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God that is hard to read. The guy might be thought a genius but I got absolutely nothing from that passage save the penguins.
by mlloyd 9y ago
God that is hard to read. The guy might be thought a genius but I got absolutely nothing from that passage save the penguins.
- leggomylibro 9y agoHonestly, I think he's more seen as a pulp-y xenophobe than a genius. But could he write portentous purple prose, or what?
- ekianjo 9y ago> xenophobe More than the people of his time?
- scandox 9y agoYes extremely more. And I like his stories.
- ekianjo 9y agoSomeone born in 1890 like Lovecraft would have been educated in the early 1900s where it was all about the White Race superiority to all other ones (check school books of the time) on top of hundreds of years of such thinking, so my guess is that you'd find people thinking like Lovecraft pretty much everywhere in his time. And regarding antisemitism, it's not like Lovecraft was an exception, antisemitism was rampant in early 20th century. So while Lovecraft was vocal about it in his letters, I doubt his peers and folks of his time would have very, very different.
- scandox 9y agoI make my argument from his work, not from history. And I am responding specifically to the word Xenophobe. I think Houellebecq's analysis[1] is correct - the force of his work derives from the very extreme nature of his Xenophobia, which is personal and psychological in nature rather than ideological. Certainly he garlanded it with all the ideological backup he could find, but I don't think that's where it came from. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20060507063256/http://blog.urbanomic.com/dread/archives/houellebecq-lovecraft.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20060507063256/http://blog.urban...
- chc 9y ago"Lovecraftian" is still used as a general term for an entire genre of fiction. He was a xenophobe, but that is not what he's best known for. Similarly, Aristotle was a misogynist, but it would not be accurate to say that Aristotle is best known as a navel-gazing misogynist.
- scarmig 9y agoI think it's a bit more complicated than that. Lovecraft is fundamentally about confronting modernism and the inevitable decay of humanity in the faces of forces beyond our control. Central to that is the decay of the Anglo-Saxon genetic stock. Xenophobic isn't quite the right word. Racist is closer, but even that misses the mark. Every story he writes is terrified of black voodoo savages, or toothless white hill people, or inbred decadent Boston brahmin families, or fishermen that are half-white-half-Chinese-half-fish. Aristotle, by contrast, isn't that concerned with gender. He is happy to treat it as a topic, but he has nowhere near the same level of preoccupation.
- Apocryphon 9y agoUr-tribalist, perhaps.
- sooheon 9y agoWow, I just learned that I despise the prefix "ur-" far more than is reasonable. Seriously though, why not call it "tribalist"?
- Apocryphon 9y agoNot ultra- enough, in Lovecraft's case.
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoLovecraft would've added at least three more adjectives.
- scandox 9y agoHe had an imaginative genius and a capability to create worlds but he was a bad writer plain and simple. He writes poorly but he has massive emotional and psychological force.
- fusiongyro 9y agoAfter reading Thomas Ligotti it's much harder for me to appreciate Lovecraft.
- chc 9y agoI think part of it is that this comes near the end of the book and a lot of it is referring to stuff that had previously been established, and part of it is that the style of writing that was en vogue a century ago is kind of hard to read today. I mean, here's a bit from the beginning of the contemporary classic Ulysses: > Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak. It's pretty writing, but it is also pretty hard to read if you're used to the way people write nowadays.
- janekm 9y agoUlysses was never really considered “easy reading”, though ;)
- morganvachon 9y agoIt's no more difficult than Tolkien. Prose from that era was practically poetry. Of course, I grew up reading a lot of books and short stories from that era, so maybe it's easier for my old brain, like riding a bicycle.
- hashkb 9y agoLike reading a bicycle.
- alkonaut 9y agoThat's what I should have responded when my fifth grade teacher always wrote "NEW SENTENCE!" in the margin, if you stacked that many sentence commas. I should have said "it's practically poetry" :)
- taneq 9y agoBasically everything they teach you in school is ignored by successful authors at times, but you've got to know the rules before you can know when to break them.
- rsynnott 9y agoI think this particular quote is _considerably_ more over-the-top than Tolkien, certainly. Though I do like "crushing the frantic penguins".
- _abattoir 9y agoI'm sure you, the guy who writes snarky tweets and codes web forms, have a lot more going for you in the annals of history than an internationally recognized titan of literature.
- SwellJoe 9y agoLovecraft is sort of the B movies of literature: Fun as hell, inventive, wild, unexpected, crazy at times. But, not great literature.
- _abattoir 9y agoExactly, that's why Houellebecq was inspired to write a biography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft%3A_Against_the_World%2C_Against_Life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft%3A_Against_the...
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoMaybe not, but it was inspiring; people like Guillermo del Toro wouldn't have had their style or whatnot if it wasn't for Lovecraft. (speaking of, he still wants to do a Mountains of Madness movie)
- mygo 9y agoI’m not th OP, but, still, doesn’t change the fact that his stuff is hard for me to digest. I don’t care how many stars a chef has. If his food is hard for me to swallow, well, I don’t like his cooking. And that’s okay. I don’t have to eat his food. And I don’t have to read Lovecraft’s works. And I don’t have to be a Nobel Laureate to have an opinion. And you don’t have to listen to my opinion.
- Nomentatus 9y agoThen you understood it perfectly. Froth, penguins. The rest was poetic repetition.
- Nomentatus 9y agoDownvoted by those who must have fantasized that I abhor poetic repetition and therefore don't like Lovecraft's writing. I adore poetry, and only the most admirable poetry can leverage and benefit from repetition. It's a terrific passage. However, perhaps it's understandable that Lovecraft fans would reflexively indulge in a fantasy about what I wrote and why, however...
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoHe was very er, gratuitous with his adjectives. Like. Blasphemous, amorphous adjectives that should not be spoken aloud.
- StormChaser_5 9y agoIf you would like a modern take on Lovecrafts ideas (with a whole bunch of IT geekery) try Charles Stross' Laundry Files
- simonh 9y agoI think people back then spent more time over their reading. Nowadays we expect easily digestible text we can speed through or skim. When reading something like that it pays to slam on the brakes and take some time over it.
- metafunctor 9y agoIf you really truly got absolutely nothing from that, I suggest you perhaps read it again, more slowly, and try to evoke your mind's eye. Maybe try reading one of his books; it's difficult to get into the right mindset from just an excerpt like that. I read a lot of H.P. Lovecraft some 25 years ago, and I still have vivid imagined visual memories of the “unspeakable ancient horrors” described. Given this background, I find it strange that someone would get, or see, “absolutely nothing”. I'd say H.P. Lovecraft is the literary equivalent of H.R. Giger. Different sub-genre of fiction, of course, but they've both contributed a similarly unique genre-defining take on things.
- WillReplyfFood 9y agoGuy was thoroughly anti-linux- i got that at least.