I am with you here. I’ve read a lot of his stuff. Once. At one period in my life.
Thanks for this amazing thread.
I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a hack, but that purple prose is of a kind that reminds me of the terrifying modernism of The Waste Land crossed with the macabre of Poe; the stuff of the 19th Century recoiling in uncomprehending horror at the 20th. Both Eliot and Lovecraft were too delicate for military service and both wrote from their own emotional baggage, but were on opposite sides; Eliot was an American converted to the British Empire, while Lovecraft was an Anglophile stranded in America. Weak of character and indecisive, Lovecraft’s horrors are literary justifications of a man too scared of the universe to walk out the door.
I think he’ll eventually be lumped in with modernist interpretations of the 20th Century in his own way, as the abstract paintings of Matisse and Picasso seem to prefigure the vision of Lovecraftian horror which to even behold will drive one mad, as reality / modernity dissolves reality into (horrifying) shapes and colors and all sense of order is lost.
I do think that once you’ve read a bit of Lovecraft than the vignette is kind of done and you don’t really need any more.
Looking for Houllebecq’s book on Lovecraft, I came across this review on The Guardian, from July 2006
I liked this paragraph very much
For Houellebecq, Lovecraft’s ‘magnificent’ tales ‘vibrate like incantations’. He even praises Lovecraft as a stylist, a bold move that may not be unrelated to the fact that English is his second language. Lovecraft’s style isn’t just fantastically inflated, as Houellebecq acknowledges, but shot through with a creeping genteelism that was bound up with his delusions of being an 18th-century gentleman. Still, it is very possible that in a hundred years’ time, when the nuances of 20th-century English have been lost, people will read Lovecraft with the same pleasure they get from Romantic poetry.
Not sure about the cultists bits though.
Huh. Lovecraft’s prose, to me, reads like newsprint. It’s the opposite of inflated; it’s dull. I can feel my eyes glazing over, then I realize I was reading about a giant invisible creature from space that is devouring people and almost missed it because of the monotone delivery of the narrator.
I just hope that when History of Qt3 becomes a mainstream field of academic study someone writes a book about me entitled John Many Jars: Against the World, Against Life. It just sounds so cool.
I’ve got your back as long as you get mine with:
At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Navaronegun
If that ever comes to pass, I look forward to not being around.
-Tom
Tom-actually hoping for oblivion.
I am with you, Sir.
How Lovecraftian.
Or just acknowledging his mortality. I mean he could live to be what 150ish?.. that would be remarkable.
The future is a different country they do things differently there
Im putting that on a T-shirt. Genius.
I prefer to read Lovecraft’s prose than Hemingway’s. Shrug. Maybe my tastes are just not very sophisticated.
“Then there is the other secret. There isn’t any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.”
I think it was Christopher Hitchens who observed. Hemingway was a man who spent an entire career trying and failing to be as butch as Gertrude Stein :)
Nor mine, it would seem.
This is me, highly sophisticated fan of Hemingway. And Lovecraft!
That gif is fantastic. :)
Puleese. We had some backs and forths about Niven and Pournelle at the club.
No. You are a Limey. :) They never seem to “get” Hemingway.
That’s because he is just a poor mans Orwell.
Buuurn :)
More seriously I genuinely prefer Norman Mailer for my manly American prose, well the naked and the dead anyway.
btw speaking of Jerry Pournelle I loved his work with Niven, I still do and enjoy reading his SF, but I had the misfortune of meeting him once at E3. Holy crap that guy was an ass, a genuinely unpleasant individual. Hopefully it was just a one off, but hooya, not a nice man that day. On the plus side he enjoyed, or at least didnt hate Dark Ages of Camelot, on the down side he seemed to despise every other game in the world.
I really enjoyed his Chaos Manor posts in Byte. He was heavily into computer hardware, as was I. Then I started reading his blog. Mistake.