re: lovecraft, some transcribed letters from before his death
lovecraft died kind of young and was turning around on an incredible amount of what people consider his ugly views as he walked toward death. i really think if he had lived a full life that he would have continued to grow, and it really bears mentioning that one of his chief regrets was how little he grew when he wrote some of his most regressive ideas.
a lot of lovecraft's stuff is still interesting despite being informed by his racism, xenophobia, reactionary politics, etc. while you can find a lot of those things informing his work, people still resonate with it despite that and there's a lot more to his work than the worst of him you see in it. perhaps, really, the value of someone's work is much more ineffable than trying to sum them up in a political bubble!
i guess his works, as they are, aren't really suitable for a modern climate without some added contextualization, but... like, what won't be as the times change? a lot of history's most beloved thinkers did some fucking wretched shit, really! whether to tarnish or celebrate shouldn't be the question, but rather how to present it going forward so that those experiencing now get the sum of the context. lovecraft wrote some interesting fiction, and you should
probably know he was racist and that xenophobia was one of the most latent fears he tapped into manipulating to spook you. one might argue his great understanding of a fear of the unknown would have made him rather empathetic in late life, had he gotten one - who knows! no work is definitive, and if something moves people, it should probably be examined -
not shelved or silenced - for better or worse.
- -
also, re: the ubiquity of 'cancelling' in general - it beckons so much to something like when socrates was found guilty of corrupting minds and executed. it's just culture trying to silence provoking thought, a lot of the time. great minds get shot down as much as turgid idiots and for just as petulant reasons. i hate that we no longer evaluate meaning in someone's work, and we instead rather work to decide which side of history they're on to determine whether they're allowed to even present ideas. everyone is so vapidly obsessed with making sure what is presented now is adequate for the future that our present is eroding to dust and we're losing the capacity to understand the worth in fucking anything. all value is decided by the creeping, motherless urge of some useless culture's political agenda.
what the fuck ever happened to self-determination? the entire political spectrum in the united states from far left to center to far right has turned so fucking far from enabling agency, identity, and expression that it reeks of the greatest evil. i can get along with and make friends with queer leftists, arguably "my people," from france, poland, brazil, chile - seems like anywhere but the UK and the US. something is fucking wrong with this country.