Samuel Johnson Coffee House

Lovecraft specialized as a prose narrative writer in horror -- though I think towards the end he was somewhat outgrowing that, expanding to a sense-of-wonder sf. But as a poet he specialized in 18th-century exercises, of which I have read few, but my sense is that only a relatively small percentage dealt with the macabre. Perhaps many of them celebrate the beautiful, or indulge in sallies of wit against satirical targets, etc.
 
Extollager said:
Lovecraft specialized as a prose narrative writer in horror -- though I think towards the end he was somewhat outgrowing that, expanding to a sense-of-wonder sf. But as a poet he specialized in 18th-century exercises, of which I have read few, but my sense is that only a relatively small percentage dealt with the macabre. Perhaps many of them celebrate the beautiful, or indulge in sallies of wit against satirical targets, etc.
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Yes you may be right there. I have what was in the early 2000s the complete poetry of Lovecraft. The book has since seen a second edition quite recently with a dozen or more new poems including fragments added. I have not really spent much time going over this collection, perhaps I ought to now that you have raised this. Here is a short comment on the first edition:

The publication in 2001 of The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft was a landmark. For the first time, all of Lovecraft’s 500 or more poems—including hundreds of Christmas greetings, untitled poems, fragments, and poems embedded in his published and unpublished letters—were gathered in accurate texts, with critical commentary and full bibliography.
 
Covid restrictions are easing in much of the world. The Samuel Johnson Cofeee House is reopening!

Let's read Boswell's complete Life of Johnson, one of the world's great chatty books, in a year, finishing by the end of June 2022. In my edition that calls for reading about a hundred pages of fairly large print per month, so say 25-30 pages a week at a minimum.

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25 Death Masks of the famous and infamous | Abroad in the Yard

Whether they were executed, assassinated, committed suicide, killed in battle or car crash, or died in their beds of old age, the features of these 25 men were preserved for posterity in plaster.
www.abroadintheyard.com www.abroadintheyard.com
 
Suggestion: Start the Life of Johnson in the year 1763, with Boswell's paragraph beginning "This is to me a memorable year; for in it I had the happiness to obtain the acquaintance of that extraordinary man whose memoirs I am now writing." Boswell was 22, Johnson about 54. I think this will be when things really get going as regards the famous chatty book by Boswell. One could skim the preceding pages or just read a reference source for what Johnson did in the earlier period.
 
Johnson: "Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labour; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable [as it is in our internet age], more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it." (1763)
 
Boswell's note on an 18 July 1763 visit mentions remarks on Frederick the Great. This reminds me of one of my favorite books of the past 15 years or so, Gaines's Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment. I love this passage: "A work that may be read as a kind of last will and testament, Bach's Musical Offering leaves us, among other things, a compelling case for the following proposition: that a world without a sense of the transcendent and mysterious, a universe ultimately discoverable through reason alone, can only be a barren place; and that the music sounding forth from such a world might be very pretty, but it can never be beautiful."

I recorded my enthusiasm for Gaines's book here:

Top Ten reads this year (2016)

I've read quite a few books this year. So far I've read 52, which is slightly up on last year's 46. My top 10 (slightly arbitrary), in order I read them, with a maximum of one book per author (self imposed rule): Bob Shaw - Other Days, Other Eyes Robert A. Heinlein - The Door into Summer Alan...
www.sffchronicles.com www.sffchronicles.com
 
----JOHNSON. 'Pity is not natural to man. Children are always
cruel. Savages are always cruel. Pity is acquired and improved by the
cultivation of reason. We may have uneasy sensations from seeing a
creature in distress, without pity; for we have not pity unless we wish
to relieve them.----

Johnson would be more ready than Rousseau to accept the conclusions of Iain Provan's Convenient Myths: The Axial Age, Dark Green Religion, and the World That Never Was (2013).
 
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