Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown Page #6

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of southernEurope and western Asia

for the most part, Lovecraft kept these views to himself

knowing full well that his friends and correspondents did not share his views

it wasn't long before his fiction give voice to these demons

Red Hook is a maze of hybrid squalor

near the ancient waterfront opposite Governor's Island

From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence

the blasphemies of a hundred dialects assail the sky

Policemen despair of order or reform

and seek rather to erect barriers protecting the outside world

from the contagion

I don't think you can ever curlywhat people think or believe with what they write

or at least I don't think you can do it on the one to one basis so beloved

of literary scholarsacademics and amateurpsychologists

for modern standards there is plenty of racism in Mark Twain

there is plenty of racism in Edgar Rice Burroughs, there is plenty of sexism in Edgar Rice Burroughs

you could thought those works were belongings to that time

what I believe that, it's essentially a fossil record of what a gentleman

of New England would think at the time

it's very very easy to look at Lovecraft and go, ok well

you know "Cthulhu" means the female genitalia

or all of these outsiders were really Jews or blacks

or you know, this is what the batrachian thing is all about, it's a cunningly disguised racism

he did however made a overly racist statement toward some groups and,

that certainly no surprise back in the 20s and 30s,

and it's too bad, I mean that doesn't make it right, but I just don't think you can take it seriously

it will be funny if we were not so objection, and to a certain understand it still is funny what it is even though it is completelyobjectionable

the sheltered character who took a long long time to grow

or you can say never grow up, that isn't true

and so is that reacting in adolescence fashion

to the streams of people who flooded the street in Brooklyn in "Red Hook" Brooklyn

and I think when he refer to himself as an unassimilatedalien

I think he understood that when he was in New York on some level he understood despite all these detestations

that New York worked

you know, despite his perceptionof it, its horrid chaotic sass pool, it were something that worked

he didn't work

it became clear to his friends that Lovecraft's exile in New York

was leading to a breakdown

some even feared a suicide attempt

help came from Lovecraft's aunts, Lilian and Annie

who found a small home for their nephew back in the safety of Providence

Sonia offered to buy the house for him, but this was not New York

in Providence propriety wouldreign

if Lovecraft could not support his wife, he would distance himself instead

in April of 1926, Lovecraft returned to his beloved city

He was released from Brooklyn and he went back to his immense to his almost unimaginably immense relief to Providence

that summer of 1926 was the start of Lovecraft's riches period

it started with an idea he had outlined during those fearful days in New York

an idea which became the most notable addition to Lovecraft's fictional universe

the story of Lovecraft, the first one I read was "The Call of Cthulhu", like most everyone, I would imagine

and it just struck me because it was an combination of cosmology and anthropology and horror that was all melded into one

George Gammel Angell, professor emeritus ofSemtic languages

at Brown University

is mysteriously murdered on the streets of Providence

sometime earlier, Angell had come into possession of a troubling clay sculpture

it represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline

but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers

a scaly, rubbery-looking body,prodigious claws

on hind and fore feet,and long, narrow wings behind

the description of the monster is probably better seen on paper

than it would be visualized

there's a thing about Lovecraft, all his creatures are really interesting

when you read them because your imagination starts to work on it

and you keep it amorphous and disgusting with the seafood variety that H P Lovecraft describes

I mean that he must have something about fish

really bothered him, you know squid and octopus and stuff like that

Angell's investigations of the graven image are taken up by his grand nephew

here is this guy, whose always, his eccentric uncle died and he was looking through all his papers and

as I did when Lin Carter died it made it kind of a chore

but you never know what kind of good issue you gonna find and he sees all these crazy things: What the hell is he into?

when you read it's sort of an incredibly clumsy story

here is a lump of this and here is some newspaper reports

and here is a it's sort of a part journalism and it's almost anecdote like, and it doesn't really have a plot

it's assembled in fragments, in a very interesting way and also a modernist way

what that technique does, is to suggest an aura of mystery in itself

and before long his intuitive and before long his expecting

the secret agents of Cthulhu to come and get him and

why is he even writing these things since he doesn't want anybody else to know about it

it's about that reoccurring thing in Lovecraft

that fear of science or just human knowledge

going where it doesn't necessarily go ofaccidentally recovering things that

either it was not much point knowing them or knowing them could lead to our destruction

the nephew endeavors to connect the reports of vivid dreams across the world

dark practices in the bayous of New Orleans

and the discovery of a corpse city by a band of innocent sailors

there lay great Cthulhu and his hordes

hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last,?after cycles incalculable

the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive

"Cthulhu" is almost like the Paul Revere of all these deities, you know,

[Paul Revere ]

or the King Arthur waiting to come back, you know and take over

he's just a general evil that existed in another place

but it's like Christianity in the sense

in sense of our creators he's our destroyer

he's kind of another version of the devil I suppose, except thatslimier

as elaborate as this story was

the spelling and the pronunciation of the ancient names was even more so

Cthulhu

of course, the association of the name this is my fourth language

Poppy Z Brite makes fun of the way our pronounce "Cthulhu", but I don't know another way

look at the way Lovecraft tries to pronounce it I can't pronounce it

many of his colleagues apparently didn't know how to pronounce it, or pronounced it wrongly

and, so finally in a letter in 1934, he tells a colleague, well, it's really meant to be two syllables

you are supposed to put your tongue at the roof of your mouth and cough it out like "Clu-lu"

but he says, you know the name is entirely alien name

not design to be pronounced by human vocal course

the word is only a symbol for something that is entirely beyond the ability for humans to make the sounds

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