SlickRiptide

That's sort of the point I was making. The street runs in both directions without regard to whether it was intentional by one party and unintentional by the other. The standard still applies.

Yeah, I'm aware of the backgrounder and the problem is that it doesn't say any of those things that you said about the Petrovics. Maybe something on the original version of the website said that. I'm not sure if I'm motivated to dig through the Wayback looking for it, because if I found it, I would just have another reason to get started on Standard Lore Rant #4 about how the studio trashes and discards its own lore.

A screencap of the "info" link on Marrowsnap might prove interesting though. Maybe I'll make a new char and run through Bonefire to see it.

I haven't visited King's Row (I will now, though) so I'm not familiar with just how the "accent" is being portrayed on the new Skulls. However, I think that _eeek_ has the right of how it OUGHT to be portrayed.

Basically I'd steal a trick from both _A Clockwork Orange_ and _Firefly_ and have the lower echelon guys be speaking a patois of English and Slavic/Whatever with some completely made-up words to boot. If any group in CoH was going to be a Droogs analog, the Skulls are the group that fits the bill, IMO.

I do think we need to be able to see that the Skulls are a mix of immigrants and home-grown from the neighborhood. If they're all immigrants then it's not so much a gang problem as it is an invasion, unless we're saying that King's Row is like Chinatown or Little Italy. Is that what's intended?

Heh. They actually kept some of his original theme, what with the big boots and the goatee. Toss in that western belt and he's got a sort of a gaucho thing going, semi-sorta.

I wish I had taken video of the motherships flying around at the end of beta. I think that they have never been seen in Live.

I just clicked one, worked for me.

The text clearly IS racist. The question is whether it has any redeeming value beyond that. Since I originally read this story as a young person and found value in it, I believe that it does have some value beyond being a rant by HPL on immigrants.

"There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I have told you of The Street."

I disagree with your assessment. The story is contained in that final paragraph.

I'm asking whether a story can be divorced from its authors intentions. Unlike _Red Hook_, _The Street_ does not explicitly describe the interlopers as immigrants or foreign aside from describing them as "swart". If you removed those references, it could just as easily be the "white trash" of Innsmouth as be the "slant-eyed" men of Red Hook.

If the evil men of the story were just "men", would the story still be racist or is there simply no way to see the story outside of the context of HPL and his beliefs?

So if we remove the one word "swarthy" then the story is no longer racist?

Oh, and please don't pass judgement on my ability to "look for" this or that, and I'll extend you the same courtesy for your ideas.

Let me ask you this: If you knew nothing at all about Lovecraft and you read The Street with "virgin" eyes, would you still see "swart sinister men" as some kind of racist comment on the people moving into the neighborhood after the original inhabitants moved out?

Well, it seems pretty clear that Lovecraft's attitudes on these things were a lot more extreme than I had supposed, so I'm going to have to do some reading up on it all.

I just took a look on hplovecraft.com and I think this is the passage you were referring to earlier:

"The especially bizarre thing was that the artist had made his Africans look like white men—the limbs and quarters hanging about the walls of the shop were ghastly, while the butcher with his axe was hideously incongruous."

The picture is of a cannibal in his "butcher shop". Now, I suppose that this could be viewed in racist terms but at face value, it's notable as something queer, and from a plot standpoint it's something that helps explain why the old man might get the feelings that he says he gets from the picture.

HPL's racism seems pretty well established by now, so I wouldn't argue about this being an example but it seems to me that there's more to it than just a comment on inappropriate depictions of Africans.

Oh, I envy you that. Innsmouth is my absolute favorite HPL story, and I once (MANY long years ago) heard Ellison read one of his stories aloud at a Star Trek convention in Seattle back when they were still real sci-fi conventions and not media showcases. I guess I was 13 or 14, maybe. The story was "How's the Night Life on Kizalda", which was pretty funny, and quite risque for a young kid to listen to. People demanded that the lights be turned down, so as the facilities people scrambled to do that, Ellison ad-libbed this "story" about a killer who would walk into a bar, sit down next to his target, put an ice pick into his ear, and walk out. Amazing (and sardonic) delivery. I can appreciate how he might have read Lovecraft.

I just want to emphasize that I am not attempting to be combative with anyone. I find this all pretty fascinating so I appreciate the input and the discussion.

That story has a way of reminding me of a real-life experience I once had, driving randomly out in the countryside some 40 miles or so out of Seattle. The area is the foothills of the Cascades, where Interstate-90 crosses over Snoqualmie Pass and leads down the evergreen slopes of the mountains to the Issaquah plateau and on down to Lake Washington. (Geez, I'm starting to imagine how a Lovecraftian pastiche of this would sound, LMAO.)

My wife and I had taken some random roads out of Issasquah and out into the forest lands where the long roads were surrounded by nothing but forest and the occasional run-down gas station or convenience store. We became rather lost and attempted to retrace our route back to civilization when we made what felt at the time like a startling discovery.

The car came out of the forest into a cul-de-sac, with around six houses on it, no different in appearance than the sort of cul-de-sac you'd find in an ordinary suburban neighborhood, except that it was literally out in the middle of nowhere and there was no other neighborhood within miles of the place. It was unmarked and unnamed.

We drove into it, and a handful of youngsters, ages 8-12 probably, stopped what they were doing to watch us. A few adults likewise came out of their houses and stared as we slowly drove in, drove around the "sac" and then drove out again. There was an unmistakable air of hostility in those glances, and somehow a feeling of something... "unwholesome" is a dramatic word but that's how it struck me.

This is the point where a Lovecraftian protagonist would have stopped for directions or begging a gallon of gasoline and found himself in the middle of something dark and unexpected. As it was, we drove on out without stopping or asking directions and we managed to find our way back to the main highway before the tank reached empty.

It turned out that it was not just me that was creeped out. My wife told me afterwards that she was pretty unsettled by the whole experience and that she too had felt that there was something not quite normal out there in that neighborhood in the woods. Not for any good reason, mind you. Maybe the unexpected transposition of suburban and deep rural combined with the obvious distrust of the inhabitants was all it took to engender feelings of surreality and "discombobulation". I don't know. I just know that I've never felt the urge to go looking for that place again, despite knowing intellectually that it was probably just a normal, if strangely placed, neighborhood of parents who would be shirking their duties if they were NOT suspicious of random people driving out of the forest and into their territory.

Not exactly life imitating art but certainly it taught me that you don't have to look into exotic locales in order to find the weird and the unexpected.

So your opinion is that the descriptions in The Horror at Red Hook do not serve the ends of the story and are simply gratuitous?

Yeah, that was pretty ugly. I've never read "Herbert West" for no particularly good reason, so I'd never seen that before. I'll have to take a look at the essay you were quoting there, it looks interesting.

I had to do a double-take when you mentioned this story, honestly. I just now went and re-read it on hplovecraft.com, since it had been a while for me. It was pretty much as I remembered it, except for the one bit about "the soul that was bequeathed through a thousand and a half years of Anglo-Saxon freedom, justice, and moderation." I probably wouldn't have paid any attention to that except for this conversation.

I don't know. Are we just going to say that every reference to "swart men" is a racist reference to "non-anglos"? That this is a metaphor for the decay of American civilization due to the influx of lesser people? Maybe it IS such a metaphor. I've certainly never read it that way but I suppose it would be easy to do so.

This is a story about life, aging, inevitable decay, and the spirit that lives within a place despite or because of all that goes on in its environs, good or evil. Reducing it to a racist rant may possibly be correct analysis; I wouldn't necessarily argue against it after reading it again. However, doing so robs it of a lot of its magic and meaning. That is a bit of a sad thing, IMO.

Okay, I actually laughed out loud at that.