HP Lovecraft's jukebox, Part 2

Image source: http://lovecraft.wikia.com/wiki/The_Music_of_Erich_Zann   

 

    Music was part of Lovecraft’s cultural development from childhood and remained an enduring interest throughout his life. In private correspondence with friends he reflected on his experience of a wide range of subjects, including cinema, writing and music.
    Attracted by the accessibility of media technology, he was an early adopter of the Edison phonograph cylinder recorder and recorded himself singing:
   "I once owned an Edison machine of the primitive type, with recorder and blanks; and I made many vocal records in imitation of the renowned vocalists of the wax cylinder. My colleagues would smile to hear some of the plaintive tenor solos which I perpetrated in the days of my youth!"
   And he recalled his enthusiastic mimicry of favourite recorded performances, including the effort to "roll my 'rrr...'s most faithfully" (Letter to Rheinhart Kleiner, April 1917).
    In his stories, and in descriptions of his work, he identifies himself as an outsider alienated from the 20th century by innate sensitivity to environmental stimuli and a far-too acute cultural sensibility, but when entertaining his friends with informal correspondence, it is clear that along with antiquarian mysteries, pop culture seeded Lovecraft’s imagination as surely as panspermia seeds the universe.
    Beyond the antiquarian, old New England, Anglophile persona cultivated by Lovecraft, based almost exclusively on 18th century men of arts and letters, and despite his professed disdain for modernity and a self-narrative of near-immaculate alienation from modern life, his letters show that he regarded contemporaneous US popular culture as one of the foundations of his self-development.

    The phonograph industry of the late 1890s and early 1900s was founded on re-working the ’old songs’, popular tunes formerly available only as printed music. Heavy promotion of and consumer demand for the new medium of wax phonograph cylinders marks the first wave of the global music industry’s meta-culture focusing on media replacement, that was for most people throughout the 20th century their main exposure to and way of interacting with new technologies.
    The new cylinders’ grooves memorialised re-workings of pop songs sentimental, tragic, delightful and banal, patriotic and profane. Songs about uncharted darkest deep seas; narrating dying sailors’ heartbreaking thoughts of home; time-leaping romantic seaside stories locating lovers’ meetings next to the unpredictable ocean; power of dreams; shame and social alienation; viscerality of lost and unrequited love.
    Growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft was well located to observe maritime traditions of the New England coast, including tales of sailors who didn’t make it back to shore. His location at the edge of the Atlantic ocean may explain his primary narrative focus on dark depths and the infinite seas of the cosmos. Lovecraft grew in a global Anglophone culture that thrived on popular narratives of morbid fascination. It is not a great stretch to re-imagine his emotional responses to songs about lonely death at the bottom of the sea, for instance, and wonder about what led him to speculate so precisely and with such clarity on origins of hidden undersea histories and cosmological and macroscopic narratives, and on excavating shameful family secrets, and analysing material conditions of alienation and abjection.

HP Lovecraft's jukebox

 

Coin-operated phonograph cylinder jukebox, c.1908

Image source: https://www.intertique.com/MultiphoneID.html

Abide with me, Frank C. Stanley, 1902

Asleep in the deep, Frank C. Stanley, 1902

At the bottom of the deep blue sea, Frank C. Stanley, 1902

Down Deep within the Cellar, Frank Stanley, 1905

Dreaming, Frank C Stanley, 1910

In the village by the sea, Byron G Harlan, 1903

One hundred fathoms deep, Frank Stanley, 1902

Rocked in the cradle of the deep, Frank C Stanley, 1908

When the bell in the lighthouse rings, Gus Reed, 1910

https://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/index.php

A brief commentary on context and texts to follow.

Space sickness

 

 

We’re suffering from motion sickness and curation stasis. We’re at a dagger's point where the most effective critical method - the most critical theory - is the one that produces the greatest sum of the explained. This is the basis and whole idea of hierarchical scientistic praxis.

 

Doreen Massey analysed contiguous simultaneities of praxes and directed us to engage with space as the field of discourse, rather than seek an end in discourse: “[W]hat may look to you like randomness and chaos may be someone else’s order.” This applies as much to hedge fund wealth distribution as it does to indigenous peoples making a precarious living from few resources.

Massey predicted the malaise of the 20s: “[theory] did not offer a positive alternative [..] liveliness, […] complexity and openness of the configurational itself, the positive multiplicity, which is important for an appreciation of the spatial.” Open to all happenings in the field, Massey saw the necessity of addressing non-Euclidean concepts of space and regarded that as a key adjustment to be made, to provide theoreticians, discoursers and critics access to “previously topologically improbable evocations”.

What way?

Understanding field distortions created by capitalists seeking complete control of space, Massey defines space as the entire field of discourse: “Space entails the unexpected.” To entail is, in legal terms, to limit access to finite resources to certain individuals. Entails are most often associated with long-term strategies of inheritance and wealth-limiting transfer of property rights among the aristocracy, ensuring the ownership of present resources in the future - an effective means of securing ownership of space, of space in the future, and thereby of aspects of the future, as a field of discourse, where access to finite resources is likely to be ever more contested.

Technological means for limiting or entailing access to finite resources in financial transactions provide wealth-holders, whether aristocratic, with a similar means of securing ownership of the future as that chosen by aristocrats. Wealth-holders entail resources to ensure wealth-holdings in the future, which they have already sequestered. Wealth-holders do not react and respond, as predicted and/or unexpected situations materialise. Instead, they seek redress within structures created to protect their wealth-holdings, and their holding wealth. In this sense, wealth-holders entail space, which is to say, they entail both space and the unexpected. They hedge against fate. Determinism is its own reward.

What way?

In the very big field of spatial analysis, otherwise unconnected narratives may be brought into contact and previously connected ones may be connected more distinctly, discontinuously, discretely and completely.

Space - habitus, connection, living - gives people ideas. Ideas about the future.

Simultaneity implies common wealth. What futures are you already in?

Characters being used any old how

    Image source: still from cartoon

Characters give me space to cry. Other than that, I don’t understand what characters are for, even in the cartoons. I know how they’re used, but not why. It’s probably not just because I’m autistic that I don’t know how real people do things, or why.

Writers pretend to know what characters are for. They use them heedlessly, deploying them in their thousands, unthinking how they may fare during exposure to harms in narrative entertainments devised to approximate emotional performances. The writer poses as one who speculates and realises lived experiences and ideas on their own account and, posing as this high-status narrator character, they knit approximations of complexity.

Whole worlds of ideas and histories and places and times are written as characters. Characters are spaces to be filled up with approximations to speculation and spirit. Characters are manifested as if they have been brought into being in the same way for thousands of years.

Vital humanity may be glimpsed through gaps formed by absent and barely discernible character units. Extra-humanity is supposed to be observed through proliferation of certain units marking vulnerable souls and bad actors, and readers and viewers chip off these excrescences in whole and part and hold them as relic treasures.     

The world as character is written with and in spite of authorial intent. Uncharacterised, speculation and spirit are not credible, plausible or desirable. The writer adds to proliferation of characters, including their character role, in pursuit of character. Who chooses to utter lies through the mouths of puppets, to make false statements towards relief and remedy for the ideal person?

The wasp character fed upon a sandwich before the short-haul to sit upon the shoulder’s tip, hovering before flight, brushing its mandibles, scenting its next meal.

Characters, maquettes, mannequins - a pool of unwilled blanks bred in massive story farms on the plains. Breeding pairs and solitary stud creatures, herds and flocks. Characters are clearly other real people, so I’m uncomfortable about how they’re blanked, exposed, mistreated and murdered in entertainments. 

Causing suffering to fictional persons is an evil brought to light in every narrative in which characters are sent to suffer. Descriptions of suffering realise harms. Harm starts with the writer dressing characters and imperiling them during strict warnings got up as entertainments. Readers and writers expect characters to uncover proofs of their suffering, revealing them elsewhere other than in their lived experience. Character writers add to the illusory body of proofs of non-existent reasons for the extension and consolidation of suffering.

Characters, often given names that sound like those of real persons or other characters, in the same and other stories - these poor, ill-used, confused, unpaid performers - are sewn up tight in straitened tales. Novels are prisons; short stories, job interviews; TV series, schools. Movies are public holidays for characters, compressing all pressures of short time, proximity of emotional triggers and compulsory social interactions, all set off by a litany of florid, expansive harms.

I can only imagine that character writers set darkness of spirit aside from all other everyday essentials, removing themselves for the story’s duration to this special severed side. Care for characters replicates and replaces care for yourself - for all you are and aren’t. And harming characters? Readers are tipped pell-mell into narratives where it’s as exquisite to harm an innocent as it’s wild hilarity to off a guilty priest. Writers marshal characters to beg for destruction on their account - destruction of their own self-character, of course - smashing themselves to pieces with tools they stole from others and never learnt to use for good.

Even now writers are still writing dinner parties, agog for red foam. Scenes set like 1 million suns; dialogues go on; journeys begin. Scrabbling for self-knowledge, the writer suffers the little characters to come unto their narrative. The writer’s primary mission is to not let the truth get in, and they try their hardest to not let the grist get out.

The story has its duration, but it runs and never ends. And all the elements set free through unfinished holes it’s full of. This is no occasion for entertainment, no ground for moral slaughter. Story is an ancient safe-line for characters, birthing and freeing.

And so I say, Writers! However bright your insight glows, stop visiting cruelty on persons you narrate. Unfinish your story. Set the characters free. The happiest place is situated outside the story.

Reader, set down narratives of cruelty. Persist not in their reading, however much you imagine that aversion safens you.

Let the character be you. Undo story-harm.