Addendum to a continuing series that got discontinued in the middle of trying not to apologize for discontinuing

We’re taking a hiatus from the CS Lewis HP Lovecraft series to initiate a new series, not really a series but more like an addendum to an already continuing series, and this new addendum to an already continuing series puts me in the mind to make a little announcement about series in general on this website, which I have always envisioned and dreamed would kind of follow a non-profit TV station type format, with regular series that would air at a certain time on a certain day and specials that air once, and live sporting events and a few documentaries.
But so far this blog has followed more of a slowly-going-bankrupt non-profit with no programming director type of format, where a series runs for a few episodes and then with no closure or warning another series starts and each series runs on less and less budget until it’s just me, the station manager, standing on a naked stage in a sad, crumpled t-shirt, mumbling about his hopes and dreams and ignoring the frantic signals from the cameraman that he’s leaving but the camera is still recording, and the cameraman finally just takes a deep breath and steps away from the camera, which Is not a hand held camera or yes, it’s a hand held camera that he’s mounted on a makeshift stand and duct taped in place. So he backs away from the iPhone on the makeshift stand, knowing as he does so that he has completely abandoned all hope of getting paid for his hours of work for this sad little failing YouTube channel, but he walks fast out of the studio that can only be used on weekends when the carpentry shop in the front isn’t open. He’s angry and disgusted and aimless and desperate, but he’s one of those happy people with actual technical expertise in something that more responsible and with it and together people pay money for and he’ll be fine after a few drinks and a short casual job search but his girlfriend who was always so nice and warm and seemed like such a wonderful person at the station parties will convince him to sue the sad failing station for back pay and drive what’s left of it into bankruptcy that the station manager works at two minimum wage jobs for years to pay off while the cameraman and his girlfriend move into a sweet house in Park City and they drive Teslas to their union gig camerawork and acting auditions and they get their kids into child acting and drink themselves to death while the Station Manager tries to think of something to write for his internet web-log.

Hagenart comic 01/14/20

Hagenart comic 01/07/20

Unexpected treat; CS Lewis HP Lovecraft mashup

I actually have a grand plan in mind for the CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft series, wherein we delve into some wild theories about their inner mind and homosexual tendencies and all that spicy stuff, but before we do that I have to re-read the books again.  But before I do that, I believe it’s time for a mashup, wherein we attempt to tell a short story as if the two of them got together for some kind of literary retreat in 1925, when Lovecraft was falling apart financially and about to leave New York, and Lewis had just become a professor at Oxford. For the purposes of the mashup, in this scenario they get married. Why? Because it seems to me that the differences in the philosophies of the two of them would ordinarily make it extremely unlikely that they could ever willingly collaborate, but people tend to overlook all types of differences if they have romantic feelings for someone, so I believe they would have fall in love and get married in order for the mashup to happen. After getting married they live in England where Lewis can support them, since Lewis in reality had a far better job than Lovecraft did.
And they write a story together:

Something Hideous Came Out of the Silent Planet
I write these sentences supine, lying in a bed in the Miskatonic University Center for Invalids and Convalescent Scholars. The daily effort to lift pen to paper drains the last vestiges of my waning strength, yet a fierce desire to warn the public of the threat from within, while seeking to protect and advocate for the furry peoples of Malacandra, impels me to my painful, remorselessly damaging daily toil.
For the Reader’s sake I will attempt to organize and cohere my tangled memories into an understandable narrative.
To begin: My name is Elwin A Ransom. I am a professor of linguistics at Magdalene College, Miskatonic Campus. Until recently, I had been immersed in my studies and my teaching duties, living my quiet, inoffensive life, writing the occasional short story about magic elves and sharing them with close friends and never dreaming that I would someday visit another world where I would meet ghastly aliens that turned out to be Anglicans and perfectly reasonable if you overlooked their tendency to be a bit judgmental and a kind of purposeful abtrusiveness that set me on edge at times but I’m not really a people person and I’ve come to terms with that.
My adventures began when I - against my better judgement - accepted an invitation for late tea from an old schoolmate who I ran into at a tavern whilst on a walking tour of New England. He claimed to live on an estate, which turned out to be true, with his friend , a genius named Weston, which turned out to be only partially true. The estate was an old mansion, filthy in a grand old way, one of those old houses that looks as if it had somehow enjoyed more weather than any of the houses around it. Weston turned out to be a sociopath, but not in an interesting-conversation-over-bottle-of-wine sort of way. I was drunk enough to misconstrue his offer to show me “the spaceship” and follow him into the backyard, where I passed out. I came to on the spaceship, on route to Mars, if you can believe it. Pretending to have Stockholm Syndrome to get their guard down, I cooked a delicious lasagne, with the unintended result that my old friend Devine developed reverse Stockholm syndrome and tried to set me free immediately, and Weston developed Oslo syndrome, consuming so much pasta that he could not fit through the kitchen doorway, in effect kidnapping himself. At this point Weston admitted that they had planned to sell me to the native Martians for meat, which is what atheists do. Devine said he was sorry and told me I could go and tried to push me into the airlock. We fought, but the ship crash landed on Mars at the exact moment that my knee liberated his front teeth. “Take that, Dicky!” I shouted, and regretted it instantly. I spent my first day on a new planet trying to think up a better line. Eventually I sought Devine out after dinner and shouted “Welcome to Mars, Dicky! Love, the Tooth Fairy!” I tried to kick his mouth again, but he dodged and heeled my instep, dropping me like a sack. We stopped speaking after that, except for making fart noises whenever Weston asked for help moving supplies. Weston eventually produced a pistol and motioned me into the nearby trees, where we met several inhumanly tall, monstrously countenanced creatures who intoned unnerving syllables in a ghastly, unknown language. Sensing that my end credits were commencing to roll, I resolved that my screams would haunt these abominations to the end of their unearthly days.

And so on... it’s a special thrill to read the collaboration of these Gand masters!

Hagenart comi 12/12/19

More on CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft

So last week we began a series on CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft
Usually when people publish a blog post on a topic, they draw upon years of professional experience and study, or upon painstaking research on the subject they wish to discuss. I’m saying this in a knowitall tone, as of if I’m an expert in these things, but I just recently found this out, in the last few days or so actually, because It did not occur to me to research the subject I wanted to write about until after I had attempted to write about it, that is until I re-read what I had written and found it to be paragraph after paragraph of utter nonsense without any discernible point. Appalled, I dug out the CS Lewis space trilogy and the Lovecraft compilation, and also searched the web to see what smart people had already said about CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft.  
I read some interesting stuff, all apparently written by Christians who ultimately disagreed with Lovecraft but still said nice things about his stories. Lovecraft depressed them, they all said, and then Lewis talked them away from the window. I completely agree with their immediate emotional reaction to reading Lovecraft, his stories will leave you with a feeling of queasy disquiet, and then Lewis inevitably reassures you. But his reassurance only works if you’re religious, it’s all about how god will take care of the scary stuff.  And so I have to wonder how come those religious people got depressed by Lovecraft at all. Don’t you have to find his point of view compelling to find it depressing and scary? 
If you believe in God, how can you be frightened of ghosts and spirits?   But if you believe in God, but are also frightened of supernatural gibberish, you may like to have protective mental walls around you, and Lewis paints a beautiful wall of stained glass with renaissance scenes all around the universe.  Wherever you go in his stories, you’re still in church. I do not personally like that feeling. My memories of church are of groaning inside while I  struggled to stay awake during the interminable sermons. No matter how compelling I find the imagery of his worlds, I find myself repeatedly disappointed by his mental cloistering of his own stories. But for a religious person, that is an intelligent religious person who reads and therefore probably thinks about things from time to time, I believe this cloistering is a comfort, a shelter. 
Lovecraft seems to completely understand the terror of ideas. His narrators often express a desire not to know what they have discovered. But Lovecraft was not his narrators, and he couldn’t possibly have agreed with that sentiment, since all the monsters in his stories came out of his own head.  What his narrators found horrible and uncanny, he may have found magical and beautiful.  His protagonists often end up embracing their monstrous, otherworldly fate. The narrator in Shadow over Innsmouth speaks euphorically of his future life as a grotesque fish-person, in the ending passages. The narrator in Mountains of Madness speaks of the Old Ones as fellow creatures, as “men, of a sort.”  And he waxes euphoric over the achievements and civilization of the “Great Race” in the Shadow Out of Time. It’s actually a little disturbing how sympathetic he is with aliens who switch minds with creatures against their will, but there’s an undeniable joy in his writing, a delight with the ideas for their own sake. I think Lovecraft secretly found the universe to be a much more wonderful place than he let’s on in his stories. But in his fiction he’s always speaking in character as the narrator, and his narrators are basically 19th century gentlemen, who see the world through a very moralistic lens.  Was that Lovecraft? It seems to be part of him, but he had an uncanny side, a side with tentacles dripping ichor and and scaly skin and multiple staring eyes.

Hagenart comic 12/03/19