Music, Automobiles, & Rocketships-Part Seven

Car Names & Brandnames

There are lots of songs about cars, driving, and being on the road. Here are just a few:

• "Be Thankful for What You've Got" by William DeVaughn (1974):

Though you may not drive a great big Cadillac

Gangsta whitewalls

TV antennas in the back

[. . .]

Diamond in the back, sunroof top

Diggin' the scene with a gangsta lean

The "diamond in the back" refers to the 1970s-era Cadillac Coupe DeVille, which had a diamond-shaped rear window.

• "Hot Rod Lincoln" covered by Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen (1971):

My pappy said, "Son, you're gonna' drive me to drinkin'

If you don't stop drivin' that Hot Rod Lincoln."

Have you heard this story of the Hot Rod race

When Fords and Lincolns was settin' the pace

That story is true, I'm here to say

I was drivin' that Model A

It's got a Lincoln motor and it's really souped up

That Model A body makes it look like a pup

It's got eight cylinders; uses them all

It's got overdrive, just won't stall

With a 4-barrel carb and a dual exhaust

With 4.11 gears you can really get lost

It's got safety tubes, but I ain't scared

The brakes are good, tires fair

The name of the band is science-fictional, but I think it has more to do with the nostalgia for the 1930s and '40s that was prevalent in the 1960s and '70s than it does with science fiction. Even so, the singer includes a lot of hard detail on his Model A with the Lincoln motor. That was common in midcentury car culture, for example in the letters column of CARtoons magazine (1959-1991). But it is and was also common in the hard science fiction and military science fiction of the 1920s until--when? Now? For an example of hard details about machinery, spacecraft, etc., see Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein (1959), such as in Chapter VII in which the narrator describes his battle suit and how it works. Here's a briefer example:

It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic.

From Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984).

That attention to detail when it comes to machinery wasn't new in American literature in 1984, or 1959, or 1926 when Amazing Stories made its debut under the editorship of electronics gadgeteer Hugo Gernsback. Here is an excerpt from "To a Locomotive in Winter" by Walt Whitman, from 1876:

 Thee for my recitative,

            Thee in the driving storm even as now, the snow, the winter-day declining,

            Thee in thy panoply, thy measur'd dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive,

            Thy black cylindric body, golden brass and silvery steel,

            Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides,

            Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance,

            Thy great protruding head-light fix’d in front [. . .].

If you sense sexual overtones in Whitman's poem, you might be onto something. Here is a poem by another American in which you will likely have the same sense:

she being Brand

by e.e. cummings (1926)

 

she being Brand

-new;and you

know consequently a

little stiff i was

careful of her and(having

thoroughly oiled the universal

joint tested my gas felt of

her radiator made sure her springs were O.

K.)i went right to it flooded-the-carburetor cranked her

up,slipped the

clutch(and then somehow got into reverse she

kicked what

the hell)next

minute i was back in neutral tried and

again slo-wly;bare,ly nudg.  ing(my

lev-er Right-

oh and her gears being in

A 1 shape passed

from low through

second-in-to-high like

greasedlightning)just as we turned the corner of Divinity

avenue i touched the accelerator and give

her the juice,good

      (it

was the first ride and believe i we was

happy to see how nice she acted right up to

the last minute coming back down by the Public

Gardens i slammed on

the

internalexpanding

&

externalcontracting

brakes Bothatonce and

brought allofher tremB

-ling

to a  dead.

stand-

;Still)

There is barely disguised sex-in-the-machine in rock and pop music, too:

• "Pink Cadillac" by Bruce Springsteen (1984):

I love you for your pink Cadillac, crushed velvet seats

Riding in the back, oozing down the street

Waving to the girls, feeling out of sight

Spending all my money on a Saturday night

Honey, I just wonder what you do there in the back

Of your pink Cadillac, pink Cadillac

• "Freeway of Love" by Aretha Franklin (1985):

We got some places to see

I brought all the maps with me

So jump in, it ain't no sin

Take a ride in my machine

[. . .]

We going riding on the freeway of love

In my pink Cadillac

(If cars, futuristic machinery, rockets, and spacecraft are symbolic of sex, then maybe the term hard science fiction has an unintentional double meaning.)

Will Rogers famously said that in Depression-era America, "We'll have the distinction of being the only nation to go to the poor house in an automobile." Americans go other places in automobiles, for example, to the:

• "Love Shack" by the B-52s (1989):

Hop in my Chrysler, it's as big as a whale, and it's about to set sail

I got me a car, it seats about 20

So come on and bring your jukebox money

Two more examples of where we go in our cars: First, in 1971 and 1972, Americans loaded automobiles onto rocketships, took them to the moon, and there they went modockin, in relative terms (or maybe I should say they went moondockin) among craters and rocks and over moon dust. Second, in 2018, Elon Musk launched a red Tesla Roadster into outer space, and so an earthly automobile became an outer space-craft. It's still out there, circling through the solar system with a dummy driver called Starman. You can follow his flight on the Internet. If that's not a science-fictional development made manifest in the real world, I don't know what is.

There have been lots of TV shows with custom cars: Batman, The Green Hornet, The Monkees, The Banana Splits, The Dukes of Hazzard, Starsky & Hutch, Knight Rider. At least a couple of those cars are science-fictional. There have also been TV shows with cars that aren't custom but nonetheless are identified with a certain character, for example, Columbo and his battered Peugeot 403, Jim Rockford and his teeny Pontiac Firebird Esprit, and Thomas Magnum and his borrowed Ferrari. In popular science fiction and outer space fantasy, spaceships are distinctive, like makes and models of cars, for example in Star Wars or Thunderbirds. A lot of those cars and spaceships have been made into die-cast toys--Hot Wheels, Tootsie Toys, Matchbox, Galoob. They have also been made into plastic models. This was Baby Boomer culture: everything became a toy, a game, a model, a bubblegum card (e.g., Weird Wheels), a comic book, a Halloween costume, or a piece of candy. I confess I can't think of a car-themed candy from the years when Baby Boomers were still young.

Cadillac . . . Ford . . . Lincoln . . . Chrysler . . . all of these are brandnames, and each appears in in at least one of the songs listed above. I'm sure you can come up with plenty more on your own. I have been railing against product placement and the use of brandnames in fiction. Last year, I wrote:

Another problem with the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales is that it is shamelessly, perhaps thoughtlessly, commercial. Its authors place the names of commercial products in their stories as if they had been paid to do so. In contrast, there is only one brandname in Heart of Darkness [by Joseph Conrad], Martini-Henry, the name of a rifle. That's a concrete detail. It's not product placement. In general, I think using the names of weapons, cars, cigarettes, and alcoholic drinks is probably okay in a work of fiction. The list of acceptable brandnames used after that must be, I think, pretty short, especially in a short story.

Using the name of a car in a story or song is not product placement, though, for the name of the car tells us something we need to know. The B-52s sang about a Chrysler "as big as a whale," and we can picture that because we know something about cars. If you're going to the Love Shack, you'd better drive a car that seats a lot of people. I knew someone in the air force who had a car so big and loose in its handling that it was called "the Tuna Boat." (I don't remember the make or model. Maybe it was an Oldsmobile.) When we were kids, our neighbors down the street had a huge car--an Oldsmobile Delta 88--light blue, all steel, with a hood the size of a barn door. Half the kids in the neighborhood could sit on that hood without its buckling. In the summer it got so hot it would scorch the back of your legs. You could have fried an egg on it. On the other end of the street was a light green AMC Gremlin, a completely opposite kind of car, named for a folkloric creature that bedevils aircraft. One of our grade school teachers, a small, intense woman with tall hair, drove a metallic blue Corvair. It was the perfect car for her. Every morning she would tear into the parking lot, late as always and unaware, I guess, that the Corvair was supposed to be "unsafe at any speed." Each of those cars had its own look and feel. It wasn't just "a car." If the detail counts in your story, you go with the detail. By the way, the Delta 88 was named after a jet airplane, the F-102 Delta Dagger, and so there are further connections between automobiles and futuristic technology. But let's move on down the road . . . a Cadillac is a car, but the name also has a certain cachet. If you were alive in the 1970s, you probably remember seeing big Cadillacs cruising up and down the streets of the city. William DeVaughn's details are perfectly evocative of not simply the car but also a time, a culture, a milieu. All are gone forever, but at least we have his song and the memories that will die only when we do.

The make or model of a car is informative, like writing "sycamore" or "oak" instead of "tree." As I wrote before, using the brandnames of weapons, cars, tobacco products, and alcoholic drinks is, I think, acceptable because that use is not about commerce or consumerism but about the story and its characters. We don't need to know specifications and details about most other products. There's a difference between a Lincoln and a Volkswagen. That difference is or can be meaningful in a story. Likewise with a Camel versus a Virginia Slim. The cover illustration of Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins (1980) looks like a pack of Camel cigarettes. That's not product placement. The package design is part of the story. One of my greatest friends ever smoked Virginia Slims. They fit her as if they had been designed for her. When Steve McQueen drove a Ford Mustang in Bullitt (1968), that wasn't product placement (although I'm sure it helped sales). The car fit with the character and with the actor, even if the Dodge Charger he chased all around San Francisco outperformed his Mustang.

In movies of the 1980s and '90s, there was a lot of product placement. For example, in Raising Arizona (1987), the Snoats brothers sit down to eat, and there in front of them--between us and them, practically in our faces--are a can of Coke and a box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes, with a picture of M&Ms on the back of the box to boot. Evelle Snoats doesn't say, "Awful good Kellogg's Corn Flakes®, Mrs. McDonough" because he doesn't have to. It's right there in front of us. That's an advantage that film has over prose: the storyteller's product placement can happen right along with the story. It's still obvious and it still detracts from the storytelling, but at least it doesn't become the storyteller's point. Put another way, film is like a syrinx, for in film the artist can sing two notes at once. Another difference between film and prose: product placement in film is explicitly self-conscious, purposeful, and commercial. The people making the movie or TV show get paid for their services. Authors who use brandnames and place products in their prose presumably do not. Their use of brandnames and their product placement are presumably unselfconscious. They give away their services, for they are so steeped in commercialism and consumerism that this is just how they think. You use brandnames in your writing and speech. It's just what you do. These things add nothing to the story. In fact they detracts from it. And yet authors of today continue to detract from their writing by including brandnames and placing commercial/consumer products, and now services, in their stories.

In our weird fiction book club for June (2026), we read new or newer stories in Robert W. Chambers' King in Yellow universe. (He didn't create that universe. Writers after him did, mainly to capitalize on his creation.) One of the stories we read is "Movie Night at Phil's" by Don Webb.* Born in 1960, Mr. Webb is a Baby Boomer, in other words, one of the TV-watching generation. His story is about watching TV. Fun fun. Writers are instructed to write from their own experience, but what if the only "experience" you have ever had is watching TV? This story is one result. If I were to keep reading newer fiction, I'm sure I would find more. What a dreary prospect that is.

I have to tell you, "Movie Night at Phil's" is an extremely annoying story. In the first sentence is a brandname, BetaMax. Although Mr. Webb's story depends on that specific commercial product, his use of a brandname in the first paragraph is jarring and immediately off-putting. Why not write a story that is not dependent upon a branded product? Wouldn't that be a better exercise? Anyway, in the second paragraph is another brandname, Loreal®, complete with the registered trademark symbol. Then another, Frisbee, then Amazon, then eBay, then Sharpie® and its registered trademark symbol. Imagine: a professional writer actually included the registered trademark symbol in his story, not once but twice, the reason being, I guess, that he can't think of a physical object or a commercial service without attaching a brandname to it. If this were a pulp fiction story, would those symbols have counted as words? Would the author have been paid a penny or two for including them? I'm sure the manufacturers of 2012 appreciated his support. Maybe they sent him a check for helping him advertise their products. Writers tend to hawk their own wares, but why would they devote any space at all to hawking anybody else's?

Anyway again, in Mr. Webb's story, even place names and the names of universities are treated as brandnames. These are among his literary offenses that include namedropping, listing, and self-referential and too cute insider information. Maybe Mr. Webb was trying to be satirical. But if your satire is indistinguishable from the things you're attempting to satirize, then something could be wrong with your writing. I suspect he was not attempting satire in his story. I suspect there wasn't any irony at all and that he was writing in weak and pale earnest the way writers do these days because they don't know any other way to write. They have thousands of years worth of literature to which they can turn for guidance, example, edification, and inspiration, and still they write as if they have never read anything at all. It's as if the only storytelling they have ever seen is on the small screen, as if the only cultural past to which they turn is their own childhoods during which they watched nine billion TV shows and commercials, as if the only thing they have ever read--or watched--is a pop culture that was based on a previous pop culture that was based on a previous pop culture . . . in a continuous stepping down from some increasingly remote original of some increasingly remote quality.

I'll take "I got me a car, it seats about 20," or even this:

Da-ga-da-beep-a-con-ja-choo-chon, honk, honk, honk

A-don-ta, ee-cha-koo-na-nee-cha

Bop-a-loo-la-ree-chow

Bomp-a-kee-cho, ee-sonk-konk

(from a driving song) over the contemporary dreck we have in prose form. No more TV-style or TV-influenced writing. No more pitches made in prose form for a new TV show. No more brandnames, no more product placement, no more commercial messages, no more displays of consumeristic knowing and prowess, and definitely no more registered trademark symbols. Please, let's just have good writing.

Be warned: I will soon be writing about more dreck.

-----

*"Movie Night at Phil's" was originally in A Season in Carcosa, edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., and published in 2012. 

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Poems for Poe, No. 2

At the Grave of Poe

by William James Price
Composed in June 1911. Published in The Baltimore Sun, December 25, 1911. 

Here, with a few forgotten one, reposes

A bard whose fame our long neglect defies

To him the selfish world gave thorns for roses.

And nations wonder where his body lies.

 

His haunting melodies, too few in number,

In alien hearts beyond the ocean live,

While we his virtues doom to endless slumber,

Condemn his faults, and no reward will give.

 

Ere Time's relentless tread at last has crumbled

These hallowed stones into the silent dust,

Will Pride awake, Ingratitude be humbled,

And Truth compel our spirits to be just?

Ah, grant him now a nobleman's estate,
Lest all the dead arise to prove him great!

* * *

Please note: I have inserted breaks where I believe the poet intended to but which the newspaper may have removed for the sake of conserving space in print. Note that Price's poem is in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet, which is broken into stanzas as I have done here.

Posted by Terence E. Hanley on the anniversary of Poe's death, October 7, 2025.

Poems for Poe, No. 1

To Edgar Allan Poe

By Howard Elsmere Fuller

Originally in Contemporary American Poets, edited by Horace C. Baker (Boston, 1928). From the website Poetry Explorer.

Thou art a thing of Death--
Born of the love of Life,
Born of the love of Life-in-Death . . . .

Denizen of a world which hath no name,
Which hath no being out of Mind--
Far-flung, with the mad ecstasy of youth,
To the Attic hills where Pan first sang
To a dew-drenched world
The amorous strains of Creation.
Above, in the star-tossed main,
Thou must have sat,
In the cool grey dawn of things
And watched with knowing Messianic eye
The swirling mists of chaos
Stiffen into a world profane.

With a haunting, dreamy sadness
Is bared thy cryptic soul;
With a rhythmic rune of madness,
Thy melancholy soul.

Sea things with seaweed hair
And faces blanched with pale-eyed Death
Sleep on the motley sands--
The crested wave of the sobbing sea
Hath lapped their blood like wine.
Draped in whispering robes of satin,
There dream in weird, fantastic chambers,
Maidens with waxen faces, fragile fingers,
Drained of life by hectic living
In mansions, grim and sunless.

World-old newness exotic
To this sordid clime
Sprang to thy lips erotic
And flowed like ruby wine.

Sweet gamboler in the dewy gardens
Of jeweled Paradise,
Where ruddy roses ebb and flow
In the cheeks of sylph-like children.
Elves, in their amours sweet with thee
Fresh with the matin dews of time,
Whisper to thee things unknown
To the sodden soul of man.

Demons, ghastly, foul and gory
Infest the Stygian gloom,
Spectres, grim and grey and hoary
Come shrieking from the tomb--

Come shrieking from mouldering mausolea,
Whence vague shadows of the uneasy dead,
Eluding Cerberus, the red-eyed watcher,
Fare forth on the sable wings of night
Peopling the sentient blackness
With ghoulish wraiths of terror.

Tears unceasing, bitter sorrow
Hath seared thy lonely years--
The leprous touch of sorrow,
The agony of tears.

The love of woman was to thee
Divinest torture of the soul.
Radiant life was but to thee
The sad betokening of death.

Soft as the sighs of Eros
Is the music of thy pain,
Sweet as the breath of Zephyr,
Fresh as the cooling rain.

Pilgrims journey far to mourn thee
As they would a thing divine,
And they that sought to scorn thee
Pay thee homage at thy shrine.

* * *

 Posted by Terence E. Hanley, 2025.

William James Price (1875-1937)

Insurance Agent, Salesman, Bookkeeper, Poet, Editor, Book Reviewer
Born March 8, 1875, Maryland
Died June 2, 1937, Baltimore, Maryland

William James Price was a poet, editor, and book reviewer. He edited a quarterly magazine of verse called Interludes, published from about 1924 until the early 1930s by Interludes Publishing Company of 2917 Erdman Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland. That happened to be Price's home. In early 1923, Price had the idea of getting together a group of Maryland poets. Coincidentally, this was at around the same time that Weird Tales was first published. Price's idea came to fruition in the Verse Writers' Guild of Maryland. Interludes was its official publication. Price's own poems include the following:

• "Come Down to Maryland" (1920) 
• "A Walk Together" (1921)
• "Woodrow Wilson" (1924)
• "The Shot Tower Speaks" (1924)
• "The Wonder Song" (1926)
• "The Plight of John McBride" in Mystery Magazine (Mar. 1927)
• "The Ballade for the End of Battles" (1929)

"A Walk Together" reminds me of Robert Frost's poem "The Pasture," from 1915.

Price had four poems in Weird Tales from November 1925 to January 1927. See the list below. He also wrote a poem on Edgar Allan Poe, which was printed with his letter to the editor of the Baltimore Sun on Christmas Day, 1911:

From the Baltimore Sun, December 25, 1911, page 6.

This is the second tribute to Poe written by authors of 1925 about whom I have written this season, Howard Elsmere Fuller (1895-1985) being the first. Price shared pages with Poe in the November 1925 issue of Weird Tales. Poe's poem was "The Conqueror Worm," from 1843, a powerful and devastating work.

 

William James Price was born on March 8, 1875, in Maryland. He worked as an insurance agent, salesman, and bookkeeper. On January 14, 1904, he married Mary Isabel or Isabella Painter or Paynter (1885-1980). Notice that Price's wife had the same (or similar) surname as Orrin C. Painter (1864-1915), who provided the bronze (or iron) gate for the tomb of Edgar Allan Poe and about whom Price wrote in his letter to the editor. Painter also provided a stone to mark Poe's grave, but for some reason it was put in the wrong place, bringing to mind Price's line, "And nations wonder where his body lies." By the way, Painter was also a poet.

 

I haven't been able to find a direct connection between Mary Painter or Paynter and Orrin C. Painter. Records for this family--or at least her branch--seem scarce, even if the latter wrote a history of them. (Where is it?) I should add that the artist, photographer, and explorer William Henry Jackson (1843-1942) married into the family of Orrin Chalfant Painter. William Henry Jackson, strangely enough, was the great-grandfather and namesake of cartoonist Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead. The connections to prominent people could go on, but this mini-biography has to turn back to its subject.

 

There was in Maryland a prominent family of men named William James Price. I don't know what relation, if any, these men had with the poet who shared their name:

• William James Price, Sr. (1831-1916) was a real estate broker and at one time the largest landowner and taxpayer in Queen Anne's County, Maryland.

• His son, William James Price, Jr., or the 2nd (1863-1928), was the editor and publisher of the Centreville [Maryland] Observer.

• His son, William James Price III (1899-1972), was a military man and an investment banker.

After following those leads for entirely too long, I discovered the identity of the poet. I wasn't prepared to rule out any of them in my search, even the Third. Money and versifying may not seem to go together, but they are also not mutually exclusive: let's not forget that Wallace Stevens, who worked in the insurance business, was also a poet of renown. Stevens famously wrote, "Money is a kind of poetry." That quotation brings us back to William James Price, or the Price of poetry, who was also in the insurance business but gave us verse to outlive all of his other work.

William James Price's Poems in Weird Tales
"The Ghostly Lovers" (Nov. 1925)
"The Ghost Girl" (Dec. 1925)
"Italian Love" (Feb. 1926)
"Ballade of Phantom Ships" (Jan. 1927)

Further Reading

• "A Maryland Society of Poets Is Suggested," letter to the editor in the Baltimore Evening Sun, February 14, 1923, page 15.
• Other brief articles and items, plus the poems themselves. 

Thanks to The FictionMags Index for the extra credit for William James Price.
Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

Adrian Pordelorrar (?-?)

I would like to start out writing about the July 1925 issue of Weird Tales by writing about the last author listed in its table of contents. He or she was Adrian Pordelorrar.

Adrian Pordelorrar was almost certainly a pseudonym. I haven't found anyone by that name or surname in my searches of newspapers and public records. The last name Pordelorrar is unusual to say the least. Nothing comes back for it in an Internet search, either. That makes me think that there is meaning in the name, and so I have tried breaking it apart and entering its parts in an online translator. I had thought that the name could be from the Esperanto, but I didn't get very far in that. Por and del are easy enough. They are prefixes in Spanish. That leaves -orrar as the main part of the name. Orrar isn't a word in Spanish, but llorar is. It means "to cry."

If the last name Pordelorrar has significant meaning, then maybe the given name Adrian does, too. It's an ancient Latin name, a variation of Hadrian or Hadrianus. The root word seems to be adur, meaning "sea" or "water." Together, maybe the poet's name means something like "water of the crying" or "water for the crying." Maybe someone who knows Spanish can propose a better meaning or translation. As an alternative, maybe Adrian refers to the Roman emperor Hadrian as a conqueror as Time seems the conqueror in the poem.

The next step in all of this would seem to be: read the poem. And so here it is, a sonnet:

The Conqueror
By Adrian Pordelorrar 

Dark, even in the sunset's crimson glare,
     There grows, unknown, an ancient forest grove; --
A voice of myst'ry murmurs in its air
     Where Night for centuries has whispered love!
Dim mirrored in a crystal pool, found there,
     Lie strange, forgotten worlds, and things, whereof
One dares not dream. Dark eyes, through matted hair,
     Laugh from its depths, to mock at Life above.

Soft words, from unseen lips, make known their thought--
     The uselessness of lab'ring through the years,
While worlds and men and kingdoms they have wrought,
     Their efforts, and their loves, and secret fears,
Crumble before the sweep of Time, as nought,
     Despite their anguish, and unnoticed tears!

If -lorrar is a play on llorar, referring to crying, and Adrian refers to water also, then the imagery of crying and water in the name of the pseudonymous poet is also in the poem.

We will probably never know who was the author of "The Conqueror," but why not consider Farnsworth Wright as a possibility?

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Two Poems About Two Crows

Francis Hard, aka Farnsworth Wright, had a poem called "Two Crows" in the January 1925 issue of Weird Tales. Just six years earlier, Wright had been a soldier stationed in France. In composing his poem, he must have drawn on memories of the Great War:

Two Crows
By Francis Hard (Weird Tales, Jan. 1925)

Two crows flapped over dismally
(So wearily, so drearily)
To the blackened limb of a blasted tree;
The shells flew screaming overhead,
And the field was covered thick with dead--
The earth reeked with its dead.

One crow lamented to his mate
(So wearily, so drearily):
"How long, how long must we now wait
For the taste of food that was so good
Before the shrapnel shattered the wood
And loaded the ground with dead?

"The odor sweet of dying men"
(Lamented he so drearily),
"How strangely pleasant was it when
I sensed it first with ravished breath!
But I am sated, and sick to death,
And would fain lie yon with the dead."

A shell came moaning through the air
(So drearily, so eerily)
And burst where the crows were plaining there;
It shivered the wreck of the blasted tree,
And bits of crow fell bloodily
Among the tangled dead.

* * *

A year and a month later, in February 1926, in his capacity as editor, Wright placed a traditional ballad called "The Twa Corbies" ("The Two Crows") in Weird Tales:

The Twa Corbies
(Old Ballad)
[By Anonymous]

As I was walking all alane,
I heard twa corbies making a mane.
The tane unto the tother say:
Where sail we gang and dine today?

In behint yon auld fail dike
I wot there lies a new-slain knight.
Naebody kens that he lies there
But his hawk, his hound, and his lady fair.

His hound is to the hunting gone,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady's ta'en another mate,
So we may mak our dinner sweet.

I'll sit on his white hause-bane,
Ye'll pick out his bonny blue een,
Wi' ae lock o' his gowden hair
We’ll theek our nest when it grows bare.

Mony a one for him makes mane,
But nane sail ken where he is gane.
O'er his white banes, when they are bare,
The wind sall blaw for evermair.

* * *

"The Twa Corbies" was first in print in 1812. A century later, it was reprinted in Ballads Weird and Wonderful (1912), illustrated by Vernon Hill (1887-1972). It seems to me that Farnsworth Wright had read "The Twa Corbies" and was inspired by it in writing his own poem. The refrain, the repeated "wearily," "drearily," and "eerily," would seem to have been inspired by "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe and its own refrain of "evermore" and "nevermore," also from its opening line:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

I wrote about "The Twa Corbies" on December 19, 2022. You can read what I wrote by clicking here.

Two corvids on the cover of Weird Tales:

Weird Tales, July 1945, cover art by Lee Brown Coye.

Weird Tales, September 1939, cover art by Virgil Finlay.

And what might be a crow but looks more like a myna:

Weird Tales, January 1946, cover art by Albert Roanoke Tilburne.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

"Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan-Part Four

I speculated the other day on the possible motivations of writers who use brandnames and product placement in their fiction. I'm not sure that I have an answer to the question of why they do it, but I have another possible explanation. Commercial products, commercial services, and brandnames are obviously on their minds. Actually, I think that what these writers do is unconscious, and so it's not so much on their minds as in them. They have been so steeped in commercialism and consumerism all of their lives that it probably comes naturally for them to throw around these labels and names. This is their natural vocabulary and their natural habit.

My alternate explanation for product placement and the use of brandnames is that these writers and so many like them are signaling their virtue. This isn't a moral or intellectual kind of virtue signaling. They are actually signaling their commercial virtue. It's a display of a kind of street cred. They're basically showing that they're hip and cool and with it. They know what the good stuff is, they know where and how to buy it, and they want you to know that they know. They have the means and the apps, the subscriptions and the accounts, the access and the cash to get it all. To them, I guess, this is a kind of skill, a display of taste, an indication of their superior status, or a status at least equal to yours. They're with it. They're keeping up. They're putting themselves on display. At its base, this kind of thing probably comes from pressures to conform. People who do it want to fit in and be accepted. They want to sit at the cool table, even though they will never be able to sit at the cool table because that was in high school and we're not in high school anymore.

Anyone trying to be cool should know that cool isn't trying. Cool is.

Here's Langston Hughes' poem "Motto," first collected in book form in 1951:

Motto
By Langston Hughes

I play it cool
And dig all jive
That's the reason
I stay alive.

My motto,
As I live and learn,
            is:
Dig And Be Dug
In Return.

-----

That's cool.

* * *

"Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan is not a pleasant story. The author, I think, claims not to write horror stories, but this is one. The horror has to do with the narrator himself and what he has inside him. He carries that horror around with him. He exposes others to it. And in one way or another, they are destroyed by it. Or apparently they are destroyed, maybe murdered, but still ruined and their souls wiped away by exposure to his abysses and voids. If you read this story only at its surface--as if you were floating on the surface of a lake sprinkled with the reflections of stars--you would believe that the abyss is external to the narrator. But if you peer into its darkest depths, you might see that the abyss is inside him. I have a feeling that the author knows abysses like these. I think we have to acknowledge that there is some autobiographical content here. So is he Edgar Allan Poe, exploring very human and very dark depths? Or is he acting as his own psychologist, examining his own torments, exploring his own abysses through his art?

So a third question for today: did the author of this story put himself into it (the way he inserted various commercial products in its pages)? And if he did, is he represented only in the narrator? Or is the boy at the end also a representation of himself? In the story, the narrator says that a thing need not be just one thing. It can actually be more than one. I take that as an artist's statement. Maybe the murderer and the murdered--the exploiter and the exploited, the recruiter and the recruited, the groomer and the groomed--are both the same person, separated only by time. (Remember that the psychiatrist asks if the thing in the lake has followed him through time, from his childhood to now.) What was done to him, he will do to others, another inversion of a biblical idea.

In reading the stories of Poe, I'm not convinced that he was like or sympathized with his darkest and most depraved characters. He may have understood the darker side of life and the dark depths of the human soul, but it's clear that we are not to think of the narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart" or Montresor in "The Cask of Amontillado" as a hero, or someone admirable, or someone whom we might aspire to be like. In other words, we're not supposed to take his side or to be on his side. I'm not sure the same kind of thing is true in the fantasy fiction of our time.

I have been reading stories by Thomas Ligotti. The first in the collection I have next to me is called "The Frolic." Mr. Kiernan's story reminds me of "The Frolic," which I think can be included in the category of cosmic horror. In "The Frolic," the situation is reversed, though, for we get things from the point of a view of a psychologist who is treating a serial killer whose names are legion but is called John Doe. The psychologist describes Doe as:

"[. . .] a comparatively lazy demi-demon from a Neverland where dizzy chaos is the norm, a state of affairs on which he gluttonously thrives. Which is as good a description as any of the metaphysical economy of a psychotic's universe."

Note the word chaos, which, as we have seen, is a synonym of abyss or void. Here is some of what Doe writes in his final note to his psychologist:

[. . . ] for in the black-foaming gutters and back alleys of paradise, in the dank windowless gloom of some intergalactic cellar, in the hollow pearly whorls found in sewerlike seas in starless cities of insanity, and in their slums . . .

(The italics are in the original.)

Here also is the imagery of cosmic horror, including mention of the sea, a word for which abyss and void might be synonyms.

I think it fair to say that the author of "The Frolic" is mentally ill. I don't take any pleasure in saying that. I don't say it gratuitously. I say it to make a point, which is that authors of today may very well write, specifically and with purpose, about the things that most torment them. One reason they might do this is as a kind of self-treatment. They are acting as their own therapists. Another might be more significant and it is that authors may attempt to bring these things, through their art, into the real world, thereby making of them a kind of affirmation of what they have inside themselves. For as long as they are inside, they are formless, chaotic, even abyssal. But if an author can speak them through word into creation, then they can be made real and ordered, after some fashion. But just because something exists in the real world doesn't mean that it's good and right and true. Material is not necessarily good, even if you're a materialist. In addition, what you might make true for yourself through your creation is not necessarily true about the universe, nor for all of us, nor for any one of us. It might still be your own private horror. I have a feeling, though, that readers of a certain type go looking for dark, negative, violent, nihilistic, atheistic, materialistic, death-dealing fiction because they believe it affirms their view of the world and all of its people, including themselves, as a terrible place. It doesn't though. There is no affirmation. The universe is not like that. All of that exists only in your head, in your heart, in the gutters and gloom, in the cellars and sewers inside you, in the God-shaped hollows you have carved out of yourself and that you keep open inside like a niche made for Nothing.

* * *

So there appear to be parallels between, first, the narrator and the box, and second, the author and his fiction. The narrator says, Open the box to see what's inside me. The author says, Open the book to see what's inside me. The hope (or despair) in each case is that the viewer or reader will be drawn into the narrator's/author's worldview--into the abyss of himself and his beliefs--and thereby converted, thereby ruined. Note that "Night Fishing" is told in the first person.

* * *

Although the words box and book are similar, they are apparently unrelated. It's interesting that both refer to the names of trees, box to boxwood and book to beech.

* * *

A hollow is a void, the numeral zero, a rim around a hole, the hole being the point and the operative part. It's no wonder, I guess, that so much of the depravity, insanity, and departures from normality of our time--that so much of atheism, materialism, nihilism, gnosticism, leftism, progressivism, and so on--that so much psychopathology and narcissism and delusional thinking--is about sex, for it's all about trying to fill a hole, to grow something self-punishers and self-sufferers hope to be good and positive inside their own voids. But you can't create yourself, you can't give birth to yourself, and you can't christen yourself. You have to get over yourself and be what you are, what you were created to be, which is a God-made human being, in your essence entirely unalterable.

To be concluded . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"When the Stars Are Right" by Nicholas Diak

The second feature in Weird Tales #367, the Cosmic Horror Issue (2023), is an essay called "When the Stars Are Right: The Weird Tales Origins of Cosmic Horror" by Nicholas Diak. Mr. Diak has an advanced degree from the University of Washington. Presumably he is an American. He is a writer and scholar interested in movies, music, comic books, and horror fiction, including the works of H.P. Lovecraft. His interests, then, match up with those of the other contributors to this issue. It looks like Weird Tales #367 is still, with this essay, the work of insiders. Mr. Diak has his own website. You can reach it by clicking here.

"When the Stars Are Right" is an essay of six pages all together. This includes a full-page illustration on the title page, four reproductions of Weird Tales covers from the 1920s through the 1940s, and a half-page illustration of tentacles at the end. That illustration is essentially filler. An enlarged part of it is used as the backdrop for the title page. Tentacles as a shorthand image representing weird fiction have become a cliché or, to use an academic kind of word, a trope. I wonder if we can all resolve to end it, to write and create new things and put some of the old ones (maybe some of those Old Ones, too) behind us. After all, new is the promise of the first essay in the Cosmic Horror Issue, editor Jonathan Maberry's brief introduction in "The Eyrie."

Nicholas Diak's essay begins with an epigraph. This is the second to appear in Weird Tales #367. The first is from Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The City in the Sea." The second is from H.P. Lovecraft's poem "Nemesis," from Weird Tales, April 1924, or one hundred and a half years ago.

Mr. Diak's essay is scholarly or academic in its structure and tone. For example:

     This article aims to celebrate cosmic horror by showcasing its unique attributes: genre staples, meta and self-referential qualities, repudiation of reality, its sense of awe, and finally its delightfulness. (p. 15)

So maybe at last we have a definition of cosmic horror. Even so, I'm not sure that it's quite complete. Also, I see three different things mixed up in that sentence. First are things from outside the story itself, namely "genre staples" and "meta and self-referential qualities." I take "genre staples" to be just another term for conventions, tropes, or clichés. I have been writing about those qualities of what is called cosmic horror already in this series. I have also written about meta-references and self-references.

Next are things that are part of the story itself or that exist within the story as part of its plot, theme, mood, and so on, namely "repudiation of reality" and a "sense of awe." I think these attributes extend into weird fiction and fantasy fiction as a whole. A sense of unreality, even if it is fleeting, is an essential part of weird fiction, I think. So is a sense of awe. Awe is a feeling we have all experienced (I hope) as we gaze into the night sky, in other words, into the cosmos. I'm not sure that anyone has ever felt horror in so gazing. Maybe I'm wrong. I think it would take a sick person to have that kind of feeling in contemplating the stars.

Finally, there is the "delightfulness" of cosmic horror. Mr. Diak explains what he means later in his essay when he calls cosmic horror fun to read. I won't argue with that. I'll just point out that fun is a reaction of the reader. And so we have preparations made by the author in the first pair of attributes, the story as a kind of sealed container of the second pair, and the reader's reaction in the last single attribute.

There are lots of names of authors in Mr. Diak's essay, including a list in the first paragraph. That list includes the name of another contributor to the Cosmic Horror Issue. If an essay can have a meta-reference or self-reference, then this is it. Mr. Maberry is also mentioned here, towards the end. I think we'll have to take Nicholas Diak's word for it that Weird Tales is enjoying a period of "current prosperity." Count me skeptical. Otherwise I don't see these names as examples of name-dropping or listing. You already know how I feel about those kinds of things.

I'll admit that I like reading non-fiction about science fiction, weird fiction, and fantasy. I like to see a mind at work. I like history and criticism that have behind them a thesis rather than just as chronicles of events. That's why I can say that Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler is an exciting book. So I'm predisposed to liking a well thought-out essay. Unfortunately, the space here is too limited, and I'm still not sure we have a very good--or at least a very thorough yet concise--definition of cosmic horror as a sub-genre or sub-sub-genre of fantasy fiction.

In his essay, Nicholas Diak looks at stories by Lovecraft as well as by Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard, C. Hall Thompson, and Clark Ashton Smith. I was surprised to find Thompson's name in this essay. As far as I can tell, he has seldom been talked about in the company of the other authors mentioned here. In 2019, I wrote a series on C. Hall Thompson. You can access the first part of what I wrote by clicking here. I have at least one more part to write in that series, based on information I did not have in 2019. I hope to get to that soon.

Like I said, there is a scholarly and academic tone and academic-type language, too, in "The Stars Are Right." For example, there is in the first paragraph the use of the passive voice, one of the scourges of academic writing. The author calls "The Call of the Cthulhu" a "text" instead of what it is, which is a story. The phrases "cosmic horror texts" and "cosmic horror canon" appear on the last page of the essay, also the word "tropes." It's good to notice and point out the use of tropes or clichés in any kind of storytelling. Those things are probably okay in storytelling for children. They should probably be left out of it for adults. "Text" and "canon" are pretty horrible words, though. My advice to any scholar is to throw them away. They're not texts, they're stories. And the only real canon I know of is in the Catholic Church.

* * *

Nemesis
by H. P. Lovecraft

     Thro' the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
          Past the wan-moon'd abysses of night,
     I have liv'd o'er my lives without number,
          I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

     I have whirl'd with the earth at the dawning,
          When the sky was a vaporous flame;
     I have seen the dark universe yawning,
          Where the black planets roll without aim;
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.

     I had drifted o'er seas without ending,
          Under sinister grey-clouded skies
     That the many-fork'd lightning is rending,
          That resound with hysterical cries;
With the moans of invisible daemons that out of the green waters rise.

     I have plung'd like a deer thro' the arches
          Of the hoary primordial grove,
     Where the oaks feel the presence that marches
          And stalks on where no spirit dares rove;
And I flee from a thing that surrounds me, and leers thro' dead branches above.

     I have stumbled by cave-ridden mountains
          That rise barren and bleak from the plain,
     I have drunk of the fog-foetid fountains
          That ooze down to the marsh and the main;
And in hot cursed tarns I have seen things I care not to gaze on again.

     I have scann'd the vast ivy-clad palace,
          I have trod its untenanted hall,
     Where the moon writhing up from the valleys
          Shews the tapestried things on the wall;
Strange figures discordantly woven, which I cannot endure to recall.

     I have peer'd from the casement in wonder
          At the mouldering meadows around,
     At the many-roof'd village laid under
          The curse of a grave-girdled ground;
And from rows of white urn-carven marble I listen intently for sound.

     I have haunted the tombs of the ages,
          I have flown on the pinions of fear
     Where the smoke-belching Erebus rages,
          Where the jokulls loom snow-clad and drear:
And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes what it never can cheer.

     I was old when the Pharaohs first mounted
          The jewel-deck'd throne by the Nile;
     I was old in those epochs uncounted
          When I, and I only, was vile;
And Man, yet untainted and happy, dwelt in bliss on the far Arctic isle.

     Oh, great was the sin of my spirit,
          And great is the reach of its doom;
     Not the pity of Heaven can cheer it,
          Nor can respite be found in the tomb:
Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.

     Thro' the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
          Past the wan-moon'd abysses of night,
     I have liv'd o'er my lives without number,
          I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

* * *

In his poem, Lovecraft used the word abyss. That word and a similar word or idea--void--will come up again in this series. It seems to me that there are two common and I guess connected ideas behind the stories in the Cosmic Horror Issue, the abyss or the void being one of them. Also, note Lovecraft's allusion to "the far Arctic isle." Was he referring to Hyperborea? Or to Ultima Thule? Are these two imaginary places related somehow?

In reading about Ultima Thule, I came across Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Dream-Land," from 1844. I see some similarities between "Dream-Land" and "Nemesis." Note the archaic contractions in both, also the use of such words as "tarns" and "ghoul" or "Ghouls," and again the reference or allusion to Ultima Thule. Remember, too, that Lovecraft wrote a story called "The Colour Out of Space." Did he get his title from Poe's phrase "Out of SPACE--Out of Time"?

* * *

Dream-Land
by Edgar Allan Poe

By a route obscure and lonely,   
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,   
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly   
From an ultimate dim Thule--
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
       Out of SPACE--Out of TIME.

Bottomless vales and boundless floods,   
And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,   
With forms that no man can discover   
For the tears that drip all over;   
Mountains toppling evermore   
Into seas without a shore;   
Seas that restlessly aspire,   
Surging, unto skies of fire;   
Lakes that endlessly outspread   
Their lone waters--lone and dead,--
Their still waters--still and chilly   
With the snows of the lolling lily.

By the lakes that thus outspread
Their lone waters, lone and dead,--
Their sad waters, sad and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lily,--
By the mountains--near the river   
Murmuring lowly, murmuring ever,--  
By the grey woods,--by the swamp   
Where the toad and the newt encamp,--   
By the dismal tarns and pools
   Where dwell the Ghouls,--   
By each spot the most unholy--   
In each nook most melancholy,--   
There the traveller meets, aghast,   
Sheeted Memories of the Past--   
Shrouded forms that start and sigh   
As they pass the wanderer by--   
White-robed forms of friends long given,   
In agony, to the Earth--and Heaven.

For the heart whose woes are legion   
'T is a peaceful, soothing region--   
For the spirit that walks in shadow   
'T is--oh, 't is an Eldorado!
But the traveller, travelling through it,   
May not--dare not openly view it;   
Never its mysteries are exposed   
To the weak human eye unclosed;   
So wills its King, who hath forbid   
The uplifting of the fring'd lid;   
And thus the sad Soul that here passes   
Beholds it but through darkened glasses.

By a route obscure and lonely,   
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,   
I have wandered home but newly   
From this ultimate dim Thule.

* * *

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley