Guess what today is, dear reader.  Well, yeah, smart ass…it’s August 20th.  But do you know the significance?  Today we are celebrating the birth of a man who somehow managed to make tentacles terrifying long before Japanese pop culture turned them into something else entirely – though let’s be honest, Howard Phillips Lovecraft probably would have found that particular cultural evolution more horrifying than anything he ever conjured up in his fever dreams of non-Euclidean geometry and cities that shouldn’t exist but absolutely do in the space between your third drink and your fourth panic attack.

And yes, before you ask, I am already three whiskeys deep into this tribute, because how else does one properly commemorate the birthday of a guy who spent his entire literary career essentially screaming “THE UNIVERSE IS INDIFFERENT TO YOUR EXISTENCE AND ALSO THERE ARE FISH PEOPLE” at anyone within earshot?

The thing about Howard – and I’m calling him Howard because we’re birthday buddies now, cosmically speaking – is that he possessed this absolutely deranged ability to take the fundamental anxiety of existing in a universe that makes no sense whatsoever (which, let’s face it, it pretty much the human condition distilled to its purest essence) and transform it into prose so dense with subordinate clauses and baroque descriptive passages that reading it becomes its own kind of madness-inducing experience, a literary equivalent of staring directly into the abyss while the abyss files your taxes incorrectly and charges you late fees.

Dig, if you will (and you will, because I’m not giving you a choice here), the sheer audacity of a man who looked at the conventional horror tropes of his era – your garden variety ghosts, vampires, werewolves, things that go bump in the night and occasionally demand your lunch money – and said, “No, thank you, I’ll take cosmic insignificance with a side of tentacles and an extra serving of geometry that makes mathematicians weep.”  This is a writer who made angles scary.  Fucking angles!  Try explaining that so someone at a party.  Try explaining that to someone at a party.  I’ve tried, and it went something like this: “Well, you see, it’s not just any angle, it’s a non-Euclidean angle, which means it exists in ways that shouldn’t be possible, and also it’s probably connected to an ancient god-thing that regards humanity the way you regard the bacteria living in your kitchen sponge.”

But here’s where it gets deliciously absurd (and by delicious, I mean the kind of delicious that makes you questions your life choices while simultaneously reaching for another drink): Lovecraft, this master of cosmic horror, this architect of existential dread, was apparently afraid of air conditioning.  The man who created Cthulhu – a creature so cosmically horrifying that merely glimpsing it drives people insane – was reportedly intimidated by modern technology to the point where he probably would have had a complete nervous breakdown if confronted with a smartphone notification.

The irony is so thick you could cut it with a sword forged in the fires of Azathoth’s blind idiot piping (which, for the non-English majors, is basically Lovecraft’s way of saying “really, really hot”), and yet somehow this contradiction makes perfect sense when you consider that his entire literary project was essentially an elaborate exploration of the terror that comes from realizing you don’t understand the world you’re living in – which, when you think about it, is exactly how most of us feel when trying to figure out why our Wi-Fi stopped working or why our car is making that weird noise that definitely wasn’t there yesterday but night have been there for months and we just now noticed it because we finally turned off the radio.

And let’s talk about that prose style for a moment.  Because reading Lovecraft is like being trapped in a very erudite Nyquil dream where every sentence contains at least 17 dependent clauses, three semicolons, and at least one reference to something that sounds vaguely geological but is actually a sleeping god whose dreams are responsible for that recurring nightmare you have about showing up to work in your underwear, except in this case your underwear is made of cosmic horror and your workplace is a dimension that exists perpendicular to reality.

The man wrote sentences so labyrinthine that getting to the end of one feels like completing a particularly challenging obstacle course designed by someone who studied both architecture and madness with equal dedication, which is to say that by the time you reach the period, you’ve forgotten not only where the sentence began but also your own name, your social security number, and whether or not you remembered to feed your cat this morning (spoiler alert: you didn’t, and now your cat is plotting you demise with the same cold calculation that Nyarlathotep  brings to his role as the Crawling Chaos).

But here’s the thing that gets me, the thing that makes me raise my glass (again) to old Howard on this, his birthday: despite all the cosmic pessimism, despite the fundamental belief that humanity is essentially a cosmic accident that will be forgotten as soon as the starts align correctly and the Old Ones wake up from their Really Long Nap, despite the prose style that requires a graduate degree in recursive sentence structure just to parse – despite all of this, there’s something weirdly optimistic about the whole enterprise.

Because think about it: Lovecraft spent his entire career imagining horrors so vast and incomprehensible that they make our daily anxieties seem laughably insignificant by comparison.  Worried about your mortgage?  Well, at least Yog-Sothoth isn’t trying to manifest through your bathroom mirror.  Stressed about some deadline at work?  Could be worse…you could be a character in “The Colour Out of Space” watching your entire family slowly dissolve into something that probably violates several laws of physics.

It’s horror as therapy, cosmic dread as a form of perspective-checking, existential terror as a weird kind of comfort food for people who find regular comfort food insufficiently terrifying and also lacking in tentacles.

And yes, we have to acknowledge that Howard had some serious issues with, well, pretty much everyone who wasn’t a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant living in New England circa 1920, which is to say that his personal brand of cosmic horror came with a heft side order of terrestrial horror that was, frankly, way more horrifying than anything involving fish people or dream dimensions, because at least the fish people had the decency to be fictional.

But here’s where literature gets weird and complicated and sometimes beautiful in spite of itself: somehow, through the alchemy of time and cultural evolution and the strange way that stories take on lives of their own once they’re released into the world, Lovecraft’s cosmic nightmares have become a kind of shared language for anyone who’s ever felt overwhelmed by the sheer incomprehensible vastness of existence – which is to say, anyone who’s ever been alive and paying attention for more than five consecutive minutes.

His creatures and concepts have escaped their original context and become metaphors for everything from corporate bureaucracy to social media algorithms to the general feeling of being a tiny, confused biological entity trying to make sense of a universe that operates according to rules nobody bother to explain to you and also the rulebook is written in a language that doesn’t exist and even if it did exist, it would probably drive you insane just to read it.

So here’s to you, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, on this sweltering August 20th, your birthday and mine to celebrate: thank you for taking the fundamental weirdness of being alive and cranking it up to eleven, then breaking off the volume knob and feeding it to something with too many teeth and not enough regard for the laws of physics.

Thank you for showing us that sometimes the best way to deal with the incomprehensible vastness of existence is to imagine it’s even more incomprehensible and vastly more vast than we originally thought, and also it has tentacles and probably wants to eat our dreams.

Thank you for proving that you can write sentences so complex that they become their own form of cosmic horror, where the real monster isn’t some ancient god sleeping beneath the ocean but the dangling participle that’s been haunting your prose since paragraph three.

And thank you most of all for reminding us that in a universe full of Things That Should Not Be, sometimes the most radical act is to imagine Things That Really, Definitely Should Not Be, and then spend your entire life writing about them with the kind of obsessive dedication usually reserved for people who collect vintage bottle caps or know way too much about the genealogy of minor European nobility.

Happy birthday, you magnificent, troubled, utterly singular architect of nightmares.  May your non-Euclidean angles remain forever acute, may your Old Ones stay comfortably asleep for at least another few decades, and may your literary legacy continue to inspire writers to create sentences so grammatically complex that they require their own GPS system to navigate.

[Raises glass to the cosmic void, which probably isn’t paying attention but might be, which is somehow both more and less comforting than complete indifference]

Ph’nglui mglw’nath Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn – and also, happy birthday, Howard.  Thanks for making the universe just a little bit weirder, which is exactly what it needed.

N.P.: “Cthulhu” – Gunship

So here we are again, dear reader, gathered around the literary campfire like a couple of degenerate scholars clutching our bottles of cheap wine and expired dreams, ready to sing the praises of the man who taught us that poetry doesn’t have to wear a tuxedo to a funeral – that sometimes it’s perfectly acceptable, even preferable, for verse to show up drunk, unshaven, and reeking of yesterday’s poor decisions.

Today marks the anniversary of August 16, 1920, when some cosmic chair-puller decided the world needed a man who would transform hangovers into haikus, who would alchemize the base metals of human failure into literary gold [Note: Honestly, dear reader, who else is going to give you alchemical references on a Saturday?  No one, that’s who.  Just sayin’.], and who would prove once and for all that you don’t need to be tortured by your art when life is perfectly willing to do the torturing for you.

Charles Bukowski – or Hank to those of us who like to pretend we knew him personally despite being more decades too late and several tax brackets too high – was the kind of writer who made the rest of us feel simultaneously inferior and relieved.  Inferior because, let’s face it, none of us will ever achieve that perfect synthesis of raw brutality and surprising tenderness that characterized his best work.  Relieved because thank God we don’t have to live through the kind of beautiful disaster that produced Post Office, Factotum, and Ham on Rye.

The man was essentially a one-person writing workshop for everyone who ever thought literature was too precious, too sanitized, too concerned with proper semicolon usage when what we really needed was someone to grab us by the literary lapels and scream, “Look, you pretentious fucks, this is what it actually feels like to be human!”  and he did this while maintaining a work ethic I can only dream about – thousands of poems, six novels, countless short stories, all produced while working dead-end jobs and drinking enough alcohol to float a small yacht.

But here’s where it gets complicated, because celebrating Bukowski means acknowledging the uncomfortable truth that separates the dilettantes from the devotees: the man wasn’t just playing at being a degenerate for artistic effect.  His was not some carefully cultivated persona designed to move units at Barnes & Noble.  This was authentic self-destruction, the Real Deal, unfiltered and unforgiving.  He lived the kind of life that most of us romanticize from the safety of our temperature-controlled offices, the kind of existence that looks glamorous in retrospect but probably felt like being slowly digested by a particularly sadistic snake.

What made Bukowski genuinely dangerous – and by dangerous I mean the kind of writer who forces you to reevaluate your entire relationship with both language and existence, as it did with me – was his refusal to apologize for any of it.  Not the drinking, not the gambling, not the brutal honesty about human relationships, not the way he could make a trip to the grocery store sound like a descent into one of Dante’s lesser-known circles of hell.  He wrote about ordinary humiliation with the kind of precision usually reserved for surgical procedures, and he did it without the safety net of ironic distance that most of us hide behind when confronting our own spectacular failures.

Let’s take Post Office, his semi-autobiographical novel about working for the United States Postal Service, which reads like Catch-22 if Joseph Heller had been raised on cheap beer and disastrous decisions instead of intellectual sophistication.  Bukowski transformed the mundane, banal bureaucratic nightmare of mail delivery into something approaching epic literature, proving that you don’t need to witness the fall of the Roman Empire to write about the human condition – sometimes all you need is a supervisor named Jonstone and the crushing realization that this job might not be temporary after all.

Or take his poetry, which achieved that rare feat of being simultaneously accessible and profound, like finding a twenty-dollar bill in a pair of jeans you were about to throw away.

Lines like “the free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them” hit me hard, with the force of recognition.  The kind of truth that makes you stop whatever you’re doing and think, “Shit, this guy gets it.”

The irony, here, of course, which irony I suspect would have made Bukowski himself cackle 0 is that this man who spent his life running from respectability, who viewed literary establishment types with the same enthusiasm most people reserve for dental surgery, has becoming something approaching required reading in creative writing programs across the country.  College kids who’ve never worked a manual labor job in their lives are now studying his technique, analyzing his use of line breaks and discussing his “aesthetic choices” as if alcoholism were a literary device rather than a progressive disease.

But maybe that’s the point.  Maybe the ultimate joke is that Bukowski’s work survives not despite its rough edges but because of them, not because it fits neatly into academic categories but because it explodes them.  In an age where so much contemporary literature feels focus-grouped to death, workshopped into bland submission, and designed to offend absolutely no one while saying absolutely nothing, Bukowski’s voice still cuts through the noise like a rusty blade through a silk nightie.

So today, as we raise our glasses – and let’s be honest, we’re probably raising them anyway, Hank’s birthday or not – let’s toast the man who proved that literature doesn’t have to be polite to be powerful, that poetry can smell like cigarettes and still move mountains, and sometimes the most profound truths come from the people society has written off as the most hopeless cases.

Here’s to Charles Bukowski: patron saint of the perpetually hungover, laureate of the legitimately lost, and reminder that sometimes the most beautiful flowers grow in the ugliest soil.  The man who showed us that rock bottom has excellent Wi-Fi and that the view from the gutter includes some spectacular sunsets.

Happy birthday, you bastard.  Know that the bar is still open, the typewriter still works, and somewhere in California, the spirit of honest literature is still stumbling through the streets, looking for the next great story and probably needing a ride home.

N.P.: “Night Has Turned to Day” – Fantastic Negrito

It’s not easy working on a book that you believe no publisher will ever touch.  There are morale issues with such an endeavor.  It can get tough to summon the energy and dedication to create something that may never see the light of day due to societal pusillanimity.  We live in the age of cowards, dear reader, which is wrist-slittingly depressing for some of us.  American society needs this book, but they are too afraid to even crack it.   Of course, if it does get published, it will be pretty revolutionary, if I may say so myself.

Here’s the thing about literary revolutions – they usually happen on Tuesday afternoons when  nobody’s paying attention, involving men with bad lungs and worse attitudes toward authority.  Which brings us, in that meandering way that all good stories eventually stumble toward their point (assuming they have one, which this one does, I think), to August 15th, 1945, when a certain skinny Brit named Eric Blair – though you probably know him by his pen name, the infinitely more ominous George Orwell – unleashed what might be the most savage takedown of totalitarian bullshit ever disguised as a children’s book about barnyard animals.  Animal Farm.  Two words that would make commissars shit themselves for decades to come.  Now, you might be thinking (and who am I to stop you from thinking, though the habit has become dangerous since this shitty decade began): “What’s so revolutionary about talking pigs?”  First you need to understand that this isn’t your average Charlotte’s Web situation.  This is literary napalm wrapped in the deceptively simple packaging of a fairy tale, which is exactly what makes it so goddamn brilliant.

Dig, if you will, this picture: It’s the middle of World War II, and here’s Orwell – already establishing himself as the kind of writer who looked at power structures the way an entomologist looks at particularly disgusting insects – crafting this razor-sharp allegory while the world burns around him.  The man had seen the writing on the wall (literally, considering his later work), and that writing spelled out the uncomfortable truth that maybe, just maybe, our glorious Soviet allies weren’t the freedom-loving champions of the proletariat they claimed to be.

But here’s where it gets interesting (and by interesting, I mean the kind of publishing nightmare that would make modern literary agents reach for the bourbon): Nobody wanted to touch this thing.  Publishers circled it like it was radioactive – which, in a sense, it was.  Political sensitivities were running higher than a meth-addled bat, and here comes Orwell with his talking pigs basically calling out Stalin as just another power-drunk pig in a different trough.

The rejection letters must have been poetry in their own right.  “Dear Mr. Blair, while we admire your allegorical approach to critiquing totalitarian regimes through the lens of barnyard democracy, we feel that now might not be the optimal time to publish what amounts to a literary assassination attempt on our wartime ally’s political system.  Also, talking animals are weird.  Sincerely, Cowardly Publishing House.”

But Orwell, bless his stubborn soul, kept pushing.  Because that’s what real writers do when they’ve got something to say: they say it, consequences be fucked.  The man had already taken a bullet fighting fascists in Spain (literally, through the throat), so a few nervous publishers weren’t about to stop him from exposing the porcine nature of power.

And then, finally, August 15th, 1945.  Secker and Warburg – publishers with enough testicular fortitude to recognize genius when it came wrapped in barnyard satire – released this literary dirty bomb into the world.  The timing was almost poetic: Japan had just surrendered, the war was ending, and suddenly everyone was free to start asking uncomfortable questions about what exactly they’d been fighting for.

The beauty of Animal Farm…the sheer, devastating brilliance of it…is how it works on multiple levels simultaneously.  Kids can read it as a simple story about farm animals.  Adults can appreciate it as a scathing indictment of Soviet totalitarianism.  Political scientists can analyze it as a meditation on the corruption of revolutionary ideals.  And cynics (like yrs. truly) can admire it as proof that sometimes the best way to tell the truth is to dress it up as a lie.

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”  If that line doesn’t make you simultaneously laugh and want to burn down the nearest government building, you might want to check your pulse.

The book’s impact was immediate and massive.  Here was someone finally saying what a lot of people had been thinking but were too polite (or terrified) to articulate: that power corrupts absolutely, regardless of the ideology used to justify it.  That revolutionary leaders have an unfortunate tendency to become the very thing they overthrew.  That the pigs, quite literally, end up indistinguishable from the humans.

What makes this whole story even more tasty is the context: while Orwell was writing this devastating critique of Soviet communism, the Western world was still largely enchanted with Stalin and company.  The man was essentially committing literary treason against the prevailing narrative, and he did it with such style and wit that by the time people realized what he was doing, it was too late to stop him.

The book became a phenomenon – banned in Soviet countries (natch), embraced by Western readers hungry for someone to finally call bullshit on the whole utopian communist experiment, and studied in schools worldwide as an example of how literature can be both entertaining and subversive as hell.

So raise a glass (or 12) to George Orwell, literary badass and professional pain-in-the-ass to tyrants everywhere.  The man who proved that sometimes the most revolutionary act is simply telling the truth, even when – especially when – nobody wants to hear it.  He gave us talking pigs that tell us more about human nature than most humans ever will.

And that, dear reader, is how you stage a literary revolution.

Because in the end, we’re all just animals in someone else’s farm.  The question is: are we going to be the sheep, or are we going to be the ones exposing the pigs?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need another drink.  All this talk of revolution and talking pigs has left me thirsty for desk bourbon and suspicious of barnyard animals.

N.P.: “My Angel” – Binary Park

I don’t even know why I try to do any serious writing in the summer…I have never been able to artfully express myself in this ridiculous and oppressive heat.  The higher the temperature, the lower the (good) word count.  That said, I shall continue to press, continue trying.  What the hell else am I going to do.

Today is a Triple Death Day on the D.P.S. calendar, so pour some out and throw some back for three literary badasses who have gone on to their Great Reward.  Unfortunately, I’ll have to be shamefully brief for each one, as this goddamn book is demanding attention, and I’m in no position to deny it.

Up (or perhaps down) first is William Blake.  This visionary poet and artist passed away on August 12, 1827.  If you’re not familiar, I highly recommend checking out Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, both being absolutely revolutionary, blending mysticism, some pretty radical politics, and raw creativity.  Blake’s defiance of conventional norms along with his unapologetic exploration of human nature and spirituality make his legacy patently badass in its fearless originality.  His death marked the end of a fascinating life spent challenging the status quo through art and words.

Next we have Thomas Mann, the German novelist and Nobel Prize winner who died on August 12, 1955.  If the dear reader is not familiar with him, check out Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain.  These both tackle some pretty big ideas – desire, morality, and the human condition – unflinchingly.  Mann showed a lot of courage in critiquing his society, especially during the rise of actual Nazism.  He has earned his place here for myriad reasons, with one of the biggest being impressive intellectual bravery.

Lastly is Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, who died on August 12, 1964.  The Bond novels, starting with Casino Royale, redefined spy fiction with their suave, gritty, and unapologetically adventurous style.  Fleming used his own experiences as a naval intelligence officer to fuel his stories with a raw, larger-than-life energy – think fast cars, high stakes, and a hero who’s cool under pressure.  His death marked a pivotal moment for a franchise that still dominates pop culture, though now more for controversy than solid storytelling…recent efforts to make James Bond female have been met with bitter and brutal backlash from those of us who understand that you can’t swap the gender of a beloved character without profoundly changing that characters in ways that would make the original creator reach for a weapon in his grave.

Alright, dear reader…back to it.

N.P.: “Skeletal Parade” – Santa Hates You