Did I ever tell you my favorite color was blue?

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And then of course I forgot to post anything for Lovecraft's birthday, but rushthatspeaks and I did catch In the Mouth of Madness (1995) at the Brattle on Sunday night. It's like someone constructed a H.P. Lovecraft story out of Stephen King parts. It is also so meta that it doesn't just settle for disappearing up its own ass, it more or less bursts out of its own chest afterward and waves at you. Suddenly that one icon of cucumberseed's makes perfect sense.

Yesterday involved a dentist's appointment for which I had to get up at stupid o'clock, but since most of this afternoon was taken up by the wooden hot tub at Inman Oasis and wandering around the Harvard Museum of Natural History with derspatchel afterward, I have no grudge against the week so far. I re-read John Bellairs' The House with a Clock in Its Walls (1973). There's a shout-out to M.R. James' "Count Magnus" in the graveyard scene. Also, I had no idea in fourth grade that Odilon Redon was not as much of Bellairs' invention as the Fifth Michigan Fire Zouave Lancers or New Zebedee. I really envy Mrs. Zimmerman that coiling purple dragon.

I have found on YouTube one of the classic things my grandparents first played for me: Shelley Berman, "Department Store." I am now trying to avoid spending the rest of the night listening to Bob Newhart.

Comments

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(it was the first one I read--thank you, fifth grade teacher with a sense of what smart ten-year-olds will find interesting).

I think it was the first one I read, too; I found it on a shelf in my fourth grade classroom and almost certainly read it while I was supposed to be paying attention to classes. It was the Dell paperback, with the greenish moon of a clock-face staring down from within the house's shadow, the same edition I borrowed from derspatchel for about an hour yesterday. I remembered certain images from it very vividly—I mentioned a couple to teddywolf here—but this time around I could see much more of its likeness to The Face in the Frost (1969), both the constant dry humor and the equally underlying unease, which I can finally appreciate without being too freaked out to analyze the technique. Bellairs doesn't write safe magic, which is a fascinating thing for a children's book. I was scared by Jonathan's eclipse of the moon:

At first they saw nothing strange. Then, slowly, a black, tarry, drippy shadow oozed down over the face of the surprised moon. Uncle Jonathan walked over to the tulip bed, put his ear to the ground, and listened. He motioned for the others to join him. Lewis put his ear to the damp earth, and he heard strange things. He heard the noise that earthworms make as they slowly inch along, breaking hard black clods with their blunt heads. He heard the secret inwound conversations of bulbs and roots, and the breathing of flowers. And Lewis knew strange things, without knowing how he came to know them. He knew that there was a cat named Texaco buried in the patch of ground he knelt on. Its delicate ivory skeleton was falling slowly to pieces down there, and its dank fur was shrivelled and matted and rotten. The boy who had buried the cat had buried a sand pail full of shells near it. Lewis did not know the name of the boy, or how long ago he had buried the cat and the pail, but he could see the red and blue pail clearly. Blotches of brown rust were eating up the bright designs, and the shells were covered with green mold.

It's a beautiful, uncanny held breath of a passage; all the things that make themselves known in the absence of the moon (like that folktale) may be an illusion visible only from Lewis' backyard, but within the aura of Jonathan's ritual that is both stage-magic and exactly the way you would draw the light down from the sky—flourishing the moon's reflection from a rain barrel—they're spellbinding and secret and true. This in the same book in which the apocalypse can be averted by playing Bon Sour One Frank until the Ace of Nitwits appears. It's an astonishing combination.