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[ Tuesday, August 24, 2004 (7:44 PM) ] ( link )
Phos and Ash: This summer, along with work, I also took care of two cats who lived in the apartment that I stayed in. Their names were Ash (female) and Phos (male) (whose namely apparently derives from the Greek word for light). For those, like certain former roommates, who worry about what I reveal on this website, be forewarned that this is hardly the manliest post I have ever written.
Phos and Ash were perhaps the two most charming cats I have ever met. Those who know me already know how fond I became of these cats. What was most striking was how much personality each of these cats had. Phos was a bright, curious, active cat, the only one I know who would play fetch with little (fake) stuffed mice. (In fact, if you threw the mouse directly over his head, he would execute an amazing in-air flip to get it.) Sometimes his activity went a little over the top. For instance, he had this annoying habit of climbing onto the bed in the early hours of the morning, convinced that either your arm or your blanket was hiding something important. The result was several mornings where I was woken up by Phos attempting to claw his way (quite painfully, I might add) through my curled up arms. Yet another annoying habit of his was his insistence that you pay 100% attention to him. So, for instance, if you were sitting on the futon trying to read a book, he would deliberately climb between your eyes and the book, and then plant himself there until you played fetch with him, pet him, or otherwise put yourself at his service. Finally, when he found you just sitting on a chair working on your computer (say, to work on your way overdue paper), and he had been trying to get your attention by meowing for a few minutes, he would decide that surely the human had something better to do, and to get your attention he would leap into the air, grab onto your back with all four long-clawed paws, and hang on as you shouted and struggled to extricate his claws from your skin.
I realize this is making Phos sound a lot more aggravating than likeable, but that's not the case. He also had this very endearing habit of climbing onto your lap (usually while you were working on the computer), scrambling around to get a good lying position, and then plopping down into your arms, so were forced to cradle him (or else he would slide off to the ground). Then he would promptly fall asleep, leaving you incapable of doing anything other than admire him, since you didn't have any hands free to, say, work on your paper, or even check your email. Another endearing habit of his was to crawl onto the futon or the bed, typically while you were oblivious to his presence, and then curling up with his back against you, at the risk of your rolling over him. Finally, being the attention hound (cat) that he was, after getting your attention he would do this cute trick of flopping onto his side and looking expectantly up at you, in the hope that you would start playing with him. When this didn't happen, he would get into your line of sight and then flop over again.
Ash was the complete opposite of Phos, in many ways. Where Phos was active and curious, Ash was one of the laziest, most placid cats I had ever met. She spent the vast majority of the day camped out in a couple of favorite roosting spots (among them my suitcase and the top of the futon), where she would either sleep or lie almost perfectly still, staring at you and looking fat. She startled easily and endearingly; her eyes had a tendency to bug out if you were bothering her but she didn't feel inclined to actually get up and avoid your attentions. She was also sometimes a lap cat, but was far less active about it than Phos, with an inclination to just sit on your lap until your legs fell asleep. About the only active things she would ever do were (1) dig food up from the garbage disposal (e.g., egg shells, grape stems, etc.) and then play with it on the kitchen floor or, even more disgustingly, on the rug; (2) run out into the hallway (along with Phos) whenever you opened the door, and then make a serious dash for it if you chased her, with occasional peeks over her shoulder, invariably followed by a brief (but impressive) burst of speed.
Anyway I liked these cats a lot, and I'm sure there are little quirks of theirs that I'm missing here. (People who knew them can fill in details.) Here are some pictures of them that I took with my cellphone's nifty new camera feature; they are only a smattering of the 300 or so photos I took of them over the course of the summer. Phos
Ash
[ Monday, August 2, 2004 (8:10 PM) ] ( link )
Cthulhu!: My posts the last few days have been way too serious for their own good. So I think it's time for some silliness, and what better way to get silly than to talk about the Cthulhu Mythos.
The Cthulhu Mythos came to mind because I recently saw Hellboy, the fun but flawed movie by Guillermo del Toro. (I've previously talked about the film here, a post that also contains a brief summary.) I think that by any objective measure the movie is pretty bad. But I love the Hellboy comics, by Mike Mignola, and I love the Cthulhu Mythos, which is part of the dark background of the Hellboy comics, and so I thought, in an unabashedly fanboyish way, that the movie was fabulous. Now, it may be that people are unfamiliar with the Hellboy comics. Although I think they're broadly accessible, it might be that their commercial distribution (at least prior to the film) wasn't wide enough for people to know enough about them. I can appreciate that. But some people are also unfamiliar with H.P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos, and I find that ignorance unacceptable.
A word about me and Lovecraft. I first encountered Lovecraft in my seventh-grade speed-reading class, which was utterly useless except that it gave me an hour every day to just read whatever the hell I wanted, outside the watchful supervision of my parents, who thought that I should only read books from the insufferably dull "Classics" section of our public library. (This is why, in that same class, I also breezed through Franz Kafka's The Trial in two days, without retaining a damned thing except that the narrator was killed by a knife twisted in his chest--the first time I had ever heard about that particular method of murder.) Unfortunately the books in my speed-reading classroom were terrible, even for somebody like me who really just wanted to read anything that was not Lorna Doone or some other hideously dull novel. The one exception was a slender volume with a luridly gruesome cover, which turned out to be a collection of stories by an author with the strangely macabre name of H.P. Lovecraft. The first two stories in the collection that I read were "The Colour out of Space" and "In the Walls of Eryx," fortunately two of Lovecraft's most accessible and sensational stories. I was immediately hooked, and devoured as many of Lovecraft's stories as I could find. By an extraordinary coincidence, many of his books were so old that they looked like classics, allowing me to fool my parents into thinking that I was educating myself, when in fact I was just scaring myself silly. (Now you can read many of Lovecraft's stories here, or in multiple collections that have sprouted since his posthumous popularity.)
But back to the Mythos. I recently discovered that the owner of my apartment, who otherwise has highbrow stuff like Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose on his shelves, also curiously has H.P. Lovecraft's Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos Volume I, edited by August Derleth. The introduction to that book, written by Mr. Derleth, has the following excellent summary of the Cthulhu Mythos: "All my stories," wrote H.P. Lovecraft, "unconnected as they may be, are based on the fundamental lore or legend that this world was inhabited at one time by another race who, in practising black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on outside ever ready to take possession of this earth again." . . .
These powers of evil are variously known as the Great Old Ones or the Ancient Ones . . . . Supreme among them is the blind idiot god, Azathoth, an "amorphous blight of netermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity." Yog-Sothoth, the "all-in-one and one-in-all," shares Azathoth's dominion, and is not subject to the laws of time and space, being co-existent with all time and conterminous [sic] with all space. Nyarlathotep, who is presumably the messenger of the Great Old Ones; Great Cthulhu, dweller in hidden R'lyeh deep in the sea; Hastur the Unspeakable, who occupies the air and interstellar spaces, half-brother to Cthulhu; and Shub-Niggurath, "the black goat of the woods with a thousand young," complete the roster of the Great Old Ones as originally conceived.
It's hard to explain to Lovecraft newbies what is so interesting and exciting about his works. It is not the silly names, which are simply too easy to make fun of. (Imagine the Great Old Ones as Pokemon creatures, who communicate by speaking their own names: "Cthu-lhu!" "Yog-yog-soth-oth!" "Aza?") It is partially, I think, Lovecraft's writing, which can sometimes achieve a slimy and decadent beauty. ("I seemed to be looking down from an immense height upon a twilit grotto, knee-deep with filth, where a white-bearded daemon swineherd drove about with his staff a flock of fungous, flabby beasts whose appearance filled me with unutterable loathing. Then, as the swineherd paused and nodded over his task, a mighty swarm of rats rained down on the stinking abyss and fell to devouring beasts and man alike.") But it is mostly the tremendous atmosphere that Lovecraft evoked, a sense of dark and awesome powers lurking behind the thin fabric of normal life, gibbering madness straining against the illusion of sanity. Or, as Lovecraft put it in the opening of the classic "The Call of Cthulhu" (from which the name of the Mythos is euphonically derived): The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Heavy stuff.
Then there is the lighter side of the Mythos. Neil Gaiman has written a short story, nominated for the Hugo Award this year, on Sherlock Holmes in a Lovecraftian universe. Roger Zelazny wrote the whimsical and charming A Night in the Lonesome October, where a dog matter-of-factly narrates his master's adventures to quell various unspeakable horrors. (His master, by the way, is Jack the Ripper.) Then there is the unmentionably weird Hello Cthulhu (irregular comic strip here, merchandise here), and Cthulhu for President. Alternatively, you can search the web with Cthuugle, which links to the highly amusing Tales of Plush Cthulhu. Or you could run your web page on the Cthulhu server. And finally, there is this site, which frankly just confuses me. ("As Cthulhu, you have a natural interest in the welfare of your fellow man, and a desire to help and serve others in a humanitarian way." They must be kidding.)
In other words, the Cthulhu Mythos has a little something for everybody. So what are you waiting for? Cthulhu fhtagn!
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