Nothing must disturb my undiluted Englishry — God Save The King! I am naturally a Nordic — a chalk-white...

>Not being able to separate an artist from his opinions, either ones you especially like or especially dislike
Guys, c'mon.

I'm not taking influence. I'm talking good writing. JK Rowling has had considerably more influence than Wallace Stevens. So what? All the best writers masterbate incessantly to all the other best writers. When you have a writer that no other good writers takes seriously, chances are he's not a good writer. That hatchetjob of a sentence inaugurating this thread serves as evidence. If not sufficient evidence, present something that doesn't make him look like a blustering animate fist made of literal ham, and perhaps I'll stop ragging so hard.

(Pro tip: you can't.)

Who was talking about whose opinions?

And where in this thread we're any artists mentioned? Wait...were you referring to the brief invocation of Poe?

>For the third hand stuff I've head it doesn't translate though.
>I don't actually know anything about it to be fair.

lol. so you haven't actually read any of his work but you still feel qualified to comment? this is the worst board on this entire website. the worst part is i'm not at all surprised when we regularly have threads from non-russian speakers passionately arguing over who is the best translator of dostoyevsky/tolstoy/etc.

>The very idea of an unspeakable evil to whom we're below the notice of is meant to be almost impossible to sell in a game or a movie because it can't be interacted upon and tends to go against our human centric world view

what are you trying to say? he's a shitty writer because his ideas can't adequately be portrayed on screen? why would you judge the worth of a work from one medium based on the limitations of another? one of the strengths of literature is that it's able to deal with things that can't adequately be depicted in a visual medium. lovecraft utilizes this well by doing exactly what you described. you have to be particularly dull and unimaginative not to see the value or significance in this.

you're a literal retard. go away.

I mean I think the idea is that Lovecraft can be a bit inaccessible. This is completely subjective but I tried listening to an audiobook or two of his and they were so fundamentally ungripping my mind wandered off and did something else.

Also its such a mishmash of nonsense. People can never give you a good starting point.

Just a hunch but you'd probably find that some of the more interesting concepts would have become so massively polluted by now that they would never have true impact. Picture reading a story on Cthulu and having an image of Cartman scratching on his head or one of the cute little Cthulu dolls that pop up coming into your head.

Do you know what that user meant by "Dude dug a deep hole, took a flashlight, climbed down into the hole, used the light to make spooky shadow puppets on the wall so he could feel like he had some company down there and wasn't completely alone, completely a narrow-minded tragedy about whom no one cared, and got so caught up doing fraternizing with his shallow inventions that he mistook them, his shadow puppet monsters, for real monsters, with real significance. Then he spent the rest of his life filling notebooks with stilted prose descriptions of them and their spooky powers."?

is that you varg, you handicapped nordicist romantic with an epic neanderthal fetish as large as his misunderstanding of these matters?

l-leave me alone

>I mean I think the idea is that Lovecraft can be a bit inaccessible.

he's a pulp writer. he's as accessible as it gets.

>This is completely subjective but I tried listening to an audiobook or two of his and they were so fundamentally ungripping my mind wandered off and did something else.

yes, it is completely subjective. as is everything else you've said. you don't like what you've read, or you just don't like genre fiction. everything else is rationalization and regurgitation of wiki skimmed criticism. you haven't said one interesting thing in fault of his approach, nor have you backed up your claim that he'll be forgotten despite him casting such a large shadow that his name is a literal adjective.

>Just a hunch but you'd probably find that some of the more interesting concepts would have become so massively polluted by now that they would never have true impact. Picture reading a story on Cthulu and having an image of Cartman scratching on his head or one of the cute little Cthulu dolls that pop up coming into your head.

so lovecraft is both utterly irrelevant and so culturally ubiquitous that it harms his work? you're just making shit up as you go along. this hasn't harmed poe or shakespeare. it won't harm lovecraft.

>Do you know what that user meant by "Dude dug a deep hole, took a flashlight, climbed down into the hole, used the light to make spooky shadow puppets on the wall so he could feel like he had some company down there and wasn't completely alone, completely a narrow-minded tragedy about whom no one cared, and got so caught up doing fraternizing with his shallow inventions that he mistook them, his shadow puppet monsters, for real monsters, with real significance. Then he spent the rest of his life filling notebooks with stilted prose descriptions of them and their spooky powers."?

you mean the guy with your exact same posting style and opinions? if you're going to samefag, at least be subtle. it's incredibly revealing that you think that lame unenlightening tryhard post was worth quoting.

>everything else is rationalization and regurgitation of wiki skimmed criticism. you haven't said one interesting thing in fault of his approach, nor have you backed up your claim that he'll be forgotten despite him casting such a large shadow that his name is a literal adjective
Youtube mate

And that wasn't me.

>so lovecraft is both utterly irrelevant and so culturally ubiquitous that it harms his work? you're just making shit up as you go along. this hasn't harmed poe or shakespeare. it won't harm lovecraft.
Once again I'm a different user mate. I mean if you want to address the point go for it.

Not even green texting that last bit. But yeah address it if you like

I have now been quoted in this thread as many times as Lovecraft himself. Some extended metaphor I typed on my phone was more interesting than the published writing of the man himself. Further evidence of his inadequacy as a writer.

So fucking explain your metaphor

Did you just make it up?

Did he say that? I like him even more now.

Yeah.

>a Viking a berserk killer
So Lovecraft was an aspie nerd who liked to larp as scary, huh? He'd fit right in on /pol/.

Fucking reee desu

Seeing as he's one of the central pillars of horror, I'll know you're wrong. It's not his writing that persists, it's his ideas. That will be enough to carry him for another century.
It's not his writing that people get particularly excited for. it's his atmosphere. He was great at setting a scene and could perfectly get across the mood of the piece. The fact that you chose a letter of his rather than any of his prose is more telling than you think.
Your logic's subjective anyway. What constitutes a good writer for you? Someone that you've decided has a good writing style, or a writer who has loads of writers wanking them off? What's more important? Your own opinion or the opinion of the masses?

>What's more important? Your own opinion or the opinion of the masses?
Not that user but you dodged that question so hard hahaha. And he wasn't talking about the opinion of "the masses" rather than that of other men who devoted their lives to literature. The difference between the two couldn't be more stark.

My own noggin done tells me what's them good scribblers and what's them dribblers. But that noggin's noddin' in tempo with the old titans of the trade, so when I ain't havin' it and neither is they, I know we got ourselves a drivelling drekula

this literally is nonsense. stop

I thought my opening of 'it's not his writing that people get particularly excited for' would have said enough. I know just how polarising his style is, and found it difficult to get into at first. Even some of the people who're influenced by him criticise him for it.
In the end the barrier of good writer was erected without any hint as to what OP deems a good writer. This thread is here only to call out peoples taste because it differs from OP's.

>undiluted Englishry
>I am naturally a Nordic
eh?

Anglo saxons were norse. Most of the British Isles outside of East England and Scotland would be predominantly celtic tho

Hardly

The fuck are the Scots then, they aren't Celt/Briton?

He forgot autism.

Lovecraft was based as fuck. When we win the civil war he will be a mandatory part of school curriculum

Houellebecq (the modern day Baudelaire)

youtube.com/watch?v=V7qQ7A4rWM8
Video of Jonathan Bowden speaking on Lovecraft

lol didn't he marry a Jew that left him?

>. The very idea of an unspeakable evil to whom we're below the notice of is meant to be almost impossible to sell in a game or a movie because it can't be interacted upon and tends to go against our human centric world view
Roadside Picknick (Or the more known movie or videogame adaptations, by the name of STALKER)
Also, there are plenty of movie and table game adaptations of his work.

Actually he was pretty well adjusted, funny and had many friends.
He was just a major fucking racist, also.

The only hardship he may have had was poverty (contrasted to coming from a line of wealthy people, until his grandfather mismanaged) and having both parents (the father being distant and a cheater; the mother being psychologically abusive) go insane/die.

He generally disliked anyone who didn't come right off the fucking Mayflower. With very few exceptions, ethnic-wise.
Weirdly tho, he also detested the Republican party.

He was a socialist for some reason. Liked FDR.

Well I mean it would depend on the times man. People tend to gloss over the fact that it was the Republicans who freed the slaves etc.

He leaned left. But I never found any evidence for him being a socialist. It was kind of a new thing back then and obviously made some sense to them, intellectually. He DID repeatedly employ utopian/dystopian ideas, after all.
I get that, but at the time the Democrats were about taking the weak and poor and improving them, while the Republicans were the ones calling for WAY stricter immigration laws. Something that Lovecraft surely would have resonated with.
Still, he wrote this:
>“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.”
It shows his left-leaning side, while also a weird contrary intellectual position to his own preferences and sensibilities. I often wonder how much he actually thought much about politics (beyond war efforts) and what the particulars of those thoughts were.
Weirder still, while he never stopped complaining about "muh degenerate foreigners", I never found him saying anything about tightening immigration. Not even in his fiction.
I vaguely recall some comment about giving black people the vote, tho. But that could have been someone else.

Dude, I can understand criticizing Lovecraft for his political views, but you sound like you haven't actually read his stuff or biographies of him.

>Lovecraft doesn't need to be remembered for his style (and obviously he won't)
His style isn't for everybody, but it's distinct, memorable, and effective in those stories where he elevates above the adjective-mongering that sometimes plagued him. He certainly knew how to deploy a long sentence for good effect, yet he didn't just drone on and on - he interspersed his lengthy multiple-clause constructions with short, punchy stuff as well, and could be colloquial when necessary.
Shadow over Innsmouth is a pretty good example of his technique.

I think what happened is that after he experienced financial hardship for years, and tried fitfully and to no effect to obtain employment, and personally witnessed the horrors of lower class life in New York, he came to believe that some form of socialism offered the best chance of reaching his main political desire - a state of affairs in which intellectual people could have the freedom to indulge in intellectual pursuits without having to participate in social darwinist competition in order to survive. He talks about this in his letters. His descriptions of alien societies in At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow out of Time also shine some light on the sort of society he envisioned.

What does it mean if you are chalk white but short and scrawny.
Not super short but like 5'9 short.

Im pretty sure Democratic Party allegiance among the Boston Brahmin would've had to of been an influence if he was a New England elitist

If I ever get enough Lovecraft nerd around me, I want to play a drinking game where we have narrations of him running and have to drink every time he uses a hyphenated adjective. Three when he double-hyphenates. Ex, when he tripple-hyphenates.
>and tried fitfully and to no effect to obtain employment,
Let's call it what it was: He refused to provide for himself with work that was anything but writing fiction.
Once he a friend basically offered him a dream job of writing articles about different parts of the USA. (Some tourism thing.) He loved to travel. Never took him up on it. This was in the time when he was alone in a shitty apartment in NYC, mind you.
That makes sense. Thanks for the tidbit.

5'9 is average height. You're not short.

All I know is that I would be pretty cool with stupid kids worshipping my stories nearly 100 years in the future.

>Let's call it what it was: He refused to provide for himself with work that was anything but writing fiction.
Well yes, I wasn't trying to imply that his failure to gain employment was anyone's fault but his own. I was just trying to explain where his attitudes on socialism probably came from.

Yeah, he was probably beefed that capitalism made his high-standing family what it was.
And he obviously romanticized the noble born of old, who seemingly had someone """run""" the estate, while everyone else could basically do whatever the fuck they wanted, so long as it didn't utterly tarnish the reputation of the family. The artist in Call of Cthulhu comes to mind.
I'm pretty sure that this wasn't a common thing in the late 20s/30s anymore.

I understand criticizing Lovecraft for his racism, or for his financial incompetence. What I don't understand is being this butthurt about him as a writer. Sure, he had many flaws as a writer. But at the end of the day, he accomplished something that most writers never do. To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, Lovecraft wrote things that seemed never to have been written before.

I live in a predominately white state so I'm pretty much shorter than every other man I meet. My dad is 6'2. Not sure how I failed so hard. 5'9 is almost midget mode if you live around a lot of white people. Even the girls are creeping up on me

Imagine that, a writer writing things that seemed never to have been written before!

>He won't even outlast Steven King.
I know its b8, but come now.

H. P. "crude draft" Lovecraft.

WE

yet he married a jew and apparently got on very well with her

>Reform? Pish! We do no want reform! What would the world be without its scarlet and purple evil! Drama is born of conflict and violence...god! Shall we ever be such women as to prefer the blond-bearded warrior? The one sound power in the world is the power of a hairy muscular right arm!

>Yah! How I spit upon this rotton (sic) age with its feeble comforts and thwarted energies -- its Freuds and Wilsons, Augustines and Heliogabali, -- rabbles and perversions! What these swine with their scruples and problems, changes and rebellions, need, is a long draught of blood from a foeman's skull on the battlements of a mountain fortalice! We need fewer harps and viols, and more drums and brasses. The answer to jazz is the wild dance of the war-like conqueror! Don't complain of the youth's high-powered motor-car unless you can give him an horse and armour and sed him to conquer the domains of the neighborouing kings! Modern life my gawd! I dont wonder that literature is going to hell or chaos! What is there to write about now? Before we have literature we must have life -- bold, colourful, primitive, and picturesque. We must change a George V for a Richard Coeur de Lion -- a Platagenet!.

Was it autism?

>Eroticism belongs to a lower order of instincts, and is an animal rather than nobly human quality. For evolved man -- the apex of organic progress on the Earth -- what branch of reflection is more fitting than that which occupies only his higher and exclusively human faculties? The primal savage or ape merely looks about his native forest to find a mate; the exalted Aryan should lift his eyes to the worlds of space and consider his relation to infinity!!!!

I've been told he was the kind of racist who thought everyone ought to stay where they are from. He didn't mind jews too much, so long as they stayed small in numbers.
Here's a picture of them being happy.
Well, especially his early works are Poe af.
He knew it too. Took him a couple years to figure out his own style.
He also admitted to not be the kind of author who would ever "stand out" as any literary giant. He has a big fanbase now, but not so much for his prose or plot, as for his world-building.
Nah, he just hated himself for being for being so meek and feeble, that the army didn't even want him in war time.
And this:
Probably had to do with his parents. Specifically his dad, a travelling salesman. When he went mad and then died, he got some BS diagnosis and it didn't take much to put two and two together there.

Plus fucking gigantic mommy issues.

Forgot pic

>tfw no businesswoman jewess gf who sends me NEETbux while i write

>tfw not living in a shitty apartment, where my shit gets stolen
>tfw I will never go on a Lovecraftian quest for cheap suits for six months

Look it up. It's hilarious.