I doubt it. The sight or smell of seafood made Lovecraft sick. People standing around large quantities of raw fish is not something he’d want to dwell on. From what I’ve read, Lovecraft’s prejudice was largely against what he saw as mixing or leaving their proper place. The Spanish were fine and noble as long as they did Spanish things in Spanish places. But, when they abandoned their old ways for new ones or moved to new places, there were problems. Note how the breeding of humans with other things always leads to offspring which are shunned and degenerate.
It’s extremely important to remember what Lovecraft was. He’d lead a sheltered life, raised by overprotective aunts. He was very shy and had poor social skills. He preferred his friends who lived far away and could only interact with him through letters. He studied the past and preferred it to the present. His writing is full of archaic spellings. He was very fond of cats.
IMHO-Lovecraft’s prejudices were taught to him by his aunts. They were reinforced by all the old books he read. He never interacted enough with the world to learn that these things weren’t true. Questioning his bigotry would have meant questioning his aunts. Lovecraft never developed enough as an independent human being to do that.
Back To The OP
I found a copy of The Hardhat’s Storybook by Al Capp. My best friend is a huge Lil Abner fan. Lil Abner is bright, and sweet, and wholesome. I’d heard stories of Capp being an angry and bitter man, but I’d never seen it in his work. The Hardhat’s Storybook is filled with rage at everything Capp found left-winged or liberal. I can’t think of a way to describe it that won’t sound like hyperbole.
In later years, signs of Capp’s real feelings appeared in Lil Abner (fer example the protest group SWINE- Students Wildly Ignorant about Nearly Everything). But the vast majority of the strips are bright and wholesome. I still don’t understand it. How could a man so utterly consumed with hate and anger produce Lil Abner?
I was put off when I found out Phillip K. Dick was anti-choice wrt abortion since so many of his stories are so progressive about other issues. Not put off enough to stop reading him, of course (by then I had already fallen totally in love with his writing), but it was a shocker. Though, after reading a few biographies of him, I think his anti-choicery has a lot more to do with specific circumstances relating to his own life (his wife aborted a fetus he helped create against his wishes) than any pre-existing ideology. His mother was an early radical feminist so it’s conceivable that he was not against abortion before his wife had one.
I still can’t stand “The Pre-Persons” (story he wrote about the “abortion” of 12-year-olds) though. It’s WAY too heavy-handed; I’d think the same thing about a story whose politics I agreed with.
As a child, I loved Steve Allen and “The Tonight Show”. Just about the time that rock and roll became my life, he started bad mouthing it and turned into a real curmudgeon. I pretty much lost respect for him. Now, before posting to this thread, I did a bit of Googling and found these wonderful Steve Allen quotes (he could’ve been a Doper).
How could such a cool guy simultaneously be such an irrational old grouch?
When the father of the artist Stanislav Szukalski died, Szukalski claimed the body, took it to his studio, and dissected it. When people asked him how he studied anatomy, he’d reply “My father taught me.”
Some folks are artists, but Szukalski was hardcore.
As does the fact that Lovecraft’s father died in a mental hospital.
Re Cats
I haven’t found conclusive proof yet, but I strongly suspect tha Lovecraft used cats as substitutes for human relatives-either having a large number of cats in his house or keeping one or two cats who lived and ate in a style superior to Lovecraft’s.
Sometimes I get a little worked up when I hear, say, Tim Robbins go off on politics. I tell myself “Ok, that does it. He’ll never see one more cent of *my * entertainment dollar…Oh, hey look! The new Shawshank Redemption Special Edition DVD is on sale for $14.95!”
Buber’s “I and Thou” made quite an impression on me when I was young and impressionable, and then I read a book called “The Other Buber” that showed how little his personal life reflected his “theology of dialogue”. I read and teach him with a strong caveat in mind now.
I am political centrist, and in this latest round of political histrionics over Iraq, the Patriot Act, etc., I found I lost respect for the wacky extremes right and left – unfortunately, the entertainment industry is almost exclusely the domain of the wacky left. I can’t watch some shows or movies when I see certain names attached.
I read Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres and thought it was one of the best novels I had read in a long time. I eagerly dove in to her next book, Moo, when it began to dawn on me - every male character is a jerk (unless they are gay) and every woman was either an unrecognized hero or a victim of abuse at the hand of some man.
I then read some more of her writings and discovered that she is a shrill charicature of the farthest left of the left wing. She is more extreme than Rush Limbaugh, only on the other side. I have very little respect for people like this, and haven’t read anything of hers since I discovered this. And I am a liberal.
For more than three decades I’ve been a big fan of S.J. Perelman, perhaps the most brilliant humorist the U.S. (or any other country, for that matter) has ever produced. So when I read Dorothy Herrmann’s biography of him a few years ago, I was dismayed to learn what a complete asshole he was to his family. I think it’s the only book I’ve ever read that afterward I wished I hadn’t. I would rather have continued to think only good of the poor man.
(Coincidentally, his son-in-law was one of my college professors, although we never spoke about Perelman.)
Hey, Doc – I was curious about the book you mentioned, but my google-fu is insufficient. Was that title perhaps similar, but not quite the one you’d posted? Thanks much!
Quick update: perhaps you meant The Hardhat’s Bedtime Story Book ? The item is out of print, no reviews, so I’m not sure if the book is the bitter commentary you’d cited…?
I was sorry to hear that **Albert Einstein ** confined his brilliant wife to a life of housewife, when she was deeply unhappy in that role, and primary (only) caregiver of their mentally retarded son. When his wife died, he put the son in a mental home and never visited him again. Hearing that shattered the image of Einstein as the friendly brilliant professor.
I never cared much for **Frank Sinatra’s ** music and acting, but I disliked him even more when I heard he was chummy with the Mafia.
Many years ago, I read Bing Crosby’s son’s “Daddy Dearest” scribe. I have no idea what – of any of it – is true, but I find it damn close to impossible to sit through a Bing Crosby film since. It does make the annual viewings of Holiday Inn and White Christmas a totally different experience. Well, that and knowing Danny Kaye was gay.
Heh–one of the recurring references in Middlemarch itself is about how noble it would be to be married to “Mr. Milton,” to selflessly support him in his work by being his reader and writer–that’s as in John Milton, brilliant, blind author of Paradise Lost, etc., and a real shit to his daughters who did just that.
I’d say Anne Rice. After she put up a rant about fan fiction and started attacking fansites, I thought she was a really defensive person.
Then the Amazon review of Blackwood Farm (? It was one of the last two books she wrote in the VC, don’t remember which one) came out, where she went off the handle on how she didn’t need an editor and blah blah blah and then wanting to do a book on Jesus just makes me think she’s a bit kooky or something.
That’s it. In Capp’s mind anybody on welfare of any kind was a lazy, greedy, lying moocher. Anybody protesting something Capp supports is a strung-out teenager living in a dream world. People who don’t love America should be forcibly expelled, or drafted and deployed in the most dangerous place possible. Anybody who disagrees with Capp’s views is either a sleazebag who is aware that liberal ideas are unworkable but is lying in order to gain money and power, or is a deluded idiot. Imagine somebody yelling “Why do you hate America?” as he shakes with rage.
Now, contrast that with Lil Abner’s sorrow upon learning that his mammy and pappy have become trapped in the priceless Burpinyour vase which will be returned to it’s native India in just a few days. Or Shadrack Throwback (whose pappy taught him that all women are evil, and raised him in the swamps) learning about women from Moonbeam McSwine.
“So ma’am, what kinds of things does ya likes?”
“Ah likes not to wash my hair. Ah likes not to wash my face. Ah likes not to wash my hands. But, mostly, ah likes not to wash.”
(Shadrack smiles, very pleased that his first attempt at flirting is going so well)
“Well ma’am, not washin is a powerful innerestin subject i’nt it?”