Hey there! Welcome to That Dang Dad, my
name is Phil and I hope you brought your
swim trunks cuz we're about to
cannonball into fun...
Last couple weeks,
we've talked about some kind of heavy
kind of deep dive philosophy stuff so I
thought this week we'd kind of switch it
up a little bit... I want to talk about
everyone's favorite racist uncle: HP
Lovecraft. Now if you somehow have
managed to avoid every single book and
graphic novel and video game and heavy
metal album cover that's been inspired
by his stuff, I wanted to give you a quick
recap. So Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an author who wrote short stories between like 1914
and 1930s-ish. You probably know his
most famous creation: a giant ancient
tentacle faced ocean-dwelling god named
Cthulhu. Now I pronounce it KuhTHOOloo, but I've
also heard it pronounced K'tooloo and
according to Lovecraft himself, human
beings don't really have the proper
mouth architecture to actually pronounce
his name as it's pronounced in real life
but according to him, if you were going
to do your best to do it it would be
something like KLOOLOO or something
like that. So Lovecraft mainly dealt with
themes of existential dread and
forbidden knowledge. Kind of a typical
Lovecraft story would be somebody opens
a book or goes to an old temple that
they shouldn't have gone to and they
catch just this little glimpse of
something
unfathomably old and mysterious and
ancient and it usually drives them
insane... we've all been there.
but anyway I've read just about every
single Lovecraft story, the ones that he
did in collaboration with other people,
the ones that his friends wrote in
tribute to him, and the ones that his
fans have written you know who've gone
on to become great horror authors and
fantasy authors and things like that and
I wanted to tell you a little bit about
why I am so just drawn to his work. So
first things first let's be clear up
front: HP Lovecraft was a big ol' racist...
not just in his personal life; it has
influenced his writing as well. It's
actually pretty difficult to separate
the art from the artist in this case
because his antipathy towards "savage
races" informed a lot of the things that
he wrote... its #problematic for
sure. I'm able to look past it I don't
blame other people that aren't.
Just wanted to say that up front.
Anyway, a lot of times when pop
culture wants to make something
Lovecraftian, they usually just add like
a tentacle monster or they name it
something like Abzathoth or Cthugalu
or something like that, and to me of
this kind of misses what makes Lovecraft
scary... it's not tentacles and weird names,
it is scale and scope.
I want to take a passage from a Lovecraft story I
called Nyarlathotep. The narrator says:
For me Lovecraft has this uncanny
ability to capture things that are
extremely big and extremely old and
extremely unknowable... and this causes
what Martin Heidegger would call "angst".
Steven Asma writing about Martin
Heidegger says that for Heidegger:
So the obvious question is who would
like that why would anybody like that
and seek it out? For me it's because a
nameless horror never loses its shock
value. Y'know werewolves vampires
and zombies, those are all scary kind of
the first time you encounter them or
when you encounter them unexpectedly but
over time you learn the rules and you
learn the tricks and the tropes and you
kind of know what to expect... But what if
there are no tricks, what if there were
no rules? What if that noise you hear
isn't some goblin in your basement but
it's the
barest echo of some chittering
nameless shadow from beyond space and
time? When Lovecraft is at his best,
there's just no recovery from his
nightmares... you only see just a sliver, just
enough to know that you could not
possibly fathom the truth, just enough
for your mind to fixate on what it COULD
be... and nothing is scarier than the
horrors that you reserve for yourself.
So what scares you? Is it something
cosmic or something more
conventional? Feel free to shoot me a
comment & let me know... also I covet your
likes and subscriptions so if you like
what I'm doing please slap a whole bunch
of buttons on the UI until I get that
burst of dopamine that I've been craving
so much... Anyway I really appreciate you
watching...
s w e e t  d r e a m s...
