Lovecraft on Twitter

by Pa Rock
Fan of Good Literature

H.P. Lovecraft is my second favorite American writer. Tim Macy of Kansas City is first, Michael Chabon is third, Mark Twain is fourth, and the top five is rounded out by Kurt Vonnegut.

Lovecraft published his stories in pulp magazines in the 1920's and 30's, sometimes for as little as a penny a word. He took the concept of horror fiction that had been practiced so well by Edgar Allen Poe, and took it places that Poe could never have contemplated - creating a world that is unmistakably Lovecraftian. From the dank halls of Miskatonic University where a fragile copy of the evil Necronomicon was housed in the school's library, to the ice fields of Antarctica, to the falling down houses of Providence, Rhode Island, in the early days of the twentieth century, Lovecraft created mysterious worlds that were truly gateways to terror.

The works of H.P. Lovecraft are an acquired taste, and once a mind has experienced his disquieting tales, it will forever know tremors of trepidation at every chance encounter, every coincidence, and every surprise that presents itself onto the quiet tranquility of day-to-day life.

I began using a tracking site on July 23rd of this year to get some sense of who was reading The Ramble and the types of things that drew people to the site. The runaway favorite post has been "Lovecraft Words," a piece that ran on June 14th, 2008, and examined the beautiful vocabulary that Lovecraft used in one of his short stories. That post has had 48 hits in less than two months, almost double the number of visitors to the second most popular piece - "The Lumley Vampire," which ran on May 31st, 2009, and has only recently outdistanced the third placeholder "The Sad Ballad of Randy Leach," a column on a Kansas mystery that was featured in The Ramble on April 16, 2008, and has been viewed 23 times since the tracking service went into effect in July.

I learned yesterday that there is a new twitter site dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft. I am hopeful that it proves to be an effective medium for reaching the fans of this prolific and amazing author. The site is LovecraftNews@Twitter.com. It is just getting up and running.

If you are on Twitter and have an interest in H.P. Lovecraft, check it out and become a follower.

Banned Books Week: Day Four The Top Ten List

by Pa Rock
Cultural Commentator

I pulled the following list off of the Internet today. There was no information given as to who made the selections or how, but I thought is was a good cross-section of books that have stoked a lot of controversy. I'm going to set a goal or reading (or re-reading) each of these classics before the next Banned Books Week rolls around. If your book club is looking for ideas, you can't go wrong with anything on this list!

Top Ten Banned Books of the Twentieth Century:

10. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

9. Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

8. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

7. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

6. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

5. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

4. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

3. The Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

2. Ulysses by James Joyce

Drum roll...and the number one banned book for the twentieth century is...

1. 1984 by George Orwell

"Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man's eternal fight against tyranny. In this war, we know, books are weapons."

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Banned Books Week: Day Three Incendiary Prose

by Pa Rock
Cultural Commentator

Sometimes books are just so blatantly God-awful that banning them isn't enough to ensure that their free-thought might not seep out and be absorbed by some unsuspecting open minds. When that happens some moron with a book of matches is usually close by.

Civilization has a long history of burning troublesome things: witches, crosses, and yes, even books. The Nazi's were consummate book-burners, dutifully torching any bound volume of ideas that didn't fit their ideology. The books that the Nazis burned were dangerous, damned dangerous, like Jack London's The Call of the Wild. Their rigid minds could not accept a tale of sled dogs and the struggle of man against the elements. It's a good thing that the twenty-first century Nazi's and fundamentalist Christians haven't bothered to read any of London's other books. The first few pages of The Iron Heel alone would send thousands of these intellectual midgets racing to flick their Bic's.

Kurt Vonnegut, the genius who looked and wrote like Twain, ran afoul of book-burners. His very provocative Slaughterhouse-Five was publicly burned in Drake, North Dakota, in 1973. Vonnegut, like London, wrote many novels that challenged our core beliefs and values. And Vonnegut's characters have evolved into classics, from Billy Pilgrim to Kilgore Trout, they have become part-and-parcel of the American literary experience.

Several years ago the Board of Trustees of the East St. Louis Library ordered all three of the library's copies of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath pulled from the shelves and burned. They described it as "vulgar, immoral, and bestial." In some places comments like that would sell books!

The Reverend (sic) George Bender of the Harvest Assembly of God Church near Pittsburgh, PA, held a large public bonfire on a cold evening in 2001 that was fueled by Bruce Springsteen CDs, Disney videos, and Harry Potter books. The showboating minister made sure that the press was there before he put the torch to his pile of filth.

Ray Bradbury, one of the best wordsmiths of the last fifty years, wrote a book about book-burners entitled Fahrenheit 451, the temperature at which a book will burn. When teachers at the Venado Middle School in Irvine, California, ordered Fahrenheit 451 for their classrooms, they were shocked to find that the books were censored by the school district enroute to the teachers, and many words, mostly "damns" and "hells," were blocked out. How's that for irony?

It's Banned Books Week! Why not celebrate by reading some Bradbury (if not Fahrenheit 451, consider The Martian Chronicles - both are great reads). Or curl up with a Harry Potter novel (with Bruce Springsteen playing in the background, of course!). Anything by John Steinbeck makes for a good weekend of lazing on the couch and reading. My personal Steinbeck favorites are The Winter of Our Discontent and East of Eden. And then there's Kurt Vonnegut. If you are brave enough to look at the world from an off-center perspective, read some Vonnegut - and start with Slaughterhouse-Five. Just keep it out of the reach of morons with matches!