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Turnip Jedi wrote: yep that one is the straightest take he did, was okay but i liked the Neilyness of the other two
dont recall the beowolf thing
It is called Bay Wolf.
As I understand it, while Neil Gaiman was working on a script for a Beowulf adaptation, he ran into a lot of people who misheard the word "Beowulf" and thought he said "Baywatch." This got him thinking about retelling the story of Beowulf as an episode of Baywatch.
He didn't feel the need to turn it into a story until an editor asked him for a contribution to an anthology. The editor suggested "make it one of your stories in meter- oh, and I really liked that wolf character, so make it about him."
So he wrote Beowulf as an episode of Bay Watch in meter starring his werewolf investigator.
Yeah, I could definitely see Gaiman pulling in some Lovecraft gods in to the American Gods setting that way.
Ultimately, I don't think he'd be interested in creating a 'world needs saving' kind of situation with them. Gaiman is usually more interested in more personal stories that don't endanger all of everything.
That, and he'd probably make the monsters sympathetic. That's been the take that several more recent Mythos writers have gone with.
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I strongly suspect Gaiman would come down on the 'we are ants to the Elder Gods' side of things. I would read the heck out of a novel based off of this post.
Spoiler:
The Elder God only appears in asides, or extremely short chapters going about their business, eating stars, vacuuming nebula and trying to swat that space probe that keeps on buzzing around its ear analogues, and attempts perfunctory solutions to the cultist calling out to it. The majority of the book are the unintended consequences of these interventions. It's not evil per se, just disinterested and somewhat bothered.
Klawz-Ramming is a subset of citrus fruit?
Gwar- "And everyone wants a bigger Spleen!"
Mercurial wrote:
I admire your aplomb and instate you as Baron of the Seas and Lord Marshall of Privateers.
Orkeosaurus wrote:Star Trek also said we'd have X-Wings by now. We all see how that prediction turned out.
Orkeosaurus, on homophobia, the nature of homosexuality, and the greatness of George Takei.
English doesn't borrow from other languages. It follows them down dark alleyways and mugs them for loose grammar.
I was recently summed to a circle of ants in my house.
The response was their total extermination of their world by chemical weapons, and of their unrelated neighbor kin in about a 10 foot radius of my home. Even ones outside of my house but too close to my foundation.
Absolute annihilation and genocide within about a quarter acre universe.
"I have become death, the destroyer of worlds"
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/06/30 21:59:43
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So seems George R. R. Martin got into some hot water recently for praising Lovecraft at the Hugo awards. Which is strange considering I remember some people in this very thread insisting that the controversy surrounding Lovecraft was something only made up in the minds of Lovecrafts fans
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/08/13 09:23:30
Was kind of odd, not quite sure that HPL being a racist crank is exactly news to anybody, but that whole seperation or otherwise of art and artist can mostly be ignored as it doesnt fit neatly into 140 characters
"AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED."
The GRRM controversy is more related to Campbell then Lovecraft if I'm not mistaken.
Death of the author is an interesting lens trough wich you can look at a work but in HPL case it's hard because his fears of the unknown and the other heavily influenced his writng.
In addition you risk acidently creating a very racist basis for a genre when you don't acknowledge the flaws in the works you are using as a basis. This is a big problem in sci fi and fantasy. Given the more controversial (today) opinions of people like Campbell, Heinlein, and Howard.
dyndraig wrote: So seems George R. R. Martin got into some hot water recently for praising Lovecraft at the Hugo awards. Which is strange considering I remember some people in this very thread insisting that the controversy surrounding Lovecraft was something only made up in the minds of Lovecrafts fans
I think most writers today are generally able to recognize Lovecraft's significant literary contributions while not becoming anal buttholes about his racism. I've mentioned this multiple times now. GRRM isn't the first to do this. King has sung Lovecraft's praises for years and when someone asked him about Lovecraft's racism at a panel one time King just shrugged and moved on.
The anal retentive "but he's not racist" crowd is almost solely the domain of people who haven't read him but get completely butt hurt at any mention that anything might be racist, so the rest of us who would like to talk about his literary contributions or achievements instead get bogged down in the lowest common denominator. This thread's first couple pages are a marvelous example.
And if GRRM is in hot water for anything after this years Hugos, it's that his speech comes off like a laundry list of "all these great writers are mostly dead and not up for an award right now." Seriously, go watch the speech. I wouldn't call it a bad speech, but... Well you know how we all point fingers at Kanye West and call him an donkey-cave every time someone wins an award and he steals the stage to talk about someone else and we all just generally agree that's something of a dick move? Well that's what GRRM did, and honestly anyone focusing on who he was praising other than the actual award winners is probably doing him a favor because the anal retentive "but he's not racist" crowd will defend anything and it's more support than GRRM would get if we all just collectively agreed he was being kind of dick.
Where's the fething book Martin. You have time to write a speech but you can't finish the damn novel? You can give us a speech about the importance of past Hugo winners but you can't even be bothered to learn how to pronounce the names of current winners properly and you still haven't finished the damn book!
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I thought the general consenus was GRRM is just a cranky old bugger fond of yelling at clouds, fantasys writings answer to Abe Simpson whose now tied so many onions to his belt he's forgetton what any of them mean
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"AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED."
Easy E wrote: I was recently summed to a circle of ants in my house.
The response was their total extermination of their world by chemical weapons, and of their unrelated neighbor kin in about a 10 foot radius of my home. Even ones outside of my house but too close to my foundation.
Absolute annihilation and genocide within about a quarter acre universe.
"I have become death, the destroyer of worlds"
This galaxy is INFESTED with VERMIN!!!
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/08/14 01:22:04
Sqorgar wrote: Why is it so important to them that Lovecraft be labeled a racist that they take the mere suggestion that it is irrelevant as a personal attack?
The kettle is strong with this one.
It is essentially worthless to call Lovecraft a racist because he's dead
His literary works aren't and they're pretty damn racist, but seriously this is just proving my point.
You could have taken this opportunity (once again) to talk about his work in practical terms. Thus far only a few people in this thread have even tried. Instead you've produced just another spiel about how butt hurt you are that his racism is being noted rather than ignored as you'd prefer.
but it's just an assumption
Seriously. Actually read some of his writing at some point.
At the end of the day, the only person who could explain Lovecraft's views is Lovecraft, and being dead, he's not in a position to answer anybody's questions.
Jesus fething christ, Lovecraft explaining Lovecraft:
Spoiler:
The negro is fundamentally the biological inferior of all White and even Mongolian races, and the Northern people must occasionally be reminded of the danger which they incur in admitting him too freely to the privileges of society and government.
The Klan merely did for the people what the law refused to do, removing the ballot from unfit hands and restoring to the victims of political vindictiveness their natural rights.
*Note that in the 1920s, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan was not well received.
Race prejudice is a gift of Nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved.
I never denied the mental capacity of the Jew; in fact I admire the race and its early history at a distance; but association with them was intolerable. Just as some otherwise normal men hate the sight or presence of a cat, so have I hated the presence of a Jew.
As to races, I deem it most proper to recognise the divisions into which nature has grouped mankind. Science shows us the infinite superiority of the Teutonic Aryan over all others, and it therefore becomes us to see that his ascendancy shall remain undisputed. Any racial mixture can but lower the result.
fething seriously. Read his work at some point and then maybe you can actually ride this dumb high horse of anal retentiveness. The man wrote entire essays about his opinions on race. This has been mentioned in this very thread numerous times to you specifically.
It feels profoundly wrong to attack someone who can not defend themselves.
It feels profoundly wrong that 100 years after the fact, people feel the need to decry that people note a racist was racist and that all debate about them must fundamentally revolve around their selfish need to ignore reality while having clearly never read a damn thing the person in question wrote.
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LordofHats wrote:I think most writers today are generally able to recognize Lovecraft's significant literary contributions while not becoming anal buttholes about his racism.
I think people who call Lovecraft racist are the anal buttholes, personally. They seem really dead set on affixing this label to Lovecraft (and his work), and don't seem to capable of allowing for alternate viewpoints on the matter. Why is it so important to them that Lovecraft be labeled a racist that they take the mere suggestion that it is irrelevant as a personal attack?
Honestly, I've said it elsewhere-
Lovecraft was pretty racist. He was pretty racist by the standards of the era that he lived in, too. Hell, Lovecraft thought that anyone who wasn't specifically Anglo in origin was a defective breed- so, yeah... you've got German, Irish, and Slavic ancestry? Lovecraft probably thought you were genetically predisposed to being stupid, due to your contaminated mixed racial heritage.
But:
He was also not an educated man, at least not very formally. His 'learning' was about like Wilbur Wheatley's- a bunch of old, outdated books. It was his Uncle's library, if I'm not mistaken- and many of those books were from the 1700's and older. Back then, people believed some really weird stuff about races and a lot of it was considered to be at the forefront of science at one point... and got debunked later.
Example: You remember in Django Unchained where Calvin J. Candie is sawing up the skull of one of the former slaves and talking about the parts of the skull and how that it made people behave? Well, that's Phrenology- a perfect example of the kind of thing people took as being actual, real science and it's been debunked for a long time.. but that's the kind of thing that someone in the 1800's would believe in (that was one of the things that impressed me about the movie, those little details), and the kind of psuedoscience that was very likely a part of Lovecraft's learning.
It also doesn't help that Lovecraft's mom was nuts, his dad was nuts, and both of them died in a nuthouse. I mean, his father was a traveling salesman and got Syphilis and likely brought it back to the marital bed. I can imagine that would make for a very, very awkward situation if we're being optimistic... but if we're going to be real? That lady probably went bonkers and came unhinged and little Howard Phillips Lovecraft was raised in that environment, and by some accounts his mother was crazy before that.
Lovecraft married and went to New York, and the part he went to? Well, let's put it this way: the place where they lived wasn't what you'd call a multicultural utopia. It was a pretty rough area, and pretty nasty at the time. When he was around people of other races and cultures there, it was probably not the most ideal examples of any of them. No matter what your race is- you've got at least one idiot cousin that lives up to all of those stereotypes, and your idiot cousin isn't good at hiding it.
Factor in that it also seemed Lovecraft got married because... he felt he had to. His wife adored him, but she was older and her accounts of their marriage seem to indicate that he just... wasn't really into it. I think I read somewhere that the only person that could really make Lovecraft open up and feel socially comfortable was Robert E. Howard, because other than that?
I do say "Lovecraft was racist".
But I'm pretty sure that Lovecraft just didn't like people.
I've been led to believe he made peace with that later in life. I do believe he was a product of a really lousy environment, and that's one thing a lot of racists have in common (I don't mean people who whisper those old 'grandpa jokes', I mean actual racists).
My opinion on the man is that he genuinely did have an imagination, he just also had bad opinions on things. But he never went out of his way to hurt anyone, or take from anyone, at the end of the day... you can enjoy his creation, tune out some of his opinions, and consider it a lesson:
One of the most creative men in the world is forever tarnished by his racism, and that might not have been the case were he raised in a better circumstance. Yeah, they weren't poor- but being rich doesn't make a deranged parent any less traumatizing.
I've always found this to be a particularly fascinating facet of Lovecraft. A interesting exercise is comparing how Lovecraft writes about writing and how King writes about writing. They're completely opposite approaches. Lovecraft's could be called the academic approach of analyzing and understanding composition, while King's is more instinctual method of writing what feels right and making judgement calls.
He didn't have a traditional 'gentlemen's education' but he managed somehow on writing at least. He had a fundamental mastery of literary art, to a level I think very few writers ever reach. The only other writer I can think of who had a similar deep understanding was J.R. Tolkien, but Tolkien was a highly educated man who dedicated his life to language. I find it unsurprising he could have such a strong understanding of literature. Erickson can be pretty smart about the underlying craft too, but Erickson doesn't talk nearly as much about writing as King, Sanderson, or Lovecraft. Lovecraft's opinions on writing can often come off as kind of snobby. Maybe he was over compensating, IDK, but damn did he understand his fundamentals. Some of his essays on literature and writing are incredibly insightful if a bit archaic in terminology. I think a big reason he managed to have such a wide circle of friends really owes a lot to his mastery of story.
Except for poetry but then I've never understood poetry myself so maybe I just don't get it.
For a guy who lacked Tolkien's level of education, Lovecraft really knew the mechanics under the hood and could talk about them concisely in ways I think few other authors can.
Check out his Notes on Writing Weird Fiction sometimes. It's amazing how much he can say in a short amount of time. Both the original Creepypasta podcast and the Magnus Archive podcasts follow the model of horror described by Lovecraft. Not sure I like the first one but damn the second one is good, though it is named for Count Magnus and the writers seem to consider that a closer inspiration than anything Lovecraft wrote. I wish some horror film makers would read it at least. Failing to create the apportiate atmosphere is the number one reason I treat most horror movies as comedies. I'd link more of his essays but a lot of them aren't online or even publicly available. At least we've got Supernatural Horror in Literature. Great bit if you want to know more about the history of the genre (at least, up to Lovecraft's time).
In regards to the point that OP posited concerning the Lovecraft quote and the contradictory exhaustive detail of the Cthulhu mythos, I argue that Lovecraft himself did very little, if anything, to provide the reader details about said mythos. Maybe there's some detail in The Colour Out Of Space or At The Mountains of Madness that I don't recall (and to be fair I'm not particularly a fan of those two), but by and large, it was other writers that fleshed out and gave the Cthulhu mythos it's detail. I think those contributions are terrible.
In regards to Lovecraft's well-documented racism I think it's important to also acknowledge that his racism was not exclusive to modern day minority groups. The Temple is anti-German. He was racist towards anyone that wasn't a full-blooded WASP.
The only way we can ever solve anything is to look in the mirror and find no enemy
LordofHats wrote: His literary works aren't and they're pretty damn racist, but seriously this is just proving my point.
Lovecraft's racism is irrelevant because his works function at face value, thematically if Lovecraft was a racist, and thematically if Lovecraft wasn't a racist. For instance, since the majority of his works are written in first person, they can function as if the character was racist, rather than Lovecraft, himself. Because his works are actually horror stories, fear of miscegenation with literal alien monsters is justified when taken at face value, and thematically if you want to say that the work is a metaphor for something else. When you separate the author's views from the work, and the work is still a deep, layered, and complex work with multiple interpretations and virtues, then the author's views are irrelevant.
You could have taken this opportunity (once again) to talk about his work in practical terms.
The only reason this dead thread was resurrected was because George RR Martin got in hot water for praising Lovecraft. It seems that nobody actually cares to talk about Lovecraft, except to discuss the righteousness of praising or condemning him as a monster.
Jesus fething christ, Lovecraft explaining Lovecraft:
If you were to ask my opinion on the mental health of the wargaming community, you'd get very different answers on different days, depending on the mood I was in and the people I had interacted with that day. You could definitely find posts of mine at one extreme or the other, and make claims that I either hate the wargaming community or love it - but the truth is neither. And both. And that opinion changes daily. If someone were to read my dakka posts a hundred years after the fact, far removed from the time and context of their writing, it would not be an accurate reflection of my views, at any one time or overall. Because complex opinions can not be summed up by a bumper sticker, and only fools would ever think so.
It feels profoundly wrong that 100 years after the fact, people feel the need to decry that people note a racist was racist and that all debate about them must fundamentally revolve around their selfish need to ignore reality while having clearly never read a damn thing the person in question wrote.
My point is that you don't know what his reality is. You can't. It is just a guess. An assumption. Even if Lovecraft was racist, you can't quantify how racist - he lived in a very racist time, when eugenics was all the rage, and which had other authors, like Agatha Christie, managed to write far, far more racist books that were some of the best selling books in the world. You could say that Lovecraft was a man of his time, or was worse, but that's still an assumption because you weren't there and you are filling in all the blanks with your own assumptions. It is, above all else, an opinion based on changing and incomplete information, and it is okay to recognize this rather than jump on a bandwagon of labeling past authors as racist.
To sum up:
1) All the virtues of Lovecraft's work remain regardless of what Lovecraft's personal beliefs are, thus making his personal beliefs irrelevant.
2) Lovecraft may have leaned towards racism during his life, but the context of this racism (compared to his contemporaries, its influences on his work, how extreme it was, how it changed over time, what it says about Lovecraft as a person, and so on) is all based on assumptions.
Thats some total bull gak. Lovecrafts work and influence is almost universally praised. With the asterix on his praise noting the racist elements and how they add nothing to the stories while over time taking away from and dating them.
But lovecraft himself isnt a racist based on assumption. Hes a racist by numerous pieces of hard evidence not put into works of fiction but his own letters to and from friends, family, and loved ones. Lets put it this way, if on any given day you think somebody should be treated differently because of the color of their skin then you are a racist and your mood is not an excuse.
These are my opinions. This is how I feel. Others may feel differently. This needs to be stated for some reason.
Sqorgar wrote: If you were to ask my opinion on the mental health of the wargaming community,
What a complete and utter river of drivel.
Do you actually have any opinion on Lovecraft's work? It's bloody obvious you've read not a lick of it. You don't even seem remotely interested in trying to read it. It seems like the sole reason for your participation here is completely removed from anything actually relating to the subject. It's impossible for anyone to have anything approaching meaningful discussion while you exercise the heckler's veto to prove your righteous ignorance. You shut the thread down in the fething first place despite attempts by Manchu, me, and others to reorient its focus and it'll shut down again because Dakka has rules about civility but no rules about propriety. You shut this discussion down like Whembly used to shut down politics; by being so ignorant it's impossible to properly ignore you and forcing all discussion to either vacate the space or to revolve around dealing with your stupid bs.
Next time there's a discussion about whether or not Dakka needs to just ban users from topic spaces, this thread deserves to be at the top of the example list.
This message was edited 4 times. Last update was at 2020/08/14 14:12:41
Do you actually have any opinion on Lovecraft's work? It's bloody obvious you've read not a lick of it. You don't even seem remotely interested in trying to read it. It seems like the sole reason for your participation here is completely removed from anything actually relating to the subject. It's impossible for anyone to have anything approaching meaningful discussion while you exercise the heckler's veto to prove your righteous ignorance. You shut the thread down in the fething first place despite attempts by Manchu, me, and others to reorient its focus and it'll shut down again because Dakka has rules about civility but no rules about propriety. You shut this discussion down like Whembly used to shut down politics; by being so ignorant it's impossible to properly ignore you and forcing all discussion to either vacate the space or to revolve around dealing with your stupid bs.
Next time there's a discussion about whether or not Dakka needs to just ban users from topic spaces, this thread deserves to be at the top of the example list.
Hmm. I went to the trouble of summing up my two main points so that you could easily address and counter them, if you wanted, but you instead decided to get personal without addressing them - then accuse me of shutting down the discussion. I'm sure you are a lovely person in real life, but as a partner in this debate, I must admit that I find you lacking.
Edited by RiTides
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/08/15 17:13:53
Sqorgar wrote: I went to the trouble of summing up my two main points so that you could easily address and counter them,
Your points were addressed and countered pages ago. You've simply ignored every response and rephrased your initial garbage response while hiding behind the airs of civility.
then accuse me of shutting down the discussion.
It's not an accusation. It's an observation.
but as a partner in this debate, I must admit that I find you lacking.
It's amazing how you've managed to delude yourself into thinking any of this qualifies as 'debate'. This isn't debate. You've ignored every basic point given to you and simply repeatedly claimed that "we can't know the opinions of a man who wrote 100,000 letters in his life", and even when direct quotes are given to you, you've continued to ride your pedestal position. You're not debating. You're ranting about things that aren't even the topic of the thread, dragging your personal political grievances about as if they are universally true and not for a moment considered that a racist might actually be a racist and that the word racist might have actual application to them. It's amazing. You've coopted the Edward Said approach to Orientalism, and applied it to all racism.
I'd like to add a third point, and you can choose whether you'd like to address it or not,
You won't like how I address it. I wanted to talk about Lovecraft. Not your discount bin grievance but fine. Let's talk about your basic bitch approach to intellectual discourse.
which is that the label "racist" is essentially meaningless these days because it covers such a wide gamut of accusations from flat out genocide and lynchings, to microagressions like "your English is very good" to voting for Trump.
It's meaningless to hacks I suppose. The short sighted and the idiotic, incapable of parsing out anything more complicated than the basic sentences a toddler could muster. There might be a point to be said that this applies to people regardless of any sort of political affiliation, ideological orientation, or personal opinion on racism, but at the end of the day short sighted idiocy is something that tends to go hand in hand with human societies. There's nothing profound about noting it, though we could point out that it's profoundly brain dead to become so absorbed in the prattle of verb regurgitation that you decide a label something 'meaningless' solely because you're too lazy to wade through the muck to approach an intelligent position.
Ironically, it seems to fail when it really is called for,
Like you've failed to even try and respond to quote after quote from Lovecraft himself that perfectly demonstrates that yes, he was a racist? Cause honestly, I don't think the label fails when called for. I think it fails when people selectively apply it, but that's a basic failing of human emotion and the information age, where data is plentiful and easy to reach but properly formed discourse takes time and effort. I don't really hold that against people, regardless of where they fall on any particular line because it's simply too common. I'd be complaining all day.
You've gone beyond basic though:
like when someone says "white people should die" on Twitter (and even getting a promotion afterwards).
You've gone straight to people who talk about racism are hypocrites so racism doesn't matter, and then:
If you can call things that aren't racist "racist" and can't call things that are racist "racist", then the word has lost value and should be avoided.
Dragged that basic bitch level of intellectual thought around like loose baggage throwing it all about like it applies to anything. It's as if your personal grievance against some mean people on the internet who didn't live up to some lofty standard you yourself have utterly failed to achieve are the real villains of society, rather than taking a good hard look in the mirror and considering that you're no better. Arguably, you're even worse because you've displayed the capacity to think things through but have chosen to be lazy about it and equate incessant whining about how unfair a label is that you disregard all possible uses of it, as if no usage of it could ever be appropriate even when talking about a man who argued the Ku Klux Klan was justified in lynching black Americans because someone had to protect White Americans when the government did it. He literally argues this, a relevant quote was given to you and still:
Nah. He had his opinions, but he wasn't really acting on any of them (largely because he didn't act, period).
I'm not even sure what to call it at this point. DakkaDakka says we have to be civil, but there's a point where someone is just so mind boggelingly stupid that there's nothing else to do but to call it what it is. We might as well point out that Henrich Himmler was a bad guy, with bad opinions, but he didn't personally throw anyone into a gas chamber, he just argued for it and supported it every step of the way. You've gone so far down the intellectual blackhole I can actually Godwin this post with a straight farce.
Define acting on it. Is writing dozens of articles for the Conservative in which Lovecraft defends the positions of segregation, jim crow discrimination, and argues that society should yet go further really an appropriate description of 'he didn't act on it'. No one accused Lovecraft of genocide or murder. That seems your hang up more than anything. People noted that Lovecraft was a virulent racist, and you've done nary a thing to argue against that point. You've simply complained about it, and whined about how calling racism racism is unfair, dragging about your own present day political baggage in a wonderful display of historical anachronism better than any mean words that anyone has ever thrown at Lovecraft.
What's the point of calling him "racist" except to lump him in with the likes of Hitler and Donald Trump in the first place,
And it's amazing too, because no one, not a soul, in this thread made these comparisons. You're the first person to mention them and you've done a better job than anyone else at equating them. The only person lumping the 'racists' together here is you.
But instead of dealing with it as your personal hung up you're literally wasting all our time accusing us of doing it. Shoveling words in our mouths so you can be indignant at us. Which is just par for the course of the nonsensical civility rules of this forum. You can treat all of us as your personal punching back to complain about how unfair 'racism' is, but we're not allowed to respond to that degrading stripping of our own thoughts and opinions appropriately. Instead, we're expected to just ignore you or be false in our civility. You're like the village idiot throwing mud at everyone passing by, and then complaining about how dirty everyone else is, and apparently pointing out that you're covered in mud from head to toe is as rude as you slinging mud about in the first place.
and to tarnish his legacy so that newer, more progressive writers can promote themselves in the vacuum left behind?
And it's circles in circles too. I'm not sure how many times I've mentioned the profound influence of Lovecraft's writing on the horror genre. Most horror writers will talk about it if you ask them, and they feel no need to go into lengthy defenses of his racism to do it because most people are capable of engaging with a figure as a multifaceted individual, a personal with many angles. There is again, something to be said that there are people who are incapable of this and 'he was a racist' is definitely a common way for the unintelligent to brand past persons as dirty, but you're not doing any better throwing mud in the opposite direction. You keep ranting about how unfair it is that people are talking about a dead man and calling him 'mean things' but I have to say, I think the worst thing anyone in this thread has done to the memory of Lovecraft here - in this thread and nowehre else - is you.
Let's go forward in this discussion without using the words "racist" or "racism" and see how dramatically that shifts the tone and productivity of it.
You don't want a productive discussion. You want a safe space. A place where your dirty little word doesn't see nary a light of day, not because it's meaningless, but because you've personally decided you don't care and it's rich how you've co-opted the corpse of Lovecraft as a vehicle for your grievance, all in the name of 'protecting his legacy.'
What would the discussion of Lovecraft look like without that single label to fall back on as an intellectual crutch?
We may never know. Someone would have to stop obsessively whining about it for us to find out and that's just the icing on the cake. For the fourth time, I point out that the only reason this thread remains locked in racism talk is you, you ninny. There are three posts above this one that tried to shift gears, yet here we are again and I suppose some mod will come along and tell me to just ignore you, but I guess I just can't help myself. There's nothing I hate more than blatant displays of ignorance and faux intelligence, hiding behind the letter of the civility rules to violate their spirit.
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What's the point of calling him "racist" except to lump him in with the likes of Hitler and Donald Trump in the first place,
And it's amazing too, because no one, not a soul, in this thread made these comparisons. You're the first person to mention them and you've done a better job than anyone else at equating them. The only person lumping the 'racists' together here is you.
To be fair, I'm pretty sure I've mentioned Lovecraft previously in association with Hitler, mostly in context of his letters saying how much he liked Hitler.
What's the point of calling him "racist" except to lump him in with the likes of Hitler and Donald Trump in the first place,
And it's amazing too, because no one, not a soul, in this thread made these comparisons. You're the first person to mention them and you've done a better job than anyone else at equating them. The only person lumping the 'racists' together here is you.
To be fair, I'm pretty sure I've mentioned Lovecraft previously in association with Hitler, mostly in context of his letters saying how much he liked Hitler.
To be fair fair, I wouldn't consider saying "Lovecraft wrote nice things about Hitler" to be equating Lovecraft with Hitler. It's simply noting he wrote nice things about Hitler, which is hardly surprising given some of his papers on race and how very much into the Teutonic Aryan theory he was. Especially since Lovecraft was way into the kind of race theory the Nazis were built on, especially in the 20s. Some of his quotes on race are actually really similar to some quotes from Gregor Strasser. I've never heard of Lovecraft mentioning the man's name. It's possible they seperatly arrived at a similar race theory, Stasser wasn't that removed from the thinkers who came before him on race.
Thank you for your letter. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject — which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.
Your enquiry is doubtless made in order to comply with the laws of your own country, but that this should be held to apply to the subjects of another state would be improper, even if it had (as it has not) any bearing whatsoever on the merits of my work or its sustainability for publication, of which you appear to have satisfied yourselves without reference to my Abstammung.
I trust you will find this reply satisfactory, and
remain yours faithfully,
J. R. R. Tolkien
It's a shame neosporin wasn't invented until 1951.
To be fair, Lovecraft died in 1937, prior to WW2, let alone finding out about the Holocaust...which hadn't even started yet. I don't think him liking Hitler is the worst or most racist thing he did.
The Horror at Red Hook is rife with racism and fear of immigrants/foreign culture. He had a cat named N-Word-Man that was featured in The Rats in the Walls. His description of non-WASPS was consistently colored by racism.
The only way we can ever solve anything is to look in the mirror and find no enemy
trexmeyer wrote: To be fair, Lovecraft died in 1937, prior to WW2, let alone finding out about the Holocaust...which hadn't even started yet. I don't think him liking Hitler is the worst or most racist thing he did.
The eugenics practices of the Nazis started in 1934 with forced sterilisation. This wasn't hidden as the Holocaust was, it was written into law.
