Speaker 1 (00:00):
Coming up on Art Palace, if you or I stop and think about all the microbes in our guts are floating around us all the time, if you really think about that, you will go mad. There's so much reality in this story. Welcome to Art Palace, produced by Cincinnati Art Museum. This is your host, Russell iig. Here at the Art Palace, we meet cool people and then talk to them about art. Today's cool person is Cedric Rose from the Mercantile Library's podcast, the 12th Story. This is actually kind of a crossover episode with the 12th story. While they normally cover literature and we normally cover art, we decided to join efforts and talk about both since it's October. Cedric and I read the Short Story from Beyond by HB Lovecraft and then discussed it in relationship to our special exhibit Ana England Kinship. 

Speaker 1 (01:12):
I think it would be good to just, maybe we should start by talking a little bit about what we're going to do, and maybe actually if you don't mind just talking a little bit about the Mercantile Library's podcast as well and what you do, and so it'll kind of help frame why we're doing this today. Great. Well, yeah, I guess I'm, we're hybridizing here with podcasts. Also another sort of organic metaphor that I think ties in nicely, but I'm from the Mercantile Library. My name's Cedric Rose. I've been the collector there for about 12 years, and several years ago we started the 12th Story, which is a podcast about books, culture, pretty much everything and just happy to be here. Yeah. Well, and so I thought we would do this episode with you as a little bit of a combination, like you're saying, we picked a work to read and then we're going to talk about in a relationship to this exhibition, which is Ana England kinship. 

Speaker 1 (02:15):
So we're not going to look at just one piece in particular. We're going to kind of talk about the major themes of the show, maybe talk about some specific pieces here and there. But the piece of fiction we read was from Beyond by HP Lovecraft, which is a short story, a very short story actually, which made it nice for this case that we didn't have to drudge through one of his lengthier pieces. This is a super quick read, but yeah. Do you typically on your show, do a little bit of a recap of, we do a bit of a recap just to kind of catch people up? Yeah. I mean, I feel like this story, it's kind of hard to spoil it because it's pretty light on plot. There's not, the premise is the plot basically. There isn't a lot else that happens apart from the basic premise. 

Speaker 1 (03:09):
So do you want to describe it for folks? Oh yeah, I'd love to. On its surface, and of course Lovecraft, beginning with Lovecraft, he was really unknown during his lifetime, HP Lovecraft, but he was a writer of essentially pulp fiction and specifically pulp horror fiction. But the premise of from Beyond really is comes down to a very familiar situation, I think to everybody, which is a falling out between friends, except these aren't just any friends. This is the narrator's friend is an inventor of sorts, a psychologist. Is that accurate? Yeah. He's described as a science of physics and metaphysics. Yeah, so the narrator has actually been kicked out of the house for kind of razzing the guy about this invention that he purports to have created, which will allow them to have vision into this realm beyond reality. So eventually he gets called back to the house and he finds his friend in pretty horrible shape. He doesn't seem to have slept, he's emaciated. He's turning into a madman, and as things unfold, I think Crawford Tillinghast, who is the central character of the story, seems to be using the narrator to further his experiment. 

Speaker 1 (04:37):
The servants are all gone. They've apparently evaporated in their clothes in an earlier experiment, and then it's a little difficult to describe. I definitely would recommend to the listeners, you have to read the story for yourself because it's downright surreal, but Tillinghast tries to convince the narrator to sort of look into this realm and seems to expect that he'll meet the same fate as the servants and the narrator. I don't know that I want to spoil it. Russell there is at the very, let's not spoil it. We don't have to spoil the end of it, but I mean, I think even while I said there's not a lot of plot really to describe, it almost just becomes this visual. It's an excuse to go through all the crazy stuff he's seeing. So it's almost very psychedelic of describing all these different things and even the way he's describing them, kind of melting into each other, what is happening around him in the laboratory where he's sitting with tilling ass, and then the way that will turn into other things that he's seeing in this other realm or other dimension that he's able to witness. 

Speaker 1 (05:58):
So yeah, I mean isn't actually, I feel like too much to spoil, especially at the end. There's this little bit of a twist that we don't have to go into. There's a very pulpy de mom, we'll say that much. We can leave that out there. But can I just say that by the third paragraph, I was literally reading the prose, which the prose, I think is the man, just the writing style is amazing. But in the voice of Rod Sterling, I mean, it was literally like there is a fifth dimension beyond what is known, and you get to this sentence, we shall overleap time, space, and dimensions, and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of creation, you're thinking this has some vibrations out into pop culture. Lovecraft definitely, and the horrors genre, I think capitalizes heavily on what Lovecraft specialized in a lot of his work that I think from Beyond Typifies, which is the thin veneer between, I think we can hear vibrations from beyond right now. 

Speaker 1 (06:58):
What is that? The thin veneer, if that's the right word, between civilization and sort of this primordial savagery, which they find themselves peering into, and it's madness. It's boundless complexity, it's infinity, and ultimately, well, hilarity does not ensue depending on, I guess how funny you, you're really into his writing style. I could imagine some people really hating his writing style too. I mean, I sometimes laugh at it. It so over the top, the first line of it, I don't know. Do you have it there? I remember Horrible Beyond Conception was the change which had taken place in my best friend. Exactly. Crawford tilling hats. I mean, the structure of that sentence is so lovecraftian where it begins with horrible beyond conception. It was, he doesn't tell you, you don't even know what he's talking about yet, but we started with Horrible Beyond Conception. It's so over the top. 

Speaker 1 (08:03):
And even this one I think I read was written in 19 20 20. That's right. Not published until after he died, I think the same year. But it's like he's always writing as if he's in the 19th century or something. There's a little bit of this foe archaic prose going on. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I'm a big fan of Jack London, who I guess was kind one of the first major majorly the JK Rowing of Pulp Fiction. Right. And it's a theme in London that our civilized lives are really just actually seconds away from tumbling into chaos. But a major difference here is that in this story, it's a machine. The machine is sort of rather than the narrator's inability to light a match during a snowstorm, well, I guess that could be construed as a machine, but I also, that's a type of, but also you mentioned that he wrote this in 1920, and I looked a little bit at the chronology of his life and combined with a sense that there was maybe a little tongue in cheek happening here in 1920, he actually went to work as a ghost writer for a psychologist, David Van Bush, who he really did not cotton into. 

Speaker 1 (09:30):
I mean, he put up with them to make money, but I couldn't help but sort of wonder is David Van Bush Crawford telecast, especially when, so is this excellent biography of Lovecraft. I have not read the whole thing, but a dreamer and a visionary HP Lovecraft in his time, St. Joshie. 

Speaker 1 (09:58):
So Lovecraft describes David V. Bush as totally the opposite of Tilling has, right? He's a short, plump fellow of about 45 with a blind face, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, kind. Affable winning and smiling probably has to be in good order to induce people to let him live after they have read his verse. So I think Lovecraft was not beyond a biting way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's an interesting person. Certainly. And I mean, should probably also mention there's some pretty unsavory things about Lovecraft too before anyone construes this as ringing endorsement of him as a person. While I think he has some really fascinating ideas and really interesting things, it doesn't take too long before reading a lot of his stuff before you go like, wait, was that just really racist what I just read? And it happens pretty often, actually. You'll be reading something and it's just really kind of gross, and there's all sorts of these in addition to racist thoughts. 

Speaker 1 (11:08):
There's a lot of xenophobia too that comes across where it's like anyone who is the other becomes essentially an alien. It's pretty easy to see his parallels drawn there where it's so there's some gross ideas, but they're not, this piece doesn't really have that in it. And so I think you can weeded through that if you're willing to see that maybe his less savory aspects. And I definitely, I'm not saying that my bizarre thesis is actually has anything to do with this story, but I definitely began to approach it on subsequent readings as Lovecraft is this frustrated artist and thinking of him in terms of the artist, and then also looking at England's body of work from very early on as a child even was having these almost hallucinatory dreams of space and fantasy. And you get the sense with this story that he's both making fun of psychology, perhaps, but also realizing in a short story, this concept of the artist dipping beneath the level of consciousness and realizing these primordial forms, these primeval forms, which again, I am sitting here in this beautiful gallery with this show in particular. 

Speaker 1 (12:36):
I mean, you've got these raku fired surfaces that kind of beguile, but confuse you with, confuse me, at least I'm easily confused at the same time, much in the same way that this narrator is presented with this horrific but almost psychedelic situation is just trying to figure out what the heck's going on and ultimately is pushed to the ultimate breaking point. Well, you described that when you said the Raku fired surfaces. You're talking about Night Sky Spiral Two, which is a piece that belongs to the museum. It's been here for a while and it's, we're sitting right next to it, and actually this was one of those pieces every time when I was reading this and I came across a quote that made me think of something in the show, I would highlight it. So this is one I took for that, which was I seemed for an instant to behold a patch of strange night sky filled with shining revolving spheres. 

Speaker 1 (13:35):
And as it receded, I saw that the Glowing Suns formed a constellation or galaxy of settled shape. It's pretty perfect. There's all these things where it's like he's seeing galaxies within things and he's watching is the idea of scale is all kind of messed up too, where I think even Tilling has says something about you think form or size or something he has meaning. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. We think it has meaning, but it's all an illusion, and it sort of plays on this idea that just when you think that you know what your place in the universe is, you're completely wrong. So this piece, the way that these discs that sort of seem to contain universes get smaller and smaller as they go down, it's always something I question of what that sort of spiral means. Are they really smaller? Are they receding in space? 

Speaker 1 (14:31):
What are we seeing here? And also, it still seems like that little tiny disc seems to contain just as much volume as the larger ones because of this idea of that they contain almost infinite space. So that's one of these interesting ideas that she's playing with that. And then the other big theme I thought of that we were kind of surrounded by several pieces that deal with this is it's all about this piece, this piece of fiction. And then the pieces in the show are often about visualizing the unseen. So we're sitting in front of this piece that's called Spatially Extended right now, and it has these sort of planetoid spheres in the middle of them, and then they're surrounded by these bowls, but they seem to almost be visualizing gravity and the way space time is warped around an object. They really do. I think they're actually altering the soundscape of the room too. 

Speaker 1 (15:31):
They're sort of, I'm sure they are discs. Yeah, because huge too. So I'm sure they do mess with that. Not to mention we have this curved wall as well that I'm sure messes with sound too. And there was something else I read from beyond, I'm not sure if I highlighted it or not, but he does talk about the very just sky and blue air, what we see around us. You think it's empty, and of course in Lovecraft's world it's like, but it's filled with monsters. Yeah, absolutely. It's filled with IDs monsters here. She's more like it's filled with molecules. It's a little gentler view of it, but I literally thought of, he's describing sort of these jellyfish forms, and I thought of the first time I saw an amoeba eat a paramecium under a microscope. And a lot of England's work includes also these micro microorganism forms, like the radio area, diatoms, that sort of thing. 

Speaker 1 (16:24):
Yeah, totally. Yeah, there's a lot of those pieces that are about blowing up the microscopic to a larger scale. There's a piece next door that includes a pollen molecule that's blown up, and so it almost feels like some kind of other worldly alien thing, and it's just like, no, we're just looking at it at a different scale. But it's sort of all happening. The story's happening at this point in history where these new tools are emerging to see things like we've never seen them before. And if you or I stop and think about all the microbes in our guts or floating around us all the time, if you really think about that, you will go mad. There's so much reality in this story. Right? Yeah. That is one of the things that's nice about, it's, of course, he's taking it to this, the farthest reaches of the story, which is that there are horrible monsters that are just right behind you and you can't see them, but we're filled with crazy creatures like tart raids and stuff that are just insane looking. 

Speaker 1 (17:29):
Oh man, tart grades. I mean, that's like a lovecraftian wined strange creatures that could be from Lovecraft right there. So can I just ask you, Russell, I have a question about this story, I guess. So he arrives for the demonstration of this device. There's an eerie glow. The device, I think is either it's been on or it's switched on, and all psychedelic hell breaks loose. But till at one point Tilling Hass is kind of yelling at him to look at it, look at it, whatever, and says he's told him that the servants have essentially evaporated, but he tells 'em that the servants don't worry. It's not painful. And he sees tilling has face also. So what do you think, I mean, think's going on there? Well, I don't think he ever turns around mean. No, I agree. Yeah, but I mean, what do you mean? 

Speaker 1 (18:24):
My question is, so how does Tilling has know that it's painless? Yeah. I am a little confused by actually some of those. The narration of what happens with the servants is a little confusing because he seems to say it one minute, like, oh, they weren't killed by these things. But it seems like clearly they were, I am a little confused. I think he was at one point when they see there's jelly fish creatures in this sort of other world, he's saying that those are harmless, but basically you're aware there is something else. The implication is something dark kind of came through the portal and got them, and he's saying it's behind him at one point. So what I read that is, is that there is this, whatever the horrible thing that did kill the servants is there with them at that moment. He can see it, I mean, can see it, but the narrator cannot. 

Speaker 1 (19:22):
And so that's facing away from it, and it kind makes it almost sound almost that I interpreted almost as, by looking at it, you're making yourself vulnerable to it as well, was another way I kind of read it. But then again, I don't know. Then again, I don't know what happens to him at the end of the story, maybe, who knows? Yeah, you kind of wish Timothy Leary was here to participate in this conversation, how not to reduce it to sort of drug references, but the idea that the act of perception changes the perceiver that plays out in all kinds of ways in this story. And then there's also the possibility that if I was one of those servants, I would've just gotten the heck out of there a long time ago. 

Speaker 1 (20:14):
So maybe they're okay. They just took off their clothes or whatever. They dropped their clothes ran away. That is a weird part of the story too. I didn't even think about it when I was reading it, but I was like, wait, so why would this other worldly being consume them? And I guess it's just like, ugh, club Trousers gross or whatever, spit out their britches. It only has a taste for the organic part of their being or Yes. Right. Yeah. Doesn't want their polyester knits or whatever they were wearing. Probably a bit early for that in the twenties. We'll pretend just a bit. Yeah. Have you ever watched the movie? I have not. I haven't either. I was hoping you had, because I was like, so there was a movie in the eighties made, I remember when I was a kid, I would see the cover of it in the hoarder section of our local video store, which I was pretty obsessed with. 

Speaker 1 (21:06):
So I would walk through and I always saw that cover, which had this creepy guy's face, and his skin was all stretched out. I had heard that that was one of the least bad sort of filmic adaptations of Lovecraft's work, because it's problematic, I think, to realize in that format, in a visual format, because it's so deeply internal, you can imagine screenwriters struggling to externalize this, these internal well, and a lot of his stuff is all about unspeakable horrors. So part of why it works so well on the written page is that he's not actually describing what you see, or he is in the vaguest of ways and letting you fill in the gaps so that when somebody has to actually make the thing, it becomes a little, it loses some of that effect that your mind is making up The worst thing you can, from what I've seen of from Beyond, it does seem to capture this kind of really gross body horror stuff where it's constantly, it looks like there's a lot of latex in that movie. 

Speaker 1 (22:13):
Just a lot of weird people kind of lumpy forms. I think the science has kind of transformed a lot by this, and I haven't seen that, but I've watched Animator, which is also based on a Lovecraft story. It has the same director, Stuart Gordon, and so, I mean, it's probably a lot more playful as well than Lovecraft ever is. But that's also, I think probably why people enjoy it is that it's not trying to be just this totally straight adaptation of it that takes itself super seriously. It also understands you can have fun with this stuff, and it is interesting that this story in particular, there's no blood. It's a very bloodless yet deeply, deeply disturbing short story. Yeah, because all just about the idea, again, of the terror, of the very concept of it, that there is all this stuff happening around us and we can't see it, but if we just had this machine that would allow us to see it, we would be horrified by what we were able to see. 

Speaker 1 (23:22):
And that works on so many different levels too, of just allegories for all sorts of things. It doesn't have to just be literally like we're talking about the sort of science of it in relation to Ana England, but there's also political ideas. One could take from that too about systems happening around you that are kind of invisible, but shaping things. I mean, that was one of the things that I thought about when reading this story is I wonder how these creatures are actually interacting with our world if this is happening, are they influencing us in some ways? Is there some interaction there that's invisible? But we're seeing the effects of the implications are truly mind bending. And the strange thing is science is borne out that yes, we are constantly being influenced by invisible forces. Well, I was thinking maybe since we've kind of been standing in here, maybe we could kind of walk into the other side of the gallery and maybe just check out some of the other pieces and if anything sticks out to us that relates to the work we read or really any lovecraft, we can kind of talk about those connections. 

Speaker 1 (24:33):
My first hobby was microscopy. Oh, really? So I love these glazed earthenware radio area, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. They're just pure geometrical forms realized organically. Well, they also, to me, I don't know, I don't think they're supposed to be, but there is something very aquatic about them, and they're shapes that make me think of sea life. And there's just a lot of those kind of shapes that are described in Lovecraft, a lot of his creatures. I mean, the most famous one, Kullu, which has this kind of octopus tentacle Lee head, everybody knows, and then bat wings. And so there's something about that he recognizes. And I think Ana recognizes the other worldliness of aquatic stuff. There's a couple of connections to aquatic life in this. There's another piece on this platforms that has sort of those shapes in it too. I actually feel like I'm snorkeling right now. Yeah, yeah. There's something, and maybe it's also the palette. A lot of the blues and stuff that just make me think of undersea creatures, the craft is amazing. Oh yeah. And again, over here on this kind of opposite wall we have, this piece could be kind of really perfect for thinking about from beyond. It's just called sense, but it's all these antennae from different creatures. 

Speaker 1 (26:05):
The matter associated with this describing, it begins with all living creatures taken and process information from their surroundings. And another just interesting factoid I took from the chronology of his life, 1920 when he wrote from Beyond was also the year he began keeping a book of commonplaces, essentially just collecting information Very early on, he was just this real AutoD act who is just interested in a lot of stuff. One earlier entry reads something like he has a nervous breakdown, becomes interested in Antarctica and kind of see, again, it's writers as artists, I think are often just kind of trying to reconcile this onslaught of information and do something with it. And probably sculptors are too. There's also something about, and I know Honest's father was a scientist, so I don't want to say she has no kind of actual science background, but I think there's something, and I'm sort of maybe talking about myself a little bit here too, that artists can be really fascinated by the point where science starts to seem like magic. 

Speaker 1 (27:20):
That's sort of the intersection that we're most interested in. And I think Lovecraft is also sort of interested in these sort of unexplained things. What are the things we don't quite understand yet? Because that's where the magic still is. So it's in that story. He chooses the pine gland as his point. Well, now we know what the pineal gland does. It's not nearly as magical as it probably was when you read it, which is kind of a shame. That's sort of where art kind of brings that magic back. But if you have this part of the body that you're just like, yeah, we don't know what it's for, and maybe it's doing has some ancient function that we've lost or something. It's more exciting to imagine. And that inspires a lot of creativity. I think. 

Speaker 1 (28:08):
I really like this tethered setup where I'm tethered to you and we're moving through the gallery. I know I get to sort of pool you where I want. So there's this raised platform in the middle of the gallery, and it has these pieces that are called Touching the Earth, touching the Sea, touching the sky, and touching the future. And one of the things I noticed, it was another piece I kind of highlighted from beyond was he's talking about being in some sort of ancient temple with these black columns rising up around him, right? Yeah. There's this cathedral. Yeah. And so there's something about these shapes, these, I've been calling them Baal columns. That's what they remind me of. I don't know if that's where Ana was going with them, but it seems pretty directly related to those. But they form these crazy columns and it's weird point where it's like nature, but it feels so architectural that it's unsettling almost. 

Speaker 1 (29:12):
This just shouldn't, nature shouldn't look like this. There's too much design or something in it. Well, she says in her statement for this show that I think something like the forest is her cathedral or the woods are her cathedral. And I love being outdoors also. And I think for a lot of people, for example, the Japanese people, there's this practice, they call it forest bathing, where you approach nature to actually kind of get in touch with this infinite regress because you look at the surface of a tree, there's moss, you get closer and closer, and it really does go onto infinity. I'm not sure that's where you were going, Russell. No, no, that's fine. You can go wherever you want. 

Speaker 1 (30:00):
Well, I feel like we probably should at the very least talk about this piece over here that we started talking about it early on called See, which was sort of the first thing that I saw in this show that made me think of Lovecraft. It literally looks like a lovecraftian ancient horror on one side, but then in relation to from beyond, it's also just a great piece about perception and this seeing in all these different angles with all these different eyes. Absolutely. Yeah. The eyes are just of different species. They're extremely realistic. Even the ones that are sort of unidentifiable, you feel that they're curing at you. And I haven't read it, but there's a book out there right now talking about sort of the evolution of consciousness and what the octopus has to say about that, and the possibility that consciousness actually evolved in the deep. 

Speaker 1 (31:04):
Oh, really? And this piece just makes me think of that, that we tend to think that we have consciousness as the sole province of us human beings, and it's just so not true. And the implications of that are also horrific. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think this is an elephant eye right in the smack middle that I'm looking at, and it's got a real human touch to it, doesn't it? Chameleon, perhaps. Yeah. I don't know. The lizard ones are all pretty, yeah, this was the one that made me think octopus, but I have no idea. Oh, yeah, that does look very octopi. I don't know. And then the fact that each of the eyes is part of this almost geodesic sphere also kind of reminds you that our concept of an I as a single point, there are organisms that have these compound eyes and how do they see the world? 

Speaker 1 (32:05):
Yeah. There's something I love that she kind of buried the human down here at the very bottom. I totally missed that. Yeah. There's a human eye right at the bottom. And actually when we asked Ana for a list of which species are which in this for the human, she just wrote Steven, which is her husband. Her husband, yeah. But I just love that Steven, and I think her dog is one of them as well. Aw, I know. Isn't that cute? The dog? Yeah. I'm not sure. I think it's that one right there that you just pointed at, but I am not sure. 

Speaker 1 (32:48):
This one just looks so dragony and so game of Thronesy, to me, it's hard to some of them. Every time I look at 'em like that's a real creature that lives on this earth. Isn't that bizarre? The glazes that make the eyes shiny are just beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. She does a great job of using that material to capture all the right textures of both the skin or the fur in some instances, and then the glossiness of the eyes. And it's really, it's one of the, she's using, there's a lot of other things like the bones that she's using clay to mimic or the claws and other shapes over there. But this is one of the few pieces in here that's kind of really, I feel like using a, I don't know, almost, I'm trying to find a better word than what I wanted to say. 

Speaker 1 (33:46):
It sounded too highfalutin. I want to say mimetic, but trying to really imitate something else. She's not usually playing that game, I feel like with us much. Yeah. Number abstract, not abstract there, but yeah, I get your concept. Even these pieces where they feel pretty realistic with the touching the sky, the future with the pollen and the sea creatures and all of that, while they're rendered very realistically by not glazing them with nothing, I can see at least it looks just like straight fired clay and keeping them white. They become a little more abstract and they organic forms, but they're organic forms from that level where it's almost the abstract form suddenly becomes reality. Like the line between the abstract and the real. And well, to me, they become conceptual too by having all of those, these different places like seeds and butterfly, chrysalis and pollen, all look sort of the same. And by being, they're all the same material. You stop thinking of it as literally the thing and more about what's the thing, and there's enough of a separation there that you can think of it more conceptually than quite so literally. But yeah, c, C is definitely a showstopper. You'll notice lots of people stopping here when you walk through the gallery, caught in the gaze of these many eyes. There's been probably lots of selfies with this one. That's how we gauge success in museums. Now, selfies. 

Speaker 1 (35:29):
Do people want to take their selfie with this? Alright, good job. They almost seem to dilate as you walk past them. Is this the weird version of for this piece? This is the thing that drives me crazy, is everyone who goes through a museum and are like, the eyes follow you. Yeah, totally. The eyes probably. And I'm always like, no, they don't. It's just like the person was looking at the artist or they're looking straight ahead. So it's like, but oddly as I walk past this, you'll notice that eyes are following me. No, they're not. They are because it's a sphere of eyes. 

Speaker 1 (36:11):
What is this about? I think this idea that the eyes follow you in art is just like, it is so bizarre to me, but it's almost like just a misunderstanding of the way of, I mean, in this case it's not flat, but in most cases we're talking about a painting where it's like the person in the painting was making eye contact with the person painting the picture. So it's like, yeah, if you're looking at it from the side, they're still staring kind of straight ahead. And if you're staring because there they're still, yeah, because it is a flat object. It is not in fact a sculpture. If it was a sculpture, you would say, so I feel like this one. I'm like, no, they're not so clearly looking in every other direction. 

Speaker 1 (36:54):
I think it works. I think by perceiving this object, it's changing how I'm perceiving this. I think part of it is just like we want to make sort of that eye contact with things, even if they're inanimate, you want to have that connection. And so it's like when you see all these eyes, it has that effect that you lock into it. It's just like when you're watching a movie and the most weird thing to happen is somebody look straight into the camera. All of a sudden it breaks the fourth wall in the most subtle way, but just somebody staring into a camera is disturbing. Suddenly they've made eye contact with you, the viewer, but we want so badly to see that it's really, it's the reason that works is the same reason people think paintings follow them is the same way. We want to make that connection so easily. No, I totally agree. And I think I need to step away from this. It's just too much. 

Speaker 1 (37:54):
Alright, well, anything else you wanted to talk about in the show that we didn't address? I can talk about that story for another couple of hours. I have so many, which is weird theories about it, which is impressive. Like 10 pages probably, right? Yeah. And one thing, not to disparage short fiction now, but a lot of short fiction is this Iowa Writer's workshop very spare after Raymond Chandler, American creative fiction became sort of flatter, and it's just impressive, the density of it, of what he managed just to pack into just a couple of pages of pers. Yeah. I think it benefits from its brevity, honestly. And I was saying I wanted to read a much longer piece at first, and I'm glad we didn't because I think this piece packed so much punch in such a short amount of space. I really like it for the same reason, and I was giving Lovecraft a little bit of a hard time for his language earlier. 

Speaker 1 (38:56):
But I really like it. And I also think you've mentioned right at the beginning that he was working in essentially Pulp Fiction. He's writing these stories that are published in magazines. And so I think that there may be is some of that loftiness to the languages is part of why he has persevered. Where as a lot of those writers didn't is he really did take it a lot more seriously. And even though there are occasionally some pulpy twists and turns in it to keep the fans happy, you can tell he was really thinking about it on a different level maybe than a lot of his peers were. I have to ask, I think you're more familiar with his work, and I just loved reading this story. I mean, what would you recommend next? I know there's the, I'm going to mispronounce it. 

Speaker 1 (39:43):
How do you pronounce it? Yeah, thank you. Yeah, the Call of Kullu is a good one. It's probably his most popular piece just because the Kullu creature has become sort of a weird, I don't know, pop culture icon in some strange way. It's longer than this one, but it's really, I think it's rewarding. It's a good read. There's a few that I'll probably forget. There's one called The Color Out of Space, which is really interesting and I think has some relationships too from beyond and conceptually, and I almost want to stop and look things up now. I can't remember the title. That's the problem. No, you give me a good start there. That's great because he has a lot of titles that are kind of interchangeable as well, that you kind of think back and you go, wait, was this the one where this happened or was this, you go, there's a lot of similar ideas and a lot of his pieces a really early piece that is fun for me. 

Speaker 1 (40:48):
It's maybe a little bit silly and has that pulpy twist to it is called Mann's Model and it's about an artist. So I of course really like that. And it actually has a really fun, now that I'm thinking about it, has a similar setup from beyond where it's like a friend is visiting a friend's studio, replace scientists with artists, and you have, it's kind of a similar idea. I didn't even put this together until we're talking about it. I'm like, oh, yeah, those stories have a lot in common. But Pitman's model has always been a really favorite of mine, and it's just, it's great. Instead of science, it's using art. And actually, even when we go to Call of Kullu in that piece, he talks about artists as well. It almost as being like they're the people who start being affected by this monster, essentially. 

Speaker 1 (41:43):
So it's starting. People are having visions and things, and the artists are the ones who are the most affected by it. So it always also makes me think of Close Encounters of the third kind, where the artists start sort of seeing Devil's Tower. So, well, I have to say just one, my last sort of association that was very powerful that came out of reading this in conjunction with Thinking about Art was of a woman's sculptor who exhibited here in the Cincinnati Art Museum, pat Rennick, who created these huge hybridized monster machine forms. Tri Copter is a lang, some library, and Stego, Volkswagen, Asosa, N K U, and Pat also, she experienced electroshock therapy, which set her on her path as an artist. So when I think about for her, at least almost literally as an artist, I feel that she descended into this psychological realm and brought these forms back. And that was very, very strongly on my mind when I was reading it, and especially now standing in this gallery. Again, it's almost like a Joseph Campbell Freudian, except that Freud has made fun of in this story, Jungian Youngian would probably be more appropriate quality to this art that just you feel that it will affect your dreams somehow. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Cedric. Thank you. I hope that you'll join us on our podcast at the Mercantile Library sometime. I would love to give me something, hopefully a short Terry. 

Speaker 1 (43:41):
Thank you for listening to Art Palace. We hope you'll be inspired to come visit the Cincinnati Art Museum and have conversations about the art yourself. General admission to the museum is always free, and we also offer free parking special exhibitions on view right now are Iris von Urin transforming fashion, Ana England Kinship and William Kentridge more sweetly Play the Dance. If you like listening to us discuss literature and art, you might want to participate in See the Story, our bi-Monthly Book Club in partnership with the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. Our next one will be on November 18th at 1130, and we will be reading Art of Rivalry by Sebastian sme. For program reservations and more information, visit cincinnati art museum.org. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and even join our Facebook group. Our theme song is Efron iCal by Balal. And as always, please rate review us and subscribe on iTunes. 

Speaker 2 (44:40):
I'm Russell 

Speaker 1 (44:41):
Iig, and this has been Art Palace produced by the Cincinnati Art Museum.