Wired Mesh

Ghosts, Gomez, and Giant Squid

I've been saving these bits of essaying in hopes that I might eventually find some clever connection between them, but to my knowledge Stephin Merritt has never written any songs about giant squid, nor has Michael Chabon written any novels about sea beasties, and there seems little hope that such inspiration will strike either of them anytime soon. (Although I, for one, would eagerly purchase a copy of "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Kraken.") So I may as well offer these morsels up in random order.

First, a really lovely New Yorker essay about one scientist's ongoing search for the giant squid, a creature that has thoroughly terrified me since my family got stuck on a replica submarine at Walt Disney World when I was six. (Damn you, Jules Verne knockoff theme park attractions! You have doomed me to a life of fear!) I still find this creature wonderfully chilling, like nothing else really. It's got all the pefect elements of gothic horror: "Though the giant squid is no myth, the species, designated in scientific literature as Architeuthis, is so little understood that it sometimes seems like one. A fully grown giant squid is classified as the largest invertebrate on Earth, with tentacles sometimes as long as a city bus and eyes about the size of human heads. Yet no scientist has ever examined a live specimen—or seen one swimming in the sea. Researchers have studied only carcasses, which have occasionally washed ashore or floated to the surface. (One corpse, found in 1887 in the South Pacific, was said to be nearly sixty feet long.)" Yikes. What could be worse than being attacked by this: a massive, slippery, tentacled thing that almost no one has actually seen?

And I suppose there is at least some connection between that monster and the next essay, a Michael Chabon piece on the legacy of gentlemanly ghost-story writer Montague Rhodes James, whose unseen, accidentally summoned horrors often sport the sort of fleshy protrubances that one generally assosiates with either squids or sex. Chabon compares James with the more famous writer he inspired, H. P. Lovecraft: "The contrast is particularly stark when it comes to their portrayal of the unportrayable. Lovecraft approaches Horror armed with adverbs, abstractions, and perhaps a too-heavy reliance on pseudopods and tentacles. James rarely does more than hint at the nature of his ghosts and apparitions, employing a few simple, select, revolting adjectives, summoning his ghosts into hideous, enduring life in the reader's mind in a bare sentence or two." Chabon goes on to make a too-short but still-rather-convincing argument that all short stories are, to some degree or another, ghost stories, depending as they do on a character's confrontation with a mentally buried past experience. (Flannery O'Connor might add that the form, ghostly or otherwise, hinges just as much on an encounter with the Other.) M. R. James has now taken a prime position among the books I hope to read this summer.

Finally, I am happy to report that Stephin Merritt, better known for his own brilliant musical work, has returned -- if only for a brief moment -- to excoriating the work of lesser artists, and noting the unsung talents as well. He gets a nice, thick column in last Sunday's New York Times, wherein he pans Morrissey's backup band and praises Gomez, Delays and The Real Tuesday Weld, of whom he drolly raves: "No style or tempo lasts more than four minutes, making the record fun for actually listening to, without feeling one should really do the dishes now."