You wouldn’t like what comes out.
I sometimes have unusually vivid dreams, some of which find their way into my books. But every now and then I get hit with a real rotter.
Heck, Frank Belknap Long dreamed a whole novelette, The Horror from the Hills–or rather , H.P. Lovecraft dreamed it and Frank Long wrote it. Get those two guys together, and anything could happen.
I do wonder where some of these outlandish dreams come from.
Was this someone’s idea of a portrait sculpture?
I’m sure I read somewhere that courts of law are not supposed to enter into any judgment with a suite of political prejudices guiding the judges’ decisions.
So what’s an 8-foot tall statue in honor of “abortion rights” doing on the steps of a New York City courthouse in the Flatiron District? It looks like a knockoff of Botticelli’s “Venus” as interpreted by H.P. Lovecraft.
Here’s the original:
The statue has been nicknamed “NOW” as an homage to abortion-loving feminism.
Looks like pro-life defendants can expect a raw deal in this court. Well, at least the court’s prejudice is–shall we say “nakedly”?–apparent.
Your taxpayer dollars at work.
I’m so sick of hanging planters, I could plotz! And here I am, using up valuable time that ought to be devoted to reporting the nooze, bellyaching about hanging planters. (See “Byron’s TV Listings,” today, for more about hanging planters that bore you to tears.)
Look at those planters in the photo! How can you help but be reminded of the way the ancient Celts made trophies of their enemies’ heads? It’ll ruin your supper.
Was it Ralph Kiner who said “I don’t want to talk about hanging planters”? But Solon said it first! He made a law against hanging planters, but as soon as his back was turned, the Athenians went hog-wild with the freakin’ things.
The Indus Valley people had really dull hanging planters–and where are they now?
H.P. Lovecraft was briefly driven mad by his mother’s hanging planters.
I’m too upset to cover any more nooze today. Blame it on those hanging planters.
I know this isn’t so for everybody; but for some of us, there’s nothing quite so bracing as a good, clean scare–just the thing horror movies were invented to provide. My wife and I both find a good scary movie very relaxing. Sure, it creeps you out for a time: but then it stops! Don’t you wish real-life problems would just stop, roll the credits, and trouble us no more?
Take a classic horror movie like The Uninvited. No cussing, no nudity, no writhing around in the bed–and no blood ‘n’ guts spattered all over the screen. And all the deaths and tragedies involved are in the past (hence the ghosts). It’s in black-and-white, and none of the characters gets killed. It’d be hard to create something less like today’s horror movies; but The Uninvited packs plenty of good, stiff scares. And having Ray Milland, Cornelia Otis Skinner, and Alan Napier in the cast doesn’t hurt, either.
Sometimes we’d like to see a movie that we haven’t seen before. We read the descriptions and rule out the slasher movies. But we still get stung. The last one we saw was supposed to be an H.P. Lovecraft thing, based on one of our favorite Lovecraft stories, The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Back in the 20s and 30s, HPL wasn’t even allowed to write gross-out horror. So his tales rely on true creepiness and weird takes on reality. And never mind! This movie soon degenerated into nudity, physical cruelty, and violence that was so far over the top, it was almost funny. The key word is “almost.”
In the last couple modern horror movies we’ve seen, the story always seems to wind up, “And then everybody got killed in assorted nasty ways!” It’s like the writers walked out halfway through the picture and the director’s 12 and 13-year-old kids had to write the rest of it.
Is this telling us something about our culture, that can’t even crank out a proper ghost story anymore?
I think so.
It’s dark and dreary, raining cats and dogs, damp and cold (man, that makes my leg hurt!)–no novel-writing today. Yeah, I know the rain is part of nature, too. But you can’t write on paper that’s getting rained on. Nor do I wish to acquire a touch of pneumonia.
Yesterday I wrote six pages of Behold! and Wednesday, five. I am being strongly pulled along–to what kind of climax, I don’t know yet. I reckon I’ve got at least one more chapter set to write, a little more than 10,000 words; and it’s got to get done before the cold weather sets in and the ink won’t run out of the pen.
But not today, ol’ hoss–not today. I can always write Joe Collidge, and there’s a book I have to review for Chalcedon. There’s also the temptation to go back to bed. My cats advise it. H.P. Lovecraft always listened to his cats. But then he was eccentric and I’m not.
H.P. Lovecraft with one of his imaginary playmates
The CEO of Kindred A.I. the other day ruffled some feathers by warning that “tech developers are summoning entities into existence” (https://clarion.causeaction.com/2019/09/17/ai-expert-says-we-are-summoning-robot-entities-who-will-treat-us-like-ants/).
Say it ain’t so!
Warns the CEO, these “entities” will be (or already are) as indifferent to us as we are to ants: “they’re way smarter than every single person in this room, in ways that we can’t even comprehend.” Well, gee–not knowing who was in the room with him when he said that, we can only speculate. I mean, if it was Joe Biden and Rosie O’Donnell, he had a great chance of being right.
These scary entities that we’re going to summon into existence, he said, are “like Lovecraftian The Great Old Ones…” Those were monsters in H.P. Lovecraft’s fantasy/horror stories. Not intended to be taken seriously. We wonder whether Mr. CEO quite understands that.
Sorry, dude, but Shakespeare got in before you. He even got in before Lovecraft. Henry IV Part I, Act III, Scene 1.
Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, and so can any man. But will they come when you do call for them?
(Why do I think I hear someone crying, “Call for Phillip Morris”?)
See, beings either exist or they don’t. No yo-yo down here on earth can summon them into existence. We already have inborn human depravity and hosts of malevolent spiritual beings turned loose on us by Satan. What can some clowns with computers add to that?
HPL was only kidding; but this guy at Kindred is nuts.
In case you missed it earlier today, we stumbled over a quote from New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (not his real name) which sums up today’s Far Left Crazy ideology in a single sentence. By “Far Left Crazy” I mean Democrat.
Here’s what the one-time Sandinista wannabe told New York magazine in 2017 (Sept. 4 issue):
“If I had my druthers, a very, very powerful government would determine your day-to-day reality.”
Let that sink in for a minute. What do you think, oh, George Washington would have to say about that sentiment? And would Thomas Jefferson say it was time again to water the tree of liberty?
Where did we get these out-and-out loonies, too damned many of whom are actually in public office–and how, how, how do we get rid of them? I mean, do we even suspect what de Blasio’s notion of “day-to-day reality” is? Do we truly want to know that? With H.P. Lovecraft unavailable, who would be able to write it down?
At rather horrifying speed, the whole Democrat Party is morphing into this.
If you voted for even one Democrat in last year’s elections, shame on you! And never, never, never do it again.
Don’t look at it too long! It’ll turn you into a racist.
Nowhere is safe from Social Justice Warriors. Not even fantasy.
https://leeduigon.com/2015/11/16/pc-thought-police-invade-fantasy/
It’s true that as a young man in the 1920s, H.P. Lovecraft was what some today would call a “racist.” In fact, he had little face-to-face contact with people in general, and had no opportunities to practice racism. Later on in his short life, he became a socialist. But I don’t hold his naivete and inexperience against him. The great fantasy writer knew very little of the real world.
Our friend “jessicafischerqueen” recently went into a local bookstore, looking for some collections of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories. There weren’t any on the shelves. It turned out that they kept the Lovecraft books under the counter, like pornography–because Lovecraft was “a racist.” So you shouldn’t read anything he wrote!
And you need Them to make your decisions for you! You couldn’t possibly read an H.P. Lovecraft horror story without being turned into a raging racist! You couldn’t possibly just ignore the writer’s occasional throwaway lines that wouldn’t pass muster today. Oh, no! Today you read The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; tomorrow you join the KKK.
Are you tired of Them making your decisions for you?
This is what can happen to you, if you read H.P. Lovecraft at bedtime.
I was reading his story, The Lurking Fear, about a family of Dutch settlers in New York who, through isolation and inbreeding, had degenerated into monsters, evolved backwards into a tribe of cannibalistic apes. Lovecraft was a great believer in the Settled Science of his time. Pure poppycock, but it was his art to scare you with it anyway.
That night I dreamed I had to visit a certain city in New Jersey, and when I went to drive home, I took a wrong turn and wound up driving deeper and deeper into the city, unable to find a road that led out. The streets got narrower and narrower, the buildings higher and higher, many of them shabby and poorly maintained. And the people I saw on the sidewalks, the deeper I got into the city, the more off-kilter they looked: something not quite right about them.
At last I had to stop my car for a red light, right in front of a brick building with an open roll-up door, like that of a garage. In the doorway loitered some individuals who were definitely on their way to becoming creatures in a Lovecraft story: half-human, half-beast, the worst half of both.
These gawked at me in a way I didn’t like at all.
Then the light turned green. And my car’s engine died.
And the loiterers moved in my direction…
You bet your boots I woke up! No way I was gonna stick around for the rest. I told my wife about it and she said the dream would make a pretty good horror story, and an even better start for a horror movie.
I do use a lot of dream material in my books, but I think I’ll leave this one to H.P. Lovecraft.
H.P. Lovecraft–thought criminal, racist, and I’ll bet he didn’t recycle, either.
The Social Justice Warriors/Big Fat Bores in change of the World Fantasy Award have decided to change it.
No longer will the award be a bust of H.P. Lovecraft, designed by Gahan Wilson ( http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/11/12/world-fantasy-awards-banish-h-p-lovecraft-to-rlyeh/ ). The fact that Lovecraft did more than anyone but Poe to shape and inspire fantasy and horror in American literature–well, that fact counts for nothing anymore. HPL is out, out, out!
Because he was “a racist.” Aw, who cares! Everyone’s a racist, these days. The man lived a hundred years ago, and has been condemned because he didn’t live by the arbitrary standards of 2015 liberal self-righteousness.
Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi–he’s Indian, by the way–has protested by returning the two World Fantasy Awards he’s won.
I would rather he held on to them and displayed them prominently, daring the SJWs to come and take them.
Nothing is safe, not even fantasy, from the Inquisition for “diversity” and “inclusiveness,” whatever the hell they mean.
I say “hell” because that’s where all this culture-poison is originally brewed up.
Long live H.P. Lovecraft!
Down with P.C.!