Quentin's Weeknotes 3/16/19-3/22/19

This Week:

• Toothpick sculpture of Star Wars shipsWe went to the Museum of Science and Technology in Syracuse. It’s an amazing facility, with lots of great interactive stuff. I found particular delight in their elaborate toothpick sculpture area, and especially the meticulous Star Wars models.  There’s a certain kind of person who puts a scale sign on models of imaginary spacecraft, and they and I are sympatico.
• I read Cody Goodfellow’s long essay on HP Lovecraft, race, and weird fiction. I have a complicated history with Lovecraft–he was basically my introduction to weird fiction, and his rich descriptions of New England were one force that drove me to live there for so many years. And he was horribly, and pretty irredeemably racist in his life and his fiction. This essay parses some of that same terrain, and argues that, though Lovecraft may not be worth glorifying, his creations certainly are.

“We embrace Otherness in all its forms, even in its most inimical and enigmatic face, when it looks at us in the mirror. The apocalypse we look forward to is not an end of old things, but an end to lies and the rise of beautifully weird new things, which shall not command but intrinsically earn, our devotion and worship.”