Tested the new WordPress Gutenberg editor. It didn’t work for me. I couldn’t add links as fluently as I like and the block-structure felt awkward considering backward compatibility. It’ll be a the default in the next major release. I fear that when it comes I’ll have to update my website in some major way.
An extract from “Lovecraft : A Study in the Fantastic. Detroit: Wayne State University” (1988) by Maurice Levy.
All my stories are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. […] To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. – H.C Lovecraft
A very cynical view (he called it “cosmic indifferentism”). I’m beginning to doubt Lovecraft as an informant in posthumanistic affairs (yet there is an appeal it this coarseness).
I’m struggling my way through The Mountain of Madness (1931). It starts almost as an action story. It’s about a group of geologists exploring the arctic and discovering strange creatures and later a city of “the old ones”. The story plays with the concept of post-truth… The beginning is narrated largely in the form of radio dispatches, that he exposition crew sends from the antarctic (there is even a reference to post-truths’ in the first chapter).
In the beginning there are also very beautiful descriptions of fossils. The structure of the book (every chapter starts by recapping the highlights of the previous) works great for contemporary readers (on a mobile phone, in between replying to emails). The structures and buildings the expedition discover in the antarctic make me think about New York City.
There were composite cones and pyramids either alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids, and occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters of five. All of these febrile structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges crossing from one to the other at various dizzy heights, and the implied scale of the whole was terrifying and oppressive in its sheer gigantism.
The way he writes about the culture of the “old ones” makes me wonder how he thought about the Indigenous peoples of the America. The story tells that long ago, someone else (the entities that have a right to the land) knew something we can’t grasp. I don’t know if he’s paying homage or what.. But he is truly scared. The artworks and architecture discovered in the city are described meticulously. Chapters 5&6 are borderline boring but it’s interesting to envision artworks through the descriptions. This could be a method to manufacture public art in the future.