felt compelled to read a bio of H P Lovecraft. I chose not to go with what I gather is the most scholarly, by S T Joshi, not willing to invest in the full seriousness, but went with one of those hacks on the back of Robert E Howard: L Sprague deCamp. I suppose it is largely competent. he is at least interested in his subject. too interested perhaps. he doesn't exactly defend HPL's racism and anti-semitism, but he tries to put that all in context. I get the point that it was a different world then, but that doesn't negate the virulence. it's such an unexamined virulance because HPL isn't even talking from experience. the Jews and Blacks he fustians about merge with those horrors and monsters he imagines in his stories. it's a keyed up intensity. that intensity is key to what is good about HPL, or Poe, or list of others. but not to ignore the loathesome shit. honestly, HPL's racism and anti-semitism are beyond the 'real world', they are an imagined conjuction of weirditudes. I think we have to accept that we all flop about in total confusion much of the time. so that even this egregiousness of HPL seems to bring light. I mean we feel enlightened now as compared to then, even the then of de Camp's book, 1975 (his disquisition on latent homosexuality seems like stone age flippy flop). that enlightenment we feel should be regarded as wispy. Lovecraft was a bit of a phlegm wad, but that was just an aspect of the complex human machine that wrote those strong desperate sories.