So What Are you Reading?: Generations

[Christopher]

Now reading Beyond the Mountains of Madness, an anthology of stories inspired by Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness." I bought this in 2015, and it was probably shortly after that that I discovered editor Robert M. Price had jumped headfirst into the misogynistic and racist far right. Price was an important player in the Lovecraft world, especially in the 1980s as editor of the zine Crypt of Cthulhu and in the 1990s as editor of a series of Lovecraftian books for Chaosium, the publisher of the Call of Cthulhu role playing game. He seems to have burned a lot of bridges over the last decade or so, though. I haven't come across anything by him in years. Not that I've looked.

Well, considering that Lovecraft himself believed that nonwhite peoples should be exterminated with poison gas, and wrote about minority communities in New York City with the same horrified, demonizing language he used to write about supernatural monstrosities in his fiction, it doesn't surprise me that there are Lovecraft fans who embrace that side of his legacy, along with those who reject it and try to keep it separate from the more positive parts of his legacy.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

considering that Lovecraft himself believed that nonwhite peoples should be exterminated with poison gas

I had to look that up on Wikipedia. . One more reason for me not to read any Lovecraft. Life is too short to read his .

 

[Steve Roby]

Lovecraft was a deeply weird and sometimes appalling person. He was also a huge influence on horror and science fiction. I can understand people avoiding his work, but at least (unlike, say, JK Rowling or Orson Scott Card) he's not alive and making a fortune while being a horrible person.

 

[JD]

Didn't also write in an era where that kind of attitude was pretty common? I don't like it from any era, but I am a little more forgiving for older things written when people didn't know better.

 

[Christopher]

Lovecraft was a deeply weird and sometimes appalling person. He was also a huge influence on horror and science fiction. I can understand people avoiding his work, but at least (unlike, say, JK Rowling or Orson Scott Card) he's not alive and making a fortune while being a horrible person.

If I threw out works created by horrible or problematical people, I'd have to throw out Alfred Hitchcock's works, Isaac Asimov's works, everything from Silver Age DC Comics onward (due to Julius Schwartz), and let's face it, probably Star Trek too.

And sometimes the work transcends the artist, despite themselves. I think that Ender's Game is a superb repudiation of everything Card now believes, and Harry Potter can easily be read as a pro-transgender allegory (someone miserable after being raised to believe he was one thing finds happiness when he realizes he was actually something else all along and is given the freedom to embrace it).

Though I don't feel that's the case with Lovecraft. I'm admittedly only peripherally familiar with his work, but it seems to me that his themes of characters being driven mad by exposure to things so alien that the human mind can't comprehend them just reflect his own inability to open his mind to accept differences in people and cultures.

Didn't also write in an era where that kind of attitude was pretty common? I don't like it from any era, but I am a little more forgiving for older things written when people didn't know better.

To an extent, yes, but it's important to keep in mind that in any era, there are people who know better. For instance, most creators in 1940s America took racist stereotypes and attitudes for granted, but there were creators like Jack Benny and Val Lewton who refused to tolerate racist tropes in their works, and in Benny's case, refused to stay in segregated hotels. So "a product of their time" isn't really an excuse. Every era has had the same tension between more inclusive and more intolerant views that we see in our own era, so you can never really say that nobody knew better. It's more a question of which viewpoint was more dominant in the marketplace of ideas.

 

[JD]

Oh yeah, there were always more progressive people in any era, I guess should have said most people instead of just people in general.
It just seems like if you were never read anything from anyone who had ever expressed racist, sexist, ect. opinions it'd pretty hard to find anything to read from before the second half of the 20th century. Again, I know there were books from before then that were against that kind of stuff, they would just be vastly outnumbered by the books that had the opposite attitudes.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

. . . it seems to me that his themes of characters being driven mad by exposure to things so alien that the human mind can't comprehend them just reflect his own inability to open his mind to accept differences in people and cultures.

There are plenty of things I freely admit to being unable to comprehend, but that doesn't mean I necessarily react to them with hatred or even with contempt. To get that kind of reaction out of me, something doesn't merely have to be beyond my comprehension; it has to be objectively harmful (e.g., sucking on burning poisonous plants).

I will note that there were plenty of composers who harbored attitudes that would be considered reprehensible today, and yet the only one of them I absolutely cannot stomach (unless he's being made the butt of a joke) is Richard Wagner. He is one of only two composers for whom I do "subscriber privilege" ticket exchanges to avoid (the other being Gustav Mahler, whom I only avoid because so much of his stuff, with the notable exception of his first symphony [I understand that his fourth is shorter, but I can't recall ever hearing it] is so long-winded that it bores me to tears).

I will also note that Rowling's transphobia is very likely lasting damage done by a disastrously abusive first marriage. Nonetheless, every one of her books that I've read was very deliberately purchased used, in a British edition (to avoid Americanizations), through Alibris.

Based on what I've read today about Lovecraft, (1) I immediately concluded that his surname is very ironic, and (2) he falls into the same category as Wagner, at least for me.

(I went to high school with a Lovecraft geek. Up until he described what HPL's writings were about, I had barely even heard the name. As I recall, he used "THULU" as his password, when he took the programming class [the McGill University MUSIC operating system limited passwords -- and filenames -- to 6 characters]. Up until he explained that it was a Lovecraft reference, I thought it was a certain George Takei character spelled with a lisp [and this was decades before Takei came out of the closet, so the idea of "camp gay" never had any reason to enter my mind].)

 

[JD]

I will also note that Rowling's transphobia is very likely lasting damage done by a disastrously abusive first marriage. Nonetheless, every one of her books that I've read was very deliberately purchased used, in a British edition (to avoid Americanizations), through Alibris.

I'm a little confused, how would an abusive marriage make a person anti-trans? Is her ex-husband trans?
I assumed she basically just let herself get brainwashed by other TERFS (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists) at some point in the last few years.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I'm a little confused, how would an abusive marriage make a person anti-trans?

My hypothesis is that being under nearly three years of continual abuse from a man she should have been able to trust completely and implicitly almost certainly left her permanently distrustful of anybody who identifies as female, and enters female-only environments (e.g., the Ladies' Room, and women's sports), while being anatomically (or even just genetically) male.

The acid test for that hypothesis is whether or not she harbors the same prejudices against those who identify as male, while being anatomically (or again merely genetically) female. And I have no idea whether or not that's the case.

 

[bdub76]

Chambers only wrote four short stories involving The King in Yellow, a play that can drive people mad. You can read them all in an hour or two. The Repairer of Reputations is an unreliable narrator story in a dystopian America. The other three are closer to conventional horror or supernatural tales. They're not much like Lovecraft, though he was a fan. But they're worth reading. The King in Yellow hasn't generated as many books and stories by later writers as Lovecraft has, but there are a few novels and anthologies out there. And of course the first season of True Detective was influenced by it.

I read the first three. Reminds me Arthur Machen. I read his Three Imposters after discovering that it influenced HPLs Whisperer in the Darkness. And that also led me to Fritz Leiber. I did enjoy his story in Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos that is edited by Robert M. Price. Good collection of stories. But I want to finish up all of HPLs before digging in further.

As for True Detective, the writer also wrote a book called Galveston that I plan to read at some point. And this also led me to the book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. I might knock these out whenever I get around to rewatching the first season of True Detective.

Since the month is almost over, I'll finish up the King in Yellow. But then I'm doing Victober, so I'm back to Doyle and Machen for short stories. And I'll see what other Victorian novels I finish besides Uncles Silas.

This is also interesting:

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[bdub76]

Oh yeah, there were always more progressive people in any era, I guess should have said most people instead of just people in general.
It just seems like if you were never read anything from anyone who had ever expressed racist, sexist, ect. opinions it'd pretty hard to find anything to read from before the second half of the 20th century. Again, I know there were books from before then that were against that kind of stuff, they would just be vastly outnumbered by the books that had the opposite attitudes.

At this point, I'm burnt out on cancel culture. I don't care anymore.

 

[JD]

My hypothesis is that being under nearly three years of continual abuse from a man she should have been able to trust completely and implicitly almost certainly left her permanently distrustful of anybody who identifies as female, and enters female-only environments (e.g., the Ladies' Room, and women's sports), while being anatomically (or even just genetically) male.

The acid test for that hypothesis is whether or not she harbors the same prejudices against those who identify as male, while being anatomically (or again merely genetically) female. And I have no idea whether or not that's the case.

OK.

 

[Christopher]

My hypothesis is that being under nearly three years of continual abuse from a man she should have been able to trust completely and implicitly almost certainly left her permanently distrustful of anybody who identifies as female, and enters female-only environments (e.g., the Ladies' Room, and women's sports), while being anatomically (or even just genetically) male.

The acid test for that hypothesis is whether or not she harbors the same prejudices against those who identify as male, while being anatomically (or again merely genetically) female. And I have no idea whether or not that's the case.

That's a bit of an oversimplification, since there are people whose anatomy and/or genetics are neither purely male nor purely female, or whose anatomy differs from their genetics (because there are multiple different factors that influence gender development and they don't always line up the expected way). It's a spectrum, not a binary. A lot of people who have ambiguous anatomy, or outward anatomy that doesn't match their genetic or neurological development, are misidentified as one gender at birth and then come to realize they're actually a different gender.

What I can't get about transphobes is their unshakeable, naive certainty that no doctor is capable of making a mistake in assigning an infant's gender. Why is it so hard for them to understand that people who were misassigned at birth are just trying to correct a mistake?

 

[Greg Cox]

Stayed up too late the other night to finish The Gates of Midnight, and found myself saddened to reach the last page, partly because I was enjoying the book so much, but mostly because I was reluctant to say goodbye to these characters now that the trilogy had finally come to end, thirteen years after the first "The Golem and the Jinni" book was first published.

Sorely tempted to go back and reread the entire trilogy -- and hoping for maybe a spin-off volume about some of the side characters.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

there are people whose anatomy and/or genetics are neither purely male nor purely female, or whose anatomy differs from their genetics

You know that, and I know that. But a lot of bigotry is based on oversimplifications, and irrational fears are, by definition, irrational.

Male genetics tend to lead to higher muscle density. Is that always the case? Of course not. I know damn well that there are women -- genetic women -- who, if so inclined, could whup my ass a dozen times before I knew what hit me, and women who make their living walking into burning buildings, dragging hose lines that I couldn't move without throwing my back out. And I hope I never piss off the former, and that the latter, should the need arise, saves my life.

Permit me to reference situation comedy for a moment. There was a British sitcom, Till Death Do Us Part, about a bigoted, hateful man named Alf Garnett. Norman Lear wanted to do an American version. He offered the lead role to very liberal actor Carroll O'Connor. O'Connor didn't want to spend a significant part of his career playing a malicious mamzer* like Garnett, and accepted the role only under the condition that Archie Bunker's bigotry would be based not on malice, but on pure ignorance and stupidity, and that he would be capable of learning, and capable of realizing that his behavior was causing harm. And that's how All In the Family racked up over three times the episode count, spawned a sequel series that exceeded the episode count of the British original, and spawned spinoffs that spawned spinoffs of their own. And the whole point of the series, its sequel, and its spin-offs was that bigotry is irrational.

Forgive me if I tend to assume the best about people, until and unless provided with incontrovertible evidence that they're mamzerim.

Be that as it may, I'm now down to the last two chapters of 18 Tiny Deaths, and Lee's own demise is coming soon.
_____
*Yiddish is such an expressive language, and "mamzer" (originally from Hebrew, if I'm not mistaken) goes far beyond "asshole" or "bastard." (It literally means someone born of such an unspeakably unclean that neither he/she, nor any of his or her descendents to the tenth generation, may be admitted to the congregation.

 

[Christopher]

I know damn well that there are women -- genetic women -- who, if so inclined, could whup my ass a dozen times before I knew what hit me, and women who make their living walking into burning buildings, dragging hose lines that I couldn't move without throwing my back out.

Of course. Human abilities are a bell curve, and the difference between the average man and the average woman is much smaller than the width of the curve, so the curves mostly overlap. People just put too much weight on averages and fail to take the range around the average into context.

I read once that the reason men's and women's sports are kept separate isn't because women are unable to beat men, as people have been led to believe, but because women kept beating men and the men's egos couldn't take it, so they required women to compete separately.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

And my understanding is that with heavy-contact sports, e.g., gridiron football, propriety has been a major factor.

I will note that in curling, the "doubles" event is always mixed doubles.

Men don't have to endure childbirth. Although the Director of the International Printing Museum has been told by at least one woman that getting a finger caught in a clamshell platen press is worse than childbirth.

At any rate, I just finished 18 Tiny Deaths. It was not until the author's note at the end that I learned how Bruce Goldfarb came to know so much about the subject: it seems that he's the public information officer for the Maryland Chief Medical Examiner's office, a job that makes him, by default, curator of the 18 dioramas on permanent loan from Harvard. Next up is the Oz anthology.

 

[Christopher]

And my understanding is that with heavy-contact sports, e.g., gridiron football, propriety has been a major factor.

When people cite segregating sports or locker rooms or whatever by gender for the sake of "propriety," it never seems to occur to them that there are many people attracted to their own gender. If anything, same-sex activity is encouraged by sex-segregated environments, because who else are people gonna sleep with?

 

[Kount Korbula]

am most of the way through *Solar Kill*, the first book of The Sand Wars series by Chrarles Ingrid. found all but the final book at the library book sale this summer. that's annoying.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Thrawn was the protagonist?!?

I've not read the Chiss homeworld trilogy yet -- these books have never climbed to the top of the pile -- but the "New Canon" Thrawn trilogy has Thrawn as its protagonist. It's not even the first time Timothy Zahn has written Thrawn as the protagonist of a story; there are a couple of Legends-era short stories, including a four-part story cowritten by Michael Stackpole, in which Thrawn is in the protagonist's role.

Several years ago when I got Thrawn signed by Zahn at Farpoint, when I handed him the book he asked me what I thought. I think Zahn expected an, "Oh, I liked it, it was good." Instead, I said, "I didn't expect a Sherlock Holmes novel, and I felt really dumb because I missed the obvious clue." Zahn stood up, handed me the book, looked me in the eye, and we had a conversation for two minutes about Thrawn as a Holmes (or Moriarty) figure, the obvious clue I missed (Nightswan/Cygnus), and translating the language of the GFFA into English. He held up the line for this conversation.

Thrawn works as a protagonist, imho, because he sees himself and acts as the hero in his story. He's not evil, I'm not even sure he counts as anti-heroic. In his mind, he wants to make the galaxy a better place for his people, and he judges the Empire to be the best route to achieve that. I think that always made him a compelling antagonist for the New Republic. I hesitate to use the word "villain" for Thrawn; he would disagree with the appellation entirely.