Episode 15 - Poetry of the Gods & Celephais

[bar1scorpio]

Hasheesh helped a great deal, and once sent him to a part of space where form does not exist, but where glowing gases study the secrets of existence.

...

Howie...  that's oregano we gave you to smoke.    Sorry to narc on you like that, man.   

Seriously.  It's passages like that that make me think, for all the drug use in his stories, he seems like a guy who had no personal experiences with the stuff.  Just second or third-hand from other poets and the like, and then trying to ape their styles.

[Genus Unknown]

Yeah, who would ever have thought H.P. Lovecraft would be kind of a prude? 

[bar1scorpio]

All I know about Drugs I learned from William Randolph Hearst by H.P. Lovecraft.

aka Reefer Madness: The Musical.

[bar1scorpio]

And I finished with the actual episode. 

Poetry and the Gods  Bow-chicka-bow-wow.  I think this is the most seductive project Lovecraft has ever been (thus far in my readings) involved in.  "Baby, lay back and let me whip out this poetry..."  Likewise, if they're Greek Gods, of course they're going to go for a guy to be their prophet, but they seem to be giving Marcia the role of Oracle, (Cassandra, Delphi, etc.)

Celephais (Cell-Phase?) - I guess it just ends on too lonely and depressing a note to not be making fun of the middle part. I dreamed about a reefer, five feet long.  A might immense, but not too strong...

[bar1scorpio]

Poetry of the Gods  - Actually, you gotta think he was doing this collab to get some play.  It's not "Free-Verse", it's Vers Libre, very romance language way to put it.  Everything's sexier in French.

And how about them gods?  You get Zeus, king of womanizers, and his boys Apollo and Dionysus, artistic pretty boy and drunk.  And who's in the midst of this?  Muses, smexy goddesses of the arts, and Bachae, the party-girls gone-wild of ancient Greece- Marcia arrived right on time for the orgy. 

She's bored & frustrated, because there's no <i>poetry</i> that's just right in her life.  And what to these guys tell her?  He's comin', baby.  They're telling her flat-out about how satisfied she's going to be.

If this was written 20 years earlier, both of the writers would have been clapped in irons for sending licentious material through the mail.

[Gard]

I can't find any info (after a quick search on the net; nothing exhaustive) on Anna Helen Crofts. You say little at all is known of her. Is the reason for this perhaps because Lovecraft invented her (so that people can do exactly what you did in the podcast and say, Oh . . . that has to have been written by a women!"), or it is known definitively that she was a real-life person? She probably was a real-life person; but it would be extremely cool if he had invented her just to test peoples reaction's to his more "feminine" associated works.

[Genus Unknown]

I have a pet theory that the classic Twilight Zone episode "A Stop at Willoughby" is a direct, uncredited adaptation of "Celephaïs."

They have the same basic plot: a man is worn out by the cares and coldness of the real world, but finds relief in dreams of a peaceful, lovely town or city. He keeps trying to get there again, but is always rudely awoken. In the end, after everything in his waking life finishes falling apart, he finally enters his dream-home to live there forever, unaware and uncaring that he has inadvertently jumped to his death in the real world.

[Bob Lovecraft]

I have a pet theory that the classic Twilight Zone episode "A Stop at Willoughby" is a direct, uncredited adaptation of "Celephaïs."

They have the same basic plot: a man is worn out by the cares and coldness of the real world, but finds relief in dreams of a peaceful, lovely town or city. He keeps trying to get there again, but is always rudely awoken. In the end, after everything in his waking life finishes falling apart, he finally enters his dream-home to live there forever, unaware and uncaring that he has inadvertently jumped to his death in the real world.

Huh, I never thought of that before, but yeah, I can definitely see it now. I wonder if Rod Serling was a Lovecraft fan?

Bob

[old book]

It's a good fit, but I think both stories belong more to the older theme found in ghost stories about, for example, a couple going on holiday in the French Riviera, finding a wonderful old rustic hotel, coming back next year, looking for it and finally discovering it had existed, but 100 years before they were born, and was destroyed many years ago. The intrusion of fantastic pshyogeography comes up in Music of Erich Zann: the protagonist can never find his way back to the same street. The reverse of that is, that the protagonist never finds his way out of the imaginary reality back to waking-life, and is thus abducted forever by the fairies, elves, etc.

[Bob Lovecraft]

is thus abducted forever by the fairies, elves, etc.

Don't forget nymphs.

Bob

[old book]

or mermaids.

[Bob Lovecraft]

or mermaids.

Touche'

Bob