Wrong Writing and Lovecraft

[SecondCircle]

Yeah I can't say that I actually had a problem when I started the thread. Things aren't always a problem that need solving. I merely wanted to point out the irony of literature in this sense.

And I like that people still have the respect for that brand of scares. The "scurrying" in the attic and such as opposed to intestines falling from a split belly. Both have their place I suppose, but the former is a lot more solid, and I know we've all experienced those strange sounds and eerie feelings.

Lovecraft was a master of this, if but a unique type of master. And I do agree that his writing can resemble that of a technical manual of sorts. He obviously was from a time where racism and such things were commonplace, so I don't find a cat named niggerman odd or offensive in his case. He did have very strange upbringings, but we've heard the old adage of genius and insanity. Maybe call it "intelligence and madness."

So yeah the thread was just sort of a touch of irony with a good deal of praise toward the man. A discussion starter that received some damn good posts if I might say. Ye authors and creative minds here at Lit are always great for in depth discussion that no one would take the time for in that dreaded "real world."

 

[Ironiclaconic]

I have never heard a rule that you shouldn't write a story told as a "this is what happened" and if I ever read such a rule in a writing guide I would roll my eyes. It's a standard framing device in many classic novels.

One can find very good guides on writing but a lot of it is drek. Tell a good story, use your words well, profit. Lovecraft did that, except his profit was in reputation and influence, not coin.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Racism is alive and well, and anyone who asserts their purity is a lying sack of shit with a serious self-awareness problem.

 

[Bramblethorn]

He obviously was from a time where racism and such things were commonplace, so I don't find a cat named niggerman odd or offensive in his case.

Racism was commonplace, yeah, and HPL's writing reflects some of the eugenic theory that was popular in his day. (Google "Jukes and Kallikaks" and you'll see where his degenerate mountain-folk come from.)

But even by the standards of 20s-30s America, HPL was uncommonly racist. The article I linked to has some quotes from his letters, where he talks approvingly and repeatedly about genocide against Asians, Blacks, and Jews.

I wasn't bothered by the cat named "Nigger-Man"; a lot of people back then gave their pets similar names without any malicious intent. But there's plenty of much more blatant, intentional racism in his fiction. "Medusa's Coil" is about a young man whose wife is a priestess in a cult and her hair is an evil life-form that slithers off her head and roams around killing people... but the sanity-blasting revelation that he saves for the very end of the story? She also had a trace of NEGRO BLOOD.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Racism was commonplace, yeah, and HPL's writing reflects some of the eugenic theory that was popular in his day. (Google "Jukes and Kallikaks" and you'll see where his degenerate mountain-folk come from.)

But even by the standards of 20s-30s America, HPL was uncommonly racist. The article I linked to has some quotes from his letters, where he talks approvingly and repeatedly about genocide against Asians, Blacks, and Jews.

I wasn't bothered by the cat named "Nigger-Man"; a lot of people back then gave their pets similar names without any malicious intent. But there's plenty of much more blatant, intentional racism in his fiction. "Medusa's Coil" is about a young man whose wife is a priestess in a cult and her hair is an evil life-form that slithers off her head and roams around killing people... but the sanity-blasting revelation that he saves for the very end of the story? She also had a trace of NEGRO BLOOD.

Racism was worse than you imagine, back then, and it hasn't changed much. Today its not polite to express racist sentiments but take it to the bank the racism is there. Its prolly worse, cuz blacks aren't doing well by any standard of measurement. We expect them to play the fool, and they do.

In Lovecrafts day people like Margaret Sanger actively worked to kill blacks via her Planned Parenthood organization. Yet she's a Liberal saint. If you think I lie, read her writings on the subject.

Even LBJ got in on the carnage by drafting blacks to fight the Vietnam War at the same time he gave white faggots college exemptions.

 

[SecondCircle]

OK racism. Its more of a subjective thing than most might realize. I personally believe that everyone is racist on some level, even the smallest level.

Now that's not to say we're defining racism in such a broad stroke as hating all blacks or all Hispanics or all whites. Most of of what attributes to racism is stereotypes. Whether you want to admit it or not, every single person is guilty of prejudice, profiling, and stereotyping. And I don't simply mean racism.

Admit it, you pull through a bad neighborhood with minorities standing out in the street, you lock your doors. You may not approve of their music or the way they dress or how they talk. And it usually has something to do with a stereotype. I don't believe people should be painted with the brush of stereotypes. After all, not all white people are the way they're portrayed by black comics, nor are all blacks thugs and gangsters that have it out for authority. But sometimes, the stereotype hits the nail on the head. And its stupid to say they don't.

Lovecraft may have been a bit extreme with racism, but when I said commonplace I meant it. It wasn't out of the ordinary to express distaste for another race in any extreme back then. If it was, I don't think it would have taken so long for them to gain equality.

Racism is wrong and shouldn't be something we actively pursue as a lifestyle, but its silly to assume that anyone is truly free of prejudice. The main idea is to judge someone by their shitty actions and not by their skin color or nationality. I have plenty of black friends. Blacks are awesome and rich in culture. But that doesn't mean I can't hate gun toting hip gangster wannabes that do nothing to contribute to anyone's well being, certainly not their own.

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

'Being' or having 'become' a generation of lazy readers and lazy thinkers is just a passing phase in the history of Mankind.

When we look back now and see what someone wrote on papyrus or onto scrolls or vellum, we accept, almost take for granted - that style reflected the culture and society at the time in question.

You MUST always write what you WANT to write and do it the way YOU want to and no one else.

I admire that you have or have found or made the time to be able to read things like Lovecraft and appreciate them.

There will be plenty - PLENTY - of appreciative readers before during and after the ADD generation kills itself. Survival goes to the MOST intelligent, not the dumbed-down. Okay there may not be as many but you can stick your prices up to compensate.

Go for the back-story. Go for the 'suck you in' moves.

Write the story, the way YOU think the story NEEDS to be written. There is no other way. Otherwise you're not 'the author,' you're just someone taking orders, or being dictated to, literally and figuratively.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

OK racism. Its more of a subjective thing than most might realize. I personally believe that everyone is racist on some level, even the smallest level.

Now that's not to say we're defining racism in such a broad stroke as hating all blacks or all Hispanics or all whites. Most of of what attributes to racism is stereotypes. Whether you want to admit it or not, every single person is guilty of prejudice, profiling, and stereotyping. And I don't simply mean racism.

Admit it, you pull through a bad neighborhood with minorities standing out in the street, you lock your doors. You may not approve of their music or the way they dress or how they talk. And it usually has something to do with a stereotype. I don't believe people should be painted with the brush of stereotypes. After all, not all white people are the way they're portrayed by black comics, nor are all blacks thugs and gangsters that have it out for authority. But sometimes, the stereotype hits the nail on the head. And its stupid to say they don't.

Lovecraft may have been a bit extreme with racism, but when I said commonplace I meant it. It wasn't out of the ordinary to express distaste for another race in any extreme back then. If it was, I don't think it would have taken so long for them to gain equality.

Racism is wrong and shouldn't be something we actively pursue as a lifestyle, but its silly to assume that anyone is truly free of prejudice. The main idea is to judge someone by their shitty actions and not by their skin color or nationality. I have plenty of black friends. Blacks are awesome and rich in culture. But that doesn't mean I can't hate gun toting hip gangster wannabes that do nothing to contribute to anyone's well being, certainly not their own.

What culture? I cant name one society near the equator that ever amounted to shit.

 

[SecondCircle]

When I say culture, I refer more to the customs and things we've drawn from them then the actual societies themselves. Rock and Roll for instance is a genre that arguably derived from blues music, and you can definitely tell when playing the scales and techniques. Blues music, though not entirely, was played by black men. Of course, rock was influenced by all kinds of music, but to argue that would be to like saying Black Sabbath was distantly inspired by Mozart in a sense.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

When I say culture, I refer more to the customs and things we've drawn from them then the actual societies themselves. Rock and Roll for instance is a genre that arguably derived from blues music, and you can definitely tell when playing the scales and techniques. Blues music, though not entirely, was played by black men. Of course, rock was influenced by all kinds of music, but to argue that would be to like saying Black Sabbath was distantly inspired by Mozart in a sense.

Ah! They contributed rhythm to the feast.

 

[desertslave]

When I say culture, I refer more to the customs and things we've drawn from them then the actual societies themselves. Rock and Roll for instance is a genre that arguably derived from blues music, and you can definitely tell when playing the scales and techniques. Blues music, though not entirely, was played by black men. Of course, rock was influenced by all kinds of music, but to argue that would be to like saying Black Sabbath was distantly inspired by Mozart in a sense.

Eddie Van Halen was classically trained before going to rock. There are all sorts of passages in VH music that were lifted from a number of classical guitar pieces. A riff got stuck in my head the first time I heard one of their early tunes on the radio, and I just couldn't shake it. I knew it was from something/somewhere else. Took me three days to surf through all the damn music in my head to realize it was an etude by Carulli that I'd learned maybe 10 years earlier.

One more useless side note, about racism, culture and "things of the time" vs. the present. I'm reading an historic recounting of the building of the Hoover Dam, titled "Colossus." I just read a portion yesterday regarding a small dog that became a sort of mascot to the work crews.

He was born under one of the construction barracks in 1932 and became a regular visitor all over the construction site. Since he was a mostly black-colored dog, the workers named him "Nig." He survived on the site, running the catwalks and labyrinths of scaffolding, until 1941, when he was accidentally crushed under a truck. "He was buried in a concrete crypt near the Nevada abutment and memorialized with a plaque identifying him as "Nig, the Dog that Adopted a Dam."

In 1979 some tourist from Wisconsin saw the plaque and got all upset over the 'racial epithet.' He complained long and loud enough that the plaque was finally removed (over many objections by the locals and long-timers), and replaced by a plaque that just described the construction crew's "devoted animal."

Another fine example of political correctness turned into censorship.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Yes, we cant leave the past in the past. Humanity treats the past as negotiable bonds it can redeem for bogus excitement. I think the mark of maturity is the loss of enthusiasm for milking what once was but is no more.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Eddie Van Halen was classically trained before going to rock. There are all sorts of passages in VH music that were lifted from a number of classical guitar pieces. A riff got stuck in my head the first time I heard one of their early tunes on the radio, and I just couldn't shake it. I knew it was from something/somewhere else. Took me three days to surf through all the damn music in my head to realize it was an etude by Carulli that I'd learned maybe 10 years earlier.

One more useless side note, about racism, culture and "things of the time" vs. the present. I'm reading an historic recounting of the building of the Hoover Dam, titled "Colossus." I just read a portion yesterday regarding a small dog that became a sort of mascot to the work crews.

He was born under one of the construction barracks in 1932 and became a regular visitor all over the construction site. Since he was a mostly black-colored dog, the workers named him "Nig." He survived on the site, running the catwalks and labyrinths of scaffolding, until 1941, when he was accidentally crushed under a truck. "He was buried in a concrete crypt near the Nevada abutment and memorialized with a plaque identifying him as "Nig, the Dog that Adopted a Dam."

In 1979 some tourist from Wisconsin saw the plaque and got all upset over the 'racial epithet.' He complained long and loud enough that the plaque was finally removed (over many objections by the locals and long-timers), and replaced by a plaque that just described the construction crew's "devoted animal."

Another fine example of political correctness turned into censorship.

I took music theory class with David Muse (Firefall) 50 years ago. Jimmy Page and the guys of Pink Floyd were trained in the classics, too.

Page doing Chopin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZXG0fNUUXs

The Toys doing Bach
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGDZc9bdUZM

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

PINK FLOYD

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk0St_zfNT4

All kinds of classical shit in this tune: Karlheintz Stockhausen, Steve Reich etc

 

[SecondCircle]

OK you guys obviously didn't get what I was saying. When I was talking about "Black Sabbath was influenced by Mozart," I was talking about blues inspiring a lot of rock. BUT I was saying that rock was ALSO inspired by lots of other music, but to say that is REDUNDANT, because ALL music was inspired by the earliest music, EVEN CLASSICAL. Duh I've seen sheet music where Randy Rhoads played classical scales. The usually when you ask a band who their influences were, they name a band they listened to when they were growing up. But of course rock was inspired by classical. All I was saying is that blacks contributed their style to its origins, but weren't the only ones.

What are we talking about again?

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

You know how it goes. The OP goes one way and the audience goes another. Napoleon had the same problem. He said he wanted to go to London NOT Moscow.

 

[slyc_willie]

Back on topic . . . .

Then Robert Bloch pointed something out to me about Lovecraft's very style of writing. When you're reading, his usual narrator leads in with an almost "let me tell you what happened" kind of deal, which most would definitely say is bad writing. But Bloch says he uses this technique almost purposely. Its like you're sitting down and having a beer and a smoke with the narrator, and you're comfortable and attentive to hear what has got him talking. This narrator loads you with back story and all, and it can be droning and boring because of the lengthy compound sentences and tricky word play that has you saying WTF.

This is exactly why I like HP. I always envisioned some emaciated intellectual telling me a story over a bottle of wine whenever I read any of his stories, someone who had seen something very strange or horrific at some point and was doing their best to explain it in an intelligent way.

Driving back from the coast one night (a three-hour or so drive), I asked my wife to find something I could listen to while driving. She found an audio of some of HP's short stories. The narrator did an excellent job of being very conversational with the prose, to the point where "ejaculations of horror and fright" didn't make me snicker. I've almost never heard an audiobook that didn't make me roll my eyes at least a few times. But translated into that medium, HP Lovecraft works very well.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

First off, the idea that there are any Natural Laws concerning grammar and style for creative writing is bullshit. All the rules and hints and guidelines on writing that we see all the time are just observations about what's worked for some people in the past. You don't want to err out of ignorance of course, but once you've made your bones as a writer you can use or abuse the rules as you please. All for art.

As for Lovecraft, you have to put him into historical context. When he was writing, the taste in literature ran to Dickens and Hagard and the like, authors we generally find pretty wordy and suffocating today. That was the style. You wrote that way if you wanted to be 'literary'.

Lovecraft was working in a whole new genre back then. The closest precedents for what he was trying to do were probably Mary Shelly and Poe. Shelly was quite obsolete, and Poe had struggled with the same problems as Lovecraft: trying to introduce the very idea of the horror story or fantasy to readers who'd never encountered anything like it. You couldn't just plunge into the kind of thing HP was trying to do and expect people to follow, but there was a literary tradition of the traveler's tale, a first-person exposition of wonders and horrors observed or experienced that went back to the middle ages or more. Poe couched his stories in the form of a traveler's tale a lot, hence his long breathless intros by narrators just barely clinging to sanity, desperate to tell what they've seen. Lovecraft used the same gimmick early on and never completely abandoned it.

These days we accept the fantastic and horrific without even blinking. But imagine encountering Lovecraft back when the only thing you'd read was Dickens or Thackery or one of those stuffed shirts. People turning into fish? Colours out of space? Chthulhu??

It's nice to know that these days HP is considered one of the major writers of the 20th century for what he did in opening up that whole new universe of possibilities, Pretty incredible.

 

[SecondCircle]

The doctor pretty much has my meaning, I think.

 

[PayDay]

Personally I think anyone who says they fully embrace everyone regardless of color/gender/sexual preference/religious affiliation etc...

Is full of shit.

.

&then what happened?

I roll this way. Neutrality is where it's @.

So I must respectfully disagree.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Lovecraft was working in a whole new genre back then. The closest precedents for what he was trying to do were probably Mary Shelly and Poe.

I'd argue that. IMHO, Lovecraft is much closer to Blackwood and Dunsany, both in time and in style. They're not remembered much now, but they were big in his day and he acknowledged a debt to both. I'd consider his contribution more as hugely developing the genre than inventing it.

HPL picked Blackwood's "The Willows" (1907) as his favourite horror story. Having read it, I think you could sneak it into a Lovecraft collection without it looking at all out of place - except, perhaps, that it's a bit more outdoors-y than HPL's usual style.

On the fantasy side, Lord Dunsany (e.g. "The King of Elfland's Daughter") seems to have had a lot of influence on things like "Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath".

There are also hints of HPL-to-come in Chambers' "The King In Yellow", although that's a bit more tenuous.

 

[manyeyedhydra]

The doctor has it spot on as always. The only wrong writing is writing no one wants to read. Plenty of people still want to read Lovecraft so all the creative writing course bullshit about HPL being a terrible writer because of purple prose is exactly that: bullshit. The style fits the stories perfectly. Whatever works and all that...

I'm reading through some of Clark Ashton Smith's old stories. The prose is equally fruity on those. It was how things were done back then.

 

[manyeyedhydra]

However! I had a cool Lovecraft based Cthulhu video game for X-box 360 and they were all over that!

Curious what that game is. I normally keep tabs on most horror game releases and it's been fairly slim pickings of late with all the big companies doing the best to ruin their own franchises.

Alone in the Dark was the main Cthulhu franchise and that's been dead for aeons. Eternal Darkness was the one that did it right from first principles, also ancient. I think Splatterhouse has references to Herbert West. That one is very enjoyable but not exactly lovecraftian in tone!

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I'd argue that. IMHO, Lovecraft is much closer to Blackwood and Dunsany, both in time and in style. They're not remembered much now, but they were big in his day and he acknowledged a debt to both. I'd consider his contribution more as hugely developing the genre than inventing it.

HPL picked Blackwood's "The Willows" (1907) as his favourite horror story. Having read it, I think you could sneak it into a Lovecraft collection without it looking at all out of place - except, perhaps, that it's a bit more outdoors-y than HPL's usual style.

On the fantasy side, Lord Dunsany (e.g. "The King of Elfland's Daughter") seems to have had a lot of influence on things like "Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath".

There are also hints of HPL-to-come in Chambers' "The King In Yellow", although that's a bit more tenuous.

Yes, yes, you're right. I forgot about Lord Dunsany (never read him), even though he's often mentioned as one of Lovecraft's predecessors.

In fact, after giving it some thought, i think my post might be pretty full of shit altogether. There were certainly ghost stories around when Lovecraft was coming up, and Algernon Blackwood as you say, and WB Yeats and the whole Celtic Revival thing at the turn of the century. Even Aleister Crowley wrote a novel or two about the supernatural. So there was no dearth of supernatural/horror stuff.

But I think what gives Lovecraft's work such power even today was his willingness to take on the unknown and unknowable. That's not easy to do in writing, but Lovecraft is always reaching for it and it gives his stuff a timelessness and resonance that still works today. The horror is ultimately psychological. The message is that the universe is unknowable and strange beyond imagining.