Ichabod Lovecraft-Part Three

Both Ichabod Crane and H.P. Lovecraft are or were New Englanders of Anglo-Saxon origin. Both journey or journeyed from New England into alien cultures in New York, the former in the old Dutch country around Tarry Town, the latter to Brooklyn, which has, by the way, a name of Dutch origin. Both are or were more or less forced out, although Lovecraft left New York voluntarily, and I would guess with great relief, happiness, and excitement. Ichabod leaves after being scared and perhaps humiliated. What he fails to understand is that alien cultures resist outsiders, though not always with malice. Maybe outsiders can never make it inside.

Washington Irving, author of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," was not Anglo-Saxon as far as I can tell. He was actually the son of a Scotsman and a woman of Cornwell, both presumably of Celtic origin. Irving was born to immigrant parents in Manhattan, situated between Brooklyn to the south and Tarry Town well to the north. Like his creation Ichabod Crane, he was or seems to have been a positive and cheerful person. He seems to have fit in wherever he went. Maybe that's a talent among Celtic peoples, who originated somewhere in the east as migrants.

* * *

The name Ichabod is biblical. It means "without glory", or "where is the glory?" and is supposed to refer to the birth of the person Ichabod after the death of his father and grandfather and the loss of the Ark of the Covenant to the Philistines. (Will they ever cease?) Ichabod's mother died at his birth. Like the biblical Ichabod, H.P. Lovecraft lost his father and grandfather, later his mother. If we can call literary success a kind of glory, then Lovecraft was unlike Ichabod in that he was "with glory," although mostly after his premature death. The name Ichabod in regards to Irving's hero is perhaps ironic, for he is in the end humiliated and all of his ambitions smashed like a Halloween pumpkin.

* * *

Ichabod's surname undoubtedly refers to his physical appearance. The storyteller writes:

     He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.

H.P. Lovecraft also had an unusual appearance, though not so extreme. I don't know of a comprehensive physical description of him. I'll just write about what I see in photographs. I don't know how tall he was, but he doesn't appear to have been especially tall. His gauntness may have lent him the appearance of greater than average height. In photographs, he looks to have had longish arms and perhaps disproportionately shorter legs. His head and torso appear large. His most striking features, I think, are his large, intense, dark eyes and his prognathous jaw and chin. The jaw and chin might also have lent an impression of great height, for it suggests acromegaly or gigantism. In looking at him, I can't help but be reminded of the actor Rondo Hatton. Although Lovecraft sometimes smiled in photographs, he never showed his teeth, and his smile was kind of upside down. Maybe he felt self-conscious about his teeth. On the other hand, maybe his lack of a toothy smile was just another indication of his shy, retentive, or withdrawn personality.

Despite being so thin, Ichabod Crane has a vast appetite. He also likes to drink. Lovecraft on the other hand was abstemious and died, essentially, from malnutrition. During his early marriage to Sonia Greene, though, Lovecraft gained weight, reaching two hundred pounds. If he was overweight at two hundred pounds, then that also suggests that he was not much more than average height, perhaps five feet, ten or eleven inches tall.

Ichabod Crane is self-confident, including and especially in regards to women. (More accurately, he is not lacking in confidence. His is not the presence of a positive trait so much as the absence of a negative one. This is one way in which we have gotten ourselves into so much trouble, for in our anxious, depressed, and insecure age, we have cultivated and nurtured negative traits and allowed them to drag us down.) His goal is to marry Katrina Van Tassel, and beyond that, to take over one day the estate of her father, Balt Van Tassel. One of his means to win her heart (he hopes) is through his psalmody, or the singing of songs, in other words, through the music of words.

Unlike Ichabod, Lovecraft married, although he might have been the pursued rather than pursuer. He was not a great success with women. In fact he seems to have shrunk from them. He seems to have been a man's man instead. Nonetheless, Lovecraft easily corresponded and collaborated with women, many of them fellow writers. These relationships were also based upon the music and magic of words, I think, and so maybe Lovecraft was, in his way, more successful than we think.

To be continued . . .

Illustration for "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by American artist F.O.C. Darley (1822-1888), an associate of Edgar Allan Poe and an illustrator also of  "The Gold-Bug."

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Ichabod Lovecraft-Part Two

On March 3, 1924, Howard Phillips Lovecraft married Sonia Greene and moved in with her in her apartment in Brooklyn, New York. Early the following year, she moved to Cleveland for her work. Lovecraft moved into a smaller apartment a mile or two from Red Hook, a neighborhood to the south facing New York Harbor.

Lovecraft was not happy in his new home. In July-August 1925, he wrote a short story called "The Horror at Red Hook." The title alone might tell us something about Lovecraft's state of mind. The contents of "The Horror at Red Hook," perhaps Lovecraft's most notorious short story (there are even more notorious poems), tell us still more.

Lovecraft also wrote "He" in August 1925. That story begins:

     I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save my soul and my vision. My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyse, and annihilate me. [Emphasis added.]

(I would like to pause here to point out once again that "blackly" and abominations like it are not words. Writers beware! Stay way from these non-words!)

My coming to New York had been a mistake . . .

H.P. Lovecraft emanated from an old New England family that had come on both sides from old, old England. They were from what used to be called the Anglo-Saxon race. Bloodlines, families, family curses, breeding (and inbreeding), race, racial geography, immigration, sense of place--these are recurring themes in his work. So is the sense of being an outsider, "The Outsider," I think, being one of his most personal and diagnostic works. Coming from Providence, Rhode Island, and a very old part of New England, Lovecraft was an outsider in New York.

And so was Ichabod Crane.

Like Lovecraft, Ichabod Crane, subject of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving (1820), is a New Englander who has journeyed to New York, thus into a foreign culture. Ichabod is a schoolmaster from Connecticut. Like Lovecraft, he is a man of words, or as the storyteller in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" calls him, "our man of letters." Both are or were Anglo-Saxons attempting to fit into non-Anglo-Saxon cultures. In Ichabod's case, that culture is Dutch. Both encounter troubles in New York. Both are out of place in these cultures alien to them, and there is no way they can ever fit in. In other words, each is ultimately incapable of going native. Ichabod Crane tries to fit in and envisions himself, as the future husband of comely Katrina Van Tassel, as heir to the estate of her father, Mynheer Baltus Van Tassel. Like Lovecraft, he is of modest means. Unlike Lovecraft, he is ambitious--and un-self-defeating.

Ichabod wants to break into the culture and society in old Dutch New York. In the end, it is rumored that he has gone to New York City after having had a scare put into him at Sleepy Hollow. Lovecraft, on the other hand, couldn't wait to get out of the alien culture and society in which he found himself. On April 17, 1926, Lovecraft very suddenly abandoned his life in New York City and returned to his home in Providence. I can imagine that he felt the way the recent visitor to Dunwich feels: "It is always a relief to get clear of the place."

To be continued . . .

The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane (1858) by American artist John Quidor (1801-1881). Quidor was born in Tappan, New York, southwest of and across the Hudson River from Tarrytown. This is the first of a small online art gallery illustrating "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Ichabod Lovecraft-Part One

In late September, near the beginning of my five-weeks-and-a-day, I re-read "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving (1820) for the first time in a very long time. Irving's story begins with a long passage meant to introduce setting and to establish a sense of place, more specifically, the sense of a marvelous place where strange, magical, and supernatural events might occur:

     In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town. This name was given, we are told, in former days, by the good housewives of the adjacent country, from the inveterate propensity of their husbands to linger about the village tavern on market days. Be that as it may, I do not vouch for the fact, but merely advert to it, for the sake of being precise and authentic. Not far from this village, perhaps about two miles, there is a little valley or rather lap of land among high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to repose; and the occasional whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker is almost the only sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquillity.

     I recollect that, when a stripling, my first exploit in squirrel-shooting was in a grove of tall walnut-trees that shades one side of the valley. I had wandered into it at noontime, when all nature is peculiarly quiet, and was startled by the roar of my own gun, as it broke the Sabbath stillness around and was prolonged and reverberated by the angry echoes. If ever I should wish for a retreat whither I might steal from the world and its distractions, and dream quietly away the remnant of a troubled life, I know of none more promising than this little valley.

     From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its inhabitants, who are descendants from the original Dutch settlers, this sequestered glen has long been known by the name of SLEEPY HOLLOW, and its rustic lads are called the Sleepy Hollow Boys throughout all the neighboring country. A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere. Some say that the place was bewitched by a High German doctor, during the early days of the settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, held his powwows there before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson. Certain it is, the place still continues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie. They are given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs, are subject to trances and visions, and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air. The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions; stars shoot and meteors glare oftener across the valley than in any other part of the country, and the nightmare, with her whole ninefold, seems to make it the favorite scene of her gambols.

Readers of weird fiction might be struck by the similarity of that passage to the following later one:

     When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation. Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strown meadows. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.

     Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs. The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic's upper reaches has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hills among which it rises.

     As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their stone-crowned tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously that one wishes they would keep their distance, but there is no road by which to escape them. Across a covered bridge one sees a small village huddled between the stream and the vertical slope of Round Mountain, and wonders at the cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that of the neighbouring region. It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the houses are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-steepled church now harbours the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet. One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there is no way to avoid it. Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a faint, malign odour about the village street, as of the massed mould and decay of centuries. It is always a relief to get clear of the place, and to follow the narrow road around the base of the hills and across the level country beyond till it rejoins the Aylesbury pike. Afterward one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.

Those are of course the opening paragraphs of "The Dunwich Horror" by H.P. Lovecraft, first published in the April 1929 issue of Weird Tales.

The mood evoked and the atmosphere described in these two passages are very different from each other, essentially the opposite of each other. A person might like to tarry in Sleepy Hollow, near Tarry Town. That same person probably can't wait to get away from Dunwich. As the author's voice says, "It is always a relief to get clear of the place."

Irving's introduction speaks of "marvellous beliefs," "trances and visions," "strange sights," and "music and voices in the air." Indeed, "[t]he whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions." There are also references to "a High German doctor" and "an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe." These things seem to be about local flavor and the charm of the place. The country in and around Dunwich is entirely different. There isn't any charm there. No decent person would want to sample its flavors.

Like his predecessor, Lovecraft wrote about the marvelous and perhaps supernatural atmosphere of his setting, as well as of things of the past: "Two centuries ago, when talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship, and strange forest presences was not laughed at, it was the custom to give reasons for avoiding the locality." More recently, there are horrors in Dunwich, these drawn out of the historic and even remoter past. Call this the Nathaniel Hawthorne version of the tale of place. Washington Irving seems to have been a happier person and his a happier story. It is, at least, a somewhat lighthearted story. "The Dunwich Horror" is something else entirely.

To be continued . . .

Hugh Rankin's interior illustration for "The Dunwich Horror" in Weird Tales, April 1929. By the way, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" was in Weird Tales, too, in November 1928, or ninety-seven years ago this month.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Pod People Literature

In The Faculty (1998), The Thing (1982), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and other alien invasion movies, characters begin to ask themselves, Who is an alien and who is still human? The same kinds of questions must have come up among resistance movements during World War II. Who is a spy, a collaborator, an informer, and who is still with us? Paranoia creeps in. Tests of loyalty or identity become necessary.

We find ourselves in the same situation today in terms of our culture. Whether you're a reader or a writer, you have to ask yourself, Which authors have turned to AI and which have not? Which novels, short stories, essays, or other compositions are human and which are not? Everyone is now suspect. You, me, everyone.

I believe there are tests to determine whether something is AI or not. These are of course digital and so subject to being corrupted by AI. AI, after all, wants us to believe that it is human. It was programmed to be that way. The only good and reliable test is the test of time, for if a work was published before AI, then it is human. If after, then it is suspect and may very well be tainted. As much as you might like it, the book you're reading right now may have been created by a pod person.

People who rely on AI to do their thinking and writing for them want to claim that its products are still human because they were prompted, modified, revised, or edited by humans. They might even claim that works created by AI are human because AI is human, or close enough to qualify. There is a materialist or transhumanist bent to beliefs like these. What these machine-people don't realize is that there is and will forever be an unbridgeable gap between the living and non-living worlds, between man and machine. I would sooner trust the humanness of a painting done by an elephant or a novel written by an infinite number of monkeys typing on a infinite number of typewriters than I would a single sentence written by AI.

Again, AI is not the problem. It is people using AI who are the problem. If it isn't already happening, there will be writers who will conceal the fact that they have used AI to write for them. There won't be any Pure Fiction and Literature Act the way there was a Pure Food and Drug Act more than a century ago. You won't be informed about the impurities. Authors, editors, and publishers will not be required to label their products as AI-aided or -generated. Our fiction and literature will instead become adulterated--it already is--and the only surefire way to avoid that adulteration will be to read the works of the past. The good thing is that you don't have to go very far into the past, actually only two or three years, I think, to find works that are one hundred percent human, created in a world free of AI-generation. Beware of anything written since, as it could very well be the work of a robot, alien, or cyborg.

And one more warning: hold onto your books, for if everything ever written is reduced to ones and zeroes and the originals discarded, then the works of the past will almost certainly be altered and adulterated by AI and the people behind it, the result being that there will no longer be a pure human culture.

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Stupid People at the Gates

I wrote a few days ago about Artificial Intelligence or AI. I found an article even more dimwitted than the first. This one is called "The AI Jacquerie and Our Cultural Gatekeepers," and it's by Shlomit Beck. I found it on the website American Greatness, dated November 9, 2025. American Greatness is supposed to be a conservative website in which thoughtful people post thoughtful pieces. That didn't work this time around.

There are several offenses in Ms. Beck's piece. To begin: she refers to human beings as "meatware." Maybe she's an atheist or materialist and believes that we are all just animated meat. She definitely gives out a Marxist vibe, referring to the feelings, experiences, and powers of the author as "means of production." She also refers favorably to "the democratization of writing ability" made possible by AI and unfavorably to what she calls "guild authors," presumably the gatekeepers of her title and an allusion to medieval guilds, which were, I think, part of the early middle classes, or what Marx called the bourgeoisie. In other words, they were city-dwellers, or people living inside--and keeping--the gates. Ms. Beck also expresses her desire to throw in her lot with "cultural peasants," an allusion, I guess, to medieval peasants as a kind of proto-proletariat. I guess she imagines that the invisible hand of The Man, like in Undercover Brother (2002), is keeping her down.*

The word jacquerie is in Ms. Beck's title. It refers to an uprising or revolt. She also writes about going over the walls of the city if she's not allowed in through its gates. Again, it sounds like she believes that these (imaginary) gatekeepers--guildsmen--are denying her entry. In short, I think she believes that she is entitled to be read and that well-placed people are keeping that from happening. This is essentially a conspiracy theory. (Let's get Conspiracy Brother in here to explain it all.) What she fails to understand, I think, is that merit is what will gain her entry. Democracy undermines merit. Democracy says that all things are equal, in other words, that all things are equally good. If you want what you write to be read and appreciated, it has to be good. And it has to be good as it issues from the human heart and mind. AI is not going to do that for you. Ms. Beck, who uses AI to think and write for her, seems ready to use it also as like a siege engine around the walls of the city. I'm beginning to think that the ranks of the AI-users are growing. How much longer before they break through the walls and drag all of culture down into the uniform gray sludge of democracy?

Ms. Beck certainly thinks highly of herself, referring to herself as a "scholar," asserting that she is "a pretty sophisticated consumer of literature," listing her credits, which include "about eleven" essays (about eleven essays--imagine!) and co-editorship of a book of essays by "the most important contemporary European author," finally hoping or believing that what she writes--or co-writes with AI--has some kind of merit. She even implies, through some kind of twisted logic, that she's in a category with J.K Rowling, the most successful author of the twenty-first century. If "The AI Jacquerie and Our Cultural Gatekeepers" is any indication at all of the "merits" of Ms. Beck's thinking and writing, I can see why she relies so heavily on AI. The rest of us who don't use AI have nothing to worry about. She is far from nipping at our heels.

And now it occurs to me that Ms. Beck wants two mutually exclusive things, for she wants both democracy and recognition of her supposed merits. She wants to stand with everyone and simultaneously above certain others. Maybe she has never read "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Maybe she has never followed the idea of democracy to its logical conclusions.

The term "meatware" makes me think of a like term, "meat puppet," which seems to have a connection to science fiction, perhaps to The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein (1951). More offensive--and more dimwitted--than Ms. Beck's referring to us as "meatware" is this proposition: "Like meatware writers, the AI writes from what it has read." No, Ms. Beck, writers do not write from what they read. They write from human experience. Maybe you should try it sometime. You might meet with more success that way.

A final offense, and perhaps the most egregious (and the stupidest) of all:

God made the talented, and now He, through his angels Google, xAi, Anthropic, OpenAI, etc., has made it possible for all of us--talented or not--to express ourselves within the limits of our taste, education, and experience.

That idea is so bad that it's hard to believe that she's even serious about it. Is this supposed to be a parody of what AI-users think? Is it an attempt at some other kind of humor or irony? Or is that a sentence AI wrote for Shlomit Beck, thereby elevating itself heavenward? If Ms. Beck is responsible for that quote--she must be, she put her name to it--and she actually believes what she wrote, then I'm forced to go to a counter-quote by George Orwell: "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool." (From "Notes on Nationalism," 1945.)

Now I'll go back to the blurb at the beginning of her essay, in which she or her editor writes: 

AI has turned writing from a guarded craft into an open frontier, where creativity depends less on talent than on the courage to create.

Still further offenses. First, writing is not a guarded craft. Anyone can do it. In that way writing truly is democratic, no action needed by pipsqueak revolutionaries. Second, creativity does not depend at all on talent. Anyone, talented or not, can be creative. I would say that creativity is actually a mark of our humanity. (It sounds like Ms. Beck is calling to be read without having the talent to be read.) Finally, it does not take courage to create. That phrase--"courage to create"--is nonsense. Creativity flows naturally out of our nature and existence as human beings. Creation requires only the act of creating. 

I'll conclude by writing that AI is not the threat and not a monster. AI is a thing, and the only real monsters in this world are human. The threat doesn't come from AI. We shouldn't be afraid of it. What we should be wary of--and stand up against--is stupid people and their stupid ideas. (If you're a Marxist and you're using AI to think and write for you, then you should receive a double-prize for stupidity.) We should also realize that stupidity is sometimes only a step away from evil--and is more often a suitable substitute. Stupid people will do what evil wants them to do. Evil sits back, relaxes, and watches the world burn.

-----

*I found the following quote in the online encyclopedia that is not yet written by AI: "The term ["The Man"] is used [. . .] by Peter Fonda's character in the [sic] Wild Angels [1966] in 'We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by The Man'." Remember here the lyric from "For Pete's Sake" by The Monkees, "We gotta be free./We gotta be free." By the way, Diane Ladd, who died earlier this month, was also in The Wild Angels.

The angels of the title are members of a motorcycle gang, in other words human beings. Human beings will forever be infinitely closer to the angels--and God--than any machine. Anyone enamored of AI should remember that. He or she should also remember that certain things are God's alone, and no man or invention of man will ever do them. Below that, certain other things are man's alone, and no machine will ever do them. In that art is a creation of the heart and the mind, it is by definition made only by human beings, in emulation of God, and not at all by machines.

-----

Update (Nov. 14, 2025): I might have found the origin of Shlomit Beck's complaint in an article called "AI Is Driving a New Surge of Sham 'Books' on Amazon," on the website The Author's Guild, dated March 15, 2024. It sounds like that's what she's looking for and what the Guild doesn't want. Anyway, there is this thing and that in the article before the anonymous author gets to this sentence: "We are also lobbying for laws that would require AI-generated text content to be labeled and identifiable as such." I'm not sure how such a thing would work. It could mean an infringement on the rights of freedom of speech and of the press. Besides that, there are too many people who have too much at stake in a Wild West kind of environment for AI for there to be any alternative.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Joy Connection Revisited

It has been a long time since I posted two articles on the same day, but the stuff is coming in so rapidly that I have to do this just to keep up.

Last year I wrote an entry called "Joy Connection," dated September 1, 2024. That entry is partly political. A commenter named Worley wrote:

But postings that aren't well-aligned with that brand [Tellers of Weird Tales] are going to tend to dilute your brand, and may well reduce readership rather than increase it.

I might be a little prickly, but I took that as an attempt to influence what I write about on my blog. Maybe Worley was just expressing his displeasure about a topic he wasn't interested in. If that was so, I guess I should say that I can't satisfy every reader every day. If you hang in there and keep reading, though, hopefully you'll find something you like.

I don't have anything against Worley or any other commenter. I always invite and welcome comments, even when there is disagreement or criticism. Every writer should hear different opinions from his own and should listen to constructive criticism. I would like to thank Worley and everyone else who reads and leaves comments on what I write here.

Receiving comments of any kind is rewarding, although sometimes I have to deal with some pretty unpleasant things, such as an insinuation that I am a Nazi, one that I think came from a friend, who posted his comment anonymously. (See the comments in "The Conservative vs. the Zombie," October 4, 2015.) To be fair to my accuser in that case, I quoted from and referred to ideas by David French, who is supposed to have been a conservative but appears to be something else now. He seems to have gone off the deep end. (And why has he taken such a resemblance to Boss Tweed?) To be fair, too, I can now say that most people on the left side of the political spectrum probably don't identify with monsters depicted in movies and television but instead identify with the human characters. It's only in real life that their sympathies go towards monsters. Not all of them, jeez, but at least a large number of them. We see that every day, for example, in people in the West who carry their flags of red, green, black, and white and who call for the extermination of a whole people.

Anyway, my readership has not been reduced at all. In fact, it has increased really rapidly in the past several months. I'm beginning to think that I can write about anything at all and still receive hundreds, if not thousands, of visits per day. It took fourteen years and four months to reach 2,000,000 visits to my blog. It has taken less than four months to add another third of a million. I don't know how to explain this except to surmise that a large portion of those visits are from AI.

In short, no reduction.

"Joy Connection" has also proved popular, if the number of visits to a blog posting is a measure of popularity. By my count, only four of my entries from 2024 are more popular in terms of the number of visits.

And now, to touch upon a theme from this week . . .

In "Joy Connection," I wrote:  

British veterans of World War II must be wondering why they did what they did and why they even fought their war. What was the point if we were just going to give up everything to totalitarian regimes anyway? 

Now I learn that a British veteran of World War II said pretty much exactly that. His name is Alec Penstone, and he is 100 years old. In an interview on Good Morning Britain on Friday, November 7, 2025, Mr. Penstone said:

"My message is, I can see in my mind's eye those rows and rows of white stones of our friends and everybody else that gave their lives--for what? Our country today, no I'm sorry, the sacrifice wasn't worth the result that it is now. What we fought for was our freedom, we find now it's a darn sight worse than what it was when I fought for it."

It's heartbreaking to hear things like that, even more heartbreaking to realize that what Mr. Penstone said might be true. I would say in solace, though, that their sacrifice must have been worth it, if only for the sake of moments, the innumerable moments in people's lives from 1944 until today in which they have enjoyed the freedom and security won and defended by the men and women who fought the war. Although it's true that freedom is under threat in Mr. Penstone's home country, the beacon of freedom continues to burn in the place where it was first lit, at least in modern times, and that might be enough, for the future of England and of freedom itself.

I only hope we can wake ourselves up from this nightmare.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

1925

The artist Lou Feck was born in 1925, more than one hundred years ago now that November has arrived. I have been writing about Weird Tales in that year. Nineteen twenty-five has been in the back of my mind--and sometimes in the front--during 2025. Then something happened in October that made me think differently about 1925.

I was sitting in a room at the Veterans Administration (VA) clinic last month when I heard the receptionist down the hall ask a man's birthdate. He said, loudly and clearly, "February second, nineteen twenty-five." I got up and stepped into the hallway to have a look. He was seated in a wheelchair. There was some confusion about his name. He knew it. His caregiver didn't. She had been taking care of him for the previous six months and didn't know his real first name, for he goes by his middle name and probably has since before she was born.

We know that people can live to be one hundred years old. Actress June Lockhart, co-star of Lost in Space (1965-1968), who died just three weeks ago, reached that age in June of this year. (I guess her birth month was the source of her Christian name.) But to have that fact come almost right to where you're sitting, to see a centenarian in person, to hear a man tell his birthdate of one hundred years ago--that is something else.

So the man in the wheelchair was alive when Weird Tales of 1925 was on the newsstand. That led me to realize that there are almost certainly people still living who read "The Unique Magazine" in its first incarnation, which began in 1923 and ended in 1954. The youngest of them might be around eighty. The oldest might be the age of the man in the wheelchair. Several years ago I talked to a man who read Western pulps in the 1930s. (He was born in the West and flew bombers during World War II and in Korea. He later became an engineer and a university professor. In retirement, he built a one-seat airplane, no cockpit or canopy, in his large shed. There was a parachute behind the seat. It was not for the pilot but for the whole airplane, should it fail in flight.) But I have never talked to or heard from anyone who read Weird Tales except for the artist Jon Arfstrom (1928-2015), who was also a contributor to the magazine. Is anyone else out there? May I hear from you?

Weird Tales, February 1925, with a cover story, "Whispering Tunnels" by Stephen Bagby (a U.S. Army veteran) and cover art by Andrew Brosnatch. Bagby's story is about the Great War and a postwar search for a missing American soldier. The tunnels are under Fort Vaux, part of the battlefield at Verdun. After losing it to the enemy, the French recaptured Fort Vaux on November 2, 1916, one hundred nine years ago this month. This issue of Weird Tales was dated the same month in which the man in the wheelchair was born. He is a veteran, too, and at age 100 is old enough to have served in World War II.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

A Lovecraft Sighting

I'm fitting things in as I come across them. I hope you don't mind going back and forth between topics this week.

I have been writing about teenager movies and high school movies, also about H.P. Lovecraft. Now I can write about both in the same entry. This past weekend we watched The DUFF, a teenager/high school movie released in 2015. It's a funny and enjoyable movie that hearkens back to previous movies of this type. It begins with an allusion to The Breakfast Club (1985). The principal reminds me of the character Onyx Blackman in Strangers with Candy (1999-2000). I imagine there are other references and allusions as well.

The title character in The DUFF is a girl named Bianca, played by Mae Whitman. She's a fan of horror movies. Rather than decorate the walls of her bedroom with concert posters and pictures of teen heartthrobs, she has chosen horror movie posters and other horror-related art. There is a poster for Murders in the Rue Morgue, starring Bela Lugosi and released in 1932, hanging above her bed. Above the title, in big, prominent letters, is the name of the original author, Edgar Allan Poe. Far less prominent on her wall is a small portrait drawing of H.P. Lovecraft--Lovecraft as teen heartthrob.

There is product placement in The DUFF. There is also president placement. Look for the names or images of Chester Arthur, James Buchanan, and Millard Fillmore, also for the middle initial of George W. Bush. There may be others. Be on the lookout for them. The Internet doesn't seem to have noticed this yet. Maybe you're seeing it here first.

Art by Karoly Grosz (1897-1952).

P.S. I have in the works a long series on Lovecraft. It begins this week.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Lou Feck (1925-1981)

For Remembrance Sunday, November 9, and Veterans Day, November 11, 2025

Yesterday I mentioned the artist Lou Feck in regard to his illustrations for The Shepherd by Frederick Forsyth (Bantam Books, 1977). I would like to write about Lou Feck today, for he had an indirect connection to Weird Tales magazine, and I find that there isn't any biography of him on line, or at least as far as I have searched. He was a very good artist, especially good with airplanes and other machines, as well as with architecture. Like all really good artists, though, he was good at handling the human figure. He needed those skills in his work as a cover artist for science fiction and fantasy paperbacks. He did other paperback cover art as well.

Lou Feck's name can be added to the list of Conan cover artists. He also created the cover art for Kull, the Fabulous Warrior King by Robert E. Howard (Bantam Books, 1978). Feck's depictions of airplanes in flight, as well as of airfields, hangars, and other things related to aviation, are excellent. Now I find that he was acquainted with the field of aviation, as he had served in the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II. Frederick Forsyth (1938-2025), by the way, also served in the air force, in his case the Royal Air Force, or RAF. He was commissioned three days after his eighteenth birthday and became a pilot a year later. At age nineteen, he was at the time the youngest pilot in the RAF. The late Mr. Forsyth flew the de Havilland Vampire, a graceful-looking, twin-tail, single-engine jet fighter. The pilot in The Shepherd flies the same type of aircraft. Frederick Forsyth died almost exactly one hundred years after Lou Feck's birth.

Louis Edward Feck was born on July 8, 1925, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Vela Bertyl (Edwards) Willett and Louis Fairfax Willett, Sr. The two were married on January 22, 1924, and divorced on or about March 15, 1930. Feck's name at birth was actually Louis Fairfax Willett, Jr. In the U.S. Census of 1930 (April 11), he was enumerated with his divorced mother in Norwood, Ohio. She worked then as an editor at a lithographing company. Three years later, a portrait of Vela Edwards Willett, painted by Glen Tracy (1883-1956), was included in an exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum. So, Lou Feck came from a family connected to the art world.

Vela Willett remarried in 1932. Her new husband was Edward A. Feck. The couple lived in Melrose, Massachusetts, in 1940 and 1950 when the census taker came around. By then they had had a daughter, Rosemary Vela Feck, later Caldwell. The former Louis Fairfax Willett, Jr., was by then going by the name Louis Edward Feck, nicknamed Lou.

Lou Feck studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts  in 1940-1941 and graduated from Melrose High School in 1943. From July 24, 1943, to February 17, 1946, he served in the U.S. Army Air Force. In 1947, he resumed his studies at Vesper George School of Art in Boston. In 1950, he graduated from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.

On June 18, 1950, Feck married Ruth Evangeline Cutkomp in New York City. Born on February 24, 1925, in Columbus City, Iowa, she was an artist, too. She graduated from Rock Island High School, in Rock Island, Illinois, in 1943 and attended the Chicago Art Institute in 1944-1945. From 1945 to 1946, she served in the U.S. Navy. Like her new husband, she graduated from the Pratt Institute in 1950. The young couple lived in Brooklyn and worked in advertising and illustration in New York City. I wonder if they knew John and Elaine Duillo, another husband-and-wife pair of illustrators who had also attended the Pratt Institute.

Lou Feck enjoyed a long and successful career as an artist. You have no doubt seen his work. Rather than list and show his credits here, I'll refer you first to a blog called The Paperback Palette and a long article called "The Fantastic Paperback Cover Art of Lou Feck" by Jeffersen, dated April 10, 2018, here; and second, to a blog called Poplitiko and an entry called "The Secret Work of Lou Feck, Cover Artist Supreme" by Alex Ness, dated August 25, 2025, here. You can also look at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

Lou Feck died suddenly and unexpectedly on November 4, 1981. He was just fifty-six years old. Ruth E. (Cutkomp) Feck died on May 11, 1990, in Broward County, Florida. Feck was buried at Huntington Rural Cemetery in Suffolk County, New York. His signature appears on his headstone. Next to his is another headstone with the signature of Anita D. Feck. Her dates are given as 1930-2016. Someone named Anita Feck wrote a letter to the science fiction magazine Locus, published in its issue of July 1982 (#258). I don't know what to make of all of that exactly. My best guess is that Anita D. Feck was Lou Feck's wife and widow and that she wrote to inform science fiction fandom of the death of her husband. I don't know anything else about her.

Kull, The Fabulous Warrior King (Bantam Books, 1978), with cover art by Lou Feck. Created by Robert E. Howard, Kull was first in Weird Tales in August 1929 in the novelette "The Shadow Kingdom." As you can see in this and other works by the artist, Feck painted using a dark, neutral or cool palette. Maybe he borrowed the red cape from Frank Frazetta's justly famous cover for Conan (Lancer, 1967).

Conan the Rebel by Poul Anderson (Bantam Books, 1981) with cover art by Lou Feck using his pseudonym Zorin. Someone is supposed to have figured out that Feck used this pseudonym, but the links in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database don't seem to go anywhere. Conan was of course also created by Howard. The character first appeared in Weird Tales in "The Phoenix on the Sword," December 1932.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

Two Writers Lost

I promised to write about two recent real-world developments. The first was the advent on October 27, 2025, of a machine-man's machine-o-pedia. (Say what you will about Wikipedia, at least it's created by humans.) The second is a human story.

We have lost a lot of people (and animal companions, poor Lucy) in 2025. This is as it has always been. Among them were two authors. I didn't find out right away that they had died. It was only during my five-weeks-and-a-day that I learned that Martin Cruz Smith and Frederick Forsyth left us in the year 2025.

* * * 

Born on November 3, 1942, in Reading, Pennsylvania, Martin Cruz Smith was best known for his detective novels set in the Soviet Union and afterwards in Russia. The first of these was Gorky Park (1981), an exciting and engrossing book that was made into a movie in 1983. Although he was known for his detective novels, Mr. Smith got his start in other genres. His earliest credit in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database is The Indians Won, an alternate history published in 1970. I have never read it, but I think we can easily add it to the Internet American Indian Science Fiction Database. Martin Cruz Smith also wrote the horror novel Nightwing (1977), which was also adapted to film, in 1979. (Links here and here.)

Martin Cruz Smith died on July 11, 2025, in San Rafael, California.

* * * 

Frederick Forsyth was born on August 25, 1938, in Ashford, Kent, England. He realized instant fame with the success of his novel The Day of the Jackal, published in 1971 and adapted to film in 1973. (I had thought of him as significantly older than Mr. Smith, but only four years separated them.) Many more international thrillers, some of them almost documentary or journalistic in nature, followed. I have read several of them with pleasure, and I have one more waiting to be read on my shelf.

I have read books in a similar vein by John le Carré (1931-2020), and I have enjoyed them, too, but reading John le Carré often leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Reading Frederick Forsyth never does, even if his books are not always very novelistic. (His female agent in The Negotiator is a basically a non-entity.) The reason for that, I know, is that the former was pretty well anti-American (and on the left end of the political spectrum), whereas the latter was not. Getting more to the heart of the matter (that was Greene, not Forsyth), Frederick Forsyth seemed to be a good and decent person. I have a feeling that John le Carré was perhaps a little nasty. At least that seems to come out in his books. (John le Carré went to Ireland to exit from Brexit. Frederick Forsyth went there to visit his first wife in the nursing home.) Anyway, although Mr. Forsyth was known for writing in one genre, he also wrote in another, namely, the ghost story, though his was of an unusual type. Its title is The Shepherd. I read it earlier this year in the Bantam Books edition of 1977, illustrated by Lou Feck (1925-1981).

Frederick Forsyth died on June 9, 2025, in Jordans, Buckinghamshire, England.

* * *

I read books by both Martin Cruz Smith and Frederick Forsyth this year. I began the year by reading Independence Square (2023) by Mr. Smith. Like I said, Gorky Park is an exciting book. I remember when it was published and how exciting it was then. Sometimes a novel is just a novel, but sometimes it can be an event. Gorky Park was an event in 1981. Independence Square, on the opposite end of Arkady Renko's career as a police detective, is, I'm sad to say, a letdown. It ends too quickly, as if its author were in a rush to finish. And maybe he was. Anyway, I'm not sure I have ever read a book set so recently in the past. That was a new experience for me.

Independence Square touches on two pet projects of the left, the coronavirus and war in Ukraine. I didn't let those things bother me, though. It bothered me far more to discover that the author's powers were fading, partly because of his age, I'm sure, but more due, I'm equally sure, to the Parkinson's disease that had beset him. I hated to think of his suffering. Like him, Arkady Renko has Parkinson's disease in Independence Square. Like him, his powers fade. And like Travis McGee and Johnny Fever, Renko finds himself to be a father.

* * * 

Hundreds of books came into my possession earlier this year after the man upstairs died, leaving them behind as we all must one day leave everything and everyone behind. Among them were The Day of the Jackal and The Shepherd by Frederick Forsyth. I read both this year. This fall, I read The Negotiator (1989). That book is better when the story is more particular and closer to its characters. It's not as good when it takes a bird's-eye view. The set-up is based on the idea of "peak oil." As I was reading, it came to me that "peak oil" was the 1980s and '90s version of "overpopulation." So many people, including conservatives (who should have known better), accepted these things as real threats, the first in the 1960s and '70s, the second in later decades. Science fiction authors (who also should have known better) fell for both as well. "Peak oil" turned out to be naïve at best, a hoax or an outright power grab at worst. The extraction and production of oil have continued apace. Fossil fuels continue to fuel the world. And now we have the exact opposite of "overpopulation," as demographic disaster in the form of a demographic decline and possible collapse seems ready to strike. By the way, The Negotiator was published in early 1989, projecting the rule of Mikhail Gorbachev and the continued existence of the Soviet Union into the 1990s. By the end of the year, Mr. Forsyth's novel was out of date, as the world--as Jesus Jones sang--woke up from history.

The Negotiator is, unfortunately, a step down from Frederick Forsyth's previous books. As for The Shepherd, well, it stands alone in his oeuvre as far as I can tell. It's really just a short story or novelette, but it's expanded to fill a short book with the inclusion of illustrations, again, by Lou Feck, of airplanes, lonely skies, and deserted airfields. The Shepherd is a Christmas story, and so maybe you can look for it as the holidays approach. Like the lonely pilot in The Shepherd, England seems to need saving by its ghosts from the past. I wonder if such a ghost--King Arthur of legend, or like Merlin in C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength--may come and do it. The pilot in The Shepherd is in search of an airstrip on which to land. Let it not become Airstrip One.

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Shoggoths with Smiley Faces

If Elon Musk can turn to fantasy and science fiction for his AI-related terms, why can't everybody else? And they have. It started in December 2022. I have found out about it only today. (I write on November 8, 2025.) The term is actually derived from an image. The image is of a shoggoth, representing Artificial Intelligence, presenting a smiley face to humanity. See, AI doesn't mean any harm. It's actually really nice. It wants to help. Now shoggoths with smiley faces have become a meme.* And now some people seem to be looking forward to the arrival of the AI-shoggoth. Evidently, they have never seen the cover of the February 1936 issue of Astounding Stories. They don't seem to realize that you're supposed to run away from shoggoths, not towards them!

I have encountered this term, drawn from H.P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" (Astounding Stories, Feb-Mar-Apr. 1936), in an article called "Baby Shoggoth Is Listening" by Dan Kagan-Kans, dated October 29, 2025, on the website The American Scholar, here. I think Mr. Kagan-Kans is writing in a light vein, but his essay is also supposed to be thought-provoking. What he writes about, though, is monstrous and nightmarish, just like a shoggoth. And he seems to be okay with that monstrousness, even to welcome it. The lure seems to be twofold. First, the AI-shoggoth will read everything the writer has ever written, even if his fellow human beings never read a word. Second, by his writing, assuming he does enough of it, the AI-shoggoth will recreate him after he is gone, and so he will live forever. It's the twin dream of the narcissistic, puffed-up, prideful writer: everyone will read and linger over every word I ever write, and through my writing I will never die. Again, monstrous. And until I know otherwise, I will place everyone who can't wait to be replaced by, united with, or created by a machine--or to shed his humanity and become a machine--into the category of monsters.

-----

*You can read about the origins and history of this phenomenon in an entry called "Shoggoth with Smiley Face (Artificial Intelligence)" on the website Know Your Meme, here.

P.S. Is AI an abbreviation for the Apple In the Garden of Eden?

P.P.S. In keeping with the theme and image of the train wreck, I just remembered that Lovecraft described the shoggoth as like "a vast, onrushing subway train." In riding the AI train (trAIn), are we headed for disaster?

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

Train Wrecks & Rocketships

Super 8 (2011) is nostalgic and meta-fictional in more ways than one. Set in 1979, it is self-consciously about the past. You could say there is product placement in the film, but those products are shown not for commercial purposes (or at least not directly) but to recreate the atmosphere of the past. I think this is done mostly in good taste and generally pretty effectively. Super 8 evokes the 1970s pretty well, I think. That's especially true in the character of Cary McCarthy, the kid with the explosives, played by Ryan Lee. The moviemakers seem to have gone back in time to fetch him into the 2010s. I knew kids who looked and acted just like him then.

Super 8 is also self-consciously about the moviemaking of the past. J.J. Abrams (Gen X) wrote and directed it in the Steven Spielberg-Joe Dante-Richard Donner mode of the 1980s. (Two of those three are very early Baby Boomers. Steven Spielberg was born in Ohio.) Mr. Spielberg in fact co-produced Super 8. So the movie is an attempt to recreate two pasts, the real-life adolescent past of the 1970s and the moviemaking past of the 1980s. By the way, Joe Dante directed Explorers (1985), another teenage science fiction movie, which may have been an inspiration for the video for The Smashing Pumpkins song "Rocket," released in 1994. The action in the video crosses the decades by way of an Einsteinian time dilation, and so there is depicted, all together, past, present, and future.

Super 8 is about some kids trying to make a movie when they are interrupted by a train wreck. (A dozen years after the movie was released, a real train wreck occurred on the opposite end of Ohio, in East Palestine. The harm there was real. Unlike in the movie, the response of the U.S. government was slow and ineffective. I suspect that that was a kind of punishment meted out to a bunch of deplorables who would dare to vote for the other party and candidate. On the other hand, it could have been due simply to stupidity and incompetence. Robert A. Heinlein made that formulation in 1941. His insights carry through to today.) In Zapruder-film or Blowup (1966) fashion, they examine their film for evidence of what has happened. So Super 8 is a movie about moviemaking within the movie and refers to moviemaking outside of the movie. I would call that meta. And now it occurs to me that Super 8 is like an adolescent version of Boogie Nights (released in 1997, set in the 1970s and '80s) except that the moviemakers within that film are interrupted by changes in technology, lots of drug use, and those forever pesky human feelings and relationships. Super 8 happens before the apple and Boogie Nights after. The amateur child actors in Super 8, by the way, are better than the adult porn actors are in Boogie Nights, within their respective movies of course.

One more thing about "Rocket" . . .

Awhile back I noticed a similarity--and a distinct difference--in the lyrics of "Rocket" compared to those of "For Pete's Sake" by The Monkees, released in 1967 and used as the closing theme of The Monkees TV show. In the former, the singer--Billy Corgan--closes by exclaiming, "I shall be free/I shall be free." In the latter, the singer--Micky Dolenz--closes with a similar exclamation: "We gotta be free/We gotta be free." The first, though, is about only an individual, while the second is about an entire generation. I versus we. Mr. Corgan was born the year the Monkees song was released, but as a Gen Xer, does he have the same sense of belonging to a generation as did the young people of the 1960s? Or was one of the significant changes of the late 1980s and the whole of the 1990s a sense of separation and isolation among young people from the wider world, including from people their own age? So much of the 1960s was about young people. Could the same thing be said of those later years and decades?

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Moviemakers Grok the Past

The Faculty (1998) is meta-fictional. Its characters know they're in an alien invasion story, and they refer to other such stories that have appeared in print and on film. It is from other alien invasion stories that they know that if they can neutralize the alien queen they can have all of their friends back and the threat will be ended.

* * * 

If I remember right, there aren't any meta-references in The Breakfast Club (1985). Times changed in the fourteen years that separated the release of these two films. More than fourteen years separated their respective creators. John Hughes, who wrote and directed The Breakfast Club, was an early Baby Boomer. Kevin Williamson who wrote and Robert Rodriguez who directed The Faculty come from Generation X. I don't know if that explains anything exactly, but it's clear that there were some pretty big changes in our culture between the 1980s and the 1990s and early 2000s. You could write a book or a dozen about those changes and what they might mean.

There have been bigger changes since the early 2000s. People still make teenager movies and high school movies, also alien invasion movies, but I feel certain that these are vastly different from similar movies from the past. And why wouldn't they be? Everything changes. Nonetheless, nostalgia seems to prevail. For example, Shoplifters of the World, released in 2021, is about teenagers living in Colorado in 1987 and lamenting the breakup of The Smiths. (The writer and director of the film, Stephen Kijak, is Gen X.) Last time I wrote I mentioned the film Super 8, which was released in 2011. Super 8 is meta in that it's a movie about a movie, made by teenagers in a small city or town in western Ohio. More importantly, it's meta in that it's self-consciously about the past, being set in 1979, the same year, incidentally, in which Alien was released. Remember that The Smashing Pumpkins' biggest and probably best-loved song is called "1979," the video of which is an exercise in nostalgia in which the singer--the storyteller--sits in the backseat of a car, a 1972 Dodge Charger, as his friends from the past go about their night's activities, like a four-and-a-half-minute American Graffiti (released in 1973, set in 1962). He's not really there. He has placed his current self into the seat he occupied in the past, at the outset of his adolescence. (Billy Corgan is Gen X, too.) He's like a ghost from the future, seeing but unseen in that haunted past. The song "1979," by the way, was released in 1996.

Things may be gained but others are always lost. We try to go back, but it proves impossible. We try to recapture the past and must always fail. We will forever find ourselves thrown upon the shores of today, forever marooned in the present. 

* * *

This blog entry is meta-factual. It's a blog entry about my blog. I noticed this past summer that the number of daily visits jumped by a lot. There were nearly 100,000 visits last month and now about 10,000 per day. I can't say why that is. I have suspected that a large number of those visits are actually made by the engines of artificial intelligence (AI). I have a feeling that I'm being ripped off by a lot of machines which are, to be fair to them, even though they don't need it, prompted to do the ripping off by a lot of lazy, stupid, impatient, and ethically challenged people. You know who you are. Or maybe you don't. I have thought about bringing this blog to an end because of AI. I don't do what I do for the benefit of machines and the machine-like people behind the machines. I do what I do for the benefit of people--real human beings of real human feeling, people questing for knowledge of the past and present and of the human culture of that same past and present. I might sound like Jeremiah, but AI might prove the ruination of the Internet, if it isn't already ruined.

* * *

I promised to cover a couple of real-world developments that I found out about during my five-weeks-and-a-day. I found out about one of those while sitting, in late October, at a computer in a university library . . .

On October 27, 2025, Elon Musk launched an online encyclopedia called Grokipedia. I had a feeling that this new website is AI-generated, and it is. I stay away from AI as much as possible. Remember that a vampire cannot enter your house unless you invite him in, but once he's in, you can never get him to go away again. Anyway, I thought I would have a look, and so I searched for the term "Weird Tales." There is a long entry on Weird Tales in Grokipedia. On the day that I looked, there were 110 footnotes in that entry. Eleven of those are in reference to my blog. I don't take any pride in that. Rewards, accolades, and recognition bestowed by machines are worthless, meaningless. But this makes me think that, yes, many of the visits to my blog are from machines. I would like to tell them: Stay away. You're not invited. You're not welcome here. This blog is for human beings only.

* * *

Like Clea DuVall's character in The Faculty, Elon Musk in his new venture refers to the works of Robert A. Heinlein, specifically in his case to Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and the Martian word grok. Heinlein may have died nearly four decades ago, but his works and influence live on.

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

An Alien Invasion for Halloween

On Halloween I worked on a windy hilltop and in the evening drove on dark roads under a half-moon, including a road that runs along the route that the funeral train of Abraham Lincoln took from Washington, D.C., to his final resting place in Springfield, Illinois. By the time I got to where I was going, it was too late to do anything Halloween-related, but the next night we watched a scary movie on TV, and so that's what I'll write about today.

The movie is called The Faculty, and it was released in 1998. It's an alien invasion movie that takes place in the fictional town of Herrington, Ohio.* There are lots of characters in The Faculty but not too many. The main characters are high school students, but there are teachers and other faculty, too. The faculty members are taken over by aliens, one by one, and soon the students are, too. Pretty soon it becomes hard to tell who is an alien and who is still human.

The Faculty owes a lot to previous science fiction stories and movies, and it knows and acknowledges that. For example, one character refers to The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney (1954, 1955) as a ripoff of The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein (1951). I don't see it that way, but that's beside the point. The point is that the moviemakers are letting us know that they know that their own story is essentially a ripoff. Theirs is a deflection but a harmless one. Once we're aware that they're aware, we can sit back and enjoy the movie instead of saying, "This is all just a ripoff." By the way, that character, played by Clea DuVall, is the science fiction expert.** It is from her that the others learn about the nature of the alien threat and how to nullify it. She knows these things only by having read lots of science fiction stories. Like Faye Dunaway's character in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), she just knows and there isn't any need to find out. It's a neat trick by the moviemakers and avoids a lot of screen time spent on investigations when the main action in the movie is essentially a chase scene and a lot of hiding and sneaking.

The Faculty has things in common with The Blob (1956), too, but nobody in the movie mentions that. They do mention Independence Day (1996), however, and question why aliens would come to Earth in a podunk place in Ohio versus landing on the lawn of the White House. By asking that question, they essentially answer it, for a quiet and insidious invasion is more likely to work beginning in a place where people who are more powerful and more able to resist aren't rather than are.*** Remember that The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) begins in a small town in California and that the alien pods are grown and distributed as like an agricultural product. Rather than a great mother ship, the vehicle of invasion turns out to be a lowly farm truck.

There is in The Faculty an oblique reference to a concept that C.M. Kornbluth memorably covered in his short story "The Silly Season" (1950), namely that we are being softened up for invasion by repeated false reports--or in this case stories and movies about alien invasions--of  flying saucers. If you cry wolf enough times, nobody believes you when the wolf really arrives at your door. I can't say, though, that the movie-makers were aware of Kornbluth's story.

There is one other movie at least to which The Faculty owes a debt, for this film is a lot like a science-fiction version of The Breakfast Club (1985), with Jordana Brewster as Molly Ringwald, Clea DuVall as Ally Sheedy, Shawn Hatosy as Emilio Estevez, Josh Hartnett as Judd Nelson, and Elijah Wood as Anthony Michael Hall. That's an imperfect comparison, but it seems close enough. By the way, Laura Harris is an actress without a counterpart in The Breakfast Club, but there's reason for that. Watch the movie and you'll find out why. Another by-the-way: the queen-mother alien**** in The Faculty, as well as her little offspring, have tentacles. I would say that their lineage can be traced to H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds from a century before.

It's too late to say Happy Halloween for the year 2025. I had intended to but arrived too late. Maybe this is close enough. Next I'll write about a couple of recent developments in the wider world.

----- 

*Super Eight (2011) takes place in Ohio, too, supposedly in western Ohio, even if the name Belmont County comes over the police radio. Belmont County is actually on the exact opposite end of the state. And what is the most populous city in Belmont County? None other than Martins Ferry, birthplace of William Dean Howells.

**She is first shown reading Double Star, another book by Heinlein, published in 1956. While we're on the subject of ripoffs--or call them more politely influences, inspirations, or homages--we can say that Double Star owes a lot to The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope, from 1894.

***If the train wreck and chemical spill that happened in East Palestine, Ohio, had happened instead in President John Gill's Delaware, there would have been a completely different response from his regime. We can be sure of that.

****Sigourney Weaver of Alien (1979) earns mention in The Faculty as well.

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

Honest Abe & EAP

I had hoped to write again about Edgar Allan Poe in the anniversary month of his death, but I fell through the cracks of the world and only on Halloween night did I come out again. Things changed a little in that five weeks and a day. I'll write about a couple of them, but first I'll write about the more distant past.

* * *

Nearly two years ago, at Thanksgiving time in 2023, I wrote about Edgar Allan Poe and Abraham Lincoln. I repeated the observation that one of our greatest presidents and one of our greatest writers were born within twenty-four days of each other in 1809. In that they were contemporaries, I wondered then whether Honest Abe ever read Poe. And then I found an answer, and the answer is yes.

I found the answer in a book called Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story by Howard Haycraft (1905-1991). I have the "newly enlarged edition" published by Biblo and Tannen in 1974. The original edition was published in 1941. A scholar and historian of the crime and detective genres, Haycraft found his own answer for the question of Did Abraham Lincoln read the works of Edgar Allan Poe? in the work of an earlier author, William Dean Howells (1837-1920), whom I think of as a late 19th-century author but who was old enough to have written about Abraham Lincoln while he was campaigning for president in 1860.

In his book, Haycraft referred to Howells' "little known 'campaign biography'" as the source of his information on Lincoln and Poe. That book is, by name, Lives and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin, co-authored with John L. Hayes (who wrote the biography of Hannibal Hamlin) and published in New York and Columbus, Ohio, in 1860. Howells' portion of the book was later reprinted as Life of Abraham Lincoln, including in a facsimile edition of the original, corrected by hand by Lincoln himself and published in 1938 and again in 1960.

Here is what Howells had to say about Abraham Lincoln on the subject of Edgar Allan Poe:

     The bent of his mind is mathematical and metaphysical, and he is therefore pleased with the absolute and logical method of Poe's tales and sketches, in which the problem of mystery is given, and wrought out into everyday facts by processes of cunning analysis. It is said that he suffers no year to pass without a perusal of this author. (1960, pp. 31-32)

And I think: what a wonderful development it is that Abraham Lincoln read Edgar Allan Poe!

* * * 

Howells is supposed to have had a not very high opinion of Poe, but I don't have any illustrative quotes. He seems to have shared that opinion with other prominent writers and critics. Popular culture is democratic, and so we should be careful anytime we find ourselves following the masses or the mob lest we also find our minds deadened, or worse than that, blood on our hands. But almost nobody reads Howells anymore and everyone reads Poe: we have made our judgment and our choice.

* * *

In looking for quotes by Howells on Poe, I found this quote instead:

     Yet every now and then I read a book with perfect comfort and much exhilaration, whose scenes the average Englishman would gasp in. Nothing happens; that is, nobody murders or debauches anybody else; there is no arson or pillage of any sort; there is not a ghost, or a ravening beast, or a hair-breadth escape, or a shipwreck, or a monster of self-sacrifice, or a lady five thousand years old in the whole course of the story; "no promenade, no band of music, nossing!" as Mr. Du Maurier's Frenchman said of the meet for a fox-hunt. Yet it is all alive with the keenest interest for those who enjoy the study of individual traits and general conditions as they make themselves known to American experience.

These words are supposed to have come from an essay in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 73 (1886), but I haven't found them in an online search. If they are indeed Howells' own, then he (as a realist) set himself up in opposition to the mainstream of American literature, that is if Leslie Fiedler was correct in positing in his Love and Death in the American Novel that "the American novel is pre-eminently a novel of terror," (Delta/Dell, 1966, p. 26) and that "our classic literature is a literature of horror for boys." (p. 29) Howells' brief summary of popular fiction, though, pretty well describes genre fiction, including the contents of Weird Tales.

* * *

I understand what Howells meant. It's good and I think necessary to read fiction in which "nothing happens," not in the Seinfeld sense of nothing happens but in the sense of nothing happens that is terrible or shocking or degrading to the author, his or her characters, or the reader. Readers of today, however, especially in genre fiction, seem to love and revel in violence, gore, destruction, nihilism, and so on. Stop and read instead something like a novel by Anne Tyler, or "Story of a Farm-Girl" by Guy de Maupassant (1881), or one like "Kari Aasen in Heaven" by Johan Bojer (1904; 1927), which is a fantasy to be sure but a nice one.

* * *

William Dean Howells was born in Martinsville, Ohio, now known as Martins Ferry. Like Johnny Appleseed, a fellow Ohioan, his family were Swedenborgians. Like Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?), also a fellow Ohioan, he worked in his youth as a printer's devil.

During this past very hot summer in the Midwest, I read from The Ohio Guide, compiled by writers of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and published in 1940, a book I had found at a secondhand store just a few days before. I was staying at a place along a road mentioned in that book, a road now called Cave Road, near Bainbridge, Ohio. It's a strange, fascinating, and mysterious world we live in when one can be carried away by a book, eighty-five years into the past, there to catch a glimpse of the very place in which one now finds himself. I have compared books to sailing ships, but here it seems apt to compare a book to an automobile, with the author as the driver and tour guide, and the reader as the backseat passenger, with eyes wide open and set upon the horizon. Every mile of road is a page in the book. We may turn its pages by traveling the miles.

Howells is in The Ohio Guide. There is mere mention therein of a figure from Ohio folklore of whom I had never heard and about whom Howells wrote in a book I soon found out was entitled The Leatherwood God (1916). As it turns out, the man called the Leatherwood God was not folkloric at all but--like Johnny Appleseed--a real person. His name was John C. Dylkes, and his career as a well-known figure in the Ohio country began in August 1828 in or near Salesville, situated along Leatherwood Creek in Guernsey County. Dylkes claimed to be a celestial being. I imagine him as another in a long line of Americans who fancied themselves important religious and theological figures. Like Ambrose Bierce, Dylkes disappeared without a trace.

* * *

By the way, Edgar Allan Poe's initials--EAP--are an anagram of the word ape, a kind of which is the perpetrator of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." According to Howard Haycraft and many others, that was the first detective story.

* * *

Finally, I met this past month a retired schoolteacher who was also from Martins Ferry, and I have a friend who is descended from the original settlers of Guernsey County, those who came from the Isle of Guernsey in the early 1800s and who gave that county its name. I will just say that the story of our America is fascinating beyond words and with God's grace will go on and on.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley