That's probably one of my favourite passages in the man's oeuvre, up there with the bit with the hill and the stones in "The White People". Both legitimately disturbed me on reading them, which is rare.
It's about a much more literal sort of white people. The kind with no irises in their eyes.
Or, more accurately, it is about a sceptical Victorian man who visits a hermit-like religious eccentric who expounds to him about his theory of what true evil is. To prove his point, the hermit gives the man a little green book to read, the diary of a teenage girl. Most of the story is simply the contents of the diary.
Reading a little of the new Ligotti in an Amazon preview. The dialogue between the narrator and the drug dealer in his dream is downright Burroughsian.
so now I'm reading Imperial Life in the Emerald City, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a book about the occupation of Iraq after the war, and God, the sheer incompetence on display is just amazing
^^ I need to read more Hawkes myself. The opening portions of The Lime Twig and basically everything about Travesty are deliciously trippy and hellish.
^ Good use of your time, but I'm not sure whether or not I'll do the same. There's a certain investment required in reading Proust...
The Mysterious Ballerina and her Tree Stump Ghosts
At the moment I'm reading (in translation) Outlaws of the Marsh (also known as Water Margin) by Shi Nai'an and/or Luo Guanzhong (nobody is quite sure), one of the Chinese '4 classic novels'. It's quite interesting, all things considered, so far.
so now I'm reading World War Z, a book about humanity's response to a fictional zombie apocalypse, and God, the sheer incompetence on display is just amazing
good. proust is good. he does the thing where he describes some incredibly deep and hidden private sensation and im like 'whoa. proust. thats totally the thing and i have never really thought consciously of it.' i dig proust.
on the other hand my kindle has run out of charge and i lost the charger
So a male writer sets out to write a realistic female character (in somewhat dubious terms) and other men bitch about him not writing women correctly because she... I dunno, likes sex?
Man is a most complex simple creature: see what he weaves, and how base his reasons for doing so.
I'm like halfway through If On A Winter's Night A Traveller and wow this is some metafiction. More erotic than I expected. I also think that while I am analyzing it, the book is mocking me for that act of analysis. It wants me to read it in one way, and one way only, and sometimes it succeeds.
I'm like halfway through If On A Winter's Night A Traveller and wow this is some metafiction. More erotic than I expected. I also think that while I am analyzing it, the book is mocking me for that act of analysis. It wants me to read it in one way, and one way only, and sometimes it succeeds.
Also I can safely say that I was engaging with the antinatalist thing way before a hugely-popular television show starring an Oscar winning actor monologueing about antinatalism became a thing.
you know every time i think about Queen i think about I SOMETIMES WISH I'D NEVER BEEN BORN AT ALL and then i hear you grumbling in the voice i read your posts in
you know every time i think about Queen i think about I SOMETIMES WISH I'D NEVER BEEN BORN AT ALL and then i hear you grumbling in the voice i read your posts in
That's sort of my thought on the matter. I love Ligotti's work and I am miffed at how Pizzolato dodges questions about where he took those lines from, but at the same time I think that the show and this controversy have both done a lot more good for his writing than ill in terms of actually getting new people to look out for his books and buy them when they find them.
I will say that I'm not sure if it's legally plagiarism per se, but it is a very heavy-handed pastiche without direct attribution and, as noted, the coy response does not help matters.
All I can say is that this better translate into somebody optioning Michigan Basement or My Work Is Not Yet Done in the next five or ten years.
In Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith, in the days when Basilides proclaimed that the cosmos was a reckless or maleficent improvisation by angels lacking in perfection, Nils Runeberg, with singular intellectual passion, would have led one of the gnostic conventicles. Dante might have consigned him to a sepulcher of fire; his name would have helped swell the catalogs of minor heresiarchs, between Satornilus and Carpocrates; one or another fragment of his teachings, bedizened with invective, would have been recorded for posterity in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes hæreses or would have perished when the burning of a monastery's library devoured the last copy of the Syntagma.
it's not like i haven't read borges before but man this really struck me. it's a good description, if you're familiar with heresies. i mean on the one hand it's hardly made up. satornilus and carpocrates were real gnostics, Irenaeus wrote "adversus hæreses", syntagma is greek for "arrangement" and is the title or part of the title of half a dozen religious thingies. on the other hand it's funny to me. i mean maybe he didn't mean it that way, since it's all real stuff, but with my cursory understanding of the history i can't help but laugh. they all have names like carpocrates and write books we end up referring to with single greek words like the evangelion. funny in this specific scholarly way. like ha ha i'm in on the joke because i spent a few weeks reading an annotated copy of the nag hammadi once. that's how you get used to words like "heresiarch" and "bedizened".
i didn't think the names were real until i looked it all up, so now i almost understand why somebody might think the celestial emporium of benevolent knowledge wasn't complete bullshit. almost.
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on the other hand my kindle has run out of charge and i lost the charger
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
i mean, usually it's technically worse writing and slightly less massive, broad, p much racist cliches, but only slightly.
i wonder if i can get the full cosmicomics somewhere
on my holiday i finished my Maupassant book at the beach despite the fact that a big wave came over it and it got soaked
also i finished Swann's Way
i didn't think the names were real until i looked it all up, so now i almost understand why somebody might think the celestial emporium of benevolent knowledge wasn't complete bullshit. almost.
it is a very fun, striking little piece of children's fiction