While reading Salon’s recent post about the controversy over H. P. Lovecraft and the use of his face on the World Fantasy Award trophy, I was surprised to find that halfway down the piece was … me!

I’d tweeted last week about how once the board announced it was changing to a more inclusive symbol for the trophy, news broke that a different organization was embracing Lovecraft, one which didn’t find his racist views at all problematic …

… and my “Whoa!” was somehow deemed newsworthy.

I have no problem with that.

In fact, it isn’t even the first time a journalist picked up on one my tweets. Back in 2014, Good Morning America showed one of my tweets on screen during a story about Alinea chef Grant Achatz having to deal with a crying baby.

Which makes this a good time, I suppose, for me to publicly state my position on the matter of the news media sharing my tweets. To repeat:

I have no problem with that.

I consider whatever I say over on Twitter to have been said in a public forum, and that my words there are as ripe for quotation as any statement I might make from a stage in a public venue, as long as no editing’s done to change my meaning and there is proper attribution and linkage.

I know there are others who feel more protective of their tweets, which is their prerogative and something I hope journalists respect. But as for me, if I should accidentally happen to tweet anything which makes enough sense you feel it worth quoting—quote away!

The Washington Post covered a controversy today concerning a long-dead fantasy icon whose legacy is being reconsidered due to racist opinions extreme even for his day—and no, this time I’m not talking about H.P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft’s views, as you’ve already heard if you’ve visited here before, have been the cause of uncomfortable but very necessary conversations within the fantasy community. And now another community is being forced to have similar uncomfortable conversations.

Because it seems the Oneida Indian Nation is about to open a $20 million casino which will pay homage to a fantasy writer who, in addition to entertaining millions, also called for genocide.

L. Frank Baum.

That’s right. The author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. (more…)

Considering this morning’s political landscape, particularly the election of Rand Paul (at least my adopted state of West Virginia elected a Democrat, which I wasn’t confident would happen), I am reminded of what H.P. Lovecraft had to say about Republicans in 1936.

The following quote is taken from S. T. Joshi’s Lovecraft biography A Dreamer and a Visionary, and was brought up recently on an email loop in which I take part:

“As for the Republicans—how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical ‘American heritage’…) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.”

Replace the word “Republican” with “Tea Partier” and you get a sense of how I’m feeling today …

It’s been a long, long day, because my journey to Readercon began at 3:00 a.m., when for some reason I woke up half an hour before the alarm had been set to go off. I didn’t mind it that much, not then, because it allowed for a more leisurely escape, but believe me, I’m minding it now, as I’m way past ready to crash.

I’m much too exhausted to fill you in on any details of the trip so far, so I’ll simply leave you with this photo of me, Michael Dirda, Michael Bishop, Paul Di Filippo, and Howard Waldrop pausing to worship at Lovecraft’s grave as we head, along with the unseen Deborah Newton and Jeri Bishop, from Paul and Deb’s Providence home to the Burlington Marriott for the 20th Readercon.

You’ll have to wait until tomorrow for anything more detailed than that, and just be happy with this image, and with a few others over at flickr.

Until tomorrow, then …

I’m about halfway through the first volume of Essential Solitude: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, and that is where I think I’m going to have to stop. It isn’t that Lovecraft doesn’t have fascinating things to say. It’s more that at times the things he has to say are … well … too fascinating.

Sometimes I find his sentiments interesting in terms of the way they differ from my own, as in this letter from August 12, 1928, in which he states:

I prefer non-committal, non-sensational titles as a general rule; especially when the stories are themselves subtle & elusive in their weirdness.

Not me! I prefer more ornate titles, both in my own writing (the titles of mine I like the best are always more complex, as with “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man” and “10 Things I’ve Learned About Writing”) and in that of others (as with Samuel R. Delany’s “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” and Harlan Ellison’s “The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World”).

I also break with Lovecraft’s comments from August 20, 1928:

I note that you prefer the dialogue form as a medium of expression—a circumstance which perhaps indicates that you are a playwright at heart. I myself am the exact opposite. My purpose in writing a tale is to delineate a certain visual picture or crystallise a certain atmospheric effect—in which human beings are only incidental “properties”.

While it’s interesting to see Lovecraft make his methods concrete in that way—since the allure of his stories has always been the language and the atmosphere, rather than any of the people—in my own work, it is the people and characters who come first. (more…)

Even though I wouldn’t have gotten along with H.P. Lovecraft on a personal level—his feelings about racial purity and his fear of non-Aryan immigrants have creeped me out ever since I read the Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft in the ’70s—as I move deeper into the first volume of Essential Solitude: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, I find more and more points on which we agree, at least as far as writing is concerned.

Here he is on May 16, 1927, addressing the choices we all have to make to put food on our tables and keep roofs over our heads:

An author really ought to be financially independent, so that he need neither cater to the commercial field in his writing, nor expend his time & energy on other pursuits. However, of the two evils, catering & outside work, the latter is by far the lesser evil. That at least does not impair the artistic sincerity of the small amount of writing one does do. I have more respect for an honest plumber or truck-driver who writes to please himself in his spare time, than for a literary hack who extinguishes his own personality in a service acquiescence to the puerile & artificial demands of an ignorant herd.

We’re in agreement there. One reason I’ve always held day jobs was to prevent economic issues from influencing my artistic decisions. (more…)

I began reading the first volume of Essential Solitude: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth last night. The relationship between the two began in 1926 when Derleth wrote a letter to Lovecraft asking for help in tracking down a couple of short stories by M.P. Shiel, and blossomed into a correspondence that continued on a weekly basis through 1937.

David E. Schultz and S.T. Joshi have edited the hundreds of letters into a fascinating two-volume set from Hippocampus Press. I read the five-volume Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft thirty years ago, but as those books contained letters to multiple correspondents, I don’t remember the reading experience as having had as intimate a feeling as this.

I’m also finding that these these letters will appeal to more than just those with either a scholarly or fanboy interest in Lovecraft. The editors’ helpful footnotes make sure that no prior knowledge of either Lovecraft or Derleth is necessary. I think any writer, whatever his or her level of familiarity with these men, will find something of interest here relating to the creative process, dealing with rejection, the nature of fantasy, and more. (more…)

Yesterday, I received an advance copy of Necronomicon: The Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft, to be published by Orion, an imprint of Gollanz. The 1,008-page book will contain all of the writer’s major stories and short novels, including the entire Cthulhu mythos. I read the complete Lovecraft a long time ago, so there’s no need for me to dive into it again immediately (though someday I will, and if you haven’t yet, you should make plans to do so now), but I did enjoy reading editor Stephen Jones’ lengthy afterword, which brought to my attention some information I’d never read before.

One such tidbit was a reproduction of the cover to an issue of Home Brew, a magazine from the ’20s which had published a few of Lovecraft’s short stories. (Click on the image at right for a closer look.) I’d heard of the magazine, but I’d never seen a copy. I was very much taken by the taglines of Home Brew, which states that it is “Full of Moonshine,” and promises “Peppy Stories – Pungent Jests – Piquant Gossip.” Home Brew also claims to be “America’s Zippiest Pocket Magazine.”

Ah, they just don’t make magazines like that anymore! (more…)