Started reading this on a whim and it has been surprisingly interesting and funny

Started reading this on a whim and it has been surprisingly interesting and funny
>One other interesting—indeed, almost alarming—fact is that Lovecraft read the entire run of the Railroad Man’s Magazine (1906–19),[58] a staggering quantity of fiction and articles about railroads. This was the first specialised Munsey pulp, and the image of Lovecraft reading 150 monthly issues of this magazine is somewhat unnerving. Perhaps the very fact that he had to give up his “New Anvik” at the age of seventeen compelled him to satisfy his enthusiasm for railroads through print.
Again, on Lovecraft's reading habits, this time for the pulp magazines:
>This means that Lovecraft read each issue—sometimes 192 pages, sometimes 240 pages—from cover to cover, month after month or even (when it changed to a weekly) week after week. This is an appalling amount of popular fiction for anyone to read, and in fact it contravened the purpose of the magazines, whereby each member of the family would read only those stories or those types of stories that were of interest to him or her.[65] One begins to develop the impression that Lovecraft was compulsive in whatever he did: his discovery of classical antiquity led him to write a paraphrase of the Odyssey, Iliad, and other works; his discovery of chemistry led him to launch a daily scientific paper; his discovery of astronomy led him to publish a weekly paper for years; and now his discovery of pulp fiction caused him to be a voracious reader of both the good and the bad, both the work that appealed to his special tastes and the work that did not.
Joshi then goes on to spend AT LEAST 20 pages describing how basically, there was this Argosy writer (Fred Jackson, later to become a famous playwright apparently), who wrote these god-awful romance stories, and Lovecraft wrote a very scathing and angry review (specifically attacking the writer's choice to have a mixed-race romance in one of his stories) and sent it to the magazine; in the next month's issue, there were tons of replies from some of Fred Jackson's fans, and this exchange turned into a year-long all-out war between Lovecraft (and one other guy who was barely literate but ended up taking Lovecraft's side) and dozens of other contributors from around the country; they went from writing short remarks about Jackson's stories to writing entire essays before resorting to writing poems attacking each other. It got so bad that the editors eventually stopped publishing Lovecraft's submissions, because now other people were starting to complain about the letter-column being full of Lovecraft's responses and responses attacking Lovecraft. Eventually the writer that started the whole thing went to another magazine, and the controversy died down.
And yes, Joshi does in fact mention the 'notorious' poem On the Creation of Niggers

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Good post, I enjoyed reading that.

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Dude would never write one story if he had access to Yea Forums shitposting.

lol that description of his reading habits as "somewhat unnerving" always sticks with me. never in a million years would I have thought that Lovecraft would be an interesting figure for a massive biography, but the path of his life is extraordinarily moving and you'll probably be close to tears by the end of it.

pic related is from a remembrance by a friend rather than the biography but I like it a lot.

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Joshi's schizophrenic fedora-tipping aside, I gotta admit that his scholarly work on Lovecraft is top-notch work. His critical essays on other writers like Dunsany and Machen are pretty good too. Gonna give this book a read someday,

I liked his job application letter.

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Well shit, at least he was productively compulsive. Also that shitposting war story is great. I will for sure read his letters/nonfiction one day.

ESL here, why "seem" in the first sentence?

It should be seems, because "an" suggests a single referent.

I wonder if he cried when his Jewess wife held him and called him a good boy.

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ST Joshi is my favorite HPL authority and responsible for the best annoted editions (Klinghoffer is acceptable if you want one volume).

Totally buying and reading this but be aware, it's in two volumes.

It's a great biography, and though I hesitate to place Joshi as the ultimate arbiter for all thing Lovecraft, I must say he's done a better job than anyone else, especially with the biography. His criticism deepened my appreciation of Lovecraft and saved me from any note of reverence towards Ligotti and Houellebecq "opinion" on the old man.

>Ligotti and Houellebecq "opinion" on the old man
Why did they get wrong?

>Why
*What

Not him but probably that he wasn't a complete world hating recluse incel but actually had a healthy social life, circle of friends/pen pals and fun or joy of life

>wasn't a complete world hating recluse incel
I see. To be fair, while Ligotti focuses on Lovecraft's cosmic pessimism in Conspiracy Against the Human Race, he does mention Lovecraft's cheerful and enthusiastic correspondence. Ligotti also got mad because Schopenhauer practiced flute, kek.

Projecting their own misanthropy onto Lovecraft, but most importantly mistaking an aesthetic program for a prophetic one. Lovecraft was primarily concerned with mastering the art of writing. Creating and maintaining suspense, something his idol Poe exceeded at, was Lovecraft's main aim in crafting fiction and both Ligotti and Houellebecq
ignore that as they want to present him as a fellow purveyor of pessimist nihilism.

I've skimmed through some of his letters, the best part I found was when he went on a multi-page rant about discovering he had a very small amount of Welsh ancestry, going on and on about what filthy Celtic sub-humans they were and how he wished he could be 100% pure Anglo-Saxon, instead of 95% or whatever overwhelming amount he merely was. In a later letter he rationalized it by saying that if he had Welsh ancestry, then he might have an even smaller and even more distant amount of Roman ancestry from the Romano-Britons, and that would be okay because he liked the Romans. This whole incident apparently inspired the plot of The Shadow over Innsmouth, with the protagonist's horrific realization of his bastard fishman ancestry being an analogue for Lovecraft discovering he was part Welsh.

Thanks

The best letter is the one where he goes visiting the swamps and old houses around Providence. Nothing more comfy than that. I'd read 1000, no 10,000 pages of Lovecraft describing just that. I could die reading nothing else.

Lovecraft's travelogue stuff rules. I visited the Endless Caverns in Virginia last year on the basis of his 100 year-old recommendation. This formation seemed very fitting.

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Sounds interesting, can I read that letter somewhere online?

It's in Selected Letters I which is available online. I don't remember the exact page though but I recommend reading the entire volume regardless. It's pure kino and multitudes better than his stories. His beautiful character arc starting from a crumbling household incel loner to a lively writer with great friends and a wife is something the best novels fail to achieve.

He's using the subjunctive mood, indicating that the statement is not necessarily reflective of reality within that moment — "If it seem unusual, then . . ."
The subjunctive mood uses the infinitive of a verb, no matter the referent: for example, the rhyme from Jack and the Beanstalk.
"Fee, fie, fo, fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman.
Be he alive or be he dead,
I'll crush his bones and bake me bread.

Wish we could bring him back and show him his legacy bros. His death diary is so gut-wrenching.

Wow! I did not know this, thank you.
That's what I thought as well, but it semeed to obvious to be a typo.

The fact that we have actual English majors on this board is both cool and depressing.

Currently reading Arthur Machen, one of Lovecraft's British predecessors, as you people of culture no doubt know. His favourite words seem to be: "queer" (nohomo) and "weird" and "dank"

I also read a few of his books but apart from the atmosphere I really disliked him, mainly for his resolutions and explanations of the supernatural.

I wasn't a fan either, though I can't say I thought very highly of any of Lovecraft's immediate inspirations. Machan is stiflingly Victorian, though I did like The Inmost Light and parts of the Great God Pan. Wasn't a fan of the explanations and have the same problem with Ambrose Bierce. I was particularly disappointed with Lord Dunsany after The King of Elfland's Daughter. With the exception of a few of the stories from Time and the Gods I thought he was very dross. I did like The Willows though.
Lovecraft honestly hoisted weird fiction onto his shoulders and really made something of it.

>I was particularly disappointed with Lord Dunsany after The King of Elfland's Daughter.
That's kinda sad. I still imagine Dunsany similar to Lovecraft's Dream Cycle stories. But since I wanted to read him in physical book form (as opposed to just listening to Horrorbabble on YouTube who has recorded tons of Lovecraft's predecessors) and not getting nice editions here in Germany, I never got around to that. Maybe I should let go of my high hopes of ever finding comfy old fantasy books.

The White People is pretty much perfect and the best weird horror story alongside The Willows. I also like some of his more subdued non-horror writings where everything is just kind of dreamlike and ethereal

>I also like some of his more subdued non-horror writings where everything is just kind of dreamlike and ethereal
Which books/stories are like that?

Explanations? how so? he usually seems to leave things pretty mysterious, as far as I can tell. Apart from generally hinting at dark powers of the mind, ancient prehuman entities etc.
Great atmosphere, yes, but he does seem to have recycled his plots and themes an awful lot : I've only just started, but the "hideous, inhuman face appearing at the window" has been used about three times iirc

A Fragment of Life, Hill of Dreams, Ornaments in Jade

Fuck, I should've written "'explanations'" or rather "resolutions". But yes, Machen is pretty shitty to read for someone familiar with Lovecraft. Apart from that literary historian perspective, of course.

Thanks, user.

>The White People is pretty much perfect and the best weird horror story alongside The Willows
I might have to give him that, though it still has the in my opinion overused framing device of a couple of well-educated chaps sipping brandy by the fireplace while discussing that nasty supernatural business. The meat of the matter is still very suspenseful, and it's probably his only story that actually made me shiver.

Moving aside House on the Borderlands was another story I was disappointed in. It's really overwrought and Hodgson, seemed, to really like, splicing, his, sentences.

Reminder that we also have a comfy companion thread:

This Lovecraft guy seems pretty weird. Maybe he should write some weird tales.
If he was alive, you know he'd be here.

>if he knows about the subjunctive he must be an English major
pathetic

Do English majors even learn about moods and clauses? I thought it was something you had to go to a language department for.

It is overused, pretty much every victorian horror or mystery author uses it I still enjoy it and find it comfy, probably because there's a lack of it in modern media. Also I really like the bit at the beginning where they're discussing the true nature of sin as something completely unnatural, great prologue to the main story

>If he was alive, you know he'd be here.
He'd also not ever have written any story whatsoever if he had been on Yea Forums.

You did write "explanations", I wondered what you meant, as I feel he goes out of his way in a sometimes almost comical manner, not to spell out the horrors behind the veil of ordinary reality (kind of made me think of Super Hans' party in Peep Show, si magna licet componere parvis)

Yeah, I love it too desu; the term "overused" obviously implies it's bad, but I rather enjoy that cliché, and it's in no way a defect. It can get a little tiresome, e.g. in Machen's Three Impostors, but the complex implication of narratives is kind of the main appeal of the framing story

only good thread on lit right now.

>tfw you've written a weird mix of Lovecraft and Murakami with an ancient alien sea urchin buried in the ground around which people have built a town but you can't show it to Yea Forums because it's in German

Along similar lines, I like the way Machen uses ridiculous coincidences without batting an eyelash. It's been awhile since I've read it, but I think it's either The Great God Pan or The Inmost Light where the plot progression pivots on someone finding a dropped letter in the street by chance. It's an antiquated, unlikely device, and perhaps there was no intention to it beyond the necessity of moving the story along, but it also gives a feeling of fate, like the protagonist is destined towards an inescapable encounter with something beyond his understanding.

Coincidences and chance (or apparent chance) meetings are numerous in The Inmost Light and The Three Impostors ; not so much in The Great God Pan iirc

Turns out people sitting together chatting about which books they like is a pleasant thing overall.

This reminds me of the autism of R.A. Lafferty. He was an electrical engineer who was fluent in 10 different languages, in addition to being an expert on Roman and native American history. One day, he read a couple of science fiction stories that he liked, so he bought 200 sci-fi books, read all of them in a couple of weeks, then decided to become a science fiction author himself. Really astonishing autism.

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Lovecraft is literally me unironically.

>"Lovecraft [...] was not actually doing much during this period aside from writing; but he had discovered one entertaining form of relaxation - moviegoing. [...] Lovecraft reports that the first cinema shows in Providence were in March 1906; and, even though he "knew too much of literature & drama not to recognize the utter & unrelieved hokum of the moving picture," he attended them anyway [...] One develops the idea that watching films may have occupied some, perhaps much, of the "blank" years of 1908 - 1913, as a letter of 1915 suggests: "As you may surmise, I am a devotee of the motion picture, since I can attend shows at any time, whereas my ill health seldom permits me to make definite engagements"

Oh, my gawd.

No, we already talked about this. Did you even publish in astronomy magazines when you were younger?

True, but all his schizo threads about fish and niggers would be glorious.

He'd certainly be a great shitposter. His letters to James F. Morton were basically high-cultured shitposting and LARPing.

>modern day Lovecraft would be Baneposting on Yea Forums

test

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Quite the eccentric.