the book-box on the borderlands

'suppose a man does find it now and then useful to be two fold'  - joseph curwen in the case of charles dexter ward. 

h.p.lovecraft a racist for certain.

the documentary horsemouth watched tried to pretend that his short-lived marriage to a jewish woman and time in new york had humanised him (but horsemouth sees no evidence of that).

BUT take the case of charles dexter ward. possibly his best. other than the necromancy it is semi-autobiographical -  young man retires from life to a world of antiquarianism and self-publishing (lovecraft). the book necromancy to the list.  here he makes the key villain (joseph curwen) a slave owner and points out the existence of slavery in the north (providence, rhode island) in colonial times (and after). in doing this the book cannot help but argue slavery is a bad thing. (whatever lovecraft himself might have thought).

lovecraft is a kind of american trascendentalist (like emerson or thoreau) but his is a kind of bad transcendentalism - beyond the world of visible nature are spirits but sadly they are absolutely fucking evil. in at the mountains of madness (think the thing  crossed with scott of the antarctic's diary) the scale is altogether too cosmic for anything  human to intrude - we are but animals to be dissected for research purposes in such a world. ward  would work as a kind of southern gothic (bad things left over from slavery and colonialism and the murder and extirpation of native americans) except that it is set in the north (where people do not care to be reminded of such times).  

horsemouth is currently missing volume 2 of the omnibus but volume 3 has 'shadow over innsmouth', 'the dunwich horror' 'the whisperer in darkness' - all the classics. his source was the book-box on the borderlands just over the border in walthamstow on the way to the aldi - horsemouth always thought he could find another copy (having got rid of previous editions unread at his last remove). 

yesterday the drama of the mooseheads moved to a conclusion (after one of the neighbours complained about the smell of rotting meat). horsemouth is calling them  mooseheads for the sake of comedy. in any event the problem is on its way to solution. 

horsemouth (as you may have noticed) makes use of his power to be two fold. he does this not because he is honest but because he is dis-honest, rather than face his pains and sufferings he has tried to evade them by being two fold. willie nelson (in the documentary on loretta lynn) points out that by writing songs about painful things they strangely start to be less painful, he then quotes the stoic seneca. 

the sun shines in horsemouth's window (it has made it up over the houses opposite). yesterday it was pleasant and hot. horsemouth sat out on the front step reading and sunbathing and said hi to the neighbours as they went past. the solar gains are good this time of year.