/lit/ - Literature

>Lovecraft describes the beings of Ultimate Chaos as "blind, voiceless, tenebrous and mindless"
>Frequent mentions of the "mindless Other Gods" in Dream-Quest
>despite this they are said to have agents that "...are eager to work the will of those blind and mindless things in return for the favour of their hideous soul and messenger, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep."
>their nameless larvae are said to be like them in that they are "blind and without mind, and possessed of singular hungers and thirsts"
>look over the lesser Great Ones of the earth dreamlands despite these seemingly contradictory descriptions

What do you think Lovecraft meant by this? A bit confused by what exactly he meant in saying they were "mindless", yet have a will and a messenger that carries out said will. I think it is perhaps, that they are "possessed of singular hungers and thirsts" - which I interpret to mean "strange instincts and desires" (as "singular" is a much-used word he used to mean this), which seems that they don't possess a rational, logical and ordered mind like we do but instead are driven by other alien, strange and chaotic impulses and desires, which reflects Lovecraft's own fears of a chaotic society that embraces the endless lusts of the irrational subconscious and reject the ordered, rationalized intellect that Lovecraft held so dear. Thoughts?

>>20249882
He stands, unwavering, unflinching, unmoved. With one paw cupping the top of his white picket fence post, he stares out into the abyss with unbridled patience. The overhead cosmos continues its cycle, with periods of whiteness, then darkness, moving ever onward as the Earth continues its shifts in orbit. The masses of white stars fly overhead, their milky elixir makeup the innards of the cosmos; it holds him as the placenta cradles life’s first breaths and movements towards the inevitable. He is cloaked in darkness, a pin-striped suit is wrapped around what we would call a body-like form, but it conceals much more than flesh and bone. A tip of his bowler blocks his face, just enough that it reveals little more than his nose and teeth. A concealment of the soul’s windows hides the very notion of his true form, for those that stare past see and understand within an instant all there is to know, and all that should not be. With flesh, he’ll create, two masses melted and merged, the horror of his eyes gleaming, but he exists as one, for his creator is to be nameless, nameless for beings that regard humans much in the same way the amoeba is paltry to humans. This form none have yet seen, but it awaits the right time, biding continuously.

Best Prose in the game. No other genre author comes close.

I'll start: Lovecraft initially left me cold and I wasn't warmed to his pastiche of Poe et al., but it's really grown on me of late. I loved "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Dunwich Horror" the most, but I still need to get through his other lesser known works, although I still don't enjoy the early "The Alchemist" very much at all.

Would he have spent his neethood arguing on /pol/ and /his/ and fapping to degenerate porn instead of writing?

What the fuck was his problem?

I was feeling quite peckish so I stopped at the first place I saw. It was a local restaurant chain, as I walked up to the register, I was shocked to find that they ignored child labor laws.
I ordered a burger and some fries, the child counted the change and used wordplay that i could not understand.

as i sat down to eat my food, the manager reprimanded the child as company policy doesn't allow free thought or critical thinking. as punishment, he was ordered to clean the floors. the child still new to the task, missed a spot and was using it as an opportunity to practice his chemistry. the manager, likely inbred, could not comprehend simple chemistry.

As i left, I imagined what the fate of this child would be, in the restaurant where dreams die.

Reminder that:

>Lovecraft being more racist than his peers
>Lovecraft excessively refusing to describe things in his works
>Lovecraft being an awkward antisocial autist

are literal unironic lies spread by woke redditor shiteaters.

I love him so much bros. Peak comfy reading.

Why does he get so much slander?

When, long ago, the gods created Earth
In Jove's fair image Man was shap'd at birth.
The beasts for lesser parts were next design'd;
Yet were they too remote from humankind.
To fill the gap, and join the rest to man,
Th'Olympian host conceiv'd a clever plan.
A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
Fill'd it with vice, and call'd the thing a NIGGER.

Why didnt Bloom put him in Western Canon? He deserves a spot

>>19820445
He was actually kind of a NEET in the sense that he never did any kind of work other than writing and he was psychologically poorly adapted for doing any kind of work other than creative work and he mostly lived with his relatives.
But yeah, he was definitely not antisocial - he had many friends, he traveled a good bit, he married, etc. Lovecraft and his literary correspondents were in many ways kind of like members of a proto-Internet, they just communicated via pieces of paper rather than via electronic signals.
The thing is, his work has overtaken him as a man in most people's imaginations. The typical visual representation of Lovecraft that one sees is pic related, the grim serious guy - often with some tentacles edited into the photograph by half-understanding fans. There is some reason to believe that he mostly looked glum in photographs because he was embarrassed about the state of his teeth and/or because his mother had at least once called him hideous. It is not that he never smiled, it is just that we have few photographs of him and most of them do not show him smiling.
Many people who are a little bit into Lovecraft but not a lot into Lovecraft enjoy the idea of Lovecraft as having been this sort of epic prince of darkness figure and they have barely read anything about what he was like as a person, so the misconceptions persist.

>"Absolute hatred of he world in general, aggravated by an aversion to the modern world in particular. This summarizes Lovecraft's attitude fairly accurately."

>"He was fundamentally racist, openly reactionary, he glorified puritanical inhibitions, and evidently found all "direct erotic manifestations" repulsive. Resolutely anticommercial, he despised money, considered democracy to be an idiocy and progress to be an illusion. The word "freedom", so cherished by Americans, prompted only a sad, derisive guffaw. Throughout his life, he maintained a typically aristocratic, scornful attitude toward humanity in general coupled with extreme kindness toward individuals in particular."

What kind of stories would Lovecraft be writing if he was alive today?

Was there any artistic merit to his writing or was he just the Stephen King of his time? Also any recommendations for authors or books that dabble in cosmic horror are much appreciated.

Any one know of any communities where they have contests to write short stories for certain prompts then people critique the writer? I don't want the community to be act like annoying Redditors though.

So do any of y'all know any writers that are like HPL/ books that look lile they were written by him?
What I especially like in his stories:
- old fashioned writing style and setting
- horror

Thanks anons

Who are your favorite writers who have been deemed “problematic” by contemporary PC readers and academics?

>My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature.

>Carter did not taste deeply of these modern freedoms; for their cheapness and squalor sickened a spirit loving beauty alone, while his reason rebelled at the flimsy logic with which their champions tried to gild brute impulse with a sacredness stripped from the idols they had discarded. He saw that most of them, in common with their cast-off priestcraft, could not escape from the delusion that life has a meaning apart from that which men dream into it; and could not lay aside the crude notion of ethics and obligations beyond those of beauty, even when all Nature shrieked of its unconsciousness and impersonal unmorality in the light of their scientific discoveries. Warped and bigoted with preconceived illusions of justice, freedom, and consistency, they cast off the old lore and the old ways with the old beliefs; nor ever stopped to think that that lore and those ways were the sole makers of their present thoughts and judgments, and the sole guides and standards in a meaningless universe without fixed aims or stable points of reference. Having lost these artificial settings, their lives grew void of direction and dramatic interest; till at length they strove to drown their ennui in bustle and pretended usefulness, noise and excitement, barbaric display and animal sensation. When these things palled, disappointed, or grew nauseous through revulsion, they cultivated irony and bitterness, and found fault with the social order. Never could they realise that their brute foundations were as shifting and contradictory as the gods of their elders, and that the satisfaction of one moment is the bane of the next. Calm, lasting beauty comes only in dream, and this solace the world had thrown away when in its worship of the real it threw away the secrets of childhood and innocence.

If anyone hasn't read "The Silver Key", it's available online:

https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/sk.aspx

>walks past ONE (1) italian man on the street
>AHHHHHHHHHHH WHAT IS THIS MAAAAADNEEEESS
>SANITY... SLIPPIN' AWAYYYYYY
why do people admire him again?

>>18592306
If reading this doesn't fill you with horror, you will never truly get Lovecraft.

>>18457050
>"There are some who would be better of with little learning."

Was he right about knowledge, broadly defined, being a curse? It feels like the more I learn about the world and how it works (and why, and for whom), the worse and more schizophrenic I feel, while the normies happily go about their business never worrying.

Is there a guide to read Lovecraft?