fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2585 ]

[ SECRET POST #2585 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2585 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

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02.

[Monster High]

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03.

[Bryan Fuller, John Green]

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04.

[Star Trek: The Next Generation]

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05.

[Pretty Little Liars]

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06.

[Breaking Bad]

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07.

[Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey]

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08.

[Reign]

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09.

[Leviathan: the last day of the decade]

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10.

[Sherlock Holmes]

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11.

[Steam]

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12.

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 017 secrets from Secret Submission Post #369.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'm interested in hearing more of your thoughts on Lovecraft, OP.

Me too. Everyone else on this list I think is a matter of taste, but Lovecraft gets reamed for a reason.(That doesn't mean I don't enjoy him or think he shouldn't be remembered like he is, just that I recognise hos flaws as a writer. And that's okay.)

that ho ain't never written anything worth a damn

Hos b4 prose

I pretty much agree. I like Lovecraft: I love the ideas he came up and the underlying philosophy of his work (sans racism/sexism), but he's just so OTT.

I once heard: "Lovecraft is a terrible writer but a good storyteller".

Such sentiments were what inspired me to create the secret in the first place. I think people who make such accusations underestimate the importance of atmosphere in a horror story in particular and in literature in general. True, Lovecraft wasn't much of a character-writer, but characters aren't of paramount significance in most of his stories. The lavish descriptions of setting and architecture exist because the emphasis is on the atmosphere, and, in most cases, a weird atmosphere at that. Anyone who thinks that Lovecraft should written like (for example) Hemingway is missing the point--Lovecraft was a weird fiction author heavily influenced by the Gothic tradition, not a modernist trying to write bestsellers or adventure stories.

Similarly, I once encountered an archived RPGNet thread in which the OP complained, among other things, that THE LORD OF THE RINGS lacked "two-fisted pulp action." You'd think it would be fairly obvious to anyone who read the novel that Tolkien was writing a sprawling epic inspired by Norse mythology and Celtic legend rather than a Doc Savage knockoff, but the frustrated poster seemed to miss the point entirely. Or, speaking hypothetically, what if Isaac Asimov had attempted to write in, say, the cadences of Nathaniel Hawthorne? You'd find that ridiculous, wouldn't you? Asimov's spare, clear style works perfectly for his idea-driven fiction, in both short and long form--and it helps that many of his stories have a lighthearted tone that makes them especially accessible.

The point that I hope I'm making is that there isn't one correct kind of style. Rather, the style should fit the story being told.

I think the point about Lovecraft is that what he was best at was creating a intriguing mythos. Plus he was sexist and a racist, which really really really bleeds into his writing and make it hard to enjoy for the modern reader.

Take off. We can't have one single conversation about Howard without someone bringing up the racism thing. Yes, he had extreme views, but towards the end of his life when he traveled and met people and got educated, his views started to change. I honestly believe that if he hadn't died so young, he would've made more progress. The man said that the oldest, greatest fear was that of the unknown, and he really proved it later in his life when he started curing his own ignorance by meeting people.

Isn't that what counts in the end? Growth and change and correcting mistakes? How would you like it if on your 50th birthday your friends and family brought up all of the stupid things you said/thought/did when you were younger? Would you like your life to be defined by every instance of ignorance you ever had with no mention of your progress or change?

If I can get over the fact that he would've at one point found me icky because of my skin color then so can everyone else. I'm not demanding that anyone love him or like him, but if a bigot like Howard could begin letting go of his hatred, then why are you holding so tightly to yours?

>Isn't that what counts in the end? Growth and change and correcting mistakes?

No, generally if you go to read a book, it matters what's on the page.

If people feel gross reading it, however much the author "grew" and "learned" 20 years later doesn't exactly do anything to improve that.

That's just fine anon. I hope, for your sake, that nobody in your life decides to throw all of your mistakes and shortcomings in your face years and years later. Or maybe they have and it's all you ever learned how to do.

But what's it to me if you want to cling to all the pet resentment you've built up over the years until it's all you have left and you die old and bitter with your indignation clutched in your fist. I'm just saying I wouldn't wish that on anyone, but if that's what you feel like doing, what am I gonna do about it?

Sounds like you are the one with a mess of balled up bitterness, because that's not even close to what I was talking about, and also kind of a sad ad hominem attack.

An author and a book are separate entities. The author can grow and change, but unless they go back and produce another edition, the words on the page can't. So yeah, if people read the book and found it upsetting and problematic because of what the author believed at the time, well, the book is still making people feel that way. And they're going to bring it up about the author, because that is the picture of the author's thoughts that we have.

I don't know what this argument is about throwing stuff in people's faces, anyway. These authors are pretty dead.

I don't mind the atmosphere; I liked the parts of "Pickman's Model (one of my faves) where the P.O.V. character is talking about walking through Boston's streets, or the long, storied history of Innsmouth in "Shadow Over Innsmouth" (another fave). But I find some of his writing... clunky? I guess.

But let me be clear: I really like Lovecraft. I'm currently working though my second reading of "The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward", largely because I've read most of his shorter stuff at least twice and am now working though his longer stuff again.

Some of the writing is clunky; there's no question about that. Just the other night, I reread "The Outsider" and thought that the string of adjectives used to describe the "monster" the narrator sees was unnecessarily long. But the rest of the story was so captivating that I could forgive that unwieldy sentence.

It's always heartening to find someone else who enjoys (the majority, at least) of HPL's stories; it sounds as though we have a couple of favorites in common. Have you reread "The Festival" recently? Reading that story holds a place in my personal pantheon of Christmas traditions, along with watching the animated adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Seasonal appropriateness aside, the atmosphere is just gorgeous.

Holy crap, I'm not sure I've ever read that one!

Long(ish) story ahead: I first got into Lovecraft after buying an anthology book of his stories pretty much on a whim. It had (among others) "The Lurking Fear", "The Outsider", and "Shadow Over Innsmouth". I got a few others, often based on a particular story the other anthologies didn't have (for example, it took me a few anthologies before I got "Call of Cthulhu"). Then I got a Kindle, and one of the first things I bought was HP Lovecraft: The Complete Collection. Thing is, looking through the Table of Contents, I think there are several short stories I've missed. Oh, dear. (-:

I still kinda wanna finish CDW first, though...

By all means, finish "CDW" first. Is "Hypnos" one of the stories you missed on your earlier sojourn through the Lovecraft corpus? I recommend that, too; it has a wonderfully opiate tone and the most homoeroticism you'll find this side of the Vampire Chronicles.

As for the anthologies, were you purchasing the Del Rey collections--you know, the ones with the random, non-chronological ordering of stories and the lurid, non-indicative Michael Whelan cover art? From your description, it sounds as if your first HPL anthology book was Waking Up Screaming, which is also published by Del Rey but has a generic 3-D-ish skull on the cover. For some reason, that company decided to publish multiple HPL anthologies that often had several of the same stories in them rather than publish a few volumes that didn't repeat any stories. Their Best of H. P. Lovecraft is a solid compilation of his work, though the first story of his that I read was "Dagon" (in a Penguin edition that I found at Barnes and Noble), which I now advise people to read if they express the desire to introduce themselves to Lovecraft's fiction.

Re: "Hypnos" I think I did, yeah. Oooh, sounds fun. "The Hound"s a bit like that, too, what with the narrator talking about how he and his male friend were doing debauched, evil things together. (-:

Actually, the first Lovecraft book I got was The Lurking Fear and Other Stories. But, yeah, it was Del Rey. For that matter, I have the book you use in your secret, too. It's weird, I really like the cover art for the Del Rey books, but... most of the images aren't stuff from the stories...

Re: OP

(Anonymous) - 2014-01-31 04:06 (UTC) - Expand

Have you heard Wayne June reading some of Lovecraft's works? Oh man. You have to hear it. You'll positively die.

DA

This is an excerpt from Stephen King's On Writing which I think sums up Lovecraft's strengths and weaknesses pretty well:

Writers have different skill levels when it comes to dialogue. Your skills in this area can be improved, but, as a great man once said (actually it was Clint Eastwood), "A man's got to know his limitations." H. P. Lovecraft was a genius when it came to tales of the macabre, but a terrible dialogue writer. He seems to have known it, too, because in the millions of words of fiction he wrote, fewer than five thousand are dialogue. The following passage from "The Colour Out of Space," in which a dying farmer describes the alien presence which has invaded his well, showcases Lovecraft's dialogue problems. Folks, people just don't talk like this, even on their deathbeds:

"Nothin'... nothin'... the colour... it burns... cold an' wet, but it burns... it lived in the well... I seen it... a kind of smoke... jest like the flowers last spring... the well shone at night... Thad an' Merwin an' Zenas... everything alive... suckin' the life out of everything... in that stone... it must a' come in that stone pizened the whole place... dun't know what it wants... that round thing them men from the college dug outen the stone... they smashed it... it was the same colour... jest the same, like the flowers an' plants... must a' ben more of 'em... seeds... seeds... they growed... I seen it the fust time this week... must a' got strong on Zenas... he was a big boy, full o' life... it beats down your mind an' then gets ye... burns ye up... in the well water... you was right about that... evil water... Zenas never come back from the well... can't git away... draws ye... ye know summ'at's comin' but tain't no use... I seen it time an' agin senct Zenas was took... whar's Nabby, Ammi?... my head's no good... dun't know how long sense I fed her... it'll git her ef we ain't keerful... jest a colour... her face is gittin' to hev that colour
sometimes towards night... an' it burns an' sucks... it come from some place whar things ain't as they is here... one o' them professors said so..."

And so on and so forth, in carefully constructed eliptical bursts of information. It's hard to say exactly what's wrong with Lovecraft's dialogue, other than the obvious: it's stilted and lifeless, brimming with country cornpone ("some pace whar things ain't as they is here"). When dialogue is right, we know. When it's wrong we also know--it jags on the ear like a badly tuned musical instrument.

Ah, yes. I've read On Writing and, for what it's worth, I agree with King. I'm very, very glad that Lovecraft avoided dialogue whenever he could.

--the same OP

OH GOD, YES. I just read that story and while the actual plot is horrifying and disturbing, it was an actual struggle to see that horror through the godawful dialogue and prose.

I would like to write a program that can detect from linguistic data, such as frequency of common words, length of words, length of sequences, variety of vocabulary etc. whether a piece of fiction is more likely to be idea-driven, action-driven or character-driven.

My current attempts were to the avail of using the source code of the popular I Write Like site in order to detect some patterns,but I do not know whether the authors there are really representative for the genres in question.

Maybe I need to select my own corpus and use it to train an analyser bot. Have you got some suggestion which works archived in Gutenberg's Project look most representative? Alas, I fear that, as those works would have to be very old in order to be used legally, my results would reflect a long-since gone state of the art instead of contemporary fiction; but copyright is as it is.

This is kind of how I feel about him. I love his mythos not his stories.

That description is absolutely spot-on.

I know, right? When I first read that, I was like, "Oh my God, that's EXACTLY IT."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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