Mike > Recent Status Updates

Hard for me to parse the bit about Levin being Stiva's friend of his youth as anything but a kind of dig at Dostoevsky (cf. the memorable, similar passage re Raskolnikov and Razumikhin). Either that or "friend of one's youth" is a Russian commonplace, but I prefer to believe the former.

Good joke on p. 298: "the John Shade Lecture in Literature and Truth." (earlier there's also reference to a Prufrock Lecture in Humanities and Human Values, but that's not actually funny, so I assume it's meant to prove a point).

Really fun so far. Probably helps if you're a philosemite and/or a philosophy or lit nerd. Though no human being has ever been as pretentious as the Prof. Klapper character: "I shall recite, as is my wont, from memory" is not a phrase anyone could say without either a) dying laughing or b) being stoned by their audience

OK, yes, two Lovecraft references so far, though 1) neither have been about race, and 2) Johnson appears to have some difficulty keeping straight the relative taxonomies of Great Old Ones, Elder Things, and shoggoths. We all have our faults, I suppose.

I'm trying to figure out my over/under on a Lovecraft reference working its way into this (Poe's Pym was the main influence on At the Mountains of Madness, along with Roerich's paintings). On the con side, it'd be a little random; on the pro side, Johnson's major concern here seems to be race, and Lovecraft had some, er, interesting views on that front.

Nobody else on Goodreads appears to have read this. That's, like, objective proof that I am cool.