The love of ruins letters on Lovecraft PDF
Preview The love of ruins letters on Lovecraft
The Love of Ruins SERIES EDITORS David E. Johnson (Comparative Literature, SUNY Buffalo) Scott Michaelsen (English, Michigan State University) SERIES ADVISORY BOARD Nahum D. Chandler (African American Studies, University of California, Irvine) Rebecca Comay (Philosophy and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto) Marc Crépon (Philosophy, École Normale Supérieure, Paris) Jonathan Culler (Comparative Literature, Cornell) Johanna Drucker (Design Media Arts and Information Studies, UCLA) Christopher Fynsk (Modern Thought, Aberdeen University) Rodolphe Gasché (Comparative Literature, SUNY Buffalo) Martin Hägglund (Comparative Literature, Yale) Carol Jacobs (Comparative Literature & German, Yale University) Peggy Kamuf (French and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California) David Marriott (History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz) Steven Miller (English, University at Buffalo) Alberto Moreiras (Hispanic Studies, Texas A&M University) Patrick O’Donnell (English, Michigan State University) Pablo Oyarzún (Teoría del Arte, Universidad de Chile) Scott Cutler Shershow (English, University of California, Davis) Henry Sussman (German and Comparative Literature, Yale University) Samuel Weber (Comparative Literature, Northwestern) Ewa Ziarek (Comparative Literature, SUNY Buffalo) The Love of Ruins Letters on Lovecraft Scott Cutler Shershow and Scott Michaelsen Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2017 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic,magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production, Jenn Bennett Marketing, Michael Campochiaro Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shershow, Scott Cutler, 1953– author. | Michaelsen, Scott (Scott J.), author. Title: The love of ruins : letters on Lovecraft / by Scott Cutler Shershow and Scott Michaelsen. Description: Albany, NY : State University of New York Press, 2017. | Series: SUNY series, literature . . . in theory Preface. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016031425 (print) | LCCN 2016048876 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438465111 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438465128 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Lovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips), 1890–1937—Criticism and interpretation. | Lovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips), 1890–1937—Appreciation. Classification: LCC PS3523.O833 Z858 2017 (print) | LCC PS3523.O833 (ebook) | DDC 813/.52—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031425 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Preface vii letter one Prayers 1 letter two Warnings 3 letter three Psychonautics, Sublimity, Love 6 letter four Love and Ruins 9 letter five Ruins and Race 12 letter six Ruins, Sublimity, Laughter 15 letter seven Race and Writing 17 letter eight Writing and the Love of Ruins 21 letter nine Race, the Fourth Dimension, Apophasis 24 letter ten Race, the Love of Wounds 28 vi Contents letter eleven Wounds, Race, Music, and Noise 32 letter twelve Race, Orientalism, Writing 38 letter thirteen Time Travel, White Mythology, the Library 42 letter fourteen Cities in Ruins 47 letter fifteen The Late City, the Decline of the West 51 letter sixteen Basalt Towers, Trapdoors, Taboos, Nameless Beings 56 letter seventeen Apophasis, Science Fiction, Visibility and Racism, Im-Possible Politics 63 letter eighteen Archive, Irruption, Eruption, Basalt 66 letter nineteen The Great Race, the Archive 73 letter twenty Comedy and Laughter 77 letter twenty-one Class, Socialism, Politics 81 letter twenty-two Doubling, Indirect Racism, the Gift of Vision, Nonknowledge 86 letter twenty-three The Fourth Dimension, Community 93 letter twenty-four The Fourth Dimension, Community, Unworking 99 Contents vii letter twenty-five Community, Sacrifice, Cults 107 letter twenty-six Racial Degeneration, Police, Sacrifice 111 letter twenty-seven Sacrifice, Madness, One Blood, the Invention of the White Race, Frogs 119 letter twenty-eight Untimeliness, Sacrifice, Religion 127 letter twenty-nine Religion after Religion, Dread 131 letter thirty Religion, the Wholesome, Faith and Knowledge 136 letter thirty-one Kindness, Wonder, Horror 141 letter thirty-two Hauntology, Religion, Science, Race, and Racism 146 letter thirty-three Modern Apophasis 152 letter thirty-four The Weird, the Future, the Open 157 Notes 163 Bibliography 181 Index 189 Preface H. P. Lovecraft’s daily life revolved around correspondence. He is esti- mated to have written 100,000 letters in his relatively short lifetime, and 20,000 of these letters survive. The longest known letter consists of more than sixty handwritten pages. It is estimated that the publication of Lovecraft’s total extant correspondence will fill 200 large volumes, with letters to certain correspondents (Donald Wandrei, Robert E. Howard, and August Derleth, for example) demanding multivolume treatment. The five-volume Selected Letters contains heavily edited versions of only 1,000 of these letters. The following is a sequence of thirty-four letters about the work of H. P. Lovecraft, each one written from Scott to Scott, who have been writing letters to each other for more than thirty years. Scott and Scott started writing to each other, at least in part, simply because they have not lived in the same city since 1981. Writing to each other has also always been our preferred mode of engaging questions of philosophy and literary theory. It’s the method by which we continue to teach each other how to think. In publishing these letters as letters, perhaps we run the risk of being seen as comparing ourselves to the many celebrated literary correspon- dences of the past, such as those between Wordsworth and Coleridge, Goethe and Schiller, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg, and many others. We might also be running the risk of a kind of anachronism. While written letters were the only real option for communicating long distance among, let’s say, the Lake Poets, and remained quite reasonable for Lovecraft in the 1930s, today the new technologies and latest software platforms enable something like the dream of real-time communication, ix
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