Sunday, April 9, 2017

Naw, it wasn't Simps.  I doubt he remembers who old Bertie was, if he ever knew.  

As to what he said over there, if he exhibited signs of understanding what I'd written I'd have to go back and check it because if he could understand it it's probably false.   He is reality resistant unless someone said it in the Village Voice or some once upon a time kewl venue.  

If the people who send me hate mail sent stuff that isn't full of false invective, especially about other people but even about me, I have no problem with posting it.  But I will not post lies and I'm not under any obligation to post content I don't want to.  That doesn't mean I don't get to refute what it accused me of,  especially when it's posted elsewhere.  I have found very few atheists who are mature enough to make an argument without making it personal and false. 

Update:  Simps didn't like what I said.  

Well, if he meant that Lovecraft, in one letter, revoked his long term anti-semitism but not his even more vicious racism, only that's not what he meant.  I told you that he was reality resistant. 

Why would he think what they do on a TV show would bother me?  Those Murdoch shows with the very sexy Yannick Bisson?  He must be getting a bit old to play the part by now, isn't he?  I mean, he's no Rich Hobson, these days.  I like Bisson and he is certainly eye-candy but I haven't watched one of those in years.  As to Lovecraft showing up in one?  When did he ever get to Canada?  Or did Murdoch move to Providence?   As he didn't start writing until the late 1910s, it's kind of a major anachronism to have him doing so around the turn of the century.  I doubt he even thought of writing at the time that show was set.   Though as so many of the writers for that show did the steam punk junk, that wouldn't stop them from that kind of a stretcher. 

I will say that much as I like Yannick Bisson and Helene Joy (I liked her as a victim of syphilis in the movie of Under the Dragon's Tail where the very good Peter Outerbridge played Murdoch), and I like Johnny Harris quite a lot, the show is kind of silly most of the time.   I have, actually, read some of the Murdoch novels by Maureen Jennings and, while she did a fair job with period accuracy and writing her characters believably into the time period, they were good to fair.  They took major liberties in Under the Dragon's Tail and some in Poor Tom is Cold in the movies, though, Except the Dying made the transition pretty much intact.  The book of Dragon's Tail seems to me to carry a lot more of the seediness and grittiness of the 1890s demimonde than the shows.  They're way too clean.  Murdoch wasn't a scientific tinkerer sleuth in the books, either. 

L.R. Wright's Canadian mysteries are pretty good.  The Suspect is the best of those I've read. 

Update 2:  Nope, never heard that Lovecraft went to Quebec once, I can't find anything about it online.  Though, looking to fact check it, I found this.

But, more broadly speaking, Lovecraft’s ascendance has also brought an uncomfortable truth into the spotlight: He was a virulent racist. The xenophobia and white supremacy that burble beneath his fiction (which may have gone unnoticed, had he remained anonymous) are startlingly explicit in his letters. Flip through them and you’ll find the author bemoaning Jews as “hook-nosed, swarthy, guttural-voiced aliens” with whom “association ... was intolerable”; New York City’s “flabby, pungent, grinning, chattering niggers”; and New England’s “undesirable Latins—low-grade Southern Italians and Portuguese, and the clamorous plague of French-Canadians.” In 1922, he wrote that he wished “a kindly gust of cyanogen could asphyxiate the whole gigantic abortion” of New York City’s Chinatown, which he called “a bastard mess of stewing mongrel flesh.” In another letter, he wrote, “In general, America has made a fine mess of its population and will pay for it in tears amidst a premature rottenness unless something is done extremely soon.”

Sounds like Steve Banon could be his bastard great, grandchild.  That is if you can imagine Lovecraft procreating.  Now, aren't you glad you poked that hornet's nest?   To claim that Lovecraft was a great traveler would seem to be a major fib.  Unless you count his brief period in NYC surrounding his marriage, its breakup and his failure to get a job or live a normal life before he fled back to Providence.

Notice that he was another Anglo-Saxon fan of murder by mass gassing well before the Nazis started doing that.  In the literary tradition of H. G. Wells, G. B. Shaw and Virginia Woolf.

Lovecraft was a piece of crap who wrote crap for people who don't read much but crap.

Update 3:  When H. P. Lovecraft lived, was the same period when the great anti-lynching crusader, anti-segregationist Ida Wells Barnett advocated people vote Republican because the Democratic Party contained the segregationist Southerners who prevented the anti-lynching and other civil rights legislation from becoming law.  In the depression, as Lovecraft hoped, as so many in the arts and those on the outer fringes of it, hoped for help from the New Deal, he overcame his previous inclinations to support FDR, to some extent on that basis.  So, dopey, if you're going to look at history with the same standards as those who write for the Murdoch TV show, you're going to come to the opposite of understanding it.  Not that that would bother you if you liked the fiction that resulted.

The Republican Party today, the Party of Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, Donald Trump, would have a lot more in common with Lovecraft the xenophobic racist and gay hater (yes, he was one of those too) than today's Democratic Party after Lyndon Johnson pushed through laws he would have absolutely hated.

Last Update unless the dolt say something really hilariously clueless (from the same link as above),

But as vexing as Lovecraft’s racism is for fans, his views are also one of the most useful lenses for reading his work. In March, Leslie Klinger delivered a lecture on Lovecraft at Brown University’s Hay Library, home to the world’s largest collection of Lovecraft papers and other materials. Toward the end of his remarks, Klinger—without excusing or defending Lovecraft’s racism—refused to separate it from his achievements. Lovecraft “despised people who weren’t White Anglo-Saxon Protestants,” he said. “But that powers the stories ... this sense that he’s alone, that he’s surrounded by enemies and everything is hostile to him. And I think you take away that part of his character, it might make him a much nicer person, but it would destroy the stories.”

The comics writer Alan Moore picks up this subject, as well, in the introduction to Klinger’s book. But first he reminds readers of the seismic social changes that occurred during Lovecraft’s life: women’s suffrage, advances in mankind’s understanding of outer space, the Russian revolution, new highly visible LGBT communities in American cities, and the largest wave of migrants and refugees the U.S. had ever seen. Moore writes,

"In this light it is possible to perceive Howard Lovecraft as an almost unbearably sensitive barometer of American dread. Far from outlandish eccentricities, the fears that generate Lovecraft’s stories and opinions were precisely those of the white, middle-class, heterosexual, Protestant-descended males who were most threatened by the shifting power relationships and values of the modern world."

Me, I always thought he was a crap writer for people who mostly read crap.

OK, Stupy did it.  Simps,  I've pointed out that you have absolutely no understanding of how time works but unless Murdoch invented a time machine, that Lovecraft might have visited Quebec (Murdoch is set in Toronto, there is a bit of a difference) three decades after the Murdoch series is set would sort of make my point that having him show up in the series is kind of a stretcher.

Didn't they ever tell you anything about how time works?  That some things happen after other things and those things didn't happen before they did?  Just how permissive were they in your first grade years?


5 comments:

  1. "I will not post lies."

    Unless they're your own, Sparkles. Believe me, we know.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lovecraft did quite a lot travelling, and he was indeed in Quebec once. You could look it up, or read Sprague DeCamp's definitive biography.

    Thanks for demonstrating your ignorance even more proudly than usual.

    ReplyDelete


  3. H.P. Lovecraft on Republicans:

    “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.”

    ReplyDelete
  4. He completely repudiated those views toward the end of his life. But you know that. And continue to pretend you don't,

    Incidentally I google "Did HP Lovecraft ever go to Canada? and look what was the first thing that turned up.
    http://www.hplovecraft.com/life/myths.aspx


    So you're lying again.

    Thanks for playing.

    ReplyDelete
  5. It's called fiction, you braying literalist jackass.

    ReplyDelete