Lovecraft Country

Radio Open Source
Nov 3 · 8 min read
Illustration by Susan Coyne.

This week: we’re off to Lovecraft Country, the imagined world of horror-writer H.P. Lovecraft, with the authors Joyce Carol Oates, Paul La Farge, Matt Ruff, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Listen today at 2pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.

Halloween, easily one of the greatest holidays, and perhaps the holiday most suited for autumnal, creaky, eldritch New England, seemed like the right moment to reflect on the troubling and troubled horror-writer from Providence, H.P. Lovecraft.

[MM: Adam was our Lovecraft teacher this week, and we all got hooked. He assigned us four stories: “Call of Cthulu,” “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” “The Color out of Space,” and “At the Mountains of Madness.” Chris specially loved the New England, North Shore of Boston connections and totally gets the spooky Lovecraft aura in that part of the World. He’s located a certain scene in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” to the parking lot at Crane’s Beach in Ipswich. Conor found our music from a silent movie adaptation of “Call of Cthulhu” and from a terrific radio dramatization of “The Rats in the Walls.”]

H.P. Lovecraft

Joyce Carol Oates—herself a major Lovecraftian, whose “Night Gaunts” imagines the life of H.P. Lovecraft in Providence—starts us off with a discussion of Gothic literature. Specifically, how Gothic literature speaks to something profoundly real, even if Cthulhu isn’t real, even if vampires aren’t real:

Gothic fiction is realistic fiction in a psychological sense. When we look at Gothic fiction over the centuries, it’s dealt with creatures and situations that don’t exist. They have no place in reality. There are no vampires. There are no werewolves. There are no ghosts. There are no haunted houses and haunted castles. These things do not exist. It’s a purely invented imagine dimension of being. So we have to ask ourselves, what does it mean? Well, obviously it’s metaphorical.

And Lovecraft is a writer coming from the Gothic tradition; so, Oates told us:

Lovecraft is purely metaphorical. I don’t think he’s ever written one realistic story, one story or one work of fiction that we would say was in a naturalistic or realistic vein. It’s purely imaginary landscape of the mind. He’s creating situations that express his basic feeling that the human beings are out of place in the universe.

Paul La Farge has written a novel, The Night Ocean, in which Lovecraft is a main character. He brought to the discussion a strong sense of Lovecraft as a person—a person who ate canned beans and ice cream with a regularity that most of us could not handle. But Lovecraft, La Farge told us, also wrestled with real cosmic problems—the problems of an indifferent universe, vaster than human imagining.

Maybe the answer the problem of an uncaring universe is to join the inhuman realm, which is what happens at the close of Lovecraft’s “Shadow over Innsmouth.” There, a character joins with fish-human hybrids off coastal Massachusetts.

You could almost see this as a happy resolution to the problem that Lovecraft’s cosmology poses to us, which is, you know, well, if we can’t defeat the monsters, maybe we should join them. You know, why not just just recognize our inner fish frogginess and, you know, kind of groove on it rather than than fighting it and getting ourselves locked up in insane asylums. Why not surrender?

Matt Ruff and Silvia Moreno-Garcia have both found ways to reuse Lovecraftian elements—as Moreno-Garcia told us, Lovecraft created the first shareable fictional universe, with places (Arkham) and mythical beings (Cthulhu) that Lovecraft himself invited people to repurpose. She edited the first ever anthology of Lovecraftian fiction by women: Cthulhu’s Daughters.

Matt Ruff has taken Lovecraftian horror and used it to dramatize the horrors of the racism espoused by Lovecraft himself. Ruff’s novel, Lovecraft Country, is now being adapted by Jordan Peele, director of Get Out, for HBO, and both tell the story of a black family traveling through the monstrous reality of Jim Crow America.

Read: Further into the Realm of Weird Fiction

Every year, Providence hosts a convention dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft: NecronomiCon, which is worth reading up on if you’re a Lovecraft enthusiast.

NecronomiCon Providence is an expansive exploration and celebration of all the greats of weird fiction, including predecessors and contemporaries of Providence’s H.P. Lovecraft and the many authors and artists who have forged their own paths of weird.

And seek out this collection of women’s weird fiction, covering authors like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edith Wharton.

Listen: Mort Garson’s Plantasia

During Lovecraft week, we’ve been thinking about the world beyond humans, which inevitably entails eco-concerns (you can read Lovecraft as a profoundly ecological writer, a prophet of world that doesn’t care about our technological “progress” and that can, at any moment, consume us). Other artists work this beat, artists like the composer Mort Garson, whose 1976 Plantasia is both an early work of electronic music and an exercise in ecological artistry. From the website:

If you purchased a snake plant, asparagus fern, peace lily, or what have you from Mother Earth on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles (or bought a Simmons mattress from Sears), you also took home Plantasia, an album recorded especially for plants. Subtitled “warm earth music for plants…and the people that love them,” it was full of bucolic, charming, stoner-friendly, decidedly unscientific tunes enacted on the new-fangled device called the Moog. Plants date back to the dawn of time, but apparently, they loved the Moog, never mind that the synthesizer had been on the market for just a few years. Most of all, the plants loved the ditties made by composer Mort Garson.

Watch: Parasite

This is the movie getting the best reviews, generally, and while nothing can live up to unanimously positive reception, this is at least not a usual kind of movie. Well. Maybe part of it is intensely usual: at times this is a familiar upstairs-downstairs scenario, a comedy of manners about the deceit and fakery implicit in work or in interactions defined or delimited by class. Struggling family-members lie their ways into working as driver, tutor, or housekeeper—this is a sharp and funny premise, but the magic of Parasite is in the 20% of the movie you can’t predict by knowing that premise alone.

The director, Bong Joon Ho, just Skyped in after a screening at the Coolidge Corner Theater, and he gave the audience insight into the strategic, calibrated, meticulous planning behind a movie that seems at times out of control. He’s a cool, brilliant filmmaker, and his movies might have a shared off-kilteredness, but they also vary greatly. It’s exciting to think about where he’ll go from here.

Go See: Gift

Gift, a documentary inspired by Lewis Hyde’s beloved classic The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World, opens this weekend at the Kendall Theater in Cambridge for about a week. Filmmaker Robin McKenna follows four collaborative art projects around the world. Lewis says it’s a fine film, and it’s getting terrific reviews. Listen to our conversation with Lewis Hyde about his most recent book A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past.

Listen: The Paris Review Podcast

Season two of the Paris Review podcast drops with an episode featuring Jason Alexander (George Costanza of Seinfeld fame) reading Philip Roth’s early story “The Conversion of the Jews.” It’s a treat and a perfect November story (and so is actor Quincy Tyler Bernstine reading of Lucille Clifton’s poem “lorena” — oh the 90's…). The production and sound design of the pod are first rate.

What Was the Best Book of 1919?

Chris will be moderating the Boston Public Library’s annual Hundred-Year Retroactive Book Award of 1919 on Wednesday night at 6:30 in the wonderful Abbey Room at the BPL. It’s a totally fun night out. This year’s contenders are: Carl Sandburg’s The Chicago Race Riots, Frans Masereel’s Passionate Journey, and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Kellie Carter Jackson, Andre Dubus, III, and Daniel Mazur will go into the ring and fight for their books. You get to vote for the winner!

Next Week: In Hoffa’s Shadow

A conversation with Harvard Law prof and former Bush Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith about his gripping memoir In Hoffa’s Shadow. Jack’s stepfather, Charles “Chuckie” O’Brien, was Jimmy Hoffa’s right-hand man and suspected killer. The book was published around the release of Martin Scorsese’s Hoffapic “The Irishman,” which we haven’t seen yet.

This week’s ephemeral library:

Matt Ruff once interviewed Paul La Farge. A listener sends us this one: The Corner of Lovecraft and Ballard — How H.P. Lovecraft and J.G. Ballard both put architecture at the heart of their fiction, and both made the humble corner into a place of nightmares. Elena Ferrante has written a new book called The Lying Life of Adults which will come out on June 9, 2020. Here’s the opening line: “Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly.”

Chris recommends this one: Andy Bacevich is the man with the message the country hungers for, he says. Read: False Security: Donald Trump and the Ten Commandments (Plus One) of the National Security State.

That’s all for now, folks. See you next week!

Radio Open Source

Written by

An American conversation with global attitude, on the arts, humanities, and global affairs, hosted by Christopher Lydon. chris@radioopensource.org

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade