{"id":95721,"date":"2016-03-18T09:25:03","date_gmt":"2016-03-18T13:25:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=95721"},"modified":"2016-03-18T10:48:44","modified_gmt":"2016-03-18T14:48:44","slug":"lovecraft-ghostwrote-for-houdini-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/18\/lovecraft-ghostwrote-for-houdini-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Lovecraft Ghostwrote for Houdini, and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_95723\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/houdini-elephant.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-95723\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-95723\" class=\"wp-image-95723\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/houdini-elephant.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"476\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/houdini-elephant.jpg 565w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/houdini-elephant-300x238.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-95723\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Houdini with an elephant, 1918.<\/p><\/div>\n<ul>\n<li>Today in long-lost manuscripts commissioned by prominent escape artists: an expansive essay by Lovecraft called \u201cThe Cancer of Superstition\u201d (sounds nuanced, doesn\u2019t it?) was found among the memorabilia from a defunct magic shop. Apparently Harry Houdini conceived the project, which was, as its title suggests, a screed against every aspect of the superstitious: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2016\/mar\/16\/hp-lovecraft-harry-houdini-manuscript-cancer-superstition-memorabilia\" target=\"_blank\">Houdini had asked Lovecraft in 1926 to ghostwrite the treatise exploring superstition, but the magician\u2019s death later that year halted the project, as his wife did not wish to pursue it<\/a> \u2026 The document explores everything from worship of the dead to werewolves and cannibalism, theorising that superstition is an \u2018inborn inclination\u2019 that \u2018persists only through mental indolence of those who reject modern science\u2019 \u2026 \u2018Most of us are heathens in the innermost recesses of our hearts,\u2019 it concludes.\u201d Christopher Hitchens would be proud.<\/li>\n<li>In which Anakana Schofield enters the job market only to find that it\u2019s been overrun with hyperbole and the bloated, dead, \u201caspirational\u201d language of advertising: \u201cI can\u2019t save lives or fix broken pipes: I need a job with the potential for staring into space or reading Pinget on the side\u2014a car park attendant seemed ideal. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lrb.co.uk\/blog\/2016\/03\/15\/anakana-schofield\/bold-open-minded-and-entrepreneurial\/\" target=\"_blank\">I found an advert online and immediately entered a car park of excessive adjectives. The parking lot attendant they were looking for needed to \u2018Be a trail blazer \u2026 Be Bold, Open-minded &amp; Entrepreneurial.\u2019<\/a> I was puzzled. How does one \u2018blaze a trail\u2019 handing out change and scanning parking stubs and visa cards through a drafty hut window? \u2026 I left that car park with the new understanding that the language of recruitment has gone up several octaves but since I negotiate language for a living, I was undeterred. The next advert included the promising phrase \u2018a front line ambassador\u2019 \u2026 \u201d<\/li>\n<li>America doesn\u2019t need vacuous words like <em>bold <\/em>and <em>open-minded. <\/em>America needs <em>y\u2019all<\/em>. \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/entertainment\/archive\/2016\/03\/the-case-for-yall\/473277\/\" target=\"_blank\">It sounds elegant, warm, and inviting. It offers both economy and an end to second-person ambiguity<\/a>. Teach it in schools across the country. Mouth it to babies. Put it on end-of-grade tests \u2026 The possibilities are endless, and a simple substitution could actually solve a real problem in modern English that will only grow as we continue to examine how gender works in language. It could provide a better and gender-neutral word. It could relieve \u201cyou\u201d of the impossible task of ostensibly functioning in so many roles, and maybe even along the way ease some of the regional and racial stigmatization of language and slang.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Talking to Zadie Smith, Darryl Pinckney looks at the effect of memoirs like Margo Jefferson\u2019s <em>Negroland <\/em>on the conventional narrative of black achievement: \u201cI think <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nypl.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/12\/podcast-darryl-pinckney-zadie-smith\" target=\"_blank\">one of the things Margo Jefferson\u2019s marvelous memoir does is\u00a0remind us that classed aspiration was at one time a radical act or a radical mode for black people, because white people didn\u2019t want you to leave the plantation<\/a>. They didn&#8217;t want your barbershop to succeed. They didn\u2019t want you to go to college. They didn\u2019t want you to have Latin in college because they violated what DuBois called \u2018personal whiteness.\u2019 It wasn\u2019t until the late fifties\u00a0with the E. Franklin Frazier book <em>Black Bourgeoisie <\/em>that all this was demonized, that black middle class. DuBois also raked everyone over the coals for wanting to play golf instead of wanting to be in the NAACP. And then in the sixties, middle-class life became an optic of scorn anyway. So blacks were doubly scorned, for \u2018trying to be white,\u2019 which was a deep insult because these people had found a way to be <em>black<\/em>, and that wasn\u2019t respected at all.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>M\u00e1irt\u00edn \u00d3 Cadhain\u2019s 1949 novel <em>Cr\u00e9 na Cille <\/em>was widely regarded as an Irish Gaelic masterpiece\u2014so why are we only now seeing an English translation? \u201cFor almost seventy years, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/books\/page-turner\/the-irish-novel-thats-so-good-people-were-scared-to-translate-it\" target=\"_blank\">\u00d3 Cadhain\u2019s greatest work remained inaccessible to nearly all Irish readers, because it was written in Irish Gaelic, a language vanishingly few of them speak, and it had never been translated into English<\/a> \u2026 S\u00e1irs\u00e9al agus Dill, \u00d3 Cadhain\u2019s publisher, took concrete steps toward putting out a translation. In the early nineteen-sixties, a contract was sent to a young woman who\u2019d submitted a sample translation as part of an open contest. (A letter from the woman\u2019s mother eventually came back: her daughter wouldn\u2019t be able to finish the translation, she wrote, as she\u2019d just entered a convent.) S\u00e1irs\u00e9al agus Dill next tried to entice the poet Thomas Kinsella to translate the book; though he was honored they\u2019d considered him, Kinsella wrote in a 1963 letter, he was \u2018sure it would be a very difficult job, especially since we\u2019re talking about <em>Cr\u00e9 na Cille<\/em>. It\u2019s not an exaggeration to say it would take years.\u2019 \u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today in long-lost manuscripts commissioned by prominent escape artists: an expansive essay by Lovecraft called \u201cThe Cancer of Superstition\u201d (sounds nuanced, doesn\u2019t it?) was found among the memorabilia from a defunct magic shop. Apparently Harry Houdini conceived the project, which was, as its title suggests, a screed against every aspect of the superstitious: \u201cHoudini had [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2512],"tags":[21586,6861,6853,4901,687,18463,21585,530,21584,1079],"class_list":["post-95721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-daryl-pinckney","tag-h-p-lovecraft","tag-harry-houdini","tag-jobs","tag-language","tag-mairtin-o-cadhain","tag-margo-jefferson","tag-translation","tag-yall","tag-zadie-smith"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>When Houdini Hired Lovecraft to Write for Him<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This and more in today\u2019s roundup.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/18\/lovecraft-ghostwrote-for-houdini-and-other-news\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Lovecraft Ghostwrote for Houdini, and Other News by Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 18, 2016 \u2013 Today in long-lost manuscripts commissioned by prominent escape artists: an expansive essay by Lovecraft called \u201cThe Cancer of Superstition\u201d (sounds\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/18\/lovecraft-ghostwrote-for-houdini-and-other-news\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-03-18T13:25:03+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2016-03-18T14:48:44+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/houdini-elephant.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"565\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"448\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/18\/lovecraft-ghostwrote-for-houdini-and-other-news\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/18\/lovecraft-ghostwrote-for-houdini-and-other-news\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Dan Piepenbring\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/6b16ca558fc538230f135c3220dfd3c8\"},\"headline\":\"Lovecraft Ghostwrote for Houdini, and Other News\",\"datePublished\":\"2016-03-18T13:25:03+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2016-03-18T14:48:44+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/18\/lovecraft-ghostwrote-for-houdini-and-other-news\/\"},\"wordCount\":811,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/18\/lovecraft-ghostwrote-for-houdini-and-other-news\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/houdini-elephant.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Daryl Pinckney\",\"H.P. 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