/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.8331890]

>Of such things I cannot, dare not tell, for therein was revealed the hideous solution of all which had puzzled me; and that solution would drive you mad
i love his work but goddamn why does he have to blueball everybody so often?

[Anonymous No.8331894]

>>8331890
That's the whole point of the word "eldritch".

[Anonymous No.8331902]

>>8331894
how so? doesn't eldritch just mean weird and spooky?

[Anonymous No.8331907]

>>8331890
no discernible talent, that's why
lovecraft fans love the idea of loving lovecraft more than anything

[Anonymous No.8331911]

>>8331902
No. Eldritch means "so horrible you go mad, but I can't be arsed to go into detail so have this neologism instead."

[Anonymous No.8331931]

>>8331907
No i don't think so, he is not pic related

[Anonymous No.8331946]

Lovecraft understood that the best kind of horror is not merely that which you cannot see, but that which lies just outside of comprehension.

[Anonymous No.8331947]

>>8331907
>he hasn't read Kenneth Grant or Austin Spare

[Anonymous No.8331966]

>>8331911
oh
>>8331907
>no discernible talent
what? how? his stories are still insanely creative and unique. maybe his writing style isn't perfect, but he at least deserves credit for creating an entire mythos that's so detailed and interesting it's inspired an entire genre of fiction.

it's practically like tolkien's middle earth

[Anonymous No.8332054]

>>8331907
Just because you don't like him doesn't mean he had no talent m8.

>>8331890
Explaining everything would go against his philosophy of cosmicism, according to which there are certain things that will simply be unknowable and unfathomable to Man. So the solution is to blueball while giving some concrete information.
In the specific case of The Green Meadow however, it's a rambling story inspired by a dream (not Lovecraft's own), and doesn't really go anywhere. So the blueballing here is more a convenient way of concluding the story than an expression of cosmic spooky.

[Anonymous No.8332060]

In 'I Am Providence', talking about 'The Picture in the House' S. T. Joshi writes:
>The Regnum Congo by Filippo Pigafetta (1533–1604) is of some interest in revealing an embarrassing lapse on Lovecraft’s part. The book was, to be sure, printed in Frankfort in 1598; but its first edition was not in Latin, as that edition was, but in Italian (Relatione del reame di Congo et della cironvicine contrade, Rome, 1591); it was subsequently translated into English (1597) and German (1597) prior to its Latin translation; and it was in the German (as well as the Latin) translation that the plates by the brothers De Bry were introduced. Lovecraft appears not to have known any of this because he derived his information on the book entirely from Thomas Henry Huxley’s essay “On the History of the Man-like Apes,” in Man’s Place in Nature and Other Anthropological Essays (1894) [...]
>What is more, Lovecraft never consulted the De Bry plates themselves but only some rather inaccurate engravings of them printed in an appendix to Huxley’s essay. As a result, Lovecraft makes errors in describing the plates; for example, the old man thinks the natives drawn in them are anomalously white-looking, when in fact this is merely the result of a poor rendering of the plates by Huxley’s illustrator. All this is only of interest because it reveals Lovecraft on occasion to have used exactly that “second-hand erudition”[30] for which he later chided Poe.[31]
I disagree with this. I always felt the mention of white cannibals was very deliberate, especially because the old man makes it himself with such insistence. We all know Lovecraft was racist, but his truly depraved characters are all white men, so I don't think it would be reaching to suggest that here he guessed that the plates represented Africans, but conceived of an ancient group of white guys living in Congo, killing and eating people to bring themselves longevity, and confide with strange creatures (a similar theme is developed in The Lurking Fear and The Rats in the Walls as well). IMO in the story we see that the same madness flourishes, simply after being observed in drawn form, in the fringes of "civilization" in the midst of a tight-knit, fanatical, dissatisfied and angry group (the Puritans). The mention of the white butcher cannibals was to suggest that this depravity has always existed in mankind. This would imply that the conventional "other" (all the primitive peoples called "savages") in distant lands perhaps weren't real strangers at all. Keep in mind that Lovecraft also writes this in the beginning of the story:
>[...] and in their isolation, morbid self-repression, and struggle for life with relentless Nature, there came to them dark furtive traits from the prehistoric depths of their cold Northern heritage.

What do you think?

[Anonymous No.8332200]

>>8332054
>In the specific case of The Green Meadow however, it's a rambling story inspired by a dream (not Lovecraft's own), and doesn't really go anywhere
i was thinking that the narrator of the green meadow could have possibly the main character from lovecraft's poem "azathoth". would that make sense? or am i just grasping at straws here

[Anonymous No.8332254]

>>8332200
Who knows? Azathoth was supposed to be a story slightly resembling Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, but Lovecraft ended up writing no more than the first lines. You can certainly pretend they are the same people.

[Anonymous No.8332263]

>>8331947
where to start with kenneth grant?

[Anonymous No.8332276]

>>8332263
I dunno, I started with The Cults of Shadow myself, as it seems most relevant to HPL. There's also this essay: http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2015/03/10/dreaming-out-of-space-kenneth-grant-on-hp-lovecraft/ where Lovecraft denigrates De Quincy

[Anonymous No.8333780]

>>8331907
Yes, it's admittedly hilarious how many fans love the idea of him more than his work