Re: S.T. Joshi says....
 

Yeah, Joshi is losing it over petty crap. And I say that as someone who still admires his Lovecraft scholarship.

His friends need to have an intervention. Just let all that resentment and ego go, Joshi. Concentrate on what you do best.

Re: S.T. Joshi says....
 

I think it has been mentioned many times in this forum that one problem of contemporary weird fiction is that every (debut) collection is praised as the next big thing. So I actually appreciate S.T. Joshi's sometimes biting criticism. I remember reading his review of a collection on which praise had been heaped and I found that his dissection of the stories and pointing out of their flaws was spot on. I was also more than irritated when some people on Facebook claimed not to know who Joshi was during the recent Necronomicon controversy. That said more about the posters and their (lack of) knowledge of weird fiction than anything else.
Having said that, his recent comments about Word Horde seemed more to have been fuelled by resentment (cf. the poor pun) than by anything else. There is a verb in the German language called "fremdschämen" that came into usage a couple of years ago and that describes how you feel embarrassed about a certain situation/certain behavior even if you have nothing to do with it and are just the observer. I felt like that when I read his comments. That was all quite unnecessary in my humble opinion.

Re: S.T. Joshi says....
 

To be fair, the guy who runs Word Horde did insult Joshi in a somewhat juvenile manner first. So it's not as if his turning against that publisher was unprovoked.

Re: S.T. Joshi says....
 

That's right. But why go as low as and be as juvenile as him? Joshi can certainly do much better.

Re: S.T. Joshi says....
 

How does that translate to dismissal of all the authors who work with him? They are individuals with their own personalities and attitudes, they aren't plugged into some sort of hivemind with Lockhart so that they can bee treated like this based on something that he has said.

Re: S.T. Joshi says....
 

I think Joshi would play the "can't you tell when I'm joking" card on this one.

Re: S.T. Joshi says....
 

There is something very similar in Spanish: "pena ajena", which basically means "cross-border shame".

Yeah, but that reminds of Al Franken's idiom "kidding on the square", where you say something jokingly, but fundamentally it's not a joke. I think a lot of the humor in roasts is related to this concept, where sometimes people will say truly devastating things that they pretend to soften by claiming it as a joke, when the reality is that it closely reflects the joker's true feelings...

Re: S.T. Joshi says....
 

There was a story I was reading in the bathroom today by Stefan Grabinski entitled "The Motion Demon." One character opines that, "A fist, my dear sir, is too ordinary an argument." To which another character replies back, "For thick-headed opponents it's the only one; nothing else can be seen as persuasive." I believe that Joshi realizes that dealing with his opponents in a subtle manner is a lost cause; therefore he has to resort to language that might have a chance of penetrating their threshold of understanding.

But in the end I don't really care what Joshi says or doesn't say on any giving matter. I don't even really have much interest in arguing about it. Really, the only reason I keep posting in this thread (as mentioned elsewhere) is simply so I can bump my post count to 500 and hit the fabled "Grimscribe" status.

Re: S.T. Joshi says....
 

Relatedly, it seems like there's a circle of friends among the current crop of weird writers who heap praise on each other and each other's work. It just seems disingenuous.

Funny. I think that's the literal translation of the German word. Perhaps "foreign/external shame."

Re: S.T. Joshi says....
 

Not saying that it isn't so, but in that case exact same thing can be said about certain group of UK and UK-born writers who frequent (or have used to frequent) this board.