(no subject)
Oct. 13th, 2004 03:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phosfateI read Lovecraft over the long weekend. I like him, what with that ability to quietly scare the living crap out of me and make me flee the house because it's got all scary in there.
But there's this problem. If you've ever read anything written before, say, 1960, you know you're gonna get casual racism. You're reading a harmless boarding school story and someone says something stupid about Jews, probably involving their nasal capacity and financial acumen. Or the detective grills a person of color, and the author decides he's gwine break out the colorful accent, yassuh, sho'nuff. It's there. There's nothing you can do about it.
Mr Lovecraft, however, took some of the (even then dubious) socialogical and anthropological thinking of the day and worked it into his supernatural milieu, so that non-white immigrants are literally subhumans, often members of ancient, hidden, devil-worshipping cults. So you get stuff like the jaw-dropping bit in "Herbert West, Re-Animator" where he describes an African-American boxer as resembling a gorilla, with long knuckle-scraping arms, and apparently means it seriously. Tom-toms are mentioned. Tom-toms. Lovecraft even scores a racist hat trick by dissing Jews and Italians on the same page. It's hard to know whether to laugh or go look for liquor. It also fucks up the story because it's hard to be scared and gobsmacked at the same time.
Oh well.
He also picks on the Kurds. I mean, Jesus, had he ever even seen a Kurd?
Lovecraft also has the mutant ability to crack my shit up, with a dry delivery that means you're often halfway through the next sentence before the soda comes out your nose. This particular volume has annotations of varying usefulness. Included was a fragment of a letter, describing a 1923 visit to the First Baptist Church in...oh, somewhere. Providence. Boston. Whatever. Let's watch:
"This is my maternal ancestral church, but I had not been in the main auditorium since 1895, or in the building at all since 1907, when I gave an illustrated astronomical lecture to the Boys' Club. We found this fane as pleasing within as without, the paneling and the carving above the doors being especially notable as specimens of Georgian workmanship. We ascended into the organ loft, and I endeavour'd to play "Yes, We Have No Bananas," but was balk'd by lack of power, since the machine is not a self-starter."
He talked like that a lot. Words such as "endeavour'd" and "balk'd" were apparently the American horrorist equivalent of "OMGWTFLOL," or "pwned."
But there's this problem. If you've ever read anything written before, say, 1960, you know you're gonna get casual racism. You're reading a harmless boarding school story and someone says something stupid about Jews, probably involving their nasal capacity and financial acumen. Or the detective grills a person of color, and the author decides he's gwine break out the colorful accent, yassuh, sho'nuff. It's there. There's nothing you can do about it.
Mr Lovecraft, however, took some of the (even then dubious) socialogical and anthropological thinking of the day and worked it into his supernatural milieu, so that non-white immigrants are literally subhumans, often members of ancient, hidden, devil-worshipping cults. So you get stuff like the jaw-dropping bit in "Herbert West, Re-Animator" where he describes an African-American boxer as resembling a gorilla, with long knuckle-scraping arms, and apparently means it seriously. Tom-toms are mentioned. Tom-toms. Lovecraft even scores a racist hat trick by dissing Jews and Italians on the same page. It's hard to know whether to laugh or go look for liquor. It also fucks up the story because it's hard to be scared and gobsmacked at the same time.
Oh well.
He also picks on the Kurds. I mean, Jesus, had he ever even seen a Kurd?
Lovecraft also has the mutant ability to crack my shit up, with a dry delivery that means you're often halfway through the next sentence before the soda comes out your nose. This particular volume has annotations of varying usefulness. Included was a fragment of a letter, describing a 1923 visit to the First Baptist Church in...oh, somewhere. Providence. Boston. Whatever. Let's watch:
"This is my maternal ancestral church, but I had not been in the main auditorium since 1895, or in the building at all since 1907, when I gave an illustrated astronomical lecture to the Boys' Club. We found this fane as pleasing within as without, the paneling and the carving above the doors being especially notable as specimens of Georgian workmanship. We ascended into the organ loft, and I endeavour'd to play "Yes, We Have No Bananas," but was balk'd by lack of power, since the machine is not a self-starter."
He talked like that a lot. Words such as "endeavour'd" and "balk'd" were apparently the American horrorist equivalent of "OMGWTFLOL," or "pwned."
