red licorice in its mouth.