He really didn’t cool it down in later years, or recant; he just stopped being as upfront about it. Read some of his personal letters and it still shines through.

Some people are afraid of clowns.

I’ve reading reading so much Deleuze that I’ve apparently turned off the part of my brain that check whether I’m using either word right lmao

i’m sure you can make my argument for me—since you already know what it is, and everything—and finish the conversation you so obviously want to have.

ok

ok

No one is saying that his books or the books of any other problematic dead white man/author need to be burned and ignored. A lot of people are the products of their times and circumstances—though, I’m sure you know that saying Lovecraft was just that is fairly reductive of like decades of scholarship on the man.

This is a pretty good overview someone else linked in a comment not replying to you

to be fair: he was constantly in communication with authors and other intellectuals that thought his more racist views were seriously out there, and finding out he was not 100% of Aryan descent might’ve been the almost-psychotic break he needed to start being less racist...since, y’know.

1) Stop begging the question about racism-at-large or “does this problematic thing I enjoy make me problematic” because that ain’t what we’re talking about and you know it.

The correct response.

I guess I’m approaching it more from the viewpoint of being a creator / writer, in that regard. I think the average fan might not need to know or contend with Lovecraft’s racism if they’re just looking to consume “something scary,”—but really understanding Lovecraftian Horror, for me, requires that you also grapple…

Try reading The Horror at Red Hook for probably the most obvious racism you’ll ever see in anything fictional short of a KKK handbook.

Excellent use of Atomic Robo.

Imagine playing a modern riff of Lovecraft, thinking the idea is pretty cool, then going on to read almost any of his writing. Like, close your eyes and throw a dart at a board picking what to read.

Yeah, he belonged to a very small subsection of anglophile racists that even your average racist found insufferable and weird—so, that’s saying something about how bad his views were.

And this right here is why we need to continue having discussions about Lovecraft and his role in pop culture + literary history.

https://lithub.com/we-cant-ignore-h-p-lovecrafts-white-supremacy/

the thing is, even when it’s not a character doing the narration, his crazy obvious racism shines through. i agree that in some stories you can maybe play it off as the narrator being a typical new england/anglophile racist at the time; but that’s a very, very low number of his stories.

I disagree with it not mattering, especially in 2020. Any author who wants to work with or adapt Lovecraft—especially biographically—needs to bring that shit front and center—even if his views did soften as he aged (and they didn’t soften by much, tbh)—because so much of Lovecraft as a person literally defines the…