I’m at the IGSS Conference in Boulder, so this week is just a brief one. Most culture war content is dumb, but just for fun, let’s uncancel people! J. R. R. Tolkien The case against: a fantasist who retreated into an imaginary world in the face of British decline. The Lord of the Rings is very, very long and not necessarily very good. Also, aren’t Orcs a bit racist?
Oct 1, 2022·edited Oct 1, 2022Liked by David Hugh-Jones
My father considered puck of pooks hill and the hobbit required childhood books.
Burn the lot. My generation were reading harry potter to their babies in utero. She can go hang as well for now she’s cancelled and deboonked. I’m not bothered by any of it. We get cast-off books for my son from our wealthy creationist ungovernable Telegram-devout neighbours. The books explicitly do not cover evolution. I’m fine with that too. Fun, cheap, or free’s what I’m about. So I appreciate the light heartedness and affectionate nostalgia of this article. Triple barrelled telyn deires, juicy wheel included.
I've disliked Kipling ever since reading Stalky & Co. In one chapter, Stalky and his friends think it's a terrific jape to kill someone's pet cat so they can hide it under the floorboards of a rival boy's bedroom. Only a psychopath would think that's admirable behaviour. Apart from that, all of his books exude a certain smugness that I find off-putting.
As for Tolkien and Lovecraft - they haven't been cancelled. The fact that one can find many people online accusing them of racism doesn't seem to have negatively affected their popularity or status. Amazon recently spent $1,000,000,000 on a TV series associated with Tolkien, and Netflix just released a TV series (Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities) with two episodes that are adaptations of Lovecraft stories.
My father considered puck of pooks hill and the hobbit required childhood books.
Burn the lot. My generation were reading harry potter to their babies in utero. She can go hang as well for now she’s cancelled and deboonked. I’m not bothered by any of it. We get cast-off books for my son from our wealthy creationist ungovernable Telegram-devout neighbours. The books explicitly do not cover evolution. I’m fine with that too. Fun, cheap, or free’s what I’m about. So I appreciate the light heartedness and affectionate nostalgia of this article. Triple barrelled telyn deires, juicy wheel included.
I've disliked Kipling ever since reading Stalky & Co. In one chapter, Stalky and his friends think it's a terrific jape to kill someone's pet cat so they can hide it under the floorboards of a rival boy's bedroom. Only a psychopath would think that's admirable behaviour. Apart from that, all of his books exude a certain smugness that I find off-putting.
As for Tolkien and Lovecraft - they haven't been cancelled. The fact that one can find many people online accusing them of racism doesn't seem to have negatively affected their popularity or status. Amazon recently spent $1,000,000,000 on a TV series associated with Tolkien, and Netflix just released a TV series (Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities) with two episodes that are adaptations of Lovecraft stories.