BABYNAMES Matilda Archibald Benjamin Katherine Theodore
CHILDHOODNICKNAMES Tilly Archie Benji Kat Teddy
NAMESFOR A JOBINTERVIEW Maddie Arch Ben Kate Ted
NAMESFOR A REBELLIOUSTEENAGER Madison Ash Benny K Spyder
PENNAMES M. K. A. W. B. R. R. K-C T
WRONGNAMESCALLEDOUT BY A BARISTA Melinda Arnold Ken Cameron Todd
NAMES TO USEWHENORDERING AT A COFFEESHOP TO AVOIDTHEBARISTACALLINGOUTTHEWRONGNAME Emily Ben Ben Emily Ben
NAMESACCORDING TO THENATIONALBIRDINGASSOCIATION OF AMERICAREGISTRY Matilda Archibald Benjamin S. Keymore, Associate Member, Expert Trail Guide, Golden Feather Recipient 2021 Katherine Theodore
NAMESFORPARENTHOOD Mrs. M Mr. A Mr. Ben Caroline’s Mom Sir
I smell them before I see them. Even as I’m surrounded by the bustling city life of Vienna, the smell of horses is unmistakable. It’s the smell of my childhood — a smell I’ve known my whole life. One whiff and I am back on the farm in Arkansas, a little girl in a big western saddle. Another deep breath, and I am soaring over jumps at a Los Angeles ranch. But I am not on the farm or the ranch now; I am in the heart of one of Europe’s great capitals. I look down to see straw strewn among the cobblestones as though I have slipped through time. I’m close, I think, as the smell gets stronger. Suddenly, I hear a neigh.
Prized by emperors, the Lipizzaner breed has been the glittering, shimmering diamond of the equine world — and, more specifically, Vienna — for centuries. Many consider them to be the perfect horses, with their docile temperaments, ability to concentrate and small builds that enhance their agility. But they are also beautiful. Bearing coats so white they seem to glow, Lipizzaners have long Roman noses, strong, arched necks and muscular shoulders. They are like beholding Pegasus, if he had shed his wings and come to live among mere mortals.
And just as the mortal Bellerophon needed the goddess Athena’s secret golden bridle to tame Pegasus, so have the secrets of training the ethereal Lipizzaners been passed down through generations of riders at Vienna’s Spanish Riding School. For nearly half a millennium, since the Habsburg monarchy established the school in the 16th century, people have come from all over the world to enter the temple of the art of classical riding and behold the legendary Lipizzaner stallions in their gleaming golden bridles.
I am here because some say the temple has fallen, that the school is dying.
As one stands alone in a shadowy corridor of the Hofburg Palace in the center of Vienna, it is not hard to imagine the Stallburg stables as a graveyard. I say “alone” because I am the only one standing — pressed against the stable’s thick glass windows watching the tamed pegasi — but behind me a steady stream of people passes, casting fleetingly interested glances at the sleek, white heads of the Lipizzaner horses who make their home there.
Some passersby stop to stare at the screen installed on the palace wall, where footage plays of the horses prancing and leaping in the regular shows put on by the school. A few even pause long enough to snap a photo of the horses on their phones before continuing to dinner. Few seem to know or care that they are in the presence of equine royalty. All of the horses that populate the stables before me are descendants of six stallions from the 18th century — their lineage as protected as that of kings. And yet the people carry on, their mobile conversations growing blessedly quieter as they depart, only to be instantly replaced by the rumble of an engine as a car passes, then the softer, yet still unwelcome, whizz of electric scooters.
Horses’ time at the center of modern culture is long past, as is the need to know how to ride one, classically or otherwise. Moreover, our views on how we interact with animals and their roles in our lives have changed. Modernization brings new criteria and values to the question of what elements of our heritage we preserve, though our past remains vital to the connectedness we experience within cities, communities and cultures.
On March 12, 2023, Alfons Dietz, a rider who formerly trained at the school, created a petition on Change.org. The petition came five days after chief rider Andreas Hausberger was dismissed from his position at the Spanish Riding School and banned from the premises. Management claims “misconduct,” but it didn’t take long for a letter to surface, allegedly penned by Hausberger before his dismissal and addressed to the school’s new CEO, Alfred Hudler. The letter claimed that the school’s stallions were overworked and that the school’s esteemed caliber of horsemanship had declined. The writer demanded Hudler change his business tactics or resign.
The mysterious letter is only the most recent form of complaint, however. In my bag, I have a heavily highlighted and scrawled-upon copy of an audit conducted on the school by the Austrian Court of Audit in 2021. It covers the years from 2014 to 2019, when the school had its first female director, Elisabeth Guertler. Known for managing Vienna’s iconic and highly lucrative Hotel Sacher, Guertler was appointed to transform the school into a business following its privatization in 2001. No longer would riders and veterinarians run the school; the Spanish Riding School now needed someone who could make the school money. And Guertler did — at great cost.
A year after her appointment in 2007, Guertler increased the school’s schedule of performances — each a 70-minute spectacle of jumps, leaps and perfectly controlled movements executed by an octet of stallions and riders — from just 35 a year to 69. By 2010, the performances were up to 72 per year; by 2012, the number was 75. All of this was in addition to traveling for international tours. Soon, according to the audit, the horses were exhausted and injured and being made to perform anyway. Many were retired early, sent to the school’s training facility in Heldenberg or back to the Spanish Riding School’s stud farm in Piber to live out their days away from the public eye. (When visiting Piber, I asked to see the school’s retired stallions and was refused.) Allegations surfaced claiming the use of abusive training methods like rollkur — hyperflexion of the horse’s neck caused by riders’ aggressive use of the reins — and unnecessary neurectomies. Typically done as a last resort in cases of heel pain and lameness, neurectomies involve severing or removing a section of the nerves in the horse’s foot. They are controversial, particularly in horses that perform or compete, as they do not cure the issues — neurectomies only eliminate the pain.
By the time Sonja Klima, the well-connected ex-wife of a former Austrian chancellor, took over in 2019, Guertler had unceremoniously axed two chief riders, and performances had increased to 90 a year.
Klima’s appointment was met with the immediate resignation of the entire school’s advisory board in protest. They had wanted the longtime rider and administrative manager Herwig Radnetter to take the reins. Not long after, Radnetter was gone too (there are conflicting reports as to whether he was suspended or left willingly).
Now, there is Hudler, whose background is in the beverage industry. To say his appointment was met with hesitation within the riding community would be an understatement. But if he were distrusted before, he is downright reviled after firing Hausberger, who, after 40 years at the school, was largely regarded as its last great keeper of the old knowledge. The institution seems on shakier ground than ever.
Dietz, who trained for eight years at the school beginning in 1984, wants the well-funded Austrian Ministry of Culture to adopt the school from the Ministry of Agriculture, thus eliminating the need for a money-driven business plan. His petition, which currently has over 16,000 signatures, calls for Hudler to be removed and for the return of the ousted chief riders. Yet these seem like solutions aimed at only half the problem.
Just because something has been practiced for centuries doesn’t necessarily make it important, points out Fumiko Ohinata, UNESCO’s secretary of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. What matters, she explains via Zoom call, is the element’s current meaning and that it is “evolving” and alive within its community now. This is why intangible cultural heritage is also called “living” culture.
A few days after arriving in Vienna, I sit in Cafe Schwarzenberg — my favorite of Vienna’s famous cafes. Like the Spanish Riding School, Vienna’s cafe culture is inscribed on UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity — a crowning achievement in the world of cultural heritage. But the vibe in the cafe is far from the lonely corridor at the Stallburg. Here, living culture thrums around me.
Under the cafe’s low-hanging chandeliers and within its dark wood-paneled walls, secrets aren’t dying — they are being traded over coffees, cakes, drinks and Hungarian goulash. Large, arched windows reveal time passing, of no great concern to those inside, lounging in their leather-backed chairs, while those in the ever-present line outside patiently wait their turn. There are no laptops here, no headphones. No one is even on their phone. People are deeply and actively drawn into their conversations, laughing, sipping and eating while servers twirl with trays, zipping and dipping to serve table after table.
I sit with Anna Puhr, the deputy secretary general of Blue Shield Austria, a nongovernmental organization involved in cultural heritage protection during conflict and disaster. Before us are two lemon sodas and two cups of Viennese-style cappuccino, or “melange.” Puhr is easy to like and easy to talk to. She has an infectious, invested interest in the world around her, and soon we are camouflaged among all the other cafe patrons, deep in conversation.
As I broach the subject of the school’s diversity, Puhr smiles knowingly. “You feel like you are in another century, no?” she asks.
“They’re all white,” I say incredulously, and I am, for once, not talking about the famous Lipizzaner stallions. Though the school accepts applications from all over the world, my tour guide at the school admitted hesitantly that the institution has never had a Black or Asian rider.
This launches Puhr into an extensive detailing of the diversification efforts of half a dozen other performative cultural institutions, from the Vienna Boys Choir to the opera, ballet and theater. Puhr’s previous work in digital communications at the Burgtheater makes her particularly resourceful in this area, and building digital bridges has remained a central focus of her work at Blue Shield and Austria’s National Defense Academy. It has also made her acutely aware of the difficulties of modernizing cultural heritage.
“There are also, in the cultural heritage community, those who still hold on to the past. They are part of another generation who kind of celebrate these older centuries,” she says. “They forget about today.”
Puhr is the future of cultural protection, talking one minute about digitizing museum inventories across the globe in case of disaster and in the next spouting a list of modern, green renovations currently underway in Vienna.
Digitization still seems a slippery concept to me, however. While it offers increased accessibility for people to experience culture via the intangible “cloud,” I worry that it simultaneously decreases our connection with the tangible world around us. But I am older than Puhr — not by a lot, but perhaps by enough that I might be considered part of the cusp between her generation and older ones.
“You need to find a way to modernize the old figures or the old symbols or the old buildings and make it something that is for everyone,” she says passionately. “Because if you cannot relate to it, why do you want to save it?”
Two days later, I am back at the Hofburg Palace, but this time I pass the stables and make my way to the palace’s Winter Riding School to attend a performance. Often regarded as the most beautiful riding hall in the world, the Baroque edifice is a palace all its own, with large pillars, two balconies and three large, glittering chandeliers stationed over the ring. Appropriately, it is all white.
Seated on the ground floor, I stare up at the majestic second- and third-level balconies with Puhr’s question still fresh in my mind. The balconies are full, but as I scan the crowd, I see today’s generation — Puhr’s generation — is notably absent.
The lights dim, leaving only the flickering of the tall candles in the elegant wall sconces. Silence fills the space — there is no whooping or cheering here — and I am drawn back through time. Classical music plays softly, and spotlights kick on, illuminating eight riders entering the arena atop their ivory stallions. They walk slowly, straight down the center of the ring under the sparkling chandeliers, the riders removing their bicorne hats in salute to an oil painting of the school’s founder, Charles VI, out of sight above my head. Then, returning their hats to their heads with practiced synchronicity, they begin the centuries-old choreography.
But it is not the riders who captivate. Gleaming like polished pearls, the horses are majestic in their golden bridles. Moving soundlessly on the mixture of sand and wood shavings covering the rubber mats below them, the horses begin to trot, their legs curling and unfurling like the limbs of ballet dancers as they prance. For the pas de deux, a term borrowed from ballet, only two horses and their riders remain in the ring to perform a dance that sees the pairs move in mirrored, elegant arcs. It is the most intimate part of the show’s choreography, and there is no better exhibit of the gracefulness of the Lipizzaners. But several minutes in, a restlessness seems to grow in the crowd.
Polite applause fills the hall as the two riders exit, and the program moves into the airs above the ground, a series of jumps and leaps known as the haute ecole. Spotlights illuminate either end of the arena now, and I watch my end, where a single stallion appears, his rider hustling into the pool of light beside him on foot, long reins in one hand, dressage whip in the other. The rider holds the whip gently against the horse’s back legs, and I watch the horse raise his front legs off the ground and balance in the air for the levade, the lines of his muscles running like streaming water down his sides and haunches. Another is soon performed with a rider on the horse’s back, perfectly balanced and seemingly at ease despite the absence of stirrups. A hesitant applause follows, and I watch as the horse and rider move quickly to the side of the ring, into the shadows, where riders rub and pat the horses profusely. With lightning speed, they produce sugar cubes from secret pockets sewn into the tails of their coats, offering them to the horses before their next turn in the spotlight.
Now comes the courbette. I watch as a stallion lifts his lithe body into a levade, but this time, the rider taps the back of the stallion’s legs lightly with his dressage whip, and the horse hops on cue: tap, hop; tap, hop; tap, hop. The applause grows.
No sooner is one horse gone than another takes its place in the lights, this one accompanied by two riders on the ground, one holding reins at the shoulders of the horse, the other trailing behind at the end of the long rein, dressage whip in hand. The stallion moves into the levade, but this time, a loud crack of the whip snaps through the air in the hall. At this cue, the horse leaps into the air and kicks out his back feet for the capriole.
A gasp ripples through the hall, followed by applause, but I can’t help the sick feeling in my stomach. Immediately, I think back to my 8-year-old son’s tormented, horrified face watching the horses charge at one another during a performance at Medieval Times, the riders’ whips working fast. I remember the shame I felt for taking him, thinking it would be a fun experience, and I am stunned by the parallels before me. These, too, are war horses with no war, made to perform not for the defense or expansion of nations but for the cost of admission — warriors made into circus animals. It is a feeling I can’t shake as the school quadrille — often called the “Ballet of the Eight White Stallions” — finishes the performance, the horses once again prancing on all four hooves, crisscrossing and weaving in a hypnotic dance before they and their riders are gone.
“I hate that word!” cries Myriam Hlatky, the communications manager at the Spanish Riding School, when I mention the circus. I can tell it’s a subject that has been raised before, and I agree that, at their core, the school and the circus are not the same. Classical training is, in its purest form, an art of harmony and sympathy between horse and rider, based upon a deep love and respect for horses, born out of people’s need to defend themselves, hunt and traverse the land more efficiently. Ask any classically trained rider, and he or she will tell you that even the practice’s most challenging moves — the lifts and jumps of the airs above the ground — supposedly mimic the movements the horses would naturally make in the wild.
These are nearly the exact words used by Hudler when I receive his responses to my emailed questions, forwarded back and forth through the school’s marketing department: “There are no tricks shown,” Hudler writes when I ask him what makes the Spanish Riding School different from a circus. “The foundation of our work is always the horse and its natural movements, hence why we work with stallions who love to show these powerful movements as part of their dominance behavior in nature.”
Horses in nature aren’t made to perform on command, however, and industrialization and technology have largely eliminated the need for this type of training. Without that need, sympathetically training a horse to jump and dance for sugar cubes looks different. And yet simplifying things to this extent fails to acknowledge that these are some of the most cared-for horses in the world, a subject Hlatky and I spend much time on.
She is easygoing, chatting with me remotely in a pale blue sweatshirt from her sparsely furnished home — a sign, I suspect, of a workaholic. And she’s funny, too, which quickly soothes any awkwardness after my weeks spent requesting in-person meetings with her, Hudler, the riders, the grooms and various other staff members, only to be denied across the board. (My follow-up request for a virtual interview, sent directly to Hudler, went unanswered.)
I ask about the neurectomies, and she does not deny them. They were done under previous management and before her time. They are not done now and will not be done in the future, she tells me, before talking at length about the school’s dedicated round-the-clock vet; a secondary, twice-a-week vet; and the school’s association with the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna.
If there is a horse that can’t perform “or has to have an operation or something serious, then it’s not only one vet that can make that decision,” she explains. “We take that very seriously because our horses are our treasures.”
The only subject she avoids is that of the dismissal of Hausberger. Instead, she discusses the concept behind the ancient knowledge for which the school is renowned, pointing out that if someone — anyone — has been at the Spanish Riding School for numerous decades and has achieved the status of chief rider, that person, by the very nature of the training involved at the school, has received the old knowledge and passed it on successfully.
This brings us to the topic of the cyclical nature of culture, and she tells me about a collection of letters the school was recently offered by an antiquities dealer in which the school’s famed director during World War II, Alois Podhajsky, was similarly accused of allowing the school’s integrity and sacred knowledge to wane. As Podhajsky literally risked his life for the cause, challenging the Nazi regime in the name of the horses and guiding them to safety through air strikes and war, it seems absurd to question his dedication. Yet the letters bring into focus how long people have been concerned with saving the school’s heritage.
It certainly makes sense to see an uptick in preservation efforts following a war; the tangible and intangible losses that resulted from WWII are some of the worst the world has ever known. To find renewed importance in the culture that survived is humanity’s resilience at its best — a testament to the soul of society in the wake of devastating loss. Seen thus, the questioning of Podhajsky’s commitment speaks to the importance of the intangible heritage at issue (and other intangible elements like it), because the destruction of such heritage is not just the loss of words, methods and traditions, but also the loss of our memory.
In his research on how war targets the collective memory, the author and architect Hadis Abdula references the near-total destruction of Gjakova’s Old Bazaar during the war in Kosovo in the late 1990s, noting that it “not only affected the urban fabric but also seriously injured the memory of society.” In many of the interviews he conducted regarding the bazaar’s destruction, however, it was not only the physical destruction of the buildings that the community mourned but also the loss of the intangible elements within the bazaar’s walls — the ancient methods of the craftspeople and their wares, along with the philosophies passed between community members.
“One of the most important features that makes a city a city is the people living in it,” Abdula writes. “Therefore, when ‘intangible cultural elements’ such as rituals that these people or ‘urbanites’ have embraced for centuries and passed on from the past to the future are subjected to destruction, the urban memory is exposed to trauma.”
Yet Vienna’s young urbanites seem largely untraumatized by the crumbling prestige of the Spanish Riding School. Puhr was born in Salzburg and has lived in Vienna most of her life. She has never been to the Spanish Riding School. Likewise, Hlatky, the riding school’s communications manager, admits that before getting a job in the school’s souvenir shop five years ago, she had not been to the school either. It is, in fact, hard to find any evidence of the school outside of its dedicated spaces in Vienna.
An element’s community is a term UNESCO leaves undefined, however, with Ohinata saying slyly, “If you are in it, you know.” Living culture is not necessarily defined by its physical location but by the people who practice it. Still, one must weigh the element’s relevance in modern society and the anticipated impact of the loss of its memory against the pleas of the community trying to save it. For instance, in 2012 UNESCO denied the inscription for the tanning and dying of the southern Zimbabwean multicolored poncho — a gift made traditionally by a husband for his wife as a symbol of “beauty, status and love.” The practice was taught orally and handed down through generations of the Nyubi community — the last of the Ndebele-speaking communities still actively crafting the poncho — but was not inscribed after UNESCO found that “the viability of the practice is threatened by the transformations of Ndebele life, in which the poncho has lost much of its function and meaning.”
If the world has outgrown the need for riding horses, the question becomes: What purpose does the practice serve? Is preservation for preservation’s sake viable, or is society better served by the reshaping of what was into something that is for everyone?
Back home in Southern California, I stand in the ranch stables of my old riding school, Jump for Joy. Here, the horses are white, brown, black and freckled, but it is not lost on me that the stables’ paint color is none other than Hofburg yellow.
I am with my 6-year-old daughter, who is about to take her first riding lesson. “You know they shut down the pony rides at Griffith Park?” my old coach, Linda Luger, asks as I lead the lesson horse, Dreamy, back to the ring. “After 75 years!” I nod. “People are going to stop riding altogether,” she says, and I wrestle with the words I have been thinking being said aloud.
Horses are in every era of my memory. I have pictures of my father holding me in diapers on my great-grandfather’s horse, Lady, and I can still see my son in diapers, playing in the sand while I trained in the very ring I stand in now, watching my daughter climb onto a horse for her first time.
We are the living and evolving inheritors of culture, and how we modernize should reflect both the traditions that made us and the statements we want to make to the world. Destruction, when necessary, is part of our job, and the time has come for us to ask ourselves if we are still living in a world in which the subjugation of another living being is acceptable for sport, entertainment or art, despite the centuries it has been practiced.
As modernization continues, our job is not just to live in the world bestowed upon us but to respect it, preserve it and, in some cases, change it — thoughtfully and in good conscience. Our goal, as Abdula suggests, should be to approach modernization not with the idea of creating “better or more perfect things” but to respond “to the needs and possibilities of the new world” in an effort to build memories we are proud of, that honor those who came before us and that the next generation will be proud to inherit.
This article was published in the Summer 2024 issue of New Lines' print edition.
Born in 1890 in Providence, Howard Phillips Lovecraft grew up in a family that was pretty wealthy, but with severe mental issues. His father (named for Winfield Scott like any good man of his era) had a “psychotic episode” while staying in a Chicago hotel in 1893. He spent the next five years in the Butler mental hospital in Providence (which is still open and has a nice campus for a stroll, public welcome) before dying of syphilis. Lovecraft either didn’t know this about his father or lied about it, because he always claimed he had worked himself to death. Of course, it’s not as if our young chap here wasn’t capable of creating stories….
In any case, Lovecraft grew up around women–his mother moved in with her sisters and his grandparents. He was their pet. His grandfather proved to be what father figure he would have. His grandfather was a big early 19th century gothic story type of a guy, big fan of Edgar Allan Poe and the like. He really wanted to educate the boy and so encouraged him to read, which included history and the like but especially the stories he had liked as a kid. Now this was not so popular at the end of the nineteenth century. This was the age of William Dean Howells and the like. moving toward the rise of the naturalism and realism of authors such as Theodore Dreiser. That was very much not where Lovecraft would go. He loved those old scary stories too.
Lovecraft started writing himself. Most of this early work was hack stuff, stories for the pulp magazines, not that there is anything wrong with that. That started in 1913. He moved to New York and married Sonia Greene, a pulp writer herself who funded a lot of this work, in 1924. But their marriage kind of fell apart. She lost her once successful hat shop that had funded so much of this, he couldn’t make enough money on his work to support them both, and then she left for Cleveland where she found a job. He could have joined her, but he didn’t. He moved back to Providence.
It was during his later Rhode Island years that Lovecraft published his most famous work. Weird Tales published “The Call of Cthulhu” in 1928 that helped establish the Cthulhu Universe that so many readers still love today, for whatever reason. He built upon this with 1931’s The Shadow over Innsmouth, a full novella that continues with the Cthulhu thing. Other key stories from this era include “At the Mountains of Madness,” a longer piece serialized in Astounding Stories in 1936 after five years of not being able to get it published. Also in 1936 was The Shadow Out of Time, another novella published in 1936.
I have never read a single word of Lovecraft. Don’t much intend to either. I am sure that will cause all sort of kerfuffling in the comments, but just because I haven’t read someone doesn’t mean they don’t deserve their grave post. But I also basically hate fantasy, science fiction, “world-building” and all that modern stuff that people like these days. I didn’t watch Game of Thrones either for instance, figuring the combination of medievalesque world building and a lot of violent rape wasn’t going to warm my heart. but whatever, all good. I’ve never really even read any Poe, or not that I can really remember. That whole way of writing just leaves me ice cold. I feel that people who still are into Lovecraft are mostly middle aged white men who wear their hair in a ponytail for god’s sake, and go to sleep dreaming of a 37-sided dice. But again, I can poke a bit of fun at all this but not really care. Read what you want!
What is not all good is Lovecraft’s racism. Let’s just lay it out–Lovecraft was a horrible racist, I mean this is a guy who wrote an early poem actually called “On the Creation of Niggers.” Classy! But then there’s his more well known anti-immigrant screeds. Vox had a good piece about this a few years ago, when HBO made Lovecraft Country. Let’s quote it:
One of the problems with Lovecraft is that his work and influence was everywhere before most people knew he was anywhere. Despite the spread of his ideas among genre fans and writers, Lovecraft himself didn’t become more widely known outside of a cult following until the late 1980s and ’90s. Consequently, the popular culture he so thoroughly left his mark on was slow to really parse where that influence came from — or address the fact that the man at the center of it was an extreme racist.
And let’s make no bones about it. Lovecraft was an avid, loud, horrific racist — suffice it to say you’ll probably fail this “Hitler or Lovecraft?” quiz — and on top of his frequent racist rants in letters and discussions with friends, his racist fears infuse and inform nearly all of his work. Famous Lovecraft short stories like “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (about a seaport town of murderous cultists who are secretly mating with terrifying fish people) and “The Horror of Red Hook” (a story full of textual xenophobia and horror at New York’s immigration influx and the “primitive half-ape savagery” of nonwhite New Yorkers) may be beloved and hugely influential, but they’re also built on overt racist metaphors. Often these metaphors involve his deep fear of miscegenation (race-mixing), hereditary evil, and his concern that he himself might have an impure bloodline, which all takes his “monster is me” trope in a terrible direction.
Throughout the decades, many of his fans have attempted to argue that actually, Lovecraft wasn’t that racist, and that he would have eventually turned away from his beliefs if he’d only lived longer. This is a terrible argument; Lovecraft’s form of racism was already profoundly more extreme than the “typical” racism of his time, and the assumption that he was growing more tolerant in his beliefs is based on wishful thinking. And as the genre has begun to diversify its scope over the past decade or so, more people have realized that.
This debate about how racist Lovecraft actually was, and what to do about it, has played out directly among the community of the World Fantasy Award — which traditionally, from its founding in 1975, awarded a bust of Lovecraft’s head as its trophy. In 2011, the Black writer Nnedi Okorafor won the annual honor, and only realized Lovecraft’s legacy after a horrified friend pointed out to her that the man whose head sat upon her mantle was a lifelong, virulent racist.
When Okorafor wrote a blog post about how conflicted she felt that “a statuette of this racist man’s head is one of my greatest honors as a writer,” including in it Lovecraft’s most overtly racist piece of writing, she drew inescapable new attention to a subject that had largely been buried and forgotten.
In 2014, writer Daniel José Older began a petition to change the World Fantasy Award to a bust of Black writer Octavia Butler. That same year, Black writer Sofia Samatar won the honor, and said in her acceptance speech, “I can’t sit down without addressing the elephant in the room, which is the controversy surrounding the image that represents this award.” The following year, in 2015, the awards finally retired Lovecraft’s image — which caused controversy both because many people felt the move was years overdue and because some were furious at what they saw as the erasure of Lovecraft’s legacy.
The conversations have been ongoing among horror fans ever since. Speaking at the “Shadow Over Lovecraft” discussion on Lovecraft’s racism, held in New York in 2019 by the Miskatonic Institute (a recurring panel series named for Lovecraft’s fictional university), Lovecraft Country author Matt Ruff discussed the ways Lovecraft’s fear of the other, even though it was rooted in racism, was also relatable on a basic level.
“In giving vent to his bigotry, he taps into a larger fear that I think we all have of people who are different from us and mean us no good,” he said. “It’s one of the reasons you can take his stories and repurpose them. … He may not have realized the universalism of some of what he was writing about, but I can take that away from his work.”
In other words, there’s something timeless and universally appealing about much of Lovecraft’s fiction that keeps even reluctant readers coming back to him. That doesn’t mean one has to overindulge; “not reading Lovecraft’s letters is a form of self-care,” writer Ruthanna Emrys quipped on the same panel.
Still, there’s an extent to which all of this discussion has been taking place within Lovecraft’s niche community of genre writers — still well below the mainstream radar, away from the broader influence of his work. (As late as 2014, it was possible to read Lovecraft explainers in media outlets that made no mention of his racism.) That might finally be changing with HBO’s Lovecraft Country now spotlighting the conversation around the author’s racist legacy — but it also inevitably yields frustration because Lovecraftian imagery and themes are so embedded within the pop culture landscape.
“He’s so woven in, I think for horror as a whole, it would feel to me a little bit like removing an arm,” Black horror writer Victor LaValle, who often writes Lovecraftian fiction, told me. “And so instead I feel like an alternative choice is to identify the illness and then maybe you can save the arm.”
Now, people in the past are flawed. They are in the present too. I get that. That’s why I don’t evaluate my art based on the politics of the creator. All I have to say is this–enjoy Lovecraft if you want. But if you do enjoy Lovecraft, I don’t want to hear a goddamn word about Philip Roth, D.W. Griffith, J.K. Rowling, Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Roger Waters, or so many other artists over the years who treated people poorly or had really bad politics. If you don’t draw this line, you are a stone cold hypocrite. I’m not going to enjoy Lovecraft but not because of his politics. I might watch Birth of a Nation though. I most certainly will watch Chinatown but I’m not going to watch Pirates. Rowling has turned into an awful person, but if I was into fantasy stuff, I’d still read the Harry Potter books. I’m certainly not going to attend a Roger Waters show and listen to him rant about the Jews (and really, fuck that guy), but I am still going to listen to Wish You Were Here.
So yeah, at least be consistent about this stuff. Given that I know there’s a lot of Lovecraft fandom out there, I’d like to hear from said readers of his work how they feel on this issue and how they feel about not only reading Lovecraft with his history, but about the more contemporary bad people who are really good artists. Once, a perceptive LGM commenter (can’t remind the name, sorry!) noted that these debates always come down to the same thing–if you like the artist, you make excuses and if you don’t, you use it as an excuse to damn them. That’s indeed how it usually goes. I’d like to move past that if we can, but at least we can admit it I hope.
And if you are on the “I Only Consume Art from People Who Meet My Political Standard” train, then I’d like to know who you like and why. Who meets these standards and where do you draw the line?
Of course feel free to discuss his art in any way if you want, even if you are a middle-aged man with a ponytail (though again, really?). I don’t have too much of offer on that. But of course that’s what the comments are for.
Lovecraft was almost as sacred of doctors as he was of Italians and Jews, so he refused to see doctors as his health deteriorated. As it turned out, he had intestinal cancer, so probably not much could have been done anyway. He died in 1937. He was 46 years old.
H.P. Lovecraft is buried in Swan Point Cemetery, Providence, Rhode Island.
Lovecraft is in the Library of America, in Volume 155. If you would like this series to visit other authors collected by the Library of America, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. I’ve done Louisa May Alcott (156) and Philip Roth (157,158). James Agee is Volume 159 and 160 and he is in Hillsdale, New York. Richard Henry Dana at 161 is in Rome, and not the New York town, so that one seems less likely unless you all are feeling generous. Henry James is 162 and I’ve long ago checked him off. Arthur Miller is Volume 163 and he is in Roxbury, Connecticut. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.
Another exciting development in what has already turned out to be a banner year for solving esoteric internet mysteries: The previously unknown silhouette of “Celebrity Number Six” has seemingly been identified on a 15-year-old piece of fabric, the end to a mystery that thousands of people have been trying to solve for several years.
The saga I’m about to explain to you is incredibly frivolous, but it also says something about how we research and confirm things on the internet these days and about the dynamics of massive anonymous research projects. Ultimately, this mystery was solved with a combination of AI facial recognition software and one photographer's long memory.
Four years ago, a Reddit user named TontsaH posted a plea on no fewer than 13 different subreddits, including r/movies, r/tipofmytongue, r/answers, r/DoesAnybodyElse, r/Models, r/celebrities, r/vikingstv, r/advice, r/whatisthisthing, r/television, r/HelpMeFind, r/WhatIsThisPainting, and r/NoStupidQuestions. They had what was seemingly a simple question: “Who are these celebrities/movie stars in this fabric?” They also made a post on r/findareddit searching for “a sub where people recognize celebrities in curtains with silhouettes of celebrities.”
TontsaH claimed that they had owned curtains made of fabric featuring the silhouettes of various celebrities, and they wanted to identify all of them. “I have had curtains made of this fabric over 10 years (maybe from 2008) but I still haven’t recognized all movie stars. Hopefully you can help me to recognize them and find the corresponding photo of the celebrity.”
Most of the celebrities were quickly identified, and included Adriana Lima, Jessica Alba, Orlando Bloom, and a handful of others. All were identified but one: Celebrity Six.
The search for Celebrity Number Six spawned its own subreddit, called r/CelebrityNumberSix, which now has 35,000 subscribers. Many theories and guesses have been proffered over the years (most notably, that maybe each celebrity had attended the Teen Choice Awards together). eBay listings for the fabric were found and sellers contacted, spreadsheets were created. An extensive list of guesses was put together, which included potential photos of Celebrity Number Six, the photo databases that had been searched, and reasons for or against the possibility that any individual guess was Celebrity Six.
For example, in the spreadsheet put together by a regular contributor to the search, u/HughWattMate, notes next to Smallville actress Allison Mack say “she does look lots like Six … loads of her photos were taken down from Getty Images after she was found to be involved with a cult called NXIVM that is now known for Sex Trafficking.”
What’s particularly notable, to me, is that new technologies have regularly been used in the search for Celebrity Six. People have tried and succeeded in replicating the effect used to create the silhouettes in the first place, and have also tried undoing that effect. In recent months, people have begun using AI to try to replicate the photo and to search for the photo. In a megathread about the search, the Redditors explain:
“We have done the following:
Contacted the sellers/designers
Reverse images searched both free and paid sites.
Asked AI.
Remade The image by hand and digitally and “cleaned up” the image.
Remade the image with AI and reverse searched with those images.
Asked around popular forums, message boards, sites and communities if they know who Six is.
WayBackMachine searched all the sellers of the fabric for new info.
Made a Pinterest filled with similar images of Six to try brute force similar suggestions.
Searched all photos taken by the other photographers on gettyimages between 1900-2008.
Asking various content creators to produce videos and get more eyes on the mystery.”
Versions of Celebrity Number Six that had been generated using AI tools
But then on Sunday, a user named IndigoRoom made a post called “Celebrity Number Six has been found.” The post features a photo that is an exact match of the silhouette, and which other Redditors have not been able to find anywhere else on the internet. According to IndigoRoom, Celebrity Number Six is the Spanish model Leticia Sardá.
IndigoRoom says they found Sardá not by using AI or attempting to recreate the image, but because another Redditor had mentioned her name, as well as the fact that she appeared on the cover of a supplement to the Spanish magazine Tendencias Mujer (Women’s Fashion) issue #162. IndigoRoom found the photographer of that cover image, Leandre Escorsell, and emailed him asking if he was aware of the Celebrity Number Six saga. Escorsell responded, said he recognized the silhouette, had the original image, and sent it to IndigoRoom.
Image: Leandre Escorsell
In a follow-up AMA, the Redditor who originally suggested that Celebrity Six was Sardà explained that they had used the facial recognition search engine PimEyes on a colorized version of the fabric and that Sardá kept coming up in the responses.
“Incredibly long searching time but i took the six image and colored them to make them look more realistic and less like an illustration,” the Redditor, StefanMorse, wrote in an AMA Sunday night. “i found her through resemblance to the colored six images i made. i didn't change any detail from six's face, the only thing that was added is coloring and making six look like a person and not the blue person from the fabric, this made pimeyes not recognize the six fabric and instead recognize the details on six's face so that it would suggest models or celebrities that either had similar facial features to the fabric or were indeed six … I put them on pimeyes and it resulted in so many leads and one of them was leticia, and she was the only one that appeared 7 times.”
Most of the Celebrity Number Six subreddit has rejoiced at this news. But not everyone. One of the moderators of the subreddit has posited that perhaps this image is itself AI, and that this solution is itself an elaborate hoax (I have seen no evidence to suggest that is the case, and the community is not taking this claim seriously.)
I mentioned at the top that this is, on its surface, a frivolous answer to a frivolous mystery. I am writing about it mostly because I love internet mysteries and lost media. But I actually do think there’s something to learn here.
Claims of “that’s AI” will be made about everything, forever. Every day I see a new project or a new gallery of AI-generated images that are focused on perfecting a specific new type of image. Last week, for example, I saw a Stable Diffusion LoRA (essentially, a plugin that narrows the output of an AI tool) that was trained to output images that looked like they were taken by an Olympus D-450, a digital camera that was released in 1999. These outputs are more realistic than anything else I’ve seen. The mere existence of these hyperspecialized AIs is going to dilute the conversation whenever anything like this happens.
Often, new types of research, archiving, and journalistic techniques are pioneered in these low-stakes internet group projects. The problem of Celebrity Number Six was attacked from every angle possible, and many of those strategies involved highly elaborate AI tools and search schemes, which are interesting and were probably worth trying. In the end, Celebrity Number Six was found with a combination of facial recognition and asking a guy with a really good memory.
Update: This article has been updated to include the use of Pimeyes to identify Celebrity Number Six.
Republican vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance’s claims that childless women are “miserable” is insulting not only to women without children but to mothers as well. As a feminist, I am offended by this narrow and paternalistic definition of misery, and I strongly believe that every woman can be miserable, whether or not she has children.
Sure, a woman could be miserable being childless. For example, maybe she wants to have children but experiences infertility or, for other reasons, needs to access reproductive technology but can’t afford to because Republicans, including Vance, voted down the Right to IVF Bill. Or maybe she’s childfree by choice but regrets it when she runs into a friend at the grocery store and can’t say that the back issues of Teen Vogue, Silly Strawberry–flavored toothpaste, and seven boxes of Froot Loops in her cart are for the kids.
However, a woman can just as easily be miserable if she is a mother. For example, she may not have wanted to have kids but was forced to by rulings from Republican-appointed judges that restrict or ban abortion. Or she may have felt compelled to have kids before she was ready, due to all four of her aunts constantly trying to set her up with every man they met, regardless of whether he was single, hospitalized, and/or currently on trial for insurance fraud.
And even if she is generally happy about being a parent, a mother may become despondent as she tries to do things like buy enough food to feed her kids if a Republican proposal to end free school lunch passes, try not to think about whether her child will get shot because Republicans won’t enact gun control measures, even for assault weapons, or talk to the other moms about which parents donated only two hundred dollars to the “optional” fundraiser for the Halloween carnival, while on four hours of sleep.
And whether or not she is a mother, if she’s pregnant and has a medical emergency, she may be turned away by doctors who are afraid they will be arrested for trying to save her life, thanks to executive orders from Republican governors. In that case, the family and friends that survive her can also be miserable.
The point is, there’s a long list of ways every woman can feel despair, no matter her circumstances. Maybe she is rewatching Parks and Rec and wondering what happened to Chris Pratt. Maybe she is listening to her favorite playlist but now has to skip every other song because so many singers are rapists. Maybe she wants to go anywhere in public and do anything at all. In this society, the possibilities for women’s misery are endless!
So it’s time men like Vance abandon their outdated, regressive ideas about women’s misery and realize that all women can be miserable, whether they are childless or not. And he should know this better than anyone—after all, his party’s policies and his own talking points make women’s lives, regardless of whether they have children, much more miserable.
So it’s time men like Vance abandon their outdated, regressive ideas about women’s misery and realize that all women can be miserable, whether they are childless or not. And he should know this better than anyone—after all, his party’s policies and his own talking points make women’s lives, regardless of whether they have children, much more miserable.
currently maybe possibly single-handedly crashing whatever servers eton hosts its archived student newspapers on because me and a friend are getting obsessed with a single outspoken prefect from 1883
@queenlua Happily! This is going to be long, so here’s some set dressing first:
Eton College, for anyone unfamiliar, is a prestigious boys’ school in England that has famously educated MANY MANY politicians, royals, nobility, and other assorted famous people. All you really need to know about it is that’s it’s incredibly posh and expensive and exclusive
The Eton Society (called “Pop” internally) is a self-selecting body of senior students at Eton that have historically held a decent amount of power at the school. If you’ve ever attended a school with a prefect system/house system etc you probably know a little bit about how obnoxious this kind of group can get. Now imagine they’re all called Lord Godfrey Pickerington or something. Are you getting it? Is the set being dressed? Good.
Now that the scene is set, here’s our tale!!
I stumbled into Eton’s archives while doing research for a fanfiction and we’ll just leave that admission where it is!! It was in reading old issues of their student-run paper, The Chronicle, from 1883 that myself and @carebewear started becoming fixated on one guy in particular.
Cecil B. Gedge (from this point on known as Gedge) was a member of the Eton Society in 1883/84. He won a few Science awards during his time there (Biology!!) and seemed to like rowing during school sports events. He went on to become a barrister, which will make sense once you know more about him.
The best part of Gedge, though, is his appearances in the minutes for the Eton Society meetings. At least at Gedge’s time, the Eton Society seemed really fond of staging debates (more like loosely organised discussions) on a wide variety of topics.
Here are some of the riveting questions they discussed!
And my personal favourite: “Are Ghosts Real?”
(They were very divided)
Gedge first came to our attention in debate about the annexation of New Guinea, in which he apparently started an “abusive attack on the British army and missionaries”:
Wow! Based Gedge!? He continues to spit period-typical truths about things like how we shouldn’t tax bicycles actually because it would disproportionately affect poor people. YIMBY Gedge?? He would’ve loved light rail.
The final nail in our Gedge obsession was a debate on women’s suffrage, in which Gedge vehemently advocates for women’s right to vote and then gets no supporters at the end of the meeting. But I appreciate that he said it anyway and kept saying it. He is more persecuted that Christ, to me.
Here are some more, from anti-conscription sentiment to indirectly calling his classmates stupid to weirding everyone out by saying he wants to donate his body to science (his friend dissecting him for fun):
We started getting the feeling people might not have liked Gedge that much, mainly since one of the Society members wrote a poem about all his friends and Gedge isn’t in it.
In 1884, there was some extended drama in the Chronicle where someone whom I groundlessly suspect was Gedge under a pseudonym (“A Socialist”), wrote to the editor complaining that the “debates” published by the Eton Society were “bad” (genuine quote) and that they should make a REAL debate society at the school that ALL boys, not just the self-selected seniors, could participate in:
To make a long story short most of the vocal members of the Eton Society threw up their hands at this and refused to do anything, basically boiling down to “Just because we’re the prefects of the school doesn’t mean we should have to actually DO anything!! Unfair!!” and also this quote which reads exactly like at least a thousand real tweets I’ve seen in my life
Liberal. Gedge, of course, was there giving practical suggestions, but the discussion was ultimately cut short because their principal died and they had to push a memorial issue of the paper. We have a working theory that the staff might’ve used that interruption as an opportunity to get the boys to cut it the fuck out.
Anyway it’s a little unclear what happens to Gedge after that. He isn’t credited as being in the 1884 Eton Society in the larger school register but it’s unclear if that’s because he wasn’t re-elected or if he just graduated. Either way, he went on to become a barrister in London, which makes a lot of sense. Sadly though, he passed away in WW1, which we were really normal about
Thank you Lt. Gedge, for truly embodying the eternal spirit of an outspoken debate-kid, a friend to the lefties, a proto-yimby, a terminal back-talker, and the kid in a biology class that’s a little too excited for the dissections. I hope your life, however short, was a rich and bright one. Thanks for the incredibly entertaining afternoon, brother 🫡
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