Some Of Your Blood

Taking a break from the decadent, cult horror of Richard Laymon's Body Rides, yesterday, I picked up and started reading Theodore Sturgeon's classic 1956 pulp-horror story, Some Of Your Blood. I learned about Sturgeon by accident, incidentally, while perusing the website of a notable, modern "classic horror" publication company, Millipede Press, after I had read their recent edition of Ramsey Campbell's The Face That Must Die. Their re-print publications are what I would consider horror's equivalent to the academic Norton Critical Editions - complete with a learned introduction by a notable modern horror author reflecting on the work's significance, and justifying its apotheosis into the literary canon, as well as extra tidbits. Other forthcoming titles include Frederic Brown's Here Comes a Candle, and Roland Torpor's The Tenant, William Hjortsberg's Falling Angel, and John Franklin Bardin's The Deadly Percheron.

Theodore Sturgeon is also somewhat recognizable, at least satirically, and indirectly, in his amusing literary re-incarnation as Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout.

Sunday Afternoon

A photo taken recently of Viv and I

Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

The work week is complete prematurely for me, thanks to the absence of a co-worker, which meant I began and also ceased working earlier in the day. Before arriving at home, I stopped over at Shopper's Drug Mart to pick up a new Mach-3 razor blade, new Nivea shaving cream and new Aqua Velva aftershave, staying true to my promise, that I would shave my unkempt, hirsute face Friday night. I have, in the mean time, been reading Harold Bloom's Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? over the past few nights and days, and feeling especially, silently nostalgic and yet crestfallen because I used to devote extraordinary time to reading classic writers, wholeheartedly believing strongly in literature's uplift. Obviously, I haven't given up on literature, merely by changing my genre direction, but my present experience reading is starting to feel more like (to adopt a phrase from 2 Chronicles 24:5) "travelling out into the cities" of books and gathering from all literature something to strengthen the house of my mind and experience as an adult. But then again I'm just thinking out-loud. The temptation is to put Bloom's book down to read something with more pulp, almost belligerent to the psyche, like Peter Straub's Hellfire Club, or Richard Laymon's raunchy magical horror Body Rides.

Happy Birthday

Happy 24th Birthday, Viv!

Kalpas Of Eternity

A copy of this 1962 collectable publication of William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland (right) , first published in 1908, nearly a century ago, has found its way into my book collection. Hodgson is one of those authors hitherto forgotten a generation or two after his demise, who, if it weren't for mentionable praise in H.P. Lovecraft's landmark 1927 essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, would be forgotten by and large.

Lovecraft says this of The House on the Borderland:

"...perhaps the greatest of all Mr. Hodgson's works -- tells of a lonely and evilly regarded house in Ireland which forms a focus for hideous otherworld forces and sustains a siege by blasphemous hybrid anomalies from a hidden abyss below. The wanderings of the Narrator's spirit through limitless light-years of cosmic space and Kalpas of eternity, and its witnessing of the solar system's final destruction, constitute something almost unique in standard literature. And everywhere there is manifest the author's power to suggest vague, ambushed horrors in natural scenery. But for a few touches of commonplace sentimentality this book would be a classic of the first water."

The Fourth Bear

Months ago the Seth MacFarlane of the book world, Jasper Fforde, came out with his second novel in the Jack Spratt "Nursery Crime" series, called The Fourth Bear. The comparison is apt: Fforde's novels operate with the same (though more literary, and therefore more sophisticated) brand of humour as Family Guy. Every one of Fforde's books is set in his imaginative alternative universe where fiction and reality commingle, with the usual "nonsensical cutaways" and inside literary jokes and parodies working on levels which only a bibliophile could appreciate.

The absurd humour centres around Jack Spratt and Mary Mary, two seasoned police officers of the derelict Nursery Crime Division.

You get jokes like this:

He explained the news to Mary, who said, "How about if we do a plot device number twenty-six and pretend not to look for him?"

"So you're suggesting we look for him against orders, catch him, cover ourselves with glory, and the by-the-book officers look like idiots?"

Mary nodded enthusiastically. "Pretty much."

"No, we're going to follow plot device number thirty-eight."

Mary narrowed her eyes. "Which one is that again?"

"We wait until they beg for our assistance, then save the day. For now we follow orders. After all, do you think we'd get the support Copperfield is getting if it was an NCD inquiry?"

Hey Buster!

Arriving home prematurely from work an hour earlier tonight due to a dearth of work, as well as feeling a bit dour and defeated by a bullying team of a work week and supervisors, I sat down and watched the kind of movie that's beginning to grow on me: the good old silver screen knockabout comedy, Steamboat Bill Jr. with Buster Keaton. Months ago, I got hold of a two-DVD set called Legends of the Silver Screen one with two pictures from Charlie Chaplin--The Kid and Tillie's Punctured Romance--and another with a double feature from Buster Keaton--The General and Steamboat Bill Jr.--together.

I love watching Keaton for two simple facts: (1) his clumsy and unabashed, yet impressively daring knockabout acrobatics, and (2) the famous and charistmatic look of pathos in his tragic eyes, and youthful dead-pan facial expressions onscreen.

I guess ever since I read and wrote a paper discussing vaudeville or knockabout comedy in Beckett's Waiting For Godot, affirming a love of all things slapstick from an early age since discovering SCTV and Jim Carey's knockabout comedy, I've become a sucker for the original vaudeville movie stars.

The Oresteia

Before I headed off to a dreadful and abusive day of work at the warehouse, having finally received the second volume of David Grene and Richmond Lattimore's Greek Tragedies series, I read Aeschylus' The Libation Bearers, or Choephoroe. I'll probably have to go back and read it a second time if I truly wish to understand and experience the full extent of the play's tragic meaning. The foremost concern in my over-enthusiastic mind was with identifying the formal structure (i.e. Prologue, Parode, Episodes, Stasimons, Kommoi, and Exode) and elements (Metabasis, Anagnorisis, Peripeteia, etc) of ancient Greek tragedy from Aristotle's Poetics, which I finally learned in a course last year.

And now I can say that I've read Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides), albeit somewhat out of sequence.

The Face That Must Die

I'm near finishing Dean Koontz's Watchers, as I continue in my somewhat dubious - and not attending school, unjustified - quest to educate myself about twentieth-century Weird fiction, but instead I put it down to read Ramsey Campbell's legendary 1979 tale of a psychotic killer, The Face That Must Die. The book lives up to its reputation of high literary innovation, as a satire of Thatcher-era English literary homophobia (Campbell cites Chandler and Whittington-Egan as two examples), and in fact transcends the common clichés of Weird or Horror fiction. I'm still only 48 pages into the novel, so I'll refrain from commenting, and conjecturing further about the storyline.

Go figure. I could probably write a complete (probably comprehensive third year) university-level English course entitled '20th-Century Weird Fiction' using my growing knowledge of the evolution of Weird and Horror fiction. It'd read something like this:

This course examines first the early twentieth-century ‘pulp’ literary tradition of Weird literature, as articulated by H.P. Lovecraft, as well as his contemporaries, and then focuses next on the thriller, horror and New Weird genres of today’s American and British ‘pulp’ literature.

Then again, I think I just have my head in the clouds these days.

Bold and the Beautiful

A shot of my beautiful fiancée Vivian on the plane to Trinidad

Eros and Psyche

A memorable photo of Viv, I and Great-Uncle Cupid

The Beach

A candid night-time shot of Uncle Kamal, Aunt Camille and I, at Los Iros (and yes, he is wearing a soccer ball on his head!)

The Day of Pentecost

A photo of Aunt Camille and Uncle Kamal's lively Pentecostal church

All In The Family

Viv, I, Devan, Keshav and Aunt Karen at Maracas Bay lookout point

King of the Hill

Uncle Derajh walking towards Fort George

Sermon on the Mount

A hill-top shot of Port of Spain, capital of Trinidad, from Fort George

Life of the Rich and Famous

A snapshot of luxury homes atop the hill in Chaguaramas, Trinidad

Subhanallah

An interior photo of Salima's breathtaking Islamic decor

I Saw The Sign

A sign posted across the street from a marketplace in Trinidad

The Vixen

A snapshot of a fox at the cottage taken by my mom.

There Has To Be Something Better Than This

"There being a divine order of learning superior to mundane knowledge, and its being available--the time is most appropriate for the further restoration of this sacred tradition."

Manly P. Hall

"These times are ripe for a more serious knowledge than hitherto permitted, though still very limited, so far."

Madame Blavatsky

"Yet perhaps it is only through the study of works of human imagination that we can make any real contact with the level of vision beyond faith."

Northrop Frye