Reading and Mental Health, Or Not

This will have to be an abbreviated post today. Maybe I can expand tomorrow. With regard to Cloverfield: the Wikipedia article on Cloverfield noted that there were erroneous rumors that the movie was based on H.P. Lovecraft's horror stories. I looked up the article on Lovecraft. Fair disclosure: I've never read Lovecraft. But it's amazing to me that, just as there are linkages between authors that enrich the soul (I'm thinking, for example, of the Inklings, George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers) there are apparently linkages between authors whose works tend to impoverish the soul. I guess I thought of them as being birds that flew solo. Silly of me, I guess. Lovecraft, and some of the authors connected with him, seem to have one link after another to suicide, mental illness, depression, atheism, cosmicism (which is the belief that human life is not so much meaningless as it is inconsequential and doomed), and racism. Then I went into a comic book store today. I keep forgetting why I gave up comics in between my visits. This is why. Darkness has largely taken over. It's depressing. C.S. Lewis said of Boswell (which could have been said of Lewis as well) that "to read him is to grow in mental health". Without wishing to condemn any person (especially those I have not read first hand) or any genre, I think I can say that I'm reminded that there are those authors for whom the opposite is true.

Second Life and Cloverfield

Here are a couple of new-ish things that have caught my interest lately:
1) Second Life, a 3-D virtual world created by its users, which they "inhabit" via their avatars. I think there must be the opportunity for me to make a lot of money from this somehow, but I haven't figured it out yet.

2) The viral marketing campaign for Cloverfield, a soon-to-be-released movie about a giant monster attacking Manhattan, told from the perspective of recordings made on personal video devices (think 9/11 news coverage meets Godzilla meets Blair Witch Project). "Cloverfield", by the way, may or may not be the actual title, and there is some speculation that it may be a Godzilla remake, though I doubt it. The roar, which I admit is Godzilla-esque, sounds like a foghorn slowed way down. For this reason, I wonder if it is perhaps a remake of, or inspired by, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, which was itself adapted from Ray Bradbury's short story, The Fog Horn (the story is about a huge dinosaur, the last of its species, mistaking the sound of a fog horn for one of its own kind). The movie has one of the most intriguing trailers ever, generating rampant speculation and a whole lot of buzz. Like many others, I hope the movie lives up to its trailer. More on this tomorrow. (Who knew my blog topics would include American kaiju?)