/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.19242820]

What does /lit/ think of HP Lovecraft?
>Considered ridiculously racist even by the standards of the time
>Thought all cultures are worthless except English and American, which was a barely acceptable second-rate knockoff
>Hated all of other people, especially French Canadians
>Hated Nazis and KKK for hating minorities for the wrong reasons
>Learned he was part Welsh, immediately wrote a story about a man learning he was part fish
>Wrote a story about an evil witch turning people into snakes where the plot twist is just that she's a light-skinned black who can pass for white
>Considered Irish to not be fully human, was vague about their other half

[Anonymous No.19242827]

>>19242820
Haha laughed at the welsh part

[Anonymous No.19242837]

My favourite poet.


When, long ago, the gods created Earth
In Jove's fair image Man was shap'd at birth.
The beasts for lesser parts were next design'd;
Yet were they too remote from humankind.
To fill the gap, and join the rest to man,
Th'Olympian host conceiv'd a clever plan.
A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
Fill'd it with vice, and call'd the thing a NIGGER.

[Anonymous No.19243180]

>>19242820
>What does /lit/ think of HP Lovecraft?
He's one of the best writers and authors of all time

[Anonymous No.19243220]

Shitty writer. Can't write characters or dialogue. Way too self-referential. All of his good "ideas" were just stolen from better writers who deserve the credit.

[Anonymous No.19243233]

>>19242820
He wrote entertaining stuff, I would say Colour Out of Space is the best. His racism and anglo supremacy don't even appear that much in the stories, they just display the typical colonial attitudes of the time.

[Anonymous No.19243234]

>>19243220
Which writers did he steal ideas from? Genuinely curious.

[Anonymous No.19243254]

>>19242820
Unhinged genius lone wolf who died in total misery and bitterness.
I mean, "Lovecraftian" isn't an adjective for nothing.
>Considered Irish to not be fully human, was vague about their other half
>Learned he was part Welsh, immediately wrote a story about a man learning he was part fish
Kek, Howard would have been a batshit insane Telegram conspiritualist in our century.

[Anonymous No.19243263]

>>19243233
He wrote in the 20s and 30s, dipshit. And no, it wasn't the prevailing attitude at the time. His BS crops up in just about every story, like a turd in a punchbowl.

Also: everything else I mentioned.

>>19243234

The general weird spin on gothic horror, and something ancient out of the past is very reminiscent of Lord Dunsany. A lot of the multi-dimensional unknowable horror is classic Algernon Blackwood. The books driving men insane is a rip-off of Robert Chambers. The fish monsters and octopus gods is pure William Hope Hodgson. Mix it all in a big pot with seasoning from Ambrose Bierce, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert Howard, then somehow find a way to make it more boring and less tasty, and you've got Howard Philips Lovecraft.

[Anonymous No.19243281]

>>19243263
>He wrote in the 20s and 30s, dipshit.
When colonialism was still in full swing.

[Anonymous No.19243300]

>>19242820
>even by the standards of the time
When Lovecraft died Birth of a Nation was the highest grossing film in history.

[Anonymous No.19243346]

>>19242820
You forgot
>Couldn't write dialogue
>Wrote the word "lumined" more than once
>Only good story is Music of Erich Zann

[Anonymous No.19243370]

>>19243263
Behind every commercially successful writer, there's usually a ton of other less-known writers that inspired their work. They all seem to steal ideas or incorporate them for their own use. I could be mistaken, but even the writers you listed probably for their ideas through adapting them from another source. Still, I fundamentally agree that Lovecraft was a pretty shitty writer in a sense. He was a mediocre writer who forwarded some very interesting ideas into the public domain. Often that's all that needed for commercial success.

[Anonymous No.19243644]

>>19243300

[Anonymous No.19243678]

>>19243263
>His BS crops up in just about every story,
>he was inspired by like a hundred different writers, that means he ripped them off

You couldn't have made it more obvious that your criticism stems from le epic culture wars and you are grasping at straws to bury an "enemy"

[Anonymous No.19243832]

>>19243678
I don't know if it's the same poster every time or a handful of people who have just now discovered that Lovecraft didn't write in a vacuum, but I keep noticing this juvenile accusation that he was "ripping off" other writers, completely ignoring the fact that he acknowledged their influence and drew attention to their work at every given opportunity. Not to mention that it frames him as some devious crook streamlining the work of better authors for commercial success when in reality he barely made any money from writing.

[Anonymous No.19244112]

>>19243263
> Lord Dunsany
> Algernon Blackwood
> Robert Chambers
> William Hope Hodgson
> Ambrose Bierce
> Clark Ashton Smith

Wow, amazing. Its as if he read other peoples works and drew inspiration from them.
Like every other author

[Anonymous No.19244170]

It feels like there are a few people on this board who for some reason love shitting on him because he didn't write high literature, as if that's in any way an intelligent nuanced way to judge him

as far as im concerned he set out to write some enjoyable pulp sci fi/horror stories that communicate an idea or and atmosphere within the confines of a few pages, and he was really good at that, and wrote some great little stories that are really effective at immersing you in an idea or an atmosphere for a few pages

[Anonymous No.19244228]

>>19243832
its just pure angry contrarianism. people who get it in their heads that they WANT to hate a writer will find any excuse to get angry even if it makes no sense at all. Lovecraft becomes a meme because of his racism, so some people now feel they have a contrarian OBLIGATION to hate him to spite others they hate, congratulations now you cannot have any sincere discussion about the writers works at all

[Anonymous No.19244237]

>>19242820
he wrote beautiful unique prose. Some of his short stories are incredible.

[Anonymous No.19244241]

>>19243346
If you think Erich Zann is his only good story you have barely read him. There are more than a dozen short stories as good as Erich Zann.

[Anonymous No.19244616]

>>19243254
He'd either be a full blown SJW fanatic or 95% exactly the same as he was.

[Anonymous No.19244644]

>>19242820
>and American, which was a barely acceptable second-rate knockoff
hilarious

[Anonymous No.19244647]

>>19244112
Except the point is everybody else is better than he would, but people fanwank HPL for no reason.

So good job missing the entire point, anon.

[Anonymous No.19244703]

[Anonymous No.19244830]

a total Catchad. The cats of ulthar gave me a good chuckle, pretty based NGL

[Anonymous No.19244909]

>>19242820
Why are you focused on these issues? You could read his entire fictional corpus and be only vaguely aware of these issues. It's honestly rather boring to have a filter only scanning for racial and sexual politics and then springing into action, while ignoring the actual content and concerns of 99% of human art. It also displays lack of original thought on your part as this is the currently dominant filter.

[Anonymous No.19244918]

I got filtered by all the Cyclopean architecture

[Anonymous No.19244949]

>>19244909
>be only vaguely aware of these issues
>Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than negro fetichism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.
lmao

[Anonymous No.19244981]

>>19244949
You've been trained to fire up and place such words at the absolute forefront of your consciousness when encountered. And you have no idea how your thonking and focus is not your own.

[Anonymous No.19245009]

>>19242820
I'm critical of him for this reason >>19244647 I've been saying for years that he's very overrated but his talent lies in motivating others to write, he was charismatic and lent his moral and professional support to his fellow writers.

[Anonymous No.19245055]

>>19244949
nothing about that screams "racism so abhorrent it makes the kkk and nazis blush"

[Anonymous No.19245062]

>>19244647
you have my curiosity, do you have any examples and commentary of writings by these folks that apparently dwarf his writings?

[Anonymous No.19245214]

He's good and defined his own genre. I don't think he's overrated because he isn't massively popular, there are just some people that obsess over him which is pretty normal.

[Trox mf No.19246267]

>>19242837
What a high-flown fancy expression to describe a black guy.
Utterly unattractive crap.

[Anonymous No.19246523]

>>19246267
Hey Trox mf

Go back to r3ddit you monumental fucking FAGGOT

[Anonymous No.19247058]

>>19243220
>>19243346
>dialogue
>dialogue
samefag

[Anonymous No.19247073]

>>19242820
All this from an antiquated mummy who was on the other side until 1931! Well—I can better understand the inert blindness & defiant ignorance of the reactionaries from having been one of them. I know how smugly ignorant I was—wrapped up in the arts, the natural (not social) sciences, the externals of history & antiquarianism, the abstract academic phases of philosophy, & so on—all the one-sided standard lore to which, according to the traditions of the dying order, a liberal education was limited. God! the things that were left out—the inside facts of history, the rational interpretation of periodic social crises, the foundations of economics & sociology, the actual state of the world today ... & above all, the habit of applying disinterested reason to problems hitherto approached only with traditional genuflections. Flag-waving, & callous shoulder-shrugs! All this comes up with the humiliating force through an incident of a few days ago—when young Conover, having established contact with Henneberger, the ex-owner of WT, obtained from the latter a long epistle which I wrote Edwin Baird on Feby. 3, 1924, in response to a request for biographical & personal data. Little Willis asked permission to publish the text in his combined SFC-Fantasy, & I began looking the thing over to see what it was like—for I had not the least recollection of ever having penned it. Well .... I managed to get through, after about 10 closely typed pages of egotistical reminiscences & showings-off & expressions of opinion about mankind & the universe. I did not faint—but I looked around for a 1924 photograph of myself to burn, spit on, or stick pins in! Holy Hades—was I that much of a dub at 33 ... only 13 years ago? There was no getting out of it—I really had thrown all that haughty, complacent, snonbish, self-centered, intolerant bull, & at a mature age when anybody but a perfect damned fool would have known better! That earlier illness had kept me in seclusion, limited my knowledge of the world, & given me something of the fatuous effusiveness of a belated adolescent when I finally was able to get out more around 1920, is hardly much of an excuse. Well—there was nothing to be done ..... except to rush a note back to Conover & tell him I'd dismember him & run the fragments through a sausage-grinder if he ever thought of printing such a thing! The only consolation lay in the reflection that I had matured a bit since '24. It's hard to have done all one's growing up since 33—but that's a damn sight better than not growing up at all. Here's hoping that Henneberger (quite a get-rich-quick Wallingford in his way) won't try to blacken me with the letter!

[Anonymous No.19247084]

>>19243263
>multi-dimensional unknowable horror is classic Algernon Blackwood
Unknowable yes, that's Blackwood, but the only instance where I've encountered the multi-dimensional bit was in the Willows.

[Anonymous No.19247126]

>>19242820
>>19243180
>>19244237
Fucking based. He is one of the finest treasures of recent history and I am eternally thankful that he lived. I would throw out most other writers of the same century before I would be without Howard. I could live without Hemingway, and without Kafka, and without Orwell, but HPL is always and has always been near and dear to my heart.

Say what you want about his ten dollar words, his prose kept and still keeps me enraptured and hooked. The grim and cold terror that I feel when I read about a simple block of forgotten masonry in the snow of Antarctica is a testament to what a man like him can do to conjure up feelings of dread. He can make me feel threatened at the mere description of a rickety New England house. Or of a sleepy and dreary seaside town. He had me listening to my own breathing at 2am as I read about the final chase in The Shadow Over Innsmouth or the nail-biting closing paragraphs of The Statement Of Randolph Carter more times than I can count.

A great litmus test is this. Harold Bloom said he hated Harry Potter because it was totally without substance. When he was asked isn't it good that it got kids to read more, he said no, because now they are encouraged to read something that won't elevate them or make them grow as people. HPL is the total opposite of this. As a teenager I fell in love with his work and as a literal 30 year old boomer I go back and read it with fresh eyes and it entertains me for the same reasons, and for new ones. Anyone can enjoy Lovecraft, and he encourages you to read beyond your capabilities and expand into the genres he helped develop like Sci-fi and Weird Fiction. When people say "X got a generation of kids to read!" as a defence, it is often of some insubstantial author, but with HPL it is the highest compliment. I would not be the /lit/izen I am today without him.

Thank you Howard, you have given this young boy a world of joy and escape, in a young life that really didn't have much else to look forward to. I never had much, but I had you.

[Anonymous No.19247143]

>>19247073
I just read the volume that this letter is from (Letters to CL Moore and Others) and highly recommend it for the CL Moore side of the correspondence. It's really funny in places.

[Anonymous No.19247150]

>>19247143
Once I was waiting the bus and a black woman told me, "Damn, it's hot today!", I nodded or something, and then she added, "Trust me, I have black skin, I feel heat way more than you!"
I laughed and had to agree

[Anonymous No.19247154]

>>19247150
Did you call her a nigger?

[Anonymous No.19247157]

>>19247154
No, why would I? I was just waiting for the bus.

[Anonymous No.19247161]

Considering most Lovecraft hate may come from just one or two angry losers, let's put /lit/ to the test and see what they actually think.

https://www.strawpoll.me/45803918

[Anonymous No.19247221]

>>19247161
This shit doesn't work, I voted and I don't see any result, it's all 0%

[Anonymous No.19247237]

I like his writing the same way I like Varg Vikernes' music. Yeah they're racist and I'm not, but I won't let that stop me from enjoying what they made.

[Anonymous No.19247375]

>>19247221
Yeah me too. Strawpoll is kill.

[Anonymous No.19247403]

>>19247237
Same
Burzum is really great imho, I didn't understand black metal when I was 15 or 20, now I do

Check this electro stuff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdrALI35tWw

[Anonymous No.19247406]

>>19242820
He's never been surpassed. His writing is fantastic and imaginative in a way none of the people who copy him can match. The fact he makes lesser people seethe is enjoyable too