What if H.P. Lovecraft’s work were set in Hollywood instead of New England? At The Toast, Kevin Sharp writes Lovecraftian gossip columns. “Two very famous couples, both well known for their complicated personal lives and grand professional successes (less known, perhaps, for the horrid dark secrets that throb and scream in their antediluvian Hollywood mansions), met for a fateful dinner.”
Hollywood Horror
Flavorwire on Author Photos
From Flavorwire, another contribution to the burgeoning field of author photo analysis.
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Cleaved in Two
"As I let the shotgun drop the butt hit the bricks and the second shell fired into me..." This excerpt from Homero Airdjis's upcoming The Child Poet, is fraught with elements of tension and discovery. Something of a künstlerroman, the book tracks Airdjis's artistic and poetic development from his boyhood through the present day.
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Miscellany
Bat Segundo's BEA podcasts continue. Yours truly makes a brief appearance in the latest installment.Elizabeth Crane is discussing George Saunders' collection In Persuasion Nation at her blog this week.Meant to post this Friday, but luckily I think spelling bee-related links have an indefinite shelf life. Language Hat and his band of commenters provide indispensible commentary on the word that won the National Spelling Bee, "ursprache," and other Bee topics.
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“Swamp Fuschia”
Scandal at the Oxford English Dictionary! Robert Burchfield's efforts in the 70s and 80s to delete words from the dictionary based on their foreign origins have been uncovered.
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To the Edge of Sanity
Edmund Wilson famously said of the works of H.P. Lovecraft that “the only real horror in most of these fictions is the horror of bad taste and bad art.” In time, however, Lovecraft developed a substantial following, which raises the question of what attracted readers to his work. The answer? “The weird realism that runs through his writings undermines any belief system – religious or humanist – in which the human mind is the centre of the universe.” Related: Ben Dooley on the scariness of House of Leaves.