LegoPirateNinja posted:

good if you delete the racist stuff which is precisely what we do with every classic american folk song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73irL7Lo4bE

hth posted:

i got a dead dreaming eldergod tentacle you can rouse from its millenia of slumber, OP

FilthyImp posted:

Lovecraft writes like Dr. Strange talks.

8-Bit Scholar posted:

For those who hate Lovecraft, you should read the Dream Cycle or whatever it is. I think it's probably his most seminal work in a lot of ways--it's basically a straightforward fantasy adventure but it feels the most "personal" of his works. It's about him, and how he sees things, and it's got so much fantastic imagery, it's something that begs for a great big budget adaptation.

Lovecraft today would be a Tumblrite pure and simple. The guy loves cats and thinks they have magic powers; the main character rides a giant cat from the moon to the earth.

I imagine Lovecraft as a kind of bitter shut-in who is terminally, terribly shy. He seems to be the kind of guy literally scared of everything. He's a much more pitiable character than loathsome in my mind, he probably was never a happy soul.

natetimm posted:

Was coming in here to post this about Howard. I think he's my favorite pulp author and he's also a prototypical goon.

Borneo Jimmy posted:

Robert E Howard and Clark Ashton Smith were better stylists imo.

rocket_man38 posted:

Lovecraft had it out for the Puritans too. One story has a puritan who ends up being a cannibal. The moral of the story was those who are that uptight and strange have dark secrets. He also told his wife something to the effect of "I hate all Jews but you".

EDIT: Also S.T. Joshi is a good source if you want to know about Lovecraft.

Twerkteam Pizza posted:

Depends how racist you are

Professor Shark posted:

Bad Author, great Ideas Guy

Cnut the Great posted:

The fact that H.P. Lovecraft was pathologically anti-Semitic yet ended up marrying a Jew really tells you all you need to know about him.

Sp1r0_Agn3W posted:

i always liked lovecraft because he kind of presented an empirical approach to the crazyness of his stories. the protagonists are professors or anthropologists or lesser sons of greater families. all well worded and rational, all approaching the nonsense with the skepticism of the disbeliever. thats a weird take, even in 2016

Dapper_Swindler posted:

yeah. pretty much. the dude was a weird neet from a white as gently caress, rich new england family and was basicaly a weird neet. I doubt he ever met a minority apart from his jewis/half jewish wife(?) . most of his racist stuff strikes me as hosed up stuff from the time period and that fact that he lived in whitey ville and never left and was afraid of everything. it doesnt exactly excuse it. but listing to wannabe tumblr dipshits try to co-opt and steal his poo poo annoyes me because the talentless fucks cant even be original. loving parasites.

Sp1r0_Agn3W posted:

i always liked lovecraft because he kind of presented an empirical approach to the crazyness of his stories. the protagonists are professors or anthropologists or lesser sons of greater families. all well worded and rational, all approaching the nonsense with the skepticism of the disbeliever. thats a weird take, even in 2016

quote:

As for the Republicans—how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical ‘American heritage’…) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.

8-Bit Scholar posted:

What's really great, and largely ignored by the knee-jerk reactionaries, is that Lovecraft lived at the dawn of the true scientific age. Science had been relegated to sideshows from the Victorian age onwards and even as technology progressed, it wasn't until the 20th century that common people really started to get wise to science, the journeys of discovery, etc. There was a ton of optimism in that age, notions that electric power would cure all ills, flying cars, instantaneous communications--at the start of the 1900's people were keenly aware that technology was going to rapidly advance and everyone was really gung ho. It's an age of intellectualism. God may be dead, but by the light of intelligence and the scientific empiricism, ye shall be as gods.

That's where Lovecraft's take comes in. The march of science, shining a light into the darkness, reveals not progress, hope or any solutions at all--only a jibbering madness, a stupidity so acute it was fatal, a chaos so pervasive that to even be made aware of its presence was to succumb to it. God is dead. Man is an insect. The universe is vast, dark, and in the shadows of the stars and the furthest reaches of the Earth, horror lurked.

CaptainSarcastic posted:

Good Lovecraft is good. Bad Lovecraft is August Derleth.

Horniest Manticore posted:

skasion posted:

One of my favorite stories by Lovecraft is "In the Walls of Eryx" which is about a smug rear end colonialist who goes on an expedition to Venus to rob the local savages of their crystals and poo poo, but it turns out the savages are probably a lot smarter than the white man and he freaks the gently caress out and dies in despair, urging people not to mess with Darkest Venus

Then the colonial company finds his body and is like "the savages must have done this, time to go all King Leopold on a motherfucker"

GRANNYS PEACH TEA posted:

Was that the one with the maze with invisible walls?

Cnut the Great posted:

The fact that H.P. Lovecraft was pathologically anti-Semitic yet ended up marrying a Jew really tells you all you need to know about him.

Cnut the Great posted:

The fact that H.P. Lovecraft was pathologically anti-Semitic yet ended up marrying a Jew really tells you all you need to know about him.

quote:

I ate about 3:30—if slipping these wretched food tablets through my mask can be called eating. Soon after that I noticed a decided change in the landscape—the bright, poisonous-looking flowers shifting in colour and getting wraith-like. The outlines of everything shimmered rhythmically, and bright points of light appeared and danced in the same slow, steady tempo. After that the temperature seemed to fluctuate in unison with a peculiar rhythmic drumming.

The whole universe seemed to be throbbing in deep, regular pulsations that filled every corner of space and flowed through my body and mind alike. I lost all sense of equilibrium and staggered dizzily, nor did it change things in the least when I shut my eyes and covered my ears with my hands. However, my mind was still clear, and in a very few minutes I realised what had happened.

I had encountered at last one of those curious mirage-plants about which so many of our men told stories. Anderson had warned me of them, and described their appearance very closely—the shaggy stalk, the spiky leaves, and the mottled blossoms whose gaseous, dream-breeding exhalations penetrate every existing make of mask.

Recalling what happened to Bailey three years ago, I fell into a momentary panic, and began to dash and stagger about in the crazy, chaotic world which the plant’s exhalations had woven around me. Then good sense came back, and I realised all I need do was retreat from the dangerous blossoms; heading away from the source of the pulsations, and cutting a path blindly—regardless of what might seem to swirl around me—until safely out of the plant’s effective radius.

Although everything was spinning perilously, I tried to start in the right direction and hack my way ahead. My route must have been far from straight, for it seemed hours before I was free of the mirage-plant’s pervasive influence. Gradually the dancing lights began to disappear, and the shimmering spectral scenery began to assume the aspect of solidity. When I did get wholly clear I looked at my watch and was astonished to find that the time was only 4:20.

Sp1r0_Agn3W posted:

i wish i was a lovecraft protagonist