Sanity Restorative
During a polite but wide disagreement with a reader, he referred to a painting by Picasso which he called ‘solid work’. Trustingly, and giving him the benefit of the doubt, I looked at the picture, and suffered the fate of many unhappy scholarly characters in an H.P. Lovecraft novel upon beholding an eldritch horror, but without the glamor or strangeness or sense of the unearthly which beholding non-euclidean shapes of a cruel cephalopod or malign mollusc might impart. It was merely banal ugliness, as one might see scrawled in poop by a lunatic on the walls of Bedlam by an inmate after his weekly beating by surly and uncaring guards.
To force the echo of the ghastly imagine from my brain, I am posting some girly pictures. This is because girls are pretty, and can restore, in Call of Cthulhu terms, 1d6 of lost SAN points.
I would particularly like the readers to note that these are done in a variety of styles, and meant some for refined artistic tastes and some for lowbrow cheesecake, with every gradation between high art and low comic inbetween. But notice what is present in all, even the humblest: they are sincere attempts to portray an attractive sight.
There is nothing distorted, warped, vile, childish, crude, abhorrent or aberrant about any of them. The thing, the only thing, present in the art of Picasso and the other moderns, pure, jarring, insolent, stomach-wrenching ugliness is what is missing.
The Birth of Venus by William Bouguereau
- Hylas and the Nymphs
He Volunteered for the Submarine Service by Jon Whitcomb
Redheaded Amazonian Ax Babe of Mars
Finally, a personal favorite of mine:
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
