Quote of the Week (August 1-7, 2010)

The quotation below is from a letter by H. P. Lovecraft to Elizabeth Toldridge. It was used as an epigraph in A Specter Is Haunting Texas, which novel I wish I had read years ago as it does not hold up well aesthetically. It makes for tough slogging now, tougher certainly than Fritz Leiber ought to be, even though it portrays the state/empire of Texas exactly as I picture it, attitudes forever entrenched by Southern/cowboy testosterone and fear, unchanged even by atomic war.

One thing I'll say for labour (the British Labour Party); and that is, that it isn't as offensive as the corresponding mutatory force which now threatens culture in America. I refer to the force of business as a dominating motive in life, and a persistent absorber of the strongest creative energies of the American people. This intensive commercialism is a force more basically dangerous and anti-cultural than labour ever has been, and threatens to build up an arrogant fabric which it will be very hard to overthrow or modify with civilized ideas.

     --H. P. Lovecraft, 1929