No Need

"How much is this?"

"Fifty lire. It is very cheap."

"All right. I want two extra clips and a box of cartridges."

She brought them from under the counter.

"Have you any need for a sword?" she asked. "I have some used swords very cheap."

"I'm going to the front," I said.

"Oh yes, then you won't need a sword," she said.


--Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 1929

the ex-Corporal

"...[T]he whole Reichstag and an astounding array of Generals had been summoned to hear his speech.  Appropriately this glittering event took place in the Kroll Opera House.  Hitler's speech was a long one and he used it to claim personal credit for the victories of 1940.  'I advised the German forces of the possibility of such a development and gave them the necessary detailed orders,' said the ex-Corporal to one of the most dazzling arrays of military brains ever gathered under one roof....

"When the applause of that multitude of Generals, politicians, and foreign dignitaries died away, Hitler began to distribute the honours. He created no less than twenty-seven new Generals.  Mostly they were men who had commanded armies or panzer groups to win for him the great victories in Poland, Norway, and the west.  But artfully Hitler arranged that yes-men such as Alfred Jodl and Wilhelm Keitel who had told Hitler, 'my Führer, you are the greatest military commander of history' got double promotions and seniority.  While Gustav von Wietersheim — whose motorized infantry corps had consolidated the panzer thrust by which Guderian skewered France — was passed over because he had argued with the Führer in 1938....

"So many new promotions were announced that there was not time for the Generals to receive Hitler's personal congratulations.  As each name was called, a General stood up and gave the Nazi salute....

"By the time that Hitler had finished creating Generals, and no less than a dozen Field Marshals, there could have been few men in the opera house who did not understand that this was a cunning piece of megalomania that, while thoroughly debasing the coinage of high rank, defined Hitler as the man who owned the mint.

"It was an unprecedented step.  The Kaiser made only five Field Marshals in the whole of the First World War.  Even General Erich Ludendorff had failed to find a baton in his knapsack.  Now Hitler made twelve after less than a year of war, and the fighting had covered only a few weeks. But the new Generalfeldmarschalle were delighted.  In Germany such exalted rank, from which the holder could neither be retired nor demoted (or even promoted), brought the provision of an office, a secretary, a staff officer, motor vehicles and horses, and full pay and privileges.  And all this for life or until defeat.  A Field Marshal ranked above Reich Chancellor in the protocol lists but not above Führer, which was a new post invented by Hitler for himself."


--Len Deighton, Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain, 1977

"Thus, I give up the spear!" - literary translation

"Vers toi je roule, baleine destructrice qui ne récolte que le néant, je suis aux prises avec toi jusqu’au dernier instant, du cœur de l’enfer je te frappe, au nom de la haine je crache contre toi mon dernier souffle. Sombrez tous cercueils, tous corbillards dans la mare commune puisque nuls ne peuvent êtres miens, que je sois déchiqueté et lié à toi en te chassant, baleine maudite ! C’est ainsi que je rends les armes !"

--la traduction est celle de Henriette Guex-Rolle

http://www.ebooksgratuits.com/html/melville_moby_dick.html

Straw Dogs --> Laozi's reference --> and elucidating commentary

"Heaven and Earth are heartless
treating creatures like straw dogs"

--Laozi, Tao Te Ching


"Heaven and Earth are not partial. They do not kill living things out of cruelty or give them birth out of kindness. We do the same when we make straw dogs to use in sacrifices. We dress them up and put them on the altar, but not because we love them. And when the ceremony is over, we throw them into the street, but not because we hate them."

--Su Ch'e, as quoted in Lao-tzu's Taoteching: with Selected Commentaries of the Past 2000 Years, translated by Red Pine

Teaching with Calvin and Hobbes

As requested, here are photos of the remarkable but desperately rare Teaching with Calvin and Hobbes.

A total of 57 Calvin and Hobbes comic strips (56 daily strips and 1 Sunday strip) appear in Teaching with Calvin and Hobbes, organized into five lesson units. Each strip is numbered and each panel in each strip is lettered for reference in the unit questions.

Number of comic strips per lesson unit:

1. The Binoculars - 10 strips
2. The Find - 10 strips
3. The Christmas Story - 1 Sunday strip + 9 daily strips = 10 strips
4. The Bug Collection - 17 strips
5. The Report - 10 strips

#25 of 25 Runes

“25. The Unknowable

“THE BLANK RUNE

“Total trust,
surrender,
relinquishing control--
all this is only words.
Look into the night sky.
Tell me what you see.

“Blank is the end, blank is the beginning....

“The Blank Rune often calls for no less an act of courage than the empty-handed leap into the void.”


--Ralph Blum, The Book of RuneCards, 1989

www.TheSteppe.com

up over yawning emptiness

"Beneath me, there is the crust of the earth. Beneath that, magma. Go far enough, through the core, eventually there will be crust again, and the bottom of the ocean. Then sea water. Then air. Then the edge of the atmosphere. Then infinite nothingness, directly beneath my feet. The entire earth is a little trapeze, holding me up over yawning emptiness. And space extends to either side of me, in front of me, behind me, and above me as well, forever."

--Michael Cisco, "Machines of Concrete Light and Dark" in Lovecraft Unbound: Twenty Stories, 2009

The Law of Conservation of Ninjutsu

"In any martial arts fight, there is only a finite amount of ninjutsu available to each side in a given encounter. As a result, one ninja is a deadly threat, but an army of them are cannon fodder.

"You can have three guesses who's going to win. The first two don't count."

--TVTropes.org

www.TheSteppe.com

Awesome Captured on Film: Orson Welles as Father Mapple in the 1956 movie *Moby Dick*

The sermon scene ends halfway through, and the following isn't worth watching, but this is the best-quality clip of Welles' performance on YouTube.

The set was reproduced from Melville's description, including the memorial plaques of the whalers lost at sea and the pulpit like a ship's prow.

"Delight is to him who against the proud commodores and gods of this earth, stands forth his own inexorable self...

"Yet this is nothing."

uninterpenetratingly: the comprehensive cosmic horror of Moby-Dick

“How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite?”

--Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Satire

"From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Satirical literature can commonly be categorized as either Horatian or Juvenalian.

"Horatian
Named for the Roman satirist, Horace, this playfully criticizes some social vice through gentle, mild, and light-hearted humour. It directs wit, exaggeration, and self-deprecating humour toward what it identifies as folly, rather than evil. Horatian satire's sympathetic tone is common in modern society. Examples of Horatian satire: Jonathan Swift's Gulliver’s Travels, Daniel Defoe's 'The True-Born Englishman', Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters, The Onion, Matt Groening's The Simpsons and the Ig Nobel Prizes.

"Juvenalian
Named after the Roman satirist Juvenal, this type of satire is more contemptuous and abrasive than the Horatian. Juvenalian satire addresses social evil through scorn, outrage, and savage ridicule. This form is often pessimistic, characterized by irony, sarcasm, moral indignation and personal invective, with less emphasis on humour. Examples of Juvenalian satire: Joseph Hall's Virgidemiarum, Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, Samuel Johnson's London, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, William Golding's Lord of the Flies, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Stephen Colbert's performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner, anarcho-punk band Crass, and the cartoon South Park."

past and gone

“Life continues interesting though I find it hard to realize that this--breakfast, dinner, lessons, mending, writing letters, arranging flowers, with a little visiting and reading is actually my life with a capital L. One waits for it to begin and will be waiting perhaps when it is past and gone.”

--Emily B. Trevett, journal, 1894 August 6

collected in Talking on Paper: An Anthology of Oregon Letters and Diaries, 1994

Halloween Reading - H.P. Lovecraft - Mongolia

“I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly-shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality. The mere telling helps me to restore confidence in my own faculties; to reassure myself that I was not the first to succumb to a contagious nightmare hallucination. It helps me, too, in making up my mind regarding a certain terrible step which lies ahead of me...”

--H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow over Innsmouth”

Unnatural sex acts, a dangerous secret cult, and one very long night...

H.P. Lovecraft's

“The Shadow over Innsmouth”

read by Radigan Neuhalfen

Cafe Amsterdam

Wednesday, 2010 October 27

8:00 PM

In the shunned New England seaport town of Innsmouth, something is very much not right, as one unfortunate traveller discovers on one unforgettable night.

Written and published in 1936 during the worldwide Great Depression, this popular and provocative classic of cosmic horror treats themes of economic collapse and desperation, miscegenation, racism, fear of the foreign, and humanity's wilful though perhaps necessary misinterpretation of the nature of the universe and our own role within it.

The subject of ever-increasing academic and mainstream attention, H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) stands as the most influential American horror writer since Edgar Allan Poe.

Radigan Neuhalfen is the author of the novel The Steppe and the blog The Crush of All Things.

Cafe Amsterdam

Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar

Influenza Pandemic, World War I, mass death is individual loss multiplied many times over, cosmic horror

"Elizabeth had fallen victim to the greatest cosmic prank of all time, the flu that had swept across the world in the spring and summer of 1918, as if the bloody abattoir in the trenches hadn't been evidence enough of humanity's divine disfavor. That's what Elizabeth had called it in the last letter he'd ever had from her: God's judgment on a world gone mad. Garner had given up on God by then: he'd packed away the Bible Elizabeth had pressed upon him after a week in the field hospital, knowing that its paltry lies could bring him no comfort in the face of such horror, and it hadn't. Not then, and not later, when he'd come home to face Elizabeth's mute and barren grave."

--Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud, "The Crevasse," Lovecraft Unbound, 2009

"enormous moral energy": Bataille on de Sade

"We know what men are with their particular circumstances and limitations. We know in advance that generally speaking they cannot fail to judge de Sade and his writings in the same way.

"Lack of understanding is in the order of things; it is that of mankind in general; it comes from their lack of strength and their feeling of being threatened.

"The criticisms that de Sade defied were well founded. He was not against the fool and the hypocrite as much as against the decent man, the normal man in all of us, so to speak. He was less concerned to convince than to challenge.

"Certain minds are fired by the thought of turning the most securely established values topsy-turvy. They are thus able to say gaily that the most subversive man who ever lived--the Marquis de Sade--was also the man who rendered the greatest service to humanity. Nothing to their mind be more certain; we shiver at the thought of death and pain (even the death and pain of other people), tragic or unspeakable events cut us to the quick, but that which inspires us with terror is like the sun, no less glorious if we turn our weak eyes away from its blaze.

"Like the sun at least in being intolerable to the naked eye, the figure of de Sade fascinated and terrified his contemporaries: was not the very idea that the monster was alive revolting? In our day and age, however, an apologist for his ideas is never taken seriously, and no one thinks them at all significant.... That would not matter if only de Sade's ideas did not lose their essential value: namely, that of being incompatible with the ideas of reasonable beings.

"De Sade asserted these unacceptable values in book after book. Life, he maintained, was the pursuit of pleasure, and the degree of pleasure was in direct ratio to the destruction of life. In other words, life reached its highest intensity in a monstrous denial of its own principle.

"Such a strange doctrine could obviously not be generally accepted, nor even generally propounded, unless it were glossed over, deprived of significance and reduced to a trivial piece of pyrotechnics. Obviously, if it were taken seriously, no society could accept it for a single instant. Indeed, those people who used to rate de Sade as a scoundrel responded better to his intentions than his admirers do in our own day: de Sade provokes indignation and protest, otherwise the paradox of pleasure would be nothing but a poetic fancy.

"In one way it is easier to be be receptive to de Sade's eroticism than to the religious demands of old. No-one today could deny that impulses connecting sexuality and the desire to hurt and to kill do exist. Hence the so-called sadistic instincts enable the ordinary man to account for certain acts of cruelty, while religious impulses are explained away as aberrations. By describing these instincts in masterly fashion then, de Sade has contributed to man's slow-growing awareness of himself--in philosophical terminology 'consciousness of self'; The expression 'sadistic', in universal use, is in itself clear proof of his contribution.

"The cruelty of de Sade's heroes should not be wholeheartedly abominated. It is a denial of the principles on which humanity is founded. We are bound to reject something that would end in the ruin of all our works. If instinct urges us to destroy the very thing we are building, we must condemn those instincts and defend ourselves from them. But there remains this question. Is our being ineluctably the negation as well as the affirmation of its own princple?

"One cannot fail to observe mankind's double nature throughout its career. There are two extremes. At one end, existence is basically orderly and decent. Work, concern for the children, kindness and honesty rule men's dealings with their fellows. At the other, violence rages pitilessly. In certain circumstances the same men practise pillage and arson, murder, violence and torture. Excess contrasts with reason.

"These extremes are called civilisation and barbarism. But the use of these words is misleading, for they imply that there are barbarians on the one hand and civilised men on the other.

"Common language will not express violence. It treats it as a guilty and importunate thing and disallows it by denying it any function or any excuse. If violence does occur, and occur it will, it is explained by a mistake somewhere, just as men of backward civilisations think that death can only happen if someone makes it by magic or otherwise. Violence in advanced societies and death in backward ones are not just given, like a storm or a flood; they can only be the result of something going wrong.

"But silence cannot do away with things that language cannot state. Violence is as stubbornly there just as much as death, and if language cheats to conceal universal annihilation, the placid work of time, language alone suffers, not time and not violence.

"Useless and dangerous violence cannot be abolished by irrational refusals to have any truck with it, any more than the irrational refusals to treat with death can eliminate that.

"The characters of de Sade's novels do not speak to man in general, as literature does even in the apparent discretion of the private journal. If they speak at all it is to someone of their own kind. De Sade's twisted libertines talk to each other. But they indulge in long speeches to show they are right.... What they insist upon is the overriding value of violence, excesses, crimes and tortures. In this way they fall short of the profound silence peculiar to violence, for violence never declares either its own existence or its right to exist; it simply exists.

"These disquisitions upon violence which keep interrupting the accounts of infamous cruelties that make up de Sade's books do not belong to the violent characters into whose mouths they are put. If such people had really lived, they would probably have lived in silence. These are de Sade's own ideas, and he uses this means to address other people.

"A paradox underlies his behaviour. De Sade speaks, but he is the mouthpiece of a silent life, of utter and inevitably speechless solitude. The solitary man for whom he speaks pays not the slightest heed to his fellows; in his loneliness he is a sovereign being, never called to account, never needing to justify himself to anyone.... All this calls for enormous moral energy, but such energy is in fact the point at issue.

"The solitary man proceeds step by step towards total negation: denial of other people first, and then by some monstrous logic denial of himself.

"It may be that de Sade's language is not common parlance, not addressed to all comers, but intended for those rare spirits capable of attaining to superhuman solitude in the very bosom of humanity.

"The man who speaks has nevertheless broken out of the solitude to which his condemnation of other people has condemned him.

"This monstrous anomaly hardly seems to correspond with the intentions of a man who, as he spoke, forgot the solitude to which he was condemning himself more unreservedly than other people had done, for he was betraying this solitude. Normal men, standing for common necessity, obviously could not understand him. His plea could not have any meaning, so that this enormous work taught solitude in solitude; a century and a half passed before its message was spread.

"Misunderstanding and revulsion from the generality of mankind are the only results worth of de Sade's ideas.

"De Sade's philosophy is not to be classed as madness. It is simply an excess, an excess to make our heads reel, but the excess of our own extravagance. We cannot ignore this without ignoring our own nature--and it is our nature that makes us tremble with fear.

"For the sake of greater satisfaction de Sade strove to infuse violence with the orderly calm of awareness.

"De Sade's writings, and this is their peculiar value, tend to bring men back to an awareness of something they have almost completely turned their backs on, looking for loop-holes and postponing the moment for coming to terms.

"They bring to man's thinking on the subject of violence the slow pace and the spirit of observation that characterise the conscious intelligence.

"In this way we reach a violence possessing the calmness of reason.

"The fact is that what de Sade was trying to bring to the surface of the conscious mind was precisely the thing that revolted the mind.

"It is only today we realise that without de Sade's cruelty we should never have penetrated with such ease the once inaccessible domain where the most painful truths lay hidden.

"And if today the average man has a profound insight into what transgression means for him, de Sade was the one who made ready the path. Now the average man knows that he must become aware of the things which repel him most violently--those things which repel us most violently are part of our own nature."


--Georges Bataille, "De Sade and the normal man" in L'Erotisme (Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo), 1957

www.TheSteppe.com

Ilf and Petrov in America

"When we had been in New York for a week and, as it seemed to us, we began to understand America, we were quite unexpectedly told that New York is not at all America. They told us that New York is a bridge between Europe and America, and that we were still situated on the bridge. Then we went to Washington, being steadfastly convinced that the capital of the United States is indisputably America. We spent a day there, and by evening we managed to fall in love with this purely American city. However, on that very same evening we were told that Washington was under no circumstances America. They told us that this was a town of governmental bureaucrats and that America was something quite different. Perplexed, we traveled to Hartford, a city in the state of Connecticut, where the great American writer Mark Twain spent his mature years. Much to our horror, the local residents told us in unison that Hartford was also not genuine America. They said that the genuine America was the southern states, while others affirmed that it was the western ones. Several didn't say anything but vaguely pointed a finger into space. We then decided to work according to a plan: to drive around the entire country in an automobile, to traverse it from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific and to return along a different route, along the Gulf of Mexico, calculating that indeed somewhere we would be sure to find America....

"This picture should be captioned as follows: 'Here, this is America!'

"And, indeed, when you close your eyes and try to rekindle memories of this country where you spent four months, you don't imagine yourself in Washington with its gardens, columns, and full collection of monuments, nor in New York with its skyscrapers and its poor and rich, nor in San Francisco with its steep streets and suspension bridges, nor in the mountains, factories, or canyons, but at such an intersection of two roads and a gasoline station against a ground of wires and advertising signs."


--Ilya Ilf and Yevgeni Petrov, Odnoetazhnaya Amerika, 1937, translated by Erica Wolf

The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival goes to Los Angeles

"Date:
2010 September 11, 2:00 PM

"Location:
Warner Grand Theater
478 West 6th Street
San Pedro, CA 90731-2632

"Contact:
Aaron Vanek
aaron@hplfilmfestival.com

"Description:
The first H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Los Angeles will screen six of the best movies that have played at the original HPLFF in Portland, Oregon, from the past 14 years.

"Schedule:
2pm - 2:45 = Socializing and opening ceremonies
2:45 - 5:45 = Movie Block 1 (180 minutes)
5:45 - 6pm = Q&A with block 1 cast and crew
6pm - 6:45 = Break
6:45 - 7pm = Astra Dance performance
7pm - 9:30 = Movie Block 2 (150 minutes)
9:30 - 9:45 = Q&A with block 2 cast and crew
10pm - 2am = Party at Whale & Ale (free admission with festival ticket, 21+), music by Thelonius Dub

"Block One:
Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown (2008) - An award-winning documentary about the man who created the Cthulhu Mythos, H.P. Lovecraft. Directed by Frank H. Woodward. (90 minutes)

Cool Air (1999) - "Never underestimate the power of the human will." Jack Donner (Transformers 3, Star Trek: The Original Series) stars in this powerful period adaptation of the classic Lovecraft tale about a man who will do anything to survive. Masterfully filmed in Los Angeles on a shoestring budget, directed by and also starring Bryan Moore. (44 minutes)

AM 1200 (2008) - Eric Lange (Lost), John Billingsley (True Blood), and Ray Wise (Reaper, Twin Peaks) star in this taut supernatural thriller about a man on the run who flees into a far worse Hell than the one he left. A modern Lovecraft-inspired tale directed by David Prior. (40 minutes)

"Intermission:
During the break, The Astra Dance Company, a theatrical dance company inspired and influenced by famed Gothic horror author Edgar Allan Poe, will perform some of their haunting scenes: http://www.astradance.com/

"Block Two:
The Music of Erich Zann (1980) - One of the earliest versions of one of Lovecraft's most popular stories. A boarder is drawn into the web of his mysterious old musician neighbor, who plays haunting music for an unseen audience. Directed by John Strysik. (17 minutes)

The Call of Cthulhu (2005) - Filmed in Mythoscope, this black and white film was made as if it were produced in 1926, the year Lovecraft wrote his definitive tale about a worldwide cult bent on raising their obscene god from the depths of the ocean. Expertly crafted by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, this is the most faithful Lovecraft story adaptation to date. Winner of many awards. Directed by Andrew Leman. (47 minutes)

Re-Animator (1985) - This extreme 80's horror movie spawned many filmmakers to follow in its footsteps by adapting Lovecraft tales. Starring Jeffrey Combs (Star Trek, The Frighteners) as Herbert West, a scientist obsessed with curing death. 2010 is the 25th anniversary of this outrageous horror-comedy. Directed by Stuart Gordon. (86 minutes)

"Guests:
Portland H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival founder Andrew Migliore

All directors of all six films: Stuart Gordon, Frank Woodward, Bryan Moore, David Prior, John Strysik, Andrew Leman, and Sean Branney

Music composer Richard Band (Re-Animator, From Beyond)

Actor Eric Lange (AM 1200, Lost)
Actor Jack Donner (Cool Air, Star Trek: The Original Series)
Cast and crew from The Call of Cthulhu: Noah Wagner, Barry Lynch, Patrick O'Day, Richard Lucas, Leslie Baldwin, cinematographer David Robertson, and special visual effects artist Dan Novy

"Vendors:
The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society: http://www.cthulhulives.org/toc.html
Behind the Scenes Costumes: http://www.behindthescenescostumes.com
Author Cody Goodfellow and Perilous Press: http://perilouspress.com/index.html
Artist Mike Dubisch: http://www.dubisch.com/theartofMike/TheArtofMike.html

"Advertisers:
Mythos Con: http://www.mythoscon.org/
Film Threat: http://www.filmthreat.com/

"The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival:
http://www.hplfilmfestival.com/ "

shared between ourselves and death

"We do not suddenly fall on death, but advance towards it by slight degrees; we die every day. For every day a little of our life is taken from us; even when we are growing, our life is on the wane. We lose our childhood, then our boyhood, and then our youth. Counting even yesterday, all past time is lost time; the very day which we are now spending is shared between ourselves and death. It is not the last drop that empties the water-clock, but all that which previously has flowed out; similarly, the final hour when we cease to exist does not of itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death-process. We reach death at that moment, but we have been a long time on the way."

--Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistulae morales, ca. 65 CE, translated by Richard M. Gummere

a grandeur, and unnecessary duplicates

“Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.”

--Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

liberators

“They said they came to liberate us. Liberate us from what? They came and said they would free us. Free us from what? We have traditions, morals, and customs. We are Arabs. We’re different from the West. Baghdad is the mother of Arab culture, and they want to wipe out our culture, absolutely.”

--Mohammed Abdullah, as quoted in Fiasco: The American Military Adventure In Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks, 2006