Before leaving for China I threw into my portmanteau the new Library of America edition of H. P. Lovecraft: Tales and have been dipping into it ever since. Here is the inimitable Lovecraft on New York City:
Of course it was just not New York that Lovecraft could not stomach:
“a tangle of material and spiritual putrescence from which the blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky . . . I saw the yellow, squint-eyed people of that city, robed horribly in orange and red, and dancing insanely to the pounding of fevered kettle-drums, and the clatter of obscene crotala, and the maniacal moaning of muted horns whose ceaseless dirges rose and fell undulantly like the waves of an unhallowed ocean of bitumen.”Wow! An “ocean of bitumen” is bad enough, but an “unhallowed” ocean of bitumen? That’s really bad. Anyhow, I am willing to bet dimes to donuts you do not know what a “crotala" is. I had to go the 20-plus volume Oxford Unabridged Dictionary to find out. A “crotale” is “A type of castanet used mainly in Latin-American music.” And far be it from me to quibble with Lovecraft, but the plural of crotale would appear to be crotalum, and not crotala, as he has it.
Of course it was just not New York that Lovecraft could not stomach:
"I hated the mocking moon, the hypocritical plain, the festering mountain . . . Everything seemed to me tainted with a loathsome contagion, and inspired by a noxious alliance with distorted hidden powers."I could not have put it better myself. But I must wonder: just what is “the hypocritical plain”? Was it just pretending to be flat? Anyhow, it was not just the Earth he was revolted by. He also loathed:
“unknown spheres and powers . . . the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim.”I had hoped that this new edition would shed some light on that much-reviled occult text the Necronomicon, which Lovecraft used as source material, but it now appears its author, the unspeakably vile Abdul Alhazred, (see his Autobiography if you got the stomach for it) was devoured by a flesh-eating demon in broad daylight in the copperware market of Damascus and is thus no longer available for interviews. I might add that Abdul Alhazred was not, repeat not, a follower of the Greek neoplatonist philosopher Proclus (410 - 485 A.D.), despite what some woefully uninformed people have claimed. For a thorough demolition of this grotesquely absurd assertion see Proclus: Neo-Platonic Philosophy and Science.
