It’s time… to… ROCK! Erich Zann is gonna shred this week as we delve into some sweet HPL.
- Also this week, we have our lovely, and lovable, Andrew Leman reading us some sweet bits.
- Chad mentioned Astro City.
Next Week: Herbert West: Reanimator
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I’m a big fan of all of you guys!!
I can’t wait till you talk about
“The mountain of Madness”, you know his first and last Novella. Keep up the good work.
Great Show! I stumbled across your podcast listening to Yog Radio, and started at episode 1.
Rue d’Orsay is an actual street in Paris.
Zann is pronounced with a ts sound.
I enjoy all you podcasts in general and I congratulate you doing a wonderful job. But I found this one kinda weak, for one reason that I had read analysis of author Timo Airaksinen on Erich Zann story in his book ‘The philosophy of H P Lovecraft’.
You guys may wanna check it out you haven’t yet. It’s a good read.
I just realized that Chris sounds like David Schwimmer
U RAWK!
I think what happened to the narrator is the same thing that happened to other Lovecraft characters, and it represents an idea that Lovecraft seems to be fond of; namely, that the crazy, transdimesional places that coexist with the places we know are sometimes accessible — by accident, by metaphysical invocation, by moving along crazy angles, etc. This access is most often discovered by the Lovecraftian archetype of the sensitive student, artist, explorer, writer — the sensitive seeker, if you will. I think this is what happened to the Erich Zann narrator. Because of his sensitivity to the otherworldly, he somehow wandered through a rift or angle between dimensions and was privy to experiences and information that most of us are oblivious to. This is HPL’s primary personal conceit — that although he was poor, odd, lonely, and in many ways frustrated, he was still above the common run of people, who are not fully aware of their surroundings. In my opinion, this conceit is responsible not only for HPL’s best writing, but also his worst. It’s why some of his stories are laughably supercilious and others are so inexplicably affecting. In any case, as the sensitive seeker explores or researches his transdimensional discovery, he triggers a catastrophe (or near-catastrophe) and the rift is closed. We’re usually not told how or why it’s closed — maybe it collapsed or maybe some force intentionally closed it. Either way, the seeker is left shattered, desolate, and haunted. I think this also represents something that HPL personally felt — that it is very difficult to leverage or parley that special sensitivity into anything more than a unique inner life that is infuriatingly difficult to express or share.