Interesting interview, though he had already implied most of this in less detail in his comments. The issue that I had, after hearing his explanation, is that the test audiences' suggestions for the ending are, well, completely fucking stupid.

I guess the way I look at it is that my perception of him is only one point of view. Whatever he is to me, he's likely many other things to many other people. I used to be very defensive about this, as I felt like I wasn't believed by some people (as he didn't do it around anyone who could raise the hue and cry, so…

I loved it. I also have terrible taste. Many of the complaints that I've heard about it (violent tonal whiplash, nastiness beyond what you're probably already expecting) are exactly the aspects that I enjoyed. It has big laughs, an incredible lead performance, and a practically perfect ending. There's a surprising…

Is there a name for this style of joke on Twitter? I mean the kind where someone posts a picture, writes a caption, and forgets what a joke is. Does that category have a name?

I should be clear and say that the racism in the story is still implicit. It's just also an integral and unavoidable part of the story.

Yeah, it's not a simple case of white = good and all others = bad in his stories. Lovecraft's characters are generally rotten in one way or another. The difference lies in description. His white villains can be backwoods types or educated, "civilized" people with fatal moral failings. I don't know all of his work,…

This is a good excerpt to pick apart. In majority white nations, you have suicide, odd religious activity, strange art, and a mob of "hysterical Levantines". In the Phillippines and India, you have "bothersome" tribes and "native unrest", complemented by "voodoo orgies" in Haiti. Basically, white people get…

I didn't, actually. Thanks.

It's a fair conclusion, but I wonder if someone else would have done it in his place. Previous presidents were also extremely racist, so why didn't they do it then? Given the racial history of the US, it seems sort of odd that it wasn't already segregated by the early 20th century, you know? Maybe Wilson was more…

"Your friends want to murder you in a well. Seems a little harsh."

If there's one thing on which I'd agree with you, it's the bizarre layout burying things. Lots of stuff that I'd like ends up halfway down the page before the day is even out.

My father and my mother divorced because he didn't want kids or a family anymore. He then proceeded to file for custody as leverage over my mother until she agreed to give him the house that she had bought in the first place, at which time he dropped the custody claim, left, and never spoke to any of us again. …

What about Houston? What about Detroit? What about Pittsburgh, PA?

I don't disagree at all. My intention has never been to defend the centrist position. Being moderate makes sense for some things (like personal finances), but it's immoral for others. Right now, the centrist position on racism still involves people bearing the effects of racism, so it's not defensible. It's not…

He has a great sense of dry humour. I always remember this bit at the end of "Eye of the Lynx" where the captive manages to stick her arm out briefly and a drunk guy shakes her hand.

The way I see it, it's not something you should have to do. It's really more of a white person duty to reach out to bigoted white people. I wouldn't ask someone who's hated by bigots to take any risks in dealing with them.

I think we might be talking at cross purposes. "Moderate", in this case, simply means "located somewhere around the middle of the range". It's not a compliment or a defense; I'm using it strictly descriptively. Anti-racist thought was freely available long before that, too, especially to presidents (after all,…

Depends on how you look at it, I suppose. There are a couple of ways in which I'd see a difference. There's the rather subjective matter of description; to my eye, his descriptions of nonwhite people have a distinctly different tone from that of his descriptions of white people. There's also the somewhat more…

Segregation seems to have been rather common in Wilson's time, so things like that appear to fit into his moment to me, but I take your meaning. It's more damning, in a way, when someone who really should know better really doesn't. I guess I'm thinking of him as a moderate because I've read of some of the extremes…

It's not a shorthand in this instance, though. The story describes skin colour and ancestries when talking about the cultists in Louisiana and the Pacific. It doesn't just leave it at "savages*"; the narrator is actually remarkably clear (if I remember correctly, as I don't have it in front of me) about said cults…