Episodes 77 - 83 ~ At the Mountains of Madness

[ahtzib]

The topic of Hyperborea came up in Ep.4 and I believe Chad was suggesting that Howard's Conan stories were set in the Hyberborean Age. It was actually called the Hyborian Age. Hyperborea, iirc, was a country in the Conan stories, though.

Another one out of the park. Great stuff so far. And I.N.J. is a great guest

I've been kicking myself for that one - especially since I'm now reading some Conan - I'll be bringing it up on the show:)

Chad

I'm no Howard expert myself, but I did have the Hyborian age on the brain because I wrote this for Ectomo's Conan week: the Archaeology of the Hyborian Age

http://www.ectomo.com/2011/05/24/archaeology-of-the-hyborian-age/

[MediaGhost]

This last chunk raises a few intriguing questions:

All good questions, btw!  

1) What the hell did Danforth see? Was it ever supposed to be a specific thing, or was it just HPL throwing a bunch of scary, unrelated stuff out there and letting the readers' imaginations run wild? I have wild speculations of my own.

I don't know what he saw, but I've always had the impression that it was something that allowed Danforth to "correlate the contents of his mind" as it were - remember, he'd been reading dangerous stuff like the Necronomicon.  And it was this brief glimpse of the entire, horrible "big picture" that drove him mad.

2) The shoggoth wrote something on the wall? Or was it a dying Elder Thing? What (if anything) might it have been meant to say? Or was it just put there because it seemed creepy? I have speculations. Speculate amongst yourselves!

Beats me.  Maybe it was a giant penguin with the head of Johnny Knoxville.  I don't really know.

3) What does "tekelili" mean? Was it ever supposed to mean something, or was it just supposed to be spooky? Is it really implied that the Elder Things spoke that 'word' as part of their language and the shoggoths learned it by its frequent use? If that is assumed, then some fun speculation of its meaning may be in order.

When I first read that, I thought of the alien in Predator, mimicking a few words of English to lure the people it was hunting.  Then again, if the Shoggoths are just robots, maybe it was a maintenance shoggoth and that was what it was programed to say when it's cleaning the tunnel floors. Maybe "tekeki-li" means something generic like: "get out of the way!"

[fishy]

This last chunk raises a few intriguing questions:

1) What the hell did Danforth see? Was it ever supposed to be a specific thing, or was it just HPL throwing a bunch of scary, unrelated stuff out there and letting the readers' imaginations run wild? I have wild speculations of my own.

I guess he saw that which the Old Ones feared.....remember their fear of the "evil mountains" beyond their city. Imagine a mirage of what is beyond those mountains, like that which they saw of the Old Ones city in the beginning of the story

2) The shoggoth wrote something on the wall? Or was it a dying Elder Thing? What (if anything) might it have been meant to say? Or was it just put there because it seemed creepy? I have speculations. Speculate amongst yourselves!

No clue here, sorry

3) What does "tekelili" mean? Was it ever supposed to mean something, or was it just supposed to be spooky? Is it really implied that the Elder Things spoke that 'word' as part of their language and the shoggoths learned it by its frequent use? If that is assumed, then some fun speculation of its meaning may be in order.

It is said that it is mimicing a word from the Old Ones language..imitating its (former) masters....

As an aside, I was watching a documentary about the Antarctic, and it showed some "brittle stars" crawling around on the ocean floor: truly spooky locomotion. I imagine this is how the Elder Things might have moved; with their pads-on-the-ends-of-arms.

Thanks for the show, guys


-Mike J.

[old book]

...
That seems unduly harsh to me, seems like some science fiction fans didn't like moving out of their comfort zone in those days.

But the only thing Cleveland C. Soper is remembered for now are his remarks in that issue of Astounding. Did he go on to a venerable career in sewer management, did he die of malaria while the Panama Canal was being dug? He didn't write anything more that we know of.

What about this in the issue of Astounding featuring the last installment of the three-part At the Mountains:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Page Mr. Lovecraft!

...

May I, Mr. Lovecraft, criticize the first installment ofyour serial? It is only because it is a fine story that I consider it worthy of the time to criticize. Invariably, in reading a story of this type I compare it with Merritt's Moon Pool, which is, of course, the perfect story in so far as perfection can be attained by mortals.

In your story compared, not to the usual standard, but to perfection, I find a few faults : a lack of attention to detail and too much repetition ; too many specific references to Necronomicon. Could you not have suggested the occult and the mystic in other ways? This is fault of all your stories. But At the Mountains of Madness was very good becuase you are an exceptional  master of words, and of the mystic mood.

Mathematics is an intensely interesting conception. The author has a slight glimpse of the truth, although he has carried his deductions in the wrong direction. It was very good reading. ...

L. M. J., Box 33, Cowley, Wyoming
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So Lovecraft is being typecast into Merritt's "type of story," but not castigated for it, by this reader.

[old book]

This last chunk raises a few intriguing questions:

...

3) What does "tekelili" mean? Was it ever supposed to mean something, or was it just supposed to be spooky? Is it really implied that the Elder Things spoke that 'word' as part of their language and the shoggoths learned it by its frequent use? If that is assumed, then some fun speculation of its meaning may be in order.

...

It's taken directly from Edgar Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, but no one really knows what it's supposed to mean. Poe tried to wrap it up along with some other mysterious words by placing a note at the end of the book, which you can find in one form here:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Narrative_of_Arthur_Gordon_Pym/Note

"...Conclusions such as these open a wide field for speculation and exciting conjecture. They should be regarded, perhaps, in connexion with some of the most faintly-detailed incidents of the narrative; although in no visible manner is this chain of connexion complete. Tekeli-li! was the cry of the affrighted natives of Tsalal upon discovering the carcass of the white animal picked up at sea. This also was the shuddering exclamation of the captive Tsalalian upon encountering the white materials in possession of Mr. Pym. This also was the shriek of the swift-flying, white, and gigantic birds which issued from the vapoury white curtain of the South. Nothing white was to be found at Tsalal, and nothing otherwise in the subsequent voyage to the region beyond. It is not impossible that 'Tsalal,' the appellation of the island of the chasms, may be found, upon minute philological scrutiny, to betray either some alliance with the chasms themselves, or some reference to the Ethiopian characters so mysteriously written in their windings.

'I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock.'"

I have long thought what others have, that tekelili! hearkens back to the mysterious "writing on the wall" Aramaic section in the Bible: mene mene tekel aforsin, which I'm informed is a double-entendre in that form and stage of Aramaic.

There is a brief description of the idea Poe was constructing a racist novel pitting black against white here:

http://www.kcc.cc.il.us/hss/pstickney/POEPYM1.htm

[Miskatonic Philologus]

Man!  This is MY favorite of HPL's stories...so chocked full of geological/paleontological goodness! 

It's funny, but in this episode, Chris says that geology students should read this story...well, actually, I'm a geologist, and I have my undergrads read "At the Mountains of Madness" in my Historical Geology course.  The course is taught in the Fall (usually), and I generally give them the story as a fun assignment over Halloween; we have a pretty neat discussion afterwords, and I usually use it as a lead-in to a discussion of nifty concepts and geological uses of ichnofossils (= tracks, trails, burrows, etc of organisms preserved in the stratigraphic record).  Some of the geology is wrong, even at the time when Lovecraft was writing, but still!  Neat stuff!  And heck, he even has some Wegener and "Continental Drift" thrown in there, when the whole idea was generally rejected by American geologists!  It's great!

Looking forward to more of the story!

Thanks for this post, as I have often wondered how accurate, or even logical, the geological parts of the story are.

[vortexgods]

...
That seems unduly harsh to me, seems like some science fiction fans didn't like moving out of their comfort zone in those days.

But the only thing Cleveland C. Soper is remembered for now are his remarks in that issue of Astounding. Did he go on to a venerable career in sewer management, did he die of malaria while the Panama Canal was being dug? He didn't write anything more that we know of.

What about this in the issue of Astounding featuring the last installment of the three-part At the Mountains:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Page Mr. Lovecraft!

...

May I, Mr. Lovecraft, criticize the first installment ofyour serial? It is only because it is a fine story that I consider it worthy of the time to criticize. Invariably, in reading a story of this type I compare it with Merritt's Moon Pool, which is, of course, the perfect story in so far as perfection can be attained by mortals.

In your story compared, not to the usual standard, but to perfection, I find a few faults : a lack of attention to detail and too much repetition ; too many specific references to Necronomicon. Could you not have suggested the occult and the mystic in other ways? This is fault of all your stories. But At the Mountains of Madness was very good becuase you are an exceptional  master of words, and of the mystic mood.

Mathematics is an intensely interesting conception. The author has a slight glimpse of the truth, although he has carried his deductions in the wrong direction. It was very good reading. ...

L. M. J., Box 33, Cowley, Wyoming
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So Lovecraft is being typecast into Merritt's "type of story," but not castigated for it, by this reader.

Ah, I like this much better.  Valid criticism of the overuse of the Necronomicon, which Chad and Chris echoed a bit when they pointed out it was a bit far-fetched that everyone had read it.

I like to think that Cleveland C. Soper was carried off by some unspeakable obscenity and subject to an unimaginable atrocity... not because I'm mad at him, but because it would be nicely ironic.  (And after all, somebody has to be carried off by an unspeakable obscenity and subjected to an unimaginable atrocity, so it may as well be him...)

Well, I'll be seeking out The Moon Pool to read at some point...

[old book]

I was leafing through the jpgs of that issue after I typed that one in, missing the fellow's surname abbreviated to J, and there was enthusiasm for the story even before the final installment was published. People praised it. They weren't as kind to the illustrator, who, some felt, was not up to his usual standard and was perhaps the wrong choice for ATMoM.

Joshi must have been reading the letters section in later issues, because the reader response this last issue in the three-part installment was much more positive than negative, I thought.

Cleveland Cronius or Cleveland Charles Soper seems to have disappeared without leaving heirs, guessing from a casual perusal of posts by the Soper descendants on the genealogical sites. They don't actually mention him at all, which is why I assume he didn't have direct descendants, but that's perhaps a premature assumption based on little or no evidence. His name appears as a photographer of a photo of the Panama Canal I'm guessing during construction or soon after, in a collection of Panama Canal material at an academic institution. It might be a different Cleveland C. Soper, although I feel the chances of that are small. The Sopers are an ancient New England family, so it's likely this was not the first brush Lovecraft's family had with their clan.

Merritt's stories are widely available for free. I think I saw some PDFs on horrormasters.com, if that site is still around.

It does seem like the Merriweather-Lewis (?) expedition was slightly overstocked with people familiar with the dreaded tome. Perhaps this was no coincidence.

[vortexgods]

It does seem like the Merriweather-Lewis (?) expedition was slightly overstocked with people familiar with the dreaded tome. Perhaps this was no coincidence.

Well, Chris and Chad have said somewhat jokingly that it was a popular page turner at Miskatonic U. (Go Pods!)

They don't actually mention him at all, which is why I assume he didn't have direct descendants, but that's perhaps a premature assumption based on little or no evidence.

No doubt his name has been blotted from the family history à la Joseph Curwen.  (While I was looking for the correct spelling of à la, I found this Wikipedia entry Ala [demon]...)

The intro in my edition of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (which is pretty old, as I bought it when I was a child) is not by S. T. Joshi, but by James Turner, and as intros go it seems a bit on the 'snarky' side. 

I suspect that that particular letter was chosen for effect (in the vein of 'Pearls cast before swine') and I'm happy to read that it misrepresents the letters following the publication of ATMoM.

[old book]

vortexgods: I followed that google books link and as usual it was a pain to deal with, and there was a page missing, but then I realized I had the Joshi ebook handy and looked it up there. I'm almost positive Joshi did a much more comprehensive survey of the letters section than I and his findings would reflect that research. All I did was look at the letters in the April, 1936 issue of Astounding Stories, the issue with the third and final installment of ATMoM. As I said, there was enthusiasm and praise, but I always liked the graphics that accompanied the story in the original publication, so it was a little startling to see the artist criticized at least twice for shoddy work.

Sorry to repeat myself, but I find it neccessary when using these electronic fora in order to avoid possible miscommunications. I don't think Joshi misrepresented the reception of ATMoM by Astounding readers overall, I just found there was contrary sentiment as well.

Is it possible the Necronomicon for purposes all its own drew the members of the expedition together to unwittingly perform a ritual or a ritual sacrifice at the southern antipodes? If as Sich and Chard say it is impossible to put it down, in the sense of it is impossible to stop reading it once you start, exactly how far can one get into its 750+ pages in one night? Or is the bulk woodcuts a la Arthur Jermyn, with large fonts and small boxes of text placed on large folio pages, as was the style in the Middle Ages? If there was a lot of white space, it might distill down to something like 50 pages in Microsoft Word, I suppose. But I'm guessing the eye really pauses on those woodcuts more than anything else, with the horrible lines a sort of running travelogue narrative voice-over. Sort of the opposite of Poe's "es lasst sich nicht lessen," the Necronomicon is a subtle multimedia experience employing subliminal and olfactory stimuli, optical illusions and eye-leading that would make commercial television focus study operations cry bitter tears and a plot outline just coherent enough to lead the reader over the edge into the deathless Abyss. Available at all quality bookstores and on barnesandnoble.com.

[Mike J.]

"Funny how sartin pitchers get ye ta thinkin' ..."

[Jake W]

In the final episode there was a quote where the narrator describes the Necronomicon as being read by very few people (I forget the exact words) and, in the context of the recent discussions on the podcast about how frequently it turns out that at least one of the characters in any given story has read it, an idea occurred to me.

We tend to think if every story has someone in it who read the Necronomican then there must be hundreds of others we're not hearing about who also have. But by making a different assumption we can frame the Lovecraft stories in another way and alter our perception so things become creepier.

If you impose an over-arcing thread so that HPL wrote about all of the small number of people who read the book it becomes more believable, to me anyway. This way suddenly they're not a sample group of Necronomicon readers, they're the whole group and bad things happen to every one of them. When this idea occurred to me I found it quite exciting.

Imagine the backstory of the protagonists of some of your favourite HPL stories, all attending Miskatonic U at the same time, sneaking into the library over several nights to look at the forbidden text. Or the university librarian as a Peter Cushing-like figure persuading the occasional student (you know the type he'd go for) to come look at a book that will open their eyes very wide indeed.

[old book]

Much in the same way the orb connected the disparate narratives in the animated film Heavy Metal, yes. Then posit a collection of near worlds, overlapping or conterminous, in a quantum dream flux of possibilities within certain bounds, and the Necronomicon swims through them as it wills, a sort of Shroedinger's porpoise, now it's real, now it's a seal, cavorting in and out of reality creating subliminal name recognition like the vapor trail of a charged particle coursing through a cloud chamber. That might explain a lot. In fact, the Necronomicon's non-reality could be a feint or cover, so that those who worship the Elder Ones and walk outside the gates go unmolested as harmless cranks.

"If you see the Necronomicon by the side of the road, kill it. With fire."

[Genus Unknown]

Old Book, I only understand about 30% of what you say.

[kulain]

Old Book, I only understand about 30% of what you say.

same here.