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How often do you start making a post and then...
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I'm too busy keeping up with everyone else's to come up with some "read worthy" of my own.
awittyusername
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ceasar989 said:
About half the time I am just to lazy to type out a responce. Its a good thing, because unfortunately in the real world I make wise ass comments all day long. So, I am twice as annoying as I am here. (believe it or not)
CrayonOfDoom2
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ceasar989 said:
probably 2 or 3 times already today where I just press the back button half-way through.
A
alien amp pharm
Guest
I do but then I'm like "Oh crap, she will kick my ass if I post this" then delete it.
CrayonOfDoom2
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Deterass said:
haha, yeah...myself included.
hamstershaver
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never, all of mine are quality posts
hamstershaver
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that clown is geigh and not scary, that was from "it" wasnt it?Wootoom said:
hamstershaver
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i say more in one sentance than these other guys pounding out novels on hereceasar989 said:
jackangel
New member
hamstershaver said:
Peter Ruber discusses this issue to some extent in his ARKHAM'S MASTERS OF HORROR. Here is something I ran through the EOD a few mailings back that is apropos:
In Derleth's Shadow
Sixty Years of Arkham House, by S. T. Joshi. Arkham, $24.95.
In Lovecraft's Shadow, by August Derleth. M&M, $60.00.
The story of H. P. Lovecraft's posthumous success might be called "In Derleth's Shadow," for in many ways the figure of August Derleth loams large, ranging from the heroic efforts to preserve Lovecraft's fiction and letters described in Sixty Years of Arkham House, to the perpetuation of the "Cthulhu Mythos" as the supposed centerpiece of Lovecraft's work, to his tenacious grasp on the rights to Lovecraft's work. For many years he has been the "whipping boy" of a vocal portion of Lovecraftians. As Robert M. Price has noted, he has become the "trace" to Lovecraft, wherein may be found all that is not found in Lovecraft himself. In this respect he has become something of a scapegoat: Derleth the self-blinded little earth-gazer, contrasted with Lovecraft the cosmic seer. Even Joseph Wrzos makes this assumption in his introduction to the collected "Cthulhu Mythos" stories of August Derleth, when he contrasts the so-called "Purists" against "Revisionists" such as AWD and Brian Lumley. (In doing so, however, he sets up a straw argument; while correctly identifying Lovecraft as a nihilist, he asserts that Lovecraft believed that "the unbounded universe ... in actuality is dominated by the Old Ones... ." In actuality, the universe is dominated by nothing except its own natural laws, one of which of course is the second law of thermodynamics, "entropy [chaos] always increase." The Old Ones, as is made clear in "At the Mountains of Madness," are just as much at the mercy of the universe as is mankind; and for all his power Cthulhu is still dreaming in R'lyeh.) Perhaps it is time to give the Devil his due and recognize that what Derleth did, he did out of love for his friend, and not out of some desire to stamp his likeness upon Lovecraft's work.
In many ways the true creator of the Cthulhu Mythos was N. J. O'Neill of Toronto. Writing in "The Eyrie" for March 1930, he noticed a resemblance between HPL's Cthulhu and Robert E. Howard's Atlantean sorceror Kathulos. Up until this time his use of the mythological apparatus of "Yog-Sothothery" had been limited to "The Call of Cthulhu," The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and "The Dunwich Horror." Despite Frank Belknap Long's mention of the Necronomicon in "The Space Eaters," no other writer had made use of this pseudomyth, although odd references had appeared in some revisions of stories by Adolphe de Castro in Weird Tales. Now Lovecraft saw the advantages of cross-referencing references to stories by others of his correspondents, as well as encouraging others to make reference to his own dark pantheon. Thus when he began writing "The Whisperer in Darkness," he included mentions of Clark Ashton Smith's Tsathoggua and Robert E. Howard's Kathulos and Bran (even though he would not begin corresponding with Howard until August). Derleth, who we must remember was still a lad barely 21 years old at this time, took his mentor's suggestion and ran with it. Soon he was submitting tales so replete with Lovecraftian touches that Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright was indignantly rejecting them as plagarisms. HPL soothed his pupil's bruised ego by damning Wright's well-intended censures, and pointing out that "I like to have others use my Azathoths & Nyarlathoteps-& in return I shall use Klarkash-Ton's Tsathoggua, your monk Clithanus, & Howard's Bran." After pointing this out to Wright, the first of his Lovecraftian tales, "Those Who Seek," appeared in the January, 1932 issue of Weird Tales. This little tale, though, contains nary a mention of any of Lovecraft's inventions, although it does deal with an ancient Druidic survival lurking in an old British abbey: a god like "huge black-green jelly ... equipped with minute suckers and tentacles, much like an octopus." Soon more overt borrowings from Lovecraft appeared under Derleth's byline, often shared with his collaborator Mark Schorer. Lovecraft's enthusiasm for these borrowings seemed unbounded; writing of Howard's "The Thing on the Roof," he told Derleth "I know it's trite, but something in it gave me a kick for all that." So Derleth learned from Lovecraft that the apparatus of the tale could overcome other weaknesses and salvage an otherwise unremarkable piece.
Of course, Lovecraft's reason for this had nothing to do with any inherent love of the apparatus. "I really agree that 'Yog-Sothothery' is a basically immature conception & unfitted for basically serious literature," he wrote Frank Belknap Long. But by having others cite his pantheon, and by making references to Howard's Valusian serpent-people as well as Bierce's Carcosa and Hastur, Dunsany's Bethmoora, and Chamber's Yellow Sign and Lake of Hali, he created an illusion of an underground myth that lent an air of verisimilitude to his stories. A weird tale must be as carefully constructed as a hoax, he wrote more than once, and a certain degree of inconsistency was all the better, since real myths likewise contained internal contradictions (who was Cain's wife?) By adhering to a strict realism in all aspects of the story except for the phenomenon itself, Lovecraft hoped to achieve the illusion of a momentary suspension of the natural laws of time and space that galled him so much. This is the Lovecraftian logos, or Reason, as Plato put it in the Phaedrus. Significantly, the opposite of logos was "repeating without knowing:" mythos. Coming from a background of devote Catholicism, Derleth did not understand the atheistic and materialistic foundations of Lovecraft's thought, and he accordingly aped the words without picking up on the song, and thought he was doing something important. When he boosted to R. H. Barlow of his contributions to Lovecraft's mythology, especially the "Star- Warriors" of the Elder Gods, Derleth did not realize that he was introducing elements diametrically opposed to Lovecraft's cosmic indifferentism by implying the existence of powers that cared at all for mankind's aspirations. He mistook Lovecraft's failure to object to these innovations as tacit approval, and deduced from that a common world view.
This phase did not last long. It is significant that between the composition of "Ithaqua" and the appearance of "The Return of Hastur" after HPL's death, Derleth published no more Cthulhoid fiction. Part of the reason for this may perhaps be found in his letters to Henry Kuttner. We can only deduce what he wrote, but to this Kuttner replied in a May 19, 1936 letter that he had not considered how "cheap imitations" of Lovecraft's style and props might in fact "be unfair to HP" and "militate against HP's acceptance" by Wright. This all changed with Lovecraft's death. Soon Derleth was completing "The Return of Hastur," an old story which Lovecraft had in fact seen some years ago but which Wright had repeatedly rejected (and would continue to reject, not accepting it until February 18, 1938).
By this time, however, Wright was willing to accept just about anything by Lovecraft, including stories which he had rejected during the latter's lifetime such as "The Shunned House" and "The Mound." The decision to publish Lovecraft's stories under the Arkham House imprint necessitated the replacement of money from a bank loan for Place of Hawks from Derleth's own writing projects, and the replacement of Wright by Dorothy McIlwraith led to the encouragement to write further Cthulhoid adventures. Although McIlwraith accepted two HPL stories which Wright still rejected (Wright rejected "Herbert West: Reanimator", because it "would surely get us into trouble with the police censors, more they would find it sickening and disgusting in parts, especially where the corpse of the negro scrambles out of the grave with the hand of a white child protruding from its mouth." [Wright to Derleth, July 17, 1939], and "The Shadow over Innsmouth" because of length.), with no more stories under the Lovecraft byline there was every possibility that Lovecraft's name would fade from the memory of the average Weird Tales reader. The solution was to keep Lovecraft alive through the mythology Derleth thought he created. Thus we see in "The Dweller in Darkness" that among the ancient books containing the elder lore there also appears The Outsider and Others . Reader response to these tales was good. In a letter to McIlwraith dated February 3, 1944, Derleth wrote "I'm glad that readers seem to be liking 'The Trail of Cthulhu;'...if they respond as well to 'The Dweller in Darkness' I'll no doubt have to do other stories in the same Lovecraftian vein-though I'll wait for the green light from you before going ahead."
At the same time that Derleth was composing the main body of his Cthulhu Mythos stories, he was suppressing attempts by other writers to use the same formula. Francis T. Laney recounts in Ah, Sweet Idiocy! how Derleth lambasted him for publishing a mythos tale by Duane Rimel. Similarly, when C. Hall Thompson began publishing Lovecraftian stories in Weird Tales, objections from Derleth brought a speedy end to his career as a writer of tentacular fiction. The reason given was that "the Cthulhu Mythos was at best a difficult thing to use adroitly, and that no one who was not a top flight writer should try to use it. . . because inept use of the mythos tended to cheapen Lovecraft's memory."
This is, indeed, the real problem with Derleth's stories in this vein. Any story pastiche involves the writer's interpretation of the material being imitated, and in this regard it is a work of literary criticism. Furthermore, if we recall the idea of intertextuality, then Derleth's stories actually influenced the reaction of readers to Lovecraft's own stories. Let me describe my own initial exposure to the Mythos. I had first come across Lovecraft through "In the Vault" in Henry Mazzeo's anthology Hauntings, which informed me through the biographical blurbs that this was someone special. Almost immediately I came across Lin Carter's anthology The Spawn of Cthulhu, which included both "The Whisperer in Darkness" and "The Return of Hastur." I read both tales in succession (Derleth was the only other author whose name was familiar to me, since "The Lonesome Place" was also in Mazzeo's collection), and I was hooked. A trip to the mall turned up The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath from Ballantine and Derleth's The Trail of Cthulhu from Beagle. Attempts to order the other Beagle-Ballantine collections by mail were unsuccessful. So for the longest time I was viewing Lovecraft through the lens of Derleth's stories. It wasn't until Richard L. Tierney and Dirk Mosig tore away the veils in the temple that my understanding of Lovecraft changed.
At the same time that Derleth was composing the stories in this book, he was also attempting to present Lovecraft's life and work in a comprehensive and understandable format, which involved the systemizing of the apparatus of Lovecraft's pseudo-mythology. It also involved his interpretation of Lovecraft's authorial intent in the light of an alleged Lovecraft letter quoted to him by Harold Farnese, the infamous "black magic" quote. As David E. Schultz points out in his article on its origin, though, Derleth did not appear to have any conscious intent to deceive the public with this quote, else he would have suppressed the letter to Wright where the real "All my stories" quote appears; it was just that Farnese's quote fit in so well with Derleth's own preconceptions that he never looked into it very deeply.
By 1945 Derleth had passed the point of writing stories in the Lovecraftian vein, and was now writing actual stories supposedly by Lovecraft, and only finished by Derleth. Dorothy McIlwraith recognized the commercial value of such an approach, and by the time Weird Tales went bankrupt had published one such "posthumous collaboration" and had two more in stock During the 1950's Arkham House published only 12 hardcover titles: two subsidized volumes of poetry; two slim volumes of poetry by Clark Ashton Smith meant as stop-gap measures until the Selected Poems could be published; two books in collaboration with Pelligrini & Cudahy; slim volumes by John Metcalfe and Joseph Payne Brennan in very small print runs; and four volumes in a Lovecraftian vein: The Curse of Yig, The Survivor and Others, The Mask of Cthulhu, and The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces. Most speciality presses had died, but through strict publishing discipline Derleth managed to keep the House intact until the better times of the 1960's. One problem which the above mentioned Lovecraft titles had was that they generally attracted negative reviews, by critics such as Avram Davidson and Damon Knight, and when they blasted these stories they blasted Lovecraft, while Derleth usually got off with some kind remarks about what a shame it was that he was wasting his time on this Lovecraft junk.
A good case could be made that most of the negative remarks of Edmund Wilson in his notorious "Tales of the Marvelous and Ridiculous" critique derived not necessarily from Lovecraft himself, but from Derleth's presentation. Wilson apparently had seen Marginalia, Best Supernatural Tales, Viking Portable Novels of Science, H.P.L.: A Memoir, Supernatural Horror in Literature and The Lurker at The Threshold. Wilson stated that "the principal feature of Lovecraft's work is an elaborate concocted myth which provides the supernatural element for his most admired stories. This myth assumes a race of outlandish gods and grotesque prehistoric peoples who are always playing tricks with time and space and breaking through into the contemporary world, usually somewhere in Massachusetts." The foregoing description could certainly be just as true, if not more so, of the stories In Lovecraft's Shadow. While Derleth's Cthulhu Mythos tales started out as affectionate attempts to "play the game" with his mentor, and then as respectful memorials to his style meant to "keep showing the flag" during the hard years of World War II, by his assertion that these were written in the same vein as H. P. Lovecraft, he may have inadvertently hurt Lovecraft's reputation. Wilson's condemnation almost certainly ended the chances of any further critical acceptance of Lovecraft, which is a pity since Wilson actually had kind things to say about much of Lovecraft, specifically "The Colour out of Time" and "The Shadow out of Time" and the letters, and the two named tales certainly rank among his best, if they are not indeed the best.
Towards the end Derleth seemed somewhat weary of Cthulhu and company. He told Felix Stefanile that The Mask of Cthulhu was "not worth going back to, unless it is for sentimental reasons... ." In many respects Derleth's Cthulhu Mythos stories are just that: a sentimental attempt to recapture the elements in Lovecraft's writing that appealed to him, and by writing stories like Lovecraft he was somehow keeping Lovecraft alive.
It was not through his own fiction that Derleth succeeded in keeping Lovecraft alive, but through the publishing house he founded with Donald Wandrei which has outlived both of its founders and continues today with an innovative and controversial publishing program. S. T. Joshi has continued the history of Arkham House presented in Thirty Years of Arkham House (reprinted here in its entirety) and has updated the bibliographic listing from the former book with a complete listing of all Arkham House books [including some forthcoming titles]. Joshi's accessment of the tenure of the late James Turner is of particular interest, since it was on Turner's watch that Arkham House published its corrected edition of Lovecraft's fiction. While many long-time readers objected to Turner's direction, many of his selections made the New York Times "Notable Books of the Year" list, and one was even a selection of the Book of the Month Club!
Comparing Sixty Years of Arkham House with some remarks made in H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, we can see that Joshi has mellowed his position considerably. In his HPL biography he charged that Arkham House contributed to the ghettoization of the weird genre. Here we see Derleth praised, not only for preserving Lovecraft's work, but also for printing the work of Clark Ashton Smith (thus giving him a desperately needed financial assist, as well as providing him with a sense of accomplishment). Derleth's roles in the resurrection of William Hope Hodgson and the discovery of Ramsey Campbell are properly singled out for praise.
A comparison with Sheldon Jaffrey's Horrors and Unpleasantries is perhaps unavoidable, but while Joshi gives brief critical commentaries on each book, he has wisely avoided much of the anecdotal information which Jaffrey provided, since much of the latter was rather hilariously incorrect. One especially welcome feature of Joshi's book is the listing of reprints of Arkham House titles, although there are a few significant omissions. However, this is not a history of Arkham House. Such a volume would involve significant research in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin archives, plus whatever material remains at Arkham House itself, and because of the controversial and litigious nature of that history, it would probably not be publishable by Arkham House in a candid and unbiased format. This is a shame, for such a volume could well be tremendously fascinatingand valuable.
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F U HAMSTER
tuc biscuit
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did the thought cross your mind with this thread?
Workin on it.
StickFigure
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637 times to date
Not often enough 
G
Gambino
Guest
fuck, i just did it twice...what could have been.
G
Gambino
Guest
DIVISION said:
Losing your conscience is an incredibly good feeling
