Sharp winter light on the trees across Main Street, door open, cold air curling in, Hank Mobley sizzling on the deck, someone -- Philly Joe Jones? -- all animated on the drums, Wynton Kelly and Grant Green adding accents and curlicues. I'm not a fan of "jazz guitar" by any stretch of the imagination, but this is awfully tasty stuff that must have been lots of fun to play. Microeconomics handed in yesterday afternoon: the long express bus ride out to the university and back, with HPL for the journey there and Philip Roth's Everyman for the journey home. HPL's a weird one. A genuinely great writer who produced some awfully purple prose. The book fell open on my lap to an account of winged bat-creatures bearing human brains across the cosmic aether in magical metal jars. But then you get a description like this: "A mountain walked or stumbled. God!" (Great Cthulhu, monstrous green octopus-bat-deity, emerging from his drowned crypt somewhere off the coast of Tasmania). Or, a sentence or two later, this astonishing account of a seaman's death: "Parker slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boats, and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn't have been there, an angle which was actute, but behaved as if it were obtuse." (The fantastic rendered in laconic just-the-facts-ma'am prose, the mystery of how a human could be swallowed "by an angle of masonry" left unresolved, the alien city leaning out to casually devour him, just as a carnivorous plant might close around an unsuspecting fly).
- posted by cjb @ 11:37 AM