Atdtda23: [46.1i] A passionate heart, 653

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Haven't read any Lovecraft.  Which book do you recommend?

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net>

>
> Laura sez:
>
>> In 2001, the object was deliberately placed.  Pynchon's is a natural,
>indigenous 
>> object -- very different.
>
>The description is ambiguous. All the strokes tending toward tomb, burial,
>sculpture are qualified with "as if," but it's also set up as seeming like a
>_nunatak_ (a projection of bedrock through the ice) but not being one.
>
>I'd extend the ambiguity to "malevolence," here and in Lovecraft's ancient
>artifacts. Yes, in Lovecraft everything pertaining to the Old Ones, Elder
>Gods etc has evil effects on people. But part of his power is the
>simultaneous hint that they're "beyond good and evil" -- i.e., any contact
>opens up vistas so ancient and immense as to drive us mad, simply because we
>are so insignificant on that scale.
>
>Think, too, of the mood Wells sets at the begiing of _The War of the
>Worlds_, with "minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the
>beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic..." That's
>all in play here.
>
>