The SFFaudio Podcast #742 – READALONG: The Many-Headed Hydra by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker

The SFFaudio Podcast

Jesse and Evan Lampe talk about The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, And The Hidden History Of The Revolutionary Atlantic by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker

Talked about on today’s show:
2012, 2000, influential for Evan, written up, dirtied edges, moldy, learned to appreciate, first big look into history from below, political history, conventional narrative history, the power of the approach of history from below, understanding Lovecraft, vernacular networks, those ideas are rooted in here, turned you into a radical, social history and labour history (vs. theory), daily life, new wave labour history, E.P. Thompson, Herbert Gutman, religious traditions, English working class radicalism, Baptists and Methodists, pirates, maroon communities, opting out, Typee by Herman Melville, William Blake, William Morris, social pariah, they haven’t read this book, pen is mightier than the sword, undermines a lot of go along get along takes, the heroes vs. the villains, Francis Bacon, this is not science, team evil, Colonel Despard, paraded through every street, 2nd hand, that scene on Jefferson’s estate, the words are compromised, turning that metaphor on its head, surprising insights, actually used as metaphors, upper crust living off the pain of the poors, poors and riches, those with weapons and those obeying until they don’t, very insightful, Villains Of All Nations, which chapter was written by Rediker?, 1741, the Slave Conspiracy, Outcast Nations Of The World, the Hydrarchy, a conspiracy!, rule over water, everything is flipped, the royal navy, left swipes, bottom up order, how wikipedia works, a bunch of CIA guys, recreationally, they’re not personally making money from locking Wikipedia accounts, life purpose, no actual work, competing ideas, some people’s pov, opressed all over the planet, Africa, North and South America and Europe, an other and later story, Bligh and the breadfruit, blackbirding, where capitalism was made, 16th and 17th century, why we have the world we have today, capitalism is fueled by sugar and slavery, the capital is being accumulated, the movement of people to serve the needs of capital, Gandhi, there’s a story there, heroes amongst the horror, repressed and excised and not promoted, Jesse’s twitter profile, all jokes, ruritarian romantic, drawer of roof bears, huer of colour, Canadian history, a youngest, Diaries Of Susana Moodie, its really hard living in the forest, chop down trees and wear high heels, interbreed with the locals, the Hudson’s Bay Company, that little building used to own this entire northern part of the continent, people in Europe wanting hats, Fort St. James, Fort St. John, Moose Factory, cut-off from this history, discovery and settlement and fast forward, Belize, from a previous period in time, independence, iron rule, most people don’t know Belize exists, they have no idea, it doesn’t serve the interests, the chamber of commerce, this book is very subversive, Mestizo, Metis, Creole, culture mixing, our mosaic, radicalized by the hydra, became radical by them, the Putney debates, Smedley Butler, the Businessman’s plot, he wasn’t executed, too much like Daniel Ellsberg, he gets a pass, Julian Assange, 1741 conspiracy, the official line, we created racism to divide the poors, now racism is used only by the bad people, keep the institutions, slave labour in us prisons, post-racial, white washing, a substantial point, slaves who were not black, indentured servants, morally reprobates, what are Australians taught about that in their schools, avarice, keeping the population of the central prairies, this labour thing, in the 17th century, you could own their contract, that could be traded, treated similarly, death rate, legally there was a distinction, the 1741 uprising in New York, the slave port of last resort, the triangular trade, the defective product, Virginia, the rebels, those who could not be seasoned, breaking them through threats of violence and death, sold them cheap, really radical slaves, we need a line between whites and blacks, after Bacon’s rebellion, give whites land, racism is a product of conscious decisions to suppress the working class, blacks used as strikebreakers, scabs, a deliberate technique that develops, am I racist, I don’t think I’m racist, homosexuality, am I gay, I don’t think I’m gay, it doesn’t seem to be the case, individual racists, primarily a system, Critical Race Theory is based, is that what based means?, the problem is institutional, its the institution that’s sending you to it, the class teaches you the history, is that what those classes are?, flagellation, root out the sin within you, not the intention, in favour of this book, progress online, online classes are terrible, Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus, an old black man, probably an ex-slave telling stories to a little white boy, interrupted stories, background information, what the boy would know, stories of how to behave so as to survive in a system of slavery, Brer Fox, reverse psychology, using the of stuckupedness, double meaning, good morning or get beaten, the writing down of the vernacular tradition, the horror that is being a slaves, the awesome style of writing, phonetic, what was good and what was bad, salty language, fuck and shit are really good words, they are valuable, your only adjective should not be fuck, make your arguments better, people at the top say don’t listen to those sailors, big surprise, swearing and cursing, if you keep hitting me, we’re not allowed to do either, always do what the authority above us tells us, school is abuse, keep the factor workers from organizing, I just don’t want to work all the time, the Barbados thing, you learn about Virginia, The Tempest by William Shakespeare, a strong limb of this many headed hydra of a book, this book needs subsequent books, we need a whole Despard book, Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons For All, Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, And Resistance, The London Hanged: Crime And Civil Society In The Eighteenth Century, something on E.P. Thompson, unfortunate, The Slave Ship, Red Round World Burning Hot, Kate and Ned Despard, emphasizes women in his writing, they need to make the babies, plead the belly, women criminals, plenty of time to get pregnant, Mexican jails, you can’t execute them, the depository for slave nobody else wanted to buy, Moby-Dick, repressed?, we don’t want this book to be popular, gatekept!, various institutions, The Fearless Benjamin Lay, the black dwarf, Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates And The Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750, the movie?, Amistad movie, the Adams’ are good guys, propaganda, an Adams descendant was president of Raytheon, ambassador to London, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Abigail Adams, the Adams, a group of people on the right side of history, sacrificed his presidency to stop a war, Jimmy Carter didn’t start any wars, people fall in line, very interesting history books, a horror show, the book is good, looking at resistance to the slave ship by white sailors, tricking sailors, disease, miserable experiences, prison guards, euphemisms are a horrible, to not know they are going to Africa, mutinies on slave ships by sailors, bold women, interracialiness, alternatives, teleology, makes the current world inevitable, the Indian Ocean trade system, the spread of Islam to East Africa, Arabic is the lingua franca, Arabic innovation in the middle ages, capitalism, corporations that are global in scope, connections, trade, that’s indoctrination, it doesn’t create wealth, there’s no wealth created, someone is being screwed from trade, production, turning that tree into that table, mahogany trade, Belize, the plantation, the ship being a site of production, the origins of capitalism, blackbirding in the 19th century, just after the time of Melville, the copra trade, massive effects, Jack London, like Star Trek, a strange federation of Romulans and Klingons, getting tricked, be slaves and die, Maoris in Vancouver, The White Pacific, Nazis moving to the states doing Nazi stuff in the states, the unknown story of this books, we found something!, labour history remains suppressed, the labour historians labour in obscurity, the world history turn, the East India Company, this history of the world in 10 drinks, Tom Standage is the author of all those books, simple, peppy, and they don’t threaten power, The World Is Flat kinda stuff, a refutation of that, the hydra is global, separation into races and nations, white supremacy is the counter revolution, a specific lady, Kimberlé Crenshaw, you’re this you’re that, she really knows what she is, she knows what she wants, very simple, you want to have boys like you, you want to be chaste and chased, this gives you both, critical marriage theory, evidence of it in literature, very modern traditional religion, alcohol, smoking, per-marital sex, a vampire/werewolf book to express the ideas of a teenage girl, land rovers, Robin Hood is a cleaned up version, how to live within your very narrow, cottagecore, keep a nice little house in the forest and you’re a hobbit, setting up your perfect, trad pre-wives, nostalgia for the medieval, collapsing the commons, when the working class was most radical, agrarian settings, the jungle meatpacking plant, this is not what we signed up for, the Stono Rebellion, the New York Uprising Conspiracy, Africans, worth it because we have iphones, nice slave phone AOC, breakage along the way was a shame, Stephen Pinker, the meme the bomber dropping bombs with different paint jobs, CIA ads, I’m an agender black disabled lady, anybody can drop bombs for the CIA, kind of a progress, getting fat, there food has additives, their babies are getting poisoned, the problems are changing, a dearth of labour, you need to coerce people into work, all that land, people would have come and took land, German immigrants, given land, we need to produce sugar/tobacco, homesteader, now we can have a UBI, the obesity epidemic, the back end of production, promoting physical fitness, relaxing immigration, a more easily exploitable working class, some black man got a piece of real estate, why did he tear it down?, instead of becoming a factor, what are you going to use this for, unused land is a sin, jubilee and letting things lay fallow, stores were closed on Sundays, 7-11 was open 7 days a week!, the Diggers, New York’s commercial space is all lying fallow, all the malls are empty now, there’s no land reform, apartments, housing is not affordable, developers never choose affordable housing, the plot of Mr. Robot, F-Society, delete debt, delete the records of who owns what, that would F the system, wild spaces, mountain people in Southeast Asia, a religious revival, geographical solution, a homesteader is a petty bourgeois selling your jam, no geographical solution for capitalist, what happens in games, the streamers and all the people who want to be them, a new phenomenon, sharecropping for Jeff Bezos, he sets the rules, it infects peoples brains, that desire is significant, people want to opt out of traditional, play video games all day, streams are not that interesting, it doesn’t work, it can’t, a colonization of a virtual, what Meta was supposed to be, new spiritual geographies, the internet, this shows people want out, their daily life might be better, coal miner pay, pathetic little podcast, we’re not covering the right things, the homesteading thing, a horrible homesteader, larp, import some immigrants have them work the land for you, why does Indiana Jones have a bullwhip?, a sinister meaning, cattle rustlers, an 80 year old man being de-aged, for swinging, The Dial Of Destiny, WWII action again, the girl from Temple Of Doom, married, Shanghai, Short Round is a teenager, anti-Japanese resistance, Chinese gangsters, he’s old, a history lesson of the early 20th century, insight into those weirdos doing those weird things, artists and humanitarians, the least interesting characters, the Russian Revolution, great documentaries, artist movements, The Outcast Nations Of The Earth, a counterexample to everybody sells out, I’ve been radicalized, you didn’t know that, he did it his way, he’s a hero, and his wife too, from the aristocratic class, siding with the workers against the capitalist class, JFK, murdered by the Dulles brothers, what about Caesar, his power comes from the loyalty of his soldiers, threatens the establishment order, his college buddies stabbed him, in the play, talk to Paul, Evan regrets Paul not being here, open his eyes?, many-headedness being democracy vs. a guy talking about “democracy” but who can cut cheques, how young do you have to be to be radicalized?, liberty university, trump university, reading history did it, away from theory, Marx and anarchist theory, coming back to philosophy, social history, rationalism vs. empiricism, that doesn’t seem to line up with the theory, never joining a political party, focusing on religion after becoming an atheist, now Evan is sympathetic to religion, what’s going on in the text through music, the British experience, counter cultural, anti-monarchy, dissenting churches, right wing churches, being religious outside of a religion, internally puritan, a space of resistance, one of the heads of the hydra, in the same paragraph as the witches, pirates, Matt Christman, Chapo Trap House, we need community again, sympathetic to religion, a space for radical transformation and alternatives, we need something else, we want something real, human experiences, long, but useful, never a dull moment, maybe the best we can hope for, the foundation, sit down and talk with people, come over our collective social anxiety, the progressive era, lived community, moving to cities, creating new instituions, Lions Club, Elks Club, Boy Scouts, used as a cudgel, Murray Bookchin, if freedom is a tree, the best you can do is become a streamer, fuck this shit we’re going to burn down New York, website problems, being very helpful, making community or whatever, problems not caused by big tech, creating “content”, generally buried and forgotten, 1000 podcasts, old posts, anything from about 10 years ago on YouTube approx 75% is gone, sad/boring comments, turning performance art into, give tips to the actors while they’re playing the play, they’re all terrible, extraordinary weirdos who are good at clicking, the worst sort of outcome imaginable, larping your jam, sitting all day, sitting too much, a new dystopia, Elon Musk buying twitter vs. making it open source, new free public engagement, he has the right enemies, a lol cow, read some more Rediker and Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto gets pretty wild, he’s braver, commentary on these themes, a very good revolitonary book, very insightful, insights into Lovecraft, when we look at something old, things we don’t know they knew, so happy teachers don’t know the contents of these stories, this is a sex metaphor, asses being stared at, these are all fart jokes, so rich, made richer, Shakespeare bad man (but also good man), holding stock, Stephen King knows the problem but can’t take that last step, Blaze, having sex with some lady, that farmer doing his best to help you, the way it should be rather than the way it is, a hotline in some boiler room, weird streamers like Stephen King, everybody can be like me, try to buy a lot less shit, games are full of virtual goods that are artificially scarce, all new games are free (pretty much), battlepasses, get skins for your character or car or gun, there are places for capitalism to go, a horrible place, consuming the public sector, Amazon still rests on producing things, ebooks are essentially skins, audiobooks are essentially skins, sometimes derived from labour, wealth generated by investments, other people’s labour, William Gibson is a shitlib, The Peripheral, disabled people in drone bodies, a place to expand to, go knock on doors and ask do you answer the phone?, a great book, 16.5 hours, the narration, too much of a boomer, Evan has come to terms with his boomerness, Evan is out of touch, YA for adults, that Rite Gud show, a retelling of a Jane Austen but late 19th century Cinderella, so not interested in class consciousness at all, so old fashioned, just Jane Austen + Cinderella as a YA, written for adults who never graduated to something that challenged them, technically well done, cinematographers, reading the subtitles, that’s the actual dialogue, if this is about my soul take it I don’t want it without you, maybe I’m crazy now, voice over narration, is it possible that there isn’t anything sane and normal at all?, Italy for some reason, Virgin airlines, Marry me Bella, GASP!, the credits roll, so cute, so spot on, we’re getting poisoned, which vampire or werewolf to choose, so funny, mass phenomenon, watching the world cup, people going back and forth, Slack is Evan’s twitter, when Qatar got the world cup, using slaves, not allowing beer, my team is my nation, the crimes are done, reparations schmeperations, soccer is not fun, basketball, volleyball, baseball is much more dynamic, cricket, nobody knows how it works, football has strategy, people like running, very simple, games are fun to play not fun to watch, your kid is involved, in solidarity with you kids, car racing, gladiators, MMA, it doesn’t have the clock, moments of great tension, makes better movies, good baseball movies, Major League, The Natural, The Sandlot, For The Love Of The Game, Field Of Dreams, more charm, pastime, a game of leisure, hockey, learning to skate, why soccer is popular on poverty stricken planets around the universe, running around, some sort of vague interest in that game they used to play, the elites care about the prestige, a bottom up thing, I am this powerful, I can pull this off, a poor kids sport, crazy for soccer, running around and kicking, Evan is not the only annoying person on Slack, the help desk blew up, complaining about things, urgent student issues, to do your ranting, friendly and non-work related, shitposting on slack, Tolkien universities, friendly and relaxed calm and peaceable, no J.R.R. Tolkien hate, orcs!, a Tolkien creation, spelled the same: orc, a more subversive reading than calling them black people, Rings Of Power, the creation of Mordor, an orc nationalist subplot, Galadriel is just a fuckin racist, no apologies, a horrible racist, we lost the war, we just need our place, no, you all have to die, a beloved character from the book, trolling on purpose, that longstanding criticism of Tolkien, all the good guys are white people, Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon, an essay about two orcs talking to each other, a fox takes note of something, attacking Tolkien in a very narrow way, a fantasy series with a gay protagonist doing gay sex, noir, dark, The Steel Remains, Market Forces, combines Mad Max and Wall Street, conflict investment, on the drive home from work they do car wars, satire sort of thing, an ESL tutor in Turkey, had some kid and fucked off, solid books, Black Man aka Thirteen, a bottom up approach, the ideas tend to be pretty good, Svudu is now Wealthy Genius, seeing it from the orc’s pov, Sam overhears, kidnapping Pippin and Merry, underorcs, discipline, our lot is misery, why William Blake is so weird, he has strong feelings, Jerusalem, undeniably powerful art, they made it a hymn, some Phil Ochs song, nice looking ladies holding hands, The Tyger is almost impenetrable, the final lines of this book, hard to understand then?, some whimsy if not power in his art, the Pacific, the ancient sign of navigators, the wanderers of the planets, some Typee for you, Thomas and Lydia Hardy, tried for his life, the globalizing powers, the planetary wanderers, Seattle, 2000, during the Battle of Seattle, 1999, the rhetoric of the 1990s, peace and trade and progress, a significant chunk of a lifetime ago, worse off now, the hope of a radical, 1997 APEC protests, authoritarian countries, I put pepper on my steak, why is everybody upset, they’re coordinating their laws to fuck us, reading the student newspaper, 2nd World is the Soviet Union, euphemism treadmill, 3rd world is more radical, it means poor, a third path, so much propaganda, poo on Jesse’s head from Evan pooing on him, lazy thinking, the truth can be exposed, you need to not be soaking in propaganda, on the ferry to Vancouver Island, Adbusters magazine, an anti-propaganda magazine, Biden on one side and Zelensky on the other, two critical takes, yessir yessir how high sir?, Megan Markle and her husband are getting a Netflix show, the number one show on Spotify, celebrities that are kings and queens, Obama and a musician had a podcast, content-less, too many books to read, 75 episodes for Mark Twain and 100 episodes for Heinlein, people who should know better, angry at the queen or the other kid for being, mostly not propaganda, a fine place to dwell, analyzing, exposing it, out from under, Jesse’s thinking of Paul, let them be in their blanket, its not Evan’s job to save everyone, do Poe eventual, the Poe wish, stay healthy, losing weight, one pack a week, anti-smoking, a week long group project planned out, deliver content, dynamism, ESL students, read these pages, answer these questions, work in groups, a private school that’s trying to make money, lecture, present this, without Slides (PPT) you might as well be speaking in a foreign language, when the bosses walk by reading at your desk, teaching taking place, devestated by lockdowns, this is going to perk you up, you’re not engaging with this amazing Lovecraft poem the way you should be, why are the kids fucking off?, some structure, a more traditional idea of academic achievement, girls do better, hard on the boys, they’re Evan’s clan/tribe/race, don’t let them embarrass us, their acculturated to do better in those class, boys in person, wooden swords and hack at each other for 45 minutes, then talk philosophy, run around for a long time, able to absorb things, pumped up with lack of sword fighting, it could be javelin throwing, less upset, less restrained, PE is not the solution, nobody cares about the grades, bad grades in gym class, kids love dodgeball, gladiator stuff, you want to do this?, of course!, Philip K. Dick Volume 1 letters, letters to his mom, Mom send my pills!, Mom I need a doctor’s note, doing bad at math, poor Philip K. Dick, terrible spelling, 1940s and early 1950s, letter to Anthony Boucher, Susan Cooper, The Skull, The Moon Maid is about communism on the Moon, centaur, a lady riding a male centaur, foreign teachers could have Christmas off, Life On The Mississippi, Lifeline, Misfit, it pisses off the insurance companies, The Man Who Traveled In Elephants, Tenderfoot In Space, Rocket Ship Galileo, the podcasts are broken, a thousand episodes, boring lame necessary (unpaid) work, Patreon stuff, she loves business shit, hey, this book’s cool!, literally gonna run out of juveniles, a theory of Philip Dick, a theory of Lovecraft, Heinlein’s thesis is he’s American (but not the way the government means), For Us, The Living, Shadows In Zamboula, roaming cannibals, a fearsome strangler, marred by including racial stereotypes, specific blacks from Darfar, profiting from cannibalism, it sounds good, near southern Egypt?, kushites, a love letter to Paul, The Golden Slave by Poul Anderson, The Venom Business by Michael Crichton, Evan can out American Jesse, people mad at him for global warming denier, ended his career sort of, he can never be a good boy like Stephen King, what about his blank book that has a blank in it, no, you’re ruining it!, a strong theory about westerns: ketchup and mustard, #KetchupAndMustardGetup, it means something but probably not anything important, pulp style covers, blues and whites, yellow and red for clothes, snowing.

The Many-Headed Hydra

Europe Supported By Africa And America by William Blake

Posted by Jesse WillisBecome a Patron!

The SFFaudio Podcast #711 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Shunned House by H.P. Lovecraft

The SFFaudio Podcast
The SFFaudio Podcast #711 – The Shunned House by H.P. Lovecraft – read by Gregg Margarite. This is a complete and unabridged reading of story (1 hour 7 minutes) followed by a discussion of it. Participants include Jesse, Evan Lampe, Connor Kaye, and Jason Thompson.

Talked about on today’s show:
a book in 1928, Weird Tales, October 1937, the S.T. Joshi, a posthumous story of immense power, The Black Stranger by Robert E. Howard, it’s been only 15 years since Robert E. Howard’s death, so fucked up, Evan’s podcast about it, Wayne June’s version for Audio Realms, he’s the best narrator for this, why is Poe in this?, he’s really into Poe, wooing, definitely probably didn’t notice this house, irony is seldom absent, what’s happening structurally, somebody buries somebody beneath the floorboards, a lady in a house down the street, two main characters who are bachelors obsessed with a house, what happens to the uncle, he’s killed, he’s homicided by his uncle, six carboys of acid, structurally its very much like The Tell-Tale Heart, ha ha ha I’m doing Poe, stronger or equal to anything Poe ever wrote, tops, weirdness and horror, one of his underrated stories, this isn’t in any of them, a little longer, the buildup, the backend, the release of the tension, very genealogical (hence kind of dull), now that Jason’s a parent, child deaths, everyone dies, everyone goes insane, tragic and emotional events in dry synopses, melodrama, some of his best deep dives into the history of a place and a character, He, using architecture to dig into the history of places, time travel, walking tours, Etienne Roulet, some of the best stuff in the story, the history and ownership of the house, windows, working class experience of horror, the way knowledge is communicated, the grapevine telegraph, so many echoes of other stories, which ones are not included, The Statement Of Randolph Of Carter, The Lurking Fear, the shadow on the mantelpiece, two guys sleeping in a house with disturbing nightmare dreams, The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward, The Colour Out Of Space, body horror, inverted, a material that goes into living things and pumps it up vs. removing something from living things and making it worse, a disgusting factor in the plants, vampirized vs. injected with tainted materials, vaguely traditional ghost stories, The Unnamable, crazy ghosts, extremely , vital force and attenuated matter, shapeless blobs, shapeless ghost monsters, we see an elbow, two feet in diameter, biceps, he seems to have been growing, they buried a titan, looking into the pit before pouring, Lovecraft knows what’s under there but we only get to see the elbow, a research story, the Indian graveyard, the town graveyard, Elihu Whipple, tricorn hats mad at him, cutting hearts out to kill vampires, a werewolf story from France, his uncle’s really into it, one of these goings back in time, he’s already tipped his hand, archaeological digging is really fun, atmosphere building, a very WWI exhumation of bodies buried, chronologically, nesting, Russian nesting dolls, Carrington brought something back, buried in the basement like a treasure, Jack Roulet, put on trial in France, half-werewolf half-vampire, 16th century people, more vampiric than it is werewolf, drawn to the land, a deeper history here, the entity, live in their own soil, a Dracula story as well, excavated their ancestor, their personal cemetery, we must destroy the memory, fainted suggestive sympathy for the monster, evil wizards, killed by a mob, hostile or seeking self-preservation, being buried alive, preserved himself in his last moments, the creature is alive, whatever it is, The Dweller by H.P. Lovecraft (Fungi From Yuggoth, #31), there’s something under the ground, a yellow day, the factory, pipes are croaking, alive down there but asleep, half-life, undead, growing in size, he’s not just pale he’s translucent, something softer than dirt, a folded stovepipe but rubbery-er, a hard turn materialistic science fiction, a gratuitous body count, we need a flamethrower, a crooke’s tube, like a cathode Ray tube, powerful batteries, positron emitters from Ghostbusters, backpack cyclotron, gas mask, a shovel and some acid, proton packs, so cool, ghost hunting shows, I’m getting em radiation, a great short film, two ghost hunters, 12 minutes long, pretty terrific, the possession, the way the possession works, the vampure thingy is stealing people, vital life essences, they are the haunters of the house, Slither (2006), an alien comes to Earth, a consciousness, monstrous body horror creature, James Gunn, a zombie aspect, sickly and dying get glassy eyed and try to bite, a completely different take, early vampire mythology, get really bloated in their coffins, a corpse being bloated from decomposing, absorbing some life force and getting bigger and bigger, feeding on life-force, a giant, if they hadn’t of stopped it, deleting it, it could have woken up and been a Clark Ashton Smith story,

Antarktos by H.P. Lovecraft
Deep in my dream the great bird whispered queerly
Of the black cone amid the polar waste;
Pushing above the ice-sheet lone and drearly,
By storm-crazed aeons battered and defaced.
Hither no living earth-shapes take their courses,
And only pale auroras and faint suns
Glow on that pitted rock, whose primal sources
Are guessed at dimly by the Elder Ones.

If men should glimpse it, they would merely wonder
What tricky mound of Nature’s build they spied;
But the bird told of vaster parts, that under
The mile-deep ice-shroud crouch and brood and bide.
God help the dreamer whose mad visions shew
Those dead eyes set in crystal gulfs below!

something frozen under the ice that’s going to come out,

The House
By H.P. Lovecraft

’Tis a grove-circled dwelling
Set close to a hill,
Where the branches are telling
Strange legends of ill;
Over timbers so old
That they breathe of the dead,
Crawl the vines, green and cold,
By strange nourishment fed;
And no man knows the juices they suck from the depths of their dank slimy bed.

In the gardens are growing
Tall blossoms and fair,
Each pallid bloom throwing
Perfume on the air;
But the afternoon sun
With its shining red rays
Makes the picture loom dun
On the curious gaze,
And above the sween scent of the the blossoms rise odours of numberless days.

The rank grasses are waving
On terrace and lawn,
Dim memories sav’ring
Of things that have gone;
The stones of the walks
Are encrusted and wet,
And a strange spirit stalks
When the red sun has set,
And the soul of the watcher is fill’d with faint pictures he fain would forget.

It was in the hot Junetime
I stood by that scene,
When the gold rays of noontime
Beat bright on the green.
But I shiver’d with cold,
Groping feebly for light,
As a picture unroll’d—
And my age-spanning sight
Saw the time I had been there before flash like fulgury out of the night.

the accompanying illustration, what is feeding the plants is a coffin, thinking layers, spirals up and down the house, beneath the ground floor, five chapters?, the occupation, the kitchen is in the basement, where the servants are going crazy, neighbouring houses are never effected, the fungus are the reaching out, black mold fucking up people’s lungs, a fungus vampire, spores are bad for your lungs, bad dreams, a toxic house, toxic mold, a ghost story, titan in the basement, tightness of The Terrible Old Man, some really awesome action, fun research in the middle, a happy ending (other than the uncle being dead), gets away with murdering his uncle, his hat is lying there, slime stained underwear, Cool Air, The Thing On The Doorstep also has a hat involved, melting, The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar, Body Melt (1993), just as tasteful, The Velveteen Rabbit lady, keep shunning that house, something physical, Hill House is just an evil house, the Marsten House, the Overlook Hotel, into science, Stephen King is not a scientist at all, a psych figure, Poltergeist (1982), buried indians, a suburban house built upon them, the Narragansett Indians, reduced to one man’s research, creepy houses, designate them, made up, based on rumor, the rumors are always true in Lovecraft, the rumors are revelatory, always in the right, true in the game vs. true in the stories, red herrings are only there to improve the story, not to fuck up the story (in good writing), Lovecraft knows what he’s doing, why these guys are unmarried, it’s not their house, what are you doing?, a funny line, my nerves were so shattered I had to write some poems, made me feel better, not the standard dude, the uncle is the stand in for Lovecraft’s grandfather, Elihu Whipple, maternal grandfather, a mixture of a few different family members, one of his uncles, a memorial for his uncle, a dedication to Lovecraft’s own grandfather, a bachelor, shed some tears, he’d still be alive with me here today, another statement (to the police or his own lawyer), to explain the missing uncle, he and Carrington Harris, he can partially backup my story, give an alibi, here’s the keys, all the equipment, fought in the Civil War, lickety split, a doctor in the Civil War, a lot of nautical stuff, a history of the United States, a break with the past, the ship being burned in 1772, set in 1919, 1920, the Klinger anthology, marginal notes, decoded it, made the timeline then wrote the story, some even and now we’re going into the deep history of this, the history of the house (vs. the history of the man), the timeline is very similar, colonial America, maritime history, Georgian America, a Mercy Dexter in this story, the names, Pelleg Harris, Moby-Dick, this is Lovecraft’s take on The House Of The Seven Gables, drink blood, a nice old lady who likes baking cookies, set in a basement, a dusty old house, no monster in the sub-basement, what this has that that doesn’t is a payoff to the awesome setup, The Undying Thing by Barry Pain, born as a werewolf, underground stuff is awesome, crashing down like, the tell-tale elbow, the weirdest part, the vampire loins, it could be anything, planting the seeds early, the apple trees are giving out small sweet apples, enjoys thinking about the house, a vampire in the basement at one point, becoming degraded, Evan needs to do a series on Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hepzibah’s gingerbread cookies, more like this, The Fall Of The House Of Usher, get out of New England, escape this past and move on, go to the frontier, I’m going to fix up this nice old house, look at my ancient furniture matches the sideboard, the fanlights are amazing, he should’ve stopped at this house, unremarkable, sinister in his description, exuding a sinister aura, a nice house he appreciated, night black deeds, unnaturally steep roof, corpse fed, the septic tank, rank, a big shit, a physical force, lush, rheumy eyed grass, really gross, the roots of the tree still form the shape of elbows, fingers, still here, but the evil’s gone, a body horror story, a generation of horror, six-seven generations, still-births, on the face of the uncle, hosing down with the proton pack, going Tell-Tale Heart, melted his uncle, yellow gas, he passes out, his gas-mask fails him, the crookes tube has no effect, an old wooden house, a wet house, using flamethrowers inside a house, military flamethrowers, no cameras to document, 12 minutes, an adaptation, good music, this shunned story, the Taiwan lockdown continues, 50 people are moderately sick, people are less crazy [in British Columbia] here now, antibodies test, PCR tests, working from home, people are over it, the first big outbreak, 23-24 million people in Taiwan, there are more people in Taiwan than Australia, crammed in there, size of Australia vs. size of Taiwan, 215 times bigger, so sparse, easier to quarantine, China’s density, hardcore lockdowns in China, Australia: “once we’re vaccinated we’ll just open up”, political, the end of a career, stories from Shanghai, Tasmania is almost twice as big as Taiwan, shipping the vaccinated to Tasmania, Australia shipping refugees to Christmas Island, on the opposite side of the planet, Paul is getting shutout, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight by Slavoj Žižek, spit-all over, so excited, amped up, touching his nose, his brain is redlining, so prolific and fun, Living In The End Times, film criticism, a public intellectual, The Goddess Of Atvatabar, The Screwfly Solution, tripping over her name, The Mystery Of Sylmare, Strawberry Spring, Marissa VU is editing a magazine, lots of time for Jesse’s nonsense, Babbitt up next, The Thing In The Woods, both good and bad news, bad news is bad, good news is German, podcast Cora time, time zone, double good news, disarray, a working holiday, au pair, a tutor for babies, GCHQ doing more evil analysis, the secret cover, Alex from Pulpcovers, NLAWs, 33 billions for Ukraine is 33 billion for the industry, extend a proxy war, 1963-75?, leftover NAZIs with NLAWs, all that money goes to the militias, the alternative, two shitty options, who do you want to be your master?, literally occupied, the Donbas and Crimea, there’s been a war there since 2014, active troops, special operations (not rolling tanks), this is how we make our money, turning off the spigot of Afghanistan, tic tok, $1 for Ukraine added toy your bill, would you like to donate this money to Children’s Hospital, a parasite business, universal healthcare, don’t you have any charity?, automated tips, for the wait staff, a shifting, public goods, care for children who are ill, from government responsibilities, floods, another bloody wave of floods, the charity drops off, Peter Dutton set up go fund me, trained that way, the World Economic Forum, Justin Trudeau, his deputy prime minster, Klaus Schwab, instant disqualification, Bill Gates’ bad press, Elon Musk, fan or stan?, in the guillotine line, Joe Rogan, a mansion, the largest landholder of croplands in the U.S.A., an attack vector, fancy cars, he’s the billionaire who hasn’t gone to space, Bezos Beelzebub, asmodeus, he’s like Tiamat, ok?, Tiamat is female and not a they them, pre-biblical, prioritize, No-Man’s Land by John Buchan, finger bandaid, a baby on each knee screaming in German, a walled city, uberroads, autobahns, ultraroads, Mr Jim Moon, Darlington, a small town in central England, a saga on YouTube and Twitter, political, PayPal cancelling people’s access to their accounts, Russian affiliated media, NFTs, the NFT weirdos, purchasing using crypto, Elon Musk was an early investor in PayPal, Charles Ardai, Hard Case Crime, awesome covers of pulp-style paperbacks, a mix of new and old, Fifty To One by Charles Ardai, the correct vision, why Elon is good too, he has passion for things, he wants to go to Mars, he likes fast cars, interested in everything, who else is making satellite internet?, a lot of change in the world, wanting power, I don’t want nice, I want rockets, anti-union, unions limit power, Toyota, responsibility, not just extracting value, we want workers to be self-actualized, the money compensation is there because the job isn’t fun, given Jesse’s awesomeness, we start with the worst not the richest, Bill Gates, locked-down, this guy with no medical degree has vast control, he stole a computer program, ruthlessness, tiger-eye, hiring a lot of engineers, who has changed cars more?, my Bill foundation, you still shorting Tesla stock?, how to lose a boner fast, he’s trolling the right people, Trump has the right enemies, Julius Caesar had the right enemies, I can see the vast appeal, lying to our faces without a sense of humour, his worst tweet: we will coup whoever we want, reins of power vs. power players, what has Microsoft done for you lately?, they got Skype, did they improve it, still free, an inertia, Discord has been cancelling people, the healthiest ecosystem is still Microsoft, sail across the pacific ocean with a granola bar, Mac’s walled garden, organize, dos a dos Ace Double style, Strange Embrace, Robert McGinnis, leg lengths, long necks, Michael Whalen, fucking fantastic covers, the name of the author, an amazing cover, where in the culture it sits, 2012, 361 by Donald E. Westlake, The Girl Who Electrified Tesla, Gun Honey, modern day pulp adventure, the Gabriel Hunt series, Robert E. Howard style, dangerous book for boys, Glen Orbik, very El Borak, he has the right taste and is enthusiastic about getting things done, The Colorado Kid by Stephen King, Joyland, Later, all the Donald E. Westlake, nice length, The Gods Of Bal-Sagoth by Robert E. Howard, The Black Stranger, he’s like Skeletor except cool, Max Allan Collins, the Quarry series,

The Shunned House - illustration by Virgil Finlay

The Shunned House - illustration by Otto Bumberger

The Shunned House - illustration by Muzski

135 Benefit Street - The Shunned House

135 Benefit Street - The Shunned House

Posted by Jesse WillisBecome a Patron!

The SFFaudio Podcast #683 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Mystery Of Sylmare by Hugh Irish

Podcast

The SFFaudio PodcastThe SFFaudio Podcast #683 – The Mystery Of Sylmare by Hugh Irish – read by Connor Kaye. This is a complete and unabridged reading of the story (1 hour 4 minutes) followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse and Connor Kaye

Talked about on today’s show:
Weird Tales, July 1927, Connor’s YouTube channel, commentary, essay writing, trying to convince us to go into a war, a Halloween writing contest, writing short stories and novels is a grifter’s game, supply exceeds demand, start writing poetry, long fantasy series possible value, talking about two unrelated horror stories, Run by Noemi Arduini, Inevitable Outcome by Adam Podoxin, a komdo dragon, hair on her arms and legs, braids, a cycle of werewolfery, well written sentence by sentence, more like a scene from a film, this is the end scene or the last paragraph of a story, whoever is tutoring this kid, how books are structured, some kid is being chased, two characters?, totally a story, sets up a problem, closed off, there’s only one character, a circle, a judgement by the author, clunky, not a wholly original idea, Behold The Man by Michael Moorcock, what your goal in writing is very important, well done language, pleasant to read, scary, which one is scarier, catharsis, what the story is doing, start watching a horror movie, teenagers at the lake, why bring this up?, polished but longer than it needs to be, why doesn’t it have more attention?, competent, some of the writing is clunky, a good premise, it resolves, a huge impression?, you are also somehow threatened, operating on an intellectual level, why isn’t it a classic of weird fiction?, the HPLHS’ Voluminous podcast, always be listening, Lovecraft is a great ideas man, Farnsworth Wright, Chicago, “closest to my notion of a weird tale”, a good story, mood, intertextuality, punching up the characters, college friends, selling farm equipment in Saskatchewan, that’s the story, moves on with his life, the most interesting events are distanced by at least three levels, the internal narrator’s now wife, US > THIS NARRATOR > S.T. CHAPMAN > PROFESSOR MORSE, taking turns reading, why the wife is so Lovecraftian traumatized, Cool Air, Pickman’s Model, the best way of having this story told, you can’t allude to it with her in the room, she has PTSD from reading, the knowledge that this place exists, what it says about our place on earth, super-awesome, vegetation having a secret consciousness is really fascinating and creep and scary, there’s some truth in it, a cosmicism poem, all over this story, geology, the size of the universe, and evolution, how we got here, upper-class elite twits, Cuba, Florida, cars and boats, no kids, the biological component is really important, vegetable life, The Shadow Out Of Time, the Migo are fungi, very immediate, the caterpillar, half-way between a plant and an animal, a Lovecraftian character, the Indians thought about this place, not a real place, Syl and Mare, forest and water, huddle near a bunch of lamps, the husband gets water, they start smoking, the word “drug” means “plant”, venom, synthetic production, caffeine from coal tar, urea from pee, the petrochemical process, all jittery, caffeine is related to urea, what is caffeine for?, caffeine is an insecticide, tropical areas, Guatemala, where the spicy stuff comes from, animals and plants in a war all the time, we are the masters of the Earth, tell it as a garden of Eden story from the tree’s point of view, align yourself with the snake, get some good sunlight, they’re there to feed you, mysterious things happening, the rise of Veganism, we don’t like our relationship to factory farming, the horror of slaughter as a moral good (a natural process), we think of it as a moral evil, you can’t make your cat become a vegan, trees communicate with each other, chemicals, cut grass, something is eating us, flatten yourself, a survival mechanism, apples today, the cultivar, tree glue, an innovation we have done as humans, the whole idea behind fruit, whose doing the manipulation, symbiosis, exploiting the apple tree, we have done something, at the core of this story we don’t actually see what happens, fully pined up, becomes entranced, his lighter, lights the island on fire, the monster vs. “the thing”, what its doing to the people, shot themselves, ensorcelled, a chemical attack, the tree doesn’t say anything, trying to fertilize the ground with the corpses of these people, the origin of this effect, a happenstance that produced a particular effect, not a part of a survival strategy, real world parallels, an instance in history, the Dyatlov Pass incident, the mystery of the Dyatlov Pass, geography creating ultra low frequency sounds, unlucky hikers, a natural process seeming to exert a supernatural force, infrasound, like an evil presence, Dreams In The Witch House, advanced mathematics, what percentage of the story is fully nested, page 96, The Grove Of Ashtaroth by John Buchan, do listeners feel it the same way?, get to the action faster, put skulls everywhere, a protection spell, what makes it a sacred grove, if you go in there bad things happen, six incidents, we could see the bodies of the youth and the girl lying in the bottom of the boat, naval reserve uniform, they went to the island to have sex, heavily wooded, lying down on the needles, a pine tree monster with flailing arms, all funked out, the Indians knew about it, the families were for it, consummating the act, why nobody talks about it, an over-reading on the motivation?, menacing, the classic backstory, the finding of the old book, an odd volume of the colonial period, a haunted island, the red men, the heart of the story, the mood part of the story, lessening the impact, long for a story of this material, a crummy setup, men of leisure who go to country clubs, Estelle telling the story, too far from the action, after dinner we went into the library, framing devices, The Oval Portrait by Edgar Allan Poe, the core of what we’re seeing, Lovecraft would have done it even better, a strangely sharp pinnacle of rock, this singular formation, a distinctly weird and eerie aspect, a great loneliness depressed me, a sense of guidance, the transition, maybe the tree is doing this to him, a toilsome passage, emitting a chemical sense, the mystery, a small circular rift, a precipice, the weird gloom, a thick mist in colour and opaqueness, the renting, similar abrasions, the evil genius of this baleful deft spot, two slight indentations, somebody brought back the tips of the fir boughs, a little bag full of some pine needles, life superimposed on death, ever growing ever dying, layering and layering of rock, fossils built on top of fossils, the earth is a living thing, a fungus growing on layer upon layer of death, a non-biological phenomenon?, really fun stuff, the self-made murmur in the silence of a cavern, the sound of the sea from some freak of acoustics, a resonance chamber, the soft mill-like murmur, the gloom of the wood, man’s earliest lullaby, the druid’s oak, fetish wold, sylvan shrine of the South Sea savages, duseute avenues of the soul, obsolete, a much older kinship, life’s dim beginnings, this vengeful death trap, ruing, an ancient covenant, parallel consciousness, it is a sure thing, plants retain the sex character, direct fixation of carbon (man), fix nutrients, catalepsy and kindred states, insectivorous plants, the whole island is a Venus fly trap, creating sugars, primitive on and off sentience, sterile soil, idle aeons, mobility’s parallel, mentality, their grey and terrible web, this is awesome, an otherwise slow story, island of the coast of Romania (Snake Island), Jason And The Argonauts, WWII, yeast, alcohol, where wine and beer came from, [almost] no animal based alcohols, “magical wine”, too pure a form, chop each other down (instead of trees), a taboo, the third one of the west coast of norther Florida, he’s really got something here, fantastic, gold, the foreshadowing is good (but too long), you got some Rus, Dionysus’ island, make an exact timeline, pick the exact time to start the story, Jesse’s never been to the Black Sea, whoever Hugh Irish may be, a visitor to this place, caught up in the wrong part of the story?, a little bit off, not enough personal family trauma?, the farther you go back in time the harder it is to get the details right, and space, with jets and nuclear powered submarines, get lost in the storytelling, WWII has Nazis, but that’s distracting from the point, a biological phenomena, dangerous and valuable, if it is the trees…, why haven’t these trees taken over North America, resonance of sound, struggling towards consciousness, evolution as a series of flukes (that stick), he burns it down, South Africa/Rhodesia, little bit racist, a parallel story without the supernatural goddess element, conquer the Earth Day Of The Triffids style, a moral horror story, crazy interesting, an ashy island, rather than one particular tree, killing the last (or first) dinosaur, human beings are too smart and they have fire, how Evan Lampe would read this, this chemical funk, psychic rays?, a typewriter or a pen, his writing gets kind of lazy, a very Lovecraftian ending, Dagon, overcome by these feelings, succumb to this knowledge, Lovecraft explainers, the opening of Supernatural Horror And Literature vs. The Call Of Cthulhu, crushing realization, we must remain unconscious of the whole, a placid island of ignorance, our level of grasp of the size and age of the universe, a bad case of the glooms, a bargain with the plants, the faith is broken, don’t eat of the tree of knowledge, you’re doing our stuff, upper class elites, they’re like fail sons, Hunter Biden, growing up in an elite household, directionless, just facts, the Naval reserve, get credibility, doing drugs instead, his parents are in the position to inveigle that, a level of failing upwards, psychological problems of elites children, fail sons and daughters, not engaging with the meaning, not sentient enough, people not being excised about the right things, God’s dead? I guess I’m transgender now, sudden realization, Nitchze, God’s dead and we killed him!, a comet is coming to hit the earth and did you see that new Netflix special?, a plant-human covenant, what the horror should be, rewriting The Mystery Of Sylmare, before I’m lost, human skulls, dying for centuries, the same effect as cosmic horror, shifting a human being’s consciousness, I am me being myself, more of a plant consciousness, phermones, vegetize, a story called Philip K. Dick called Piper In The Woods, Jason Thompson is a plant monster guy, a collective of evil trees, Algernon Blackwood style, mad scientists, alien plants, making them like plants in that they don’t move anymore, becoming plants vs. going mad, understanding of the cosmos or infinity is too much for the human mind, it consumes their normal human consciousness, sanity blasted, you as the reader beware, pockets of this may still exist in danger, end with the outer narrator with a fireaxe, email or a tweet, Of Withered Apples by Philip K. Dick, taxes at the dinner table, inferable reasons, appendicitis, she at the seeds, a fable or something, Out In The Garden by Philip K. Dick, Zeus impregnated a story in the suburbs in the 1950s, weird paranoia, nailing a real truth, where life came from, In The Case Of Bradner, The Smart Set, Lord Dunsany, the opening paragraphs, written by the same guy, a mortal coward in storms, under the potato bin, it taught our progenitors, cunning and mind, fear: greatest friend that man ever had, same kind of personality, same kind of wavelength, Este Chapman is a writer, a fiction writer?, deadlines, a couple of columns in Collier’s from 1913, E.F. Bleiler, Hugh Rankin, short story, Florida, a segment of the vegetable world, burning oil, overwritten and two many frames, the layering and layering, the layering down of stories, the professor is the most interesting character in it, the red men on the far end, a style that’s not popular today, Arthur Conan Doyle, Tony Walker and the CLASSIC GHOST STORIES PODCAST, immediate, immediate and simple, Lovecraft doesn’t care, The Lurking Fear and Herbert West: Re-Animator, the focus on the market, fucking up readership, trying to influence reality, high ideals for writing, making a true work of art, Obama, the Unabomber, or Frank Herbert, who is the moral superior?,

Which would you prefer

Having written short story, or _haha_ a novel, and have had it read by 1000 people

or have had 1000 people listen to your words for the time it would have taken to read your story or _haha_ novel?

preferring readers, trying to make the scales even, teasing out the number, a mug’s game, a lie wannabe writers tell themselves, it’s about identity, a bit cynical, to have a book on the shelf, I wrote this one, an element of vanity, willing to make compromises to get it, readers vs. listeners, old episodes get listened to, millions of downloads, we don’t respect the medium we respect the medium of books or TV shows, angry at Joe Rogan, jealousy, get their dignity back, most people don’t read, who are you deluding?, how many J.K. Rowlings are there?, a winnowing over time, H.G. Wells, The World Set Free, The Food Of The Gods, what makes something wonderful, what makes something important, b films, The Spirits Of The Dead (1968), William Wilson, Don’t Bet The Devil Your Head, it deserves more status than it has, the best time ever to be a person digging into the past, never been easier, search engines are fucking wizardry, like the flakes in this story, you have to write H.P. Lovecraft, libraries sprining up all over, Carnegie libraries, read the book Dune, Dune‘s not a film its a book, The Canal by Everil Worrell, for a film, In The Earth (2021), folk horror, The Stone Tape (1972) BBC TV movie, The Blair Witch Project (1999), be in the mind of the narrator or the character, voice over, the idea driving vs. just writing, forgiving non-action, this is why these woods have that effect, Laird Barron, keep punching up, the core defined concept, Lovecraft is all about mood (caused by the idea), what if my ancestors were fishmen?, if I was Arthur Jermyn, my grandmother was a gorilla?, best news ever!, humour as a reaction to an idea, how to make your sentences look and smell nice, reduce the stories characters by one, make the title a key, making people want to read, reading for different reasons, reading for fiction, reading for intellectual engagement, confusing the actor for the character, Nicholas Cage is compelling on screen, Steve Buscemi chooses better movies, The Color Out Of Space (2019), Pig (2021), who wrote it?, David Mamet movies vs. James Bond movies, movies with x actor, whether the author did the work or not, those are Poe stories, story is important, does budget matter that much?, Hey! Stop Stabbing Me (2003), movies with subtitles, training up, enjoying Soviet movies, Akira Kurosawa movies, what school should be about, The Woman Of The Dunes (1964), how much money do you need?, the bare minimum and a little bit more, Hex (2019), The Interlopers by Saki, Connor gave some wisdom, easy to be too negative, when analyzing, if you’re lying to yourself, be more demanding.

The Mystery Of Sylmare by Hugh Irish

Posted by Jesse WillisBecome a Patron!

The SFFaudio Podcast #599 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: Hawks Of Outremer by Robert E. Howard

Podcast

The SFFaudio PodcastThe SFFaudio Podcast #599 – Hawks Of Outremer by Robert E. Howard; read by Connor Kaye. This is an unabridged reading of the story (1 hour 5 minutes) followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Paul Weimer, Evan Lampe, Trish E. Matson, Alex, and Connor Kaye

Talked about on today’s show:
Oriental Stories, Spring 1931, Weird Tales, Boom Studios, Mark Finn, Savage Sword Of Conan #222, “freely adapted”, did Connor say Conan?, square cut black mane, lightning blue yes, iron thews, a very unConan conclusion, “sheer weight of numbers”, man against man, Cormac Fitzgeoffrey, characters get in the head, ultra-brain damaged, punch drunk, his father was bastard, half norman half celt, a very special story, really interesting, super fun, very manny, Robert E. Howard nerding-out about history, historical references, who was real and who was not, Robert de Vale, Richard Lionheart, Saladin, Mark Finn’s essay, rewriting history in the guise of fiction, the markets are too scanty, if I twist facts too much, my stories center entirely on my conceptions of my characters, writing to a point, pooping on Lovecraft, Howard’s racism, England’s fucked up, Ireland’s fucked up, France is fucked up, religious zealots on a conquering spree, A Means To Freedom, the peopling of the British Isles, anthropology, its all migration, the Normans, two generations away from Vikings, civilization and barbarism, he’s obsessed with it, the German’s the bad guy, entrenched in the blood and the soil, Lovecraft doesn’t really care about characters, we remember Robert E. Howard characters, the themes are always the same, manliness vs gentlemanliness, a character up against them, The Black Stone, Lovecraft couldn’t or didn’t do that, the Saladin movie, Kingdom Of Heaven, Bertran de Born, 1140s-1215, Dante’s Inferno, Gustave Dore, jousting, He nicknamed Richard Lionheart…”Oc-e-Non” (Which translates to “Yes-and-No”),a translation of one of his war poem/songs (by Ezra Pound):

“…We shall see battle axes and swords, a-battering colored haumes and a-hacking through shields at entering melee;
and many vassals smiting together, whence there run free the horses of the dead and wrecked.
And when each man of prowess shall be come into the fray he thinks no more of (merely)
breaking heads and arms, for a dead man is worth more than one taken alive.
I tell you that I find no such savor in eating butter and sleeping, as when I hear cried “On them!”
and from both sides hear horses neighing through their head-guards, and hear shouted “To aid!
To aid!” and see the dead with lance truncheons, the pennants still on them, piercing their sides.
Barons! put in pawn castles, and towns, and cities before anyone makes war on us.
Papiol, be glad to go speedily to “Yea and Nay”, [Richard Lionheart] and tell him there’s too much peace about.”

this is hardcore, yo, the spirit inside of Cormac, war-madness, Apocalypse Now, he’s a ghost, a skull on his shirt and his shield, the West is open, Heart Of Darkness, Cormac is the crazy one, “My most somber character”, an unsalable version of Conan, the story works perfectly without any sorcery (without any sword), spartan in the backgrounds, Joe Jusko‘s covers, an eight page sequence which is almost completely wordless, arms floppin’ off, Medieval castle in Outremer, his hand swelling up like a glove and then exploding, crush the vertebrae, not for the faint of heart, quite vivid, Conan The Salaryman, “the giant”, his catlike slept, pantherish movements, so formidable in battle, he is a fool, a lot of backstory, Robin Hood is running around, the timeline, killed about a people burned a castle, took a sword from a sea-king, a ‘magic’ sword, his true beliefs, he swears by Satan, a symbol of the craziness that is the crusades, Richard is a fool (admirable), I would have you among my men, acting in honour to obey a blood debt, historical fiction, a tiny interregnum between another crusade and another betrayal, everyone is becoming free agents, craft their own little kingdoms, all these bastard sons, what the title means, a girl at the center of the action, a death wish, he’s like The Punisher from the 1190s, a war on crime that will never end, he’s a vigilante, he goes looking for trouble, you broke him, at least one more adventure, Richard Lionheart died in 1199, Saladin’s rule, unhorsed in battle, an Arabian steed and an English warhorse, Saladin was a Kurd, break up the two teams, united in their religion, dismounted?, a french she-knight, a belly fat German, throwing battle axes and lances, that impossible grip, bending the iron bars, this unstoppable Punisher plowing through people, going everywhere trying to make trouble, makes friends with people who are getting into trouble, Howard is so different from Lovecraft, H.P. Podcraft, The Picture Of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Oscar Wilde defeats you using nonsense logic that sounds great, rhetorical flourish vs. rhetorical substance, enough words, time to move, an experiment in manhood, why his stuff is so incredibly powerful, buffin’ up at the gym, military warriors, uncles and advisors and friends, unsurpassed for what it is, walking down the street wearing a time with a notebook and thinking about the stars, the boxing ring, wrestling with what it is to be a man, King Kull is a lot more philosophical than Conan, A Man Returns, were he a total caricature, he thinks its a trick, not just a walking sword, what Europe is like, a feint, betraying fealty, friends betrayed, Queen Of The Black Coast, a big long moral lecture, cleaves the judge’s head, manly loyalty that gets you into wars, the same kind of mentality, the thin blue line, I’m not a knight I’m a lord in my own land, running around in bearskins, philosophizing in fiction about what it is to be a man, the women in the stories are there for addressing men’s duties towards women, ideals of masculinity, a love letter to Saladin, a compeletly different way of being a man, a charismatic chivalrous civilized man, Saladin and Richard, fresh fruit, eat this get better, Joppa, prisoners of war, a Kurd among Arabs, I’m gonna prove you wrong, a Mary Sue, writing about the man he wants to be, strong and chivalrous, kind to his friends and cruel to his enemies, male fantasy,

Cormac glared at him, tensing himself for a sudden leap that would carry the Kurd with him into the Dark. The Norman-Gael was a product of his age and his country; among the warring chiefs of blood-drenched Ireland, mercy was unknown and chivalry an outworn and forgotten myth. Kindness to a foe was a mark of weakness; courtesy to an enemy a form of craft, a preparation for treachery; to such teachings had Cormac grown up, in a land where a man took every advantage, gave no quarter and fought like a blood-mad devil if he expected to survive.

Now at a gesture from Saladin, those crowding the door gave back.

“Your way is open, Lord Cormac.”

The Gael glared, his eyes narrowing to slits: “What game is this?” he growled. “Shall I turn my back to your blades? Out on it!”

“All swords are in their sheaths,” answered the Kurd. “None shall harm you.”

Cormac’s lion-like head swung from side to side as he glared at the Moslems.

“You honestly mean I am to go free, after breaking the truce and slaying your jackals?”

“The truce was already broken,” answered Saladin. “I find in you no fault. You have repaid blood for blood, and kept your faith to the dead. You are rough and savage, but I would fain have men like you in mine own train. There is a fierce loyalty in you, and for this I honor you.”

Cormac sheathed his sword ungraciously. A grudging admiration for this weary-faced Moslem was born in him and it angered him. Dimly he realized at last that this attitude of fairness, justice and kindliness, even to foes, was not a crafty pose of Saladin’s, not a manner of guile, but a natural nobility of the Kurd’s nature. He saw suddenly embodied in the Sultan, the ideals of chivalry and high honor so much talked of—and so little practiced—by the Frankish knights. Blondel had been right then, and Sieur Gerard, when they argued with Cormac that high-minded chivalry was no mere romantic dream of an outworn age, but had existed, and still existed and lived in the hearts of certain men. But Cormac was born and bred in a savage land where men lived the desperate existence of the wolves whose hides covered their nakedness. He suddenly realized his own innate barbarism and was ashamed. He shrugged his lion’s shoulders.

“I have misjudged you, Moslem,” he growled. “There is fairness in you.”

“I thank you, Lord Cormac,” smiled Saladin. “Your road to the west is clear.”

And the Moslem warriors courteously salaamed as Cormac FitzGeoffrey strode from the royal presence of the slender noble who was Protector of the Califs, Lion of Islam, Sultan of Sultans.

that’s the author talking, a lion like roar, Richard the Lionheart is the other lion, wasting all these lives, Robin Of Sherwood, Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves, maybe their religion aint that bad, reading Howard in comics, its never Cimmeria, interacting with not nice people, he comes from the north, that wanderlust, a lack of the gigantic mirth, that being towards death thing, in search of a calling, he’s clearly looking for someone, we want him to go there, its corrupt, decadence, Bêlit is probably supposed to be Jewish, she’s a Shemite, hawk-nosed Shemites, was so passionate her love, she’s a psycho killer, corruption everywhere, this person is not corrupt, a romance of the westerners towards this history, the propaganda is that he was exceptionally good, Howard inspired by history stories, his themes are not shallow, redeeming features to the latest Marvel Conan?, Conan the Gambler, it just carries you along and you hardly notice the philosophizing, he is so skilled at writing the prose, the dialogue is used in the Boom Studios adaptation, Roy Thomas era of Conan, text boxes, virtually no text boxes, losing all the sidelights that Howard is throwing, it feels like a novel’s worth of material, two major flashbacks, he storms two castle, a really strong workout, a lot of the tension came from Howard’s writing, it ends and you almost want to cheer, Two-gun Bob, His Own Barbarism by Mark Finn, he saw suddenly embodied in the sultan, the Frankish knights, his own innate barbarism and I was ashamed, he’s literally a werewolf, semi-mythological metaphors, Smaug, The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien rewriting the Saga of the Volsungs for his own children, Thorin becomes the next dragon, a representation of turning into a dragon, a wolf-like figure, there’s too much peace around, a dead man is worth more than one taken alive, ransom, the butter and the sleeping, propagandistic: let’s do this fucking think, a hype-up, flex contests, let’s get this war on, fuck the money, it feels so fucking good, PUBG, trench warfare, become a wizard (like Evan), become a lich, ways of winning this manhood game, Connor is so lucky to be young and have Jesse giving him his wisdom, Mark Finn, Robert’s relationship with Doctor Howard, I got a $120 for that story, Blood & Thunder The Art & Life Of Robert E. Howard by Mark Finn, Connor’s narration, the voice of Cormac, really fun to narrate, The Blood Of Belshazzar, more of the same?, Magic Carpet Magazine, looking east, Orientalism, the interest in the east, Connor’s big Hippocampus Press purchase, R.H. Barlow, W.H. Pugmire, Clark Ashton Smith, The Tindalos Cycle, John Ajvide Lindqvist, The Black Diamonds by Clark Ashton Smith, a Boy’s Own Adventure by a kid who didn’t know what he was doing, ridiculously fun, an enthusiasm, Lovecraft seems to be a fanboy of Clark Ashton Smith, that prose that is a painting, the reds from Robert E. Howard, Scarlet Citadels, Red Shadows, it was a colour but I can’t describe it, four issues on Archive.org, 33 stories up on the PDF Page, The Sowers Of Thunder by Robert E. Howard, set in Otremer, an Irish crusader with a troubled past, maybe Connor’s got another project, talking about manhood, Lovecraft is more correct about the status of masculinity in the 20th century, Lovecraft knows the future is going to be libraries, academics, Lovecraft’s Roman dream, a fantasy of the working class, Wastelands by W. Scott Poole, it doesn’t matter how much you train, what it is to be a man and what it is to be masculine and what it is to be an adult, trophies, the female gaze upon the muscles, female characters who are wimps, the Indiana Jones second movie, Willie Scott’s job is to scream, The People Of The Black Circle, The Hour Of The Dragon, Zenobia, Red Sonja, Valeria from Red Nails, she’s a companion, not a plot object, the exact same plot as Iron Shadows In The Moon, the stupid squire character, Zula, Grace Jones is great, a little horse battle, Conan: The Destroyer is garbage, N’Longa, I need you, I’m yours, if Will were here, Tonto to The Lone Ranger, fifties square, Jay Silverheels, rancher’s daughter needs rescuing, range romance on the edge of civilization, Beyond The Black River, Conan fighting Indians on the frontier, John Carter, Tharks, not having magical element, sword and sorcery, didn’t need an evil wizard, Hashshashin, other than being really strong, Sharpe’s Rifles is historical fiction, that axe-throw was borderline, Harold Lamb, Adventure (magazine), it doesn’t really matter what he applies his writing to, The Tower Of The Elephant, he steals from the best, the puzzle solving, the pathos of the elephant, Almuric, and here’s some fragments, a description of a real town, how the houses loom, those sentences are still him talking, the natural storytelling, a jigsaw puzzle and a protractor, the soul of a poet.

Hawks Of Outremer by Robert E. Howard

Joe Jusko - Hawks Of Outremer

Cormac Fitzgeoffrey by Chris Schweizer

Posted by Jesse WillisBecome a Patron!

Reading, Short And Deep #234 – The Hidden Beast by J.D. Beresford

Podcast

Reading, Short And DeepReading, Short And Deep #234

Eric S. Rabkin and Jesse Willis discuss The Hidden Beast by J.D. Beresford

Here’s a link to a PDF of the story.

The Hidden Beast was first published in Signs & Wonders, 1921.

Posted by Scott D. Danielson Become a Patron!

Reading, Short And Deep #227 – Arctic Justice by Harold Willard Gleason

Podcast

Reading, Short And DeepReading, Short And Deep #227

Eric S. Rabkin and Jesse Willis discuss Arctic Justice by Harold Willard Gleason

Here’s a link to a PDF of the poem.

Arctic Justice was first published in Argosy, May 1, 1937.

Posted by Scott D. Danielson