Octavia E. Butler against Lovecraft (World Fantasy Award).

[brendanconnell]

เดี่ยวไมโครโฟน 8 Pt. 1/4 - YouTube

[qcrisp]

Quote Originally Posted by brendanconnell

I would trust the dictionary definition of the word.

Yes and no. Drunk, and being talked at, so not the best time to go into details, but the fact that people do things in the name of something has to be addressed, even if the name itself is not necessarily to blame.

Quote Originally Posted by brendanconnell

I don't know anything about the word changing meaning in the Reagan years.

Well... see above. Surely the thing I posted was a lampooning of the idea that the meaning of the word had changed. I thought it was, anyway. I'm probably too drunk to deal with this adequately at present, though. So, best be brief.

Quote Originally Posted by brendanconnell

Just because there are a lot of idiots on the left, is no reason to go rushing to the right.

To which I would add, because someone criticises the left, there's no need to assume they are rushing to the right.

[qcrisp]

P.S. If you're learning Japanese, you definitely don't want to trust the dictionary definitions in the Japanese-English dictionaries.

I just wish Brendan would post more foreign language You-Tube clips of great length that he knows no-one will watch.

It's great fun and very Zen.

Mark S.

[qcrisp]

Okay...

As the Zen masters say: katsu! Katsu! KATSU! Cats:

30代���������ンキッキ�歌　�編 - YouTube

Excuse any failures in humour. I must adjourn myself to another day and another state of mind.

[brendanconnell]

Well, I thought the video was funny. I watched the whole Kung-Fu one and believe in the profundity if Quentin's video. Dictionaries: well, yes, I was hoping an English-English dictionary might be more accurate! I don't know how to add spaces on this thing, but here is an impromptu poem for everyone to ponder: The crags of TLO have scattered flowers; Like boats on a raging river; Where there is no bridge of agreement; Can't ef u see kay a jelly donut; Because it has no hole.

	TLO THOMAS LIGOTTI ONLINE

[Druidic]

Quote

The crags of TLO have scattered flowers; Like boats on a raging river; Where there is no bridge of agreement; Can't ef u see kay a jelly donut; Because it has no hole. TLO -Brendanconnell

jelly doughnut conceals essence
providence Titan masters page
racism glazes your sweet award
expectation now grave
w/ disappointment
not jelly center
cream filled
ah damn

Those people who seek contemporary attitudes in all things in the work of a man born in1890 are the same people looking for jelly in crème-filled doughnuts.

[scrypt]

Quote Originally Posted by qcrisp

Similarly, I'd say there are levels of political correctness. The top level wouldn't be, for instance, thoroughly hating Lovecraft on every level because he was racist, but thoroughly hating someone on every level for not thoroughly hating Lovecraft on every level because he was racist. . . . I feel like we are inching towards that top level of political correctness.

Christ on a swizzle stick -- that was the last direction I thought this thread might take. I was expecting people to talk about qualities and technical achievements that comprised the virtues of Lovecraft's writing -- as Alan Moore did in the interview to which I linked in a previous post (see his comments on the brilliance of Lovecraft's "over-description," which some critics have considered a flaw) -- and possibly to evaluate that which isn't worth doing after Lovecraft. I had no idea that anyone would think that generalized character assassinations of "the liberal," or vilifying the "politically correct" could possibly yield anything interesting. I was talking about a persuasive cosmology that is deeply pessimistic and considering whether Lovecraft's racism and antisemitism made that cosmology less persuasive -- not in terms of whether his views were correct, nor work tainted in some ideological way, but whether it was in any way pithed of its powers of abjection by some of the more literal-minded turns -- whether the atmosphere was flattened in any sense. It's a technical question that has nothing to do with correctness and everything to do with Lovecraft's effectiveness as an artist. It has do with the inviolability of his word-spell.

If you love him, then you love him -- no one has said you must do otherwise. But what I would have found interesting was a description of what you love about him, and possibly why you think the atmosphere in his work isn't compromised technically by the more literal-minded aspects of his misanthropy. That didn't seem to be a problem for E.M. Cioran, for example, who was viciously antisemitic in his youth and produced essays in which he affirmed his agreement with Hitler's genocide, but whose style and transcendent misanthropy -- in my view -- ensures the scope, tone and value of his work.

Prior to your post, how exactly was this discussion "inching toward that top level of political correctness" -- the level at which someone here threatened to punch someone else for not thoroughly hating Lovecraft because he was racist? And how exactly does the word hatred apply here at all -- not only between members, but between any given member and Lovecraft himself?

What’s odd about your post is that you’re maintaining a level tone, but the ideas themselves don’t seem level-headed: in response to a conversation that was simply evaluating Lovecraft as a writer (and none of us should be expected to agree about his qualities as a stylist, storyteller or innovator), you’ve introduced and characterized a type that is not in evidence here. You’ve also done it immediately after I asked whether Lovecraft’s antisemitism and racism limited his powers of horror (as it were).

Who exactly is exhibiting intolerance on this thread, the TLO member who doesn’t like certain aspects of Lovecraft’s writing or the member who characterizes anything other than total approval of Lovecraft as "hatred"?

I was quite careful to give examples of racist and anti-Semitic writers who retained their power despite their political views, which is the clearest indication possible that I didn’t "hate Lovecraft on every level because he was racist," let alone "hate someone [else] on every level for not thoroughly hating Lovecraft on every level because he was racist."

If you’d care to offer an example this aforementioned hatred -- one that was made of concrete rather than straw -- I’d be happy to discuss it with you. Instead, the conversation has devolved from talking about Lovecraft’s writing (always the more interesting subject) to talking about "liberals" or "social justice warriors" who -- in the abstract -- might disapprove of Lovecraft in the abstract. Who exactly fits that description on TLO and why are you resorting to ad hominem to characterize their participation here?

Calling for measured appraisals of Lovecraft’s prose and effectiveness -- appraisals that needn’t be reflexively loyal or anachronistically intolerant -- is hardly an act of political correctness, but to call such a request an act of hatred does suggest reductive generalization that veers closer to the close-mindedness you seem to be arguing against.

When you characterize the total hatred of hatred -- the total intolerance of intolerance and the hypocrisy of a supposed fascism that opposes free behavior as fascism -- as the behavior of "the liberal" (and I do appreciate your efforts not to reduce "the liberal" to a particularly familiar archetype, even though I view as doomed any attempt to escape prejudice that is predicated on it) -- I'm reminded of Glenn Beck’s standard characterization of anyone who disagrees with him ideologically. He strikes two notes on the subject: (i) not addressing people’s views separately but instead referring to anyone who expresses such views as "the liberal" and (ii) asking why that person “hates America” -- as if social criticism that questioned the patriotic orthodoxy were itself an act of hatred that could invalidate one’s citizenship. Whenever he and Ann Coulter refer to “the liberal,” they reduce multiple strata of different points of view to a mono-view held by what amounts to a genetic archetype.

I would never do that to a conservative, a liberal or anyone else because to do so is to trivialize and demean their hard-won point of view, and it is also to fail to distinguish between individual virtue and what we -- as the ideological hothouse flowers we are, having each become quirk-riddled socialized constructs -- deem to be ideologically sound. To characterize a liberal or conservative as innately immoral based on their leanings is to overlook the contradictions and complexities of their continuing existence and evolution. Each is a little world made cunningly and it seems unobservant to reduce their psycho-emotional ecosystem to the sum of their (alleged) generalized beliefs.

Quote

I used the word 'liberalism' earlier in the thread. I meant it in a limited sense, and I would have to, as it's a word with a very, very long history and has meant many different things along the way. But if anyone has a more appropriate word for the people who think the espousal of the 'correct' left-wing causes automatically makes them a superior human being, please let me know, as being able to make a clear distinction might help me avoid, to some degree, misunderstandings.

I appreciate your qualification, but where to start? To characterize liberals as leftists means that one has failed to notice the legerdemain of media terminology reshapers like Murdoch and the Heritage Foundation in the wake of 9/11 -- legerdemain that shifted serviceable definitions of left, center and right further to the right to make the extreme positions advocated by those companies and organizations appear to occupy center position on the political chart. Prior to that shift, a true Marxist was a leftist, F.D.R. was a liberal, the Clintons were centrists, Ron Paul was close to being a true libertarian, G.W. Bush was a far-right conservative and someone like Rand Paul would have been considered a right-wing anarchist who opposed most systems of government. If one is actually willing to call Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama "leftists" -- centrists who are more conservative socially than '50s conservatives like Richard Nixon -- then, conceptually, actual Marxists don’t even exist, let alone, old-school liberals. Instead, you’ve allowed political marketing to erase a hundred years of useful theory and categorization. You’ve introduced that boogeyman, the shrill advocate of political correctness whom, you appear to be certain, threatens to take away your right to express your ideas. Where racial, sexual and gender reforms have actually encouraged greater freedom of expression, you seem to posit a kind of reversed Orwellian world in which people are stoned to death for not being tolerant enough -- a state of affairs that has never happened in the short bleak history of civilization. The Marxist argument against art that fails to appeal to the working class as being inherently bourgeois veers close to it (as shown in what used to be the second volume of Richard Wright's autobiography), but so does the same argument in populist terms: That elitists are ruining Lovecraft. Both arguments suggest that the ordinary reader is being harmed by some abstract and manipulative type.

Quote

Anyway, whatever you want to call them, the impression I get from the kind of people I'm talking about is that they have never known what it is like to be an outsider. They seem to believe that judging someone else as non-liberal and therefore bad seems to elevate them to a more liberal and therefore more virtuous status. They are essentially social climbers, and their so-called morals are the rungs of the ladder they climb. . . . This, in brief, is my take on it: we all have a right to our hatred. The liberals pretend to find hatred the ultimate crime. But since no one has yet managed to free human nature from hatred, hatred also exists within the liberal fold. However, this is how they cope with it: they say that "personal is political" and then codify what you're allowed to hate. And, unsurprisingly, what you're allowed to hate is only ever the enemies of liberalism. This, for them, doesn't qualify as hatred, since they have supposedly sublimated the personal for a political cause - 'supposedly', because what they have really done is the opposite, and infected politics with their subliminal hatred.

Do you not see that detailing the mindset of absolute strangers based on opinions they hold in connection with positions you attribute to them is so reductive that you're not even talking about individuals any more?

We might have a "right" to personal hatred -- which Charles Lamb called our "imperfect sympathies" -- but reductive politicization becomes an impediment to insight when it gets in the way of the perception of the qualities of individuals. Lovecraft's, for example, but also those of any of his critics.

	TLO THOMAS LIGOTTI ONLINE

[Druidic]

Personally, I found qcrisp's post quite reasonable and persuasive. Perhaps this thread is nearing exhaustion...

One thing I'll never understand is this Manichean attitude in the U.S. about Democrats vs Republicans. It's rather like the guy in Northern Ireland who asks an atheist whether he's a Catholic or Protestant atheist.

I think some of the problems arising are questions of terminology. I would hesitate to label all “social justice warriors” as liberals in the broad sense. Personally, if I had to identify a specific ideology that covers my understanding of those pursuing this cultural agenda of “social justice” it would probably be that they're ideological Marxists. I'd actually be more comfortable with simply terming them Totalitarians. I have no doubt it would be equally as unpleasant to live under Fascism, where directed hatreds are also acceptable and channelled into political currents. I also have no doubt that where the popular vote proves inconvenient, both Marxists and Fascists, given the opportunity, will aim to do away with it as their end goal. To this end, the Far Right would be talking about the absolute morality of “ethnic justice” rather than “social justice”.

Both fascists and communists are very keen on the revolutionary spirit. Their ends are the same: control over human individuals, even to the extent of eventually transforming language itself so that, eventually, all “reactionary” ideas will not only be verboten but also cannot be thought.

I say all of this from a purely artistic perspective. I've long held the view that where art serves politics it rapidly starts going off the rails. I can only stomach it (just about) as part of some defensive “life or death” struggle for existence but never in the name of a revolutionary ideology, whether one of the far Left or far Right. I hate politics. All I want is to be left alone, not attract bad karma by ####ing with others, and to be free to be who I want to be.

Mark S.