World Fantasy Award Bust

Yeah, sorry. I am doing this.

Late to the party, as usual.

I was looking up some stuff about Peter Straub, because Ghost Story keeps getting better and I'm thinking I might want to read more of this guy, and I noticed that he had won the World Fantasy Award for his book 'Koko'. And after my initial excitement I was reminded of all the outcry concerning the World Fantasy Award bust, a little while back.

Let me say first that I'm a troubled and isolated individual and very much an introvert, so even the notion of coming out of my door and viewing the world in all its exotic variety is very much abhorrent to me. And because of this and of growing up in a circle of friends and family members that is practically exclusively white, I don't really come into contact with racism often or even at all.

(But then this isn't really about racism for me. This is entirely about identity dismissal.)

So then, with my extremely qualified criteria for giving my opinions on this:

What do I think of the doing away with the bust of Lovecraft as the physical representation for the World Fantasy Award, in response to public outcry against Lovecraft's racism, present in his work and personal views?

I think it's a silly response.

Lovecraft is dead and though he definitely had more than a few racist tones in his work and writings, he apparently lamented his racism later in life.
Regardless of if any of what he did was despicable or not... We are so many influences rolled up into one I keep finding it stunning when people show such a short-sighted, unwilling effort to see how others have come to be what they are or were. They focus on the aspects and then stamp a seal of disapproval and outright condemnation on the whole.

What I'm saying is that he was human and he fucked up and he has since lamented and guess what; he's dead and gone. Gone a while. A little over 80 years in fact. So really quite dead. So I'm not going to spit in the face of his memory and label him as just this one aspect of the identity that he was. Unthinkingly dismiss all his troubles and woes and joys and hates.

But hey, you do you and just label anyone however you want to. Dismiss them and be just as bigoted as the person you think you hate. But the truth is he didn't know you for you and you can't know him for who he really was.
Be unfeeling, unsympathetic, closedminded and above all, stand strong for your righteous beliefs, all bubbled up into the safe cocoon of your own selfish, warping hate.

Ahem.

There was some talk of a Cthulhu statue for a while, which would have been indescribably awesome, (see my cthulhu-plague marine to the right, partially modelled on Bill Nighy's Davy Jones)  but I figure they couldn't get far away enough from "The Toxic Legacy of Lovecraft" with that. so here we have it then... The replacement.

An ugly tree.

The reasons for doing away with the bust might be blinkeredly focused on just one aspect of Lovecraft's character, like a bad case of tunnel vision,

but to be honest I never liked that singularly ugly bust of his face. So regardless of the reasons that prompted it, I do applaud the change.

But you could've at least given us something more inspired than this. Something more representative of the imagination and dedication inherent in the act of creating this type of art.

Sure, using the face of a particular author for a specific genre in literature was never going to stand the test of time, like a bust of Mozart would for music, but I'm rather thinking that a random-ass statue of a sun in what looks like a bonsai tree won't either. 

As an afterthought.

It's the same sentiment about which language the books are in. For now, all the contestants need to have their entry having been published in the english language or have to have been translated to it.

But calling it the World Fantasy Award seems very odd by those criteria, if you rule out the books not published in English. It's typical western hubris. Our own little centre of the world.

You know, that'll have to change and eventually there'll be an uproar about that as well.

Because times keep changing. Our beliefs, language, cultures and religions are uprooted and outdated and they will change with the times to conform to the predominant cultural zeitgeist of the moment. And in 10-thousand years there will be but one race on this earth and we'll all belong to it, and they'll look at this time and they'll shake their multiple green heads and grey flippers (for fotosynthesis and to blend in with the rest of the fishes, respectively. Obviously.) in bafflement, shrug their blobroxus, continue on with their day and forget all about this ridiculous rage of a bunch of humanoids about an even deader humanoid's bust and whether or not it was inappropriate to use his face to celebrate the act of imaginative writing.

Or so I can hope.