| Author | Message | ||
     Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 83.92.216.182 |
A friend just passed me a copy of 'Collapse', a collection of critical writings on the horror field from 2008. Their 4th volume has essays by China Mieville, Thomas Ligotti, Michel Houllebecq amongst others. It also some pretty stunning photography. This has essays with titles as : 'M.R James and the Quantum Vampire: Weird; Hauntological: versus and/or and and/or or?' (Mieville), 'The shadow of a puppet Dance: Metzinger, Ligotti and the illusion of Selfhood (James Trafford) 'Nine disputations on theology and Horror' (Eugene Thacker) 'On the horror of phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl/ singular agitations and a common vertigo (Keith Tilford) Some good stuff here and a handsome book. Recommended if it is your kind of thing, otherwise keep writing and don't look back. Ha! | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.149.134.59 |
Karim, you are kidding us, aren't you? Please say you are. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.161.241.208 |
No, he's not kidding - we know all about it on TLO. :-) | ||
| Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 83.92.216.182 |
No mate, published by Urbanomic and printed by Athenæum Press: May 2008: 950 copies in paperback with a great cover. 10 quid. | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 61.216.37.37 |
What, precisely, is a 'quantum vampire' and how does one become 'hauntological', I wonder? 'Nine Disputations on Theology and Horror'? I think I'd rather read Nine Horrors and a Dream again instead. :-) | ||
| Allybird (Allybird) Username: Allybird Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 79.70.85.130 |
There's a party in London http://blog.urbanomic.com/urbanomic/ | ||
| Allybird (Allybird) Username: Allybird Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 79.70.85.130 |
So - anyone buying it then? | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.161.241.208 |
I've bought it, not arrived yet. I doubt if 'Ligotti and the illusion of Selfhood' mentions Nemonymous, though. :-( | ||
| Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 83.92.216.182 |
An interesting reading of Jamesian appartions and the relationship to the old/ new weird : Sort of a move from the spirit to the tentacle would be the t-shirt- Ha! This collection seems to have been put together with alot of heart. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.149.134.59 |
Des, look out for the follow-up: 'Sly Stone and the Illusion of Soul Food'. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.24.122.40 |
Lovecraft and Husserl?! Now there's a man who never bracketed his natural attitude. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.149.134.59 |
Isn't ETology a branch of phonehomenology? | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.161.241.208 |
Lovecraft and Husserl?! Now there's a man who never bracketed his natural attitude. =============== HPL = empiricist Husserl = rationalist "The rationalists and empiricists were like two evenly matched teams in a tug of war. Ironically, the competing parties are kept standing by their opposing efforts. Kant's strategy was to cut the rope." (Roy Sorensen) Kant = Collapsist | ||
| Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 83.92.216.182 |
Another good t-shirt Des- 'Collapsist' :-) | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.24.122.40 |
How does one conduct a phenomenological study of an Elder God? Get back to the "unspeakable things themselves"? | ||
| Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 83.92.216.182 |
As Wittgenstein postulated in the tractatus: What can be shown and not said' And you're not going to draw me into a debate right now. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.149.134.59 |
The Elder Gods are putting on weight. Things haven't been working out recently. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.161.241.208 |
I've called it 'chasing the noumenon' for years. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.149.134.59 |
They also sit in judgement. These things are sent to try us. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.24.122.40 |
That's not true. Cthulhu's always jogging a race memory. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.161.241.208 |
Tug of War, Jogging, Yoga ... | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.149.134.59 |
I can't remember a thing. | ||
| Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 83.92.216.182 |
'The Elder Gods are putting on weight. Things haven't been working out recently.' Funny thats what the homeless person who gave me the book said to me. | ||
| Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 83.92.216.182 |
I thought there was something strange about him, but I decided to ignore the movements under his tattered clothes, the husky voice - he'd had too much strong drink I figured, and the wind did that to his clothes. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.149.134.59 |
The Crawling Chaos was having another bad hair day. | ||
| Griff (Griff) Username: Griff Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.93.21.100 |
The Horror at Redhook - the neighbours at 47 had put up Georgian carriage lamps and bought a caravan. Tsk Barrathomestastic! | ||
| Griff (Griff) Username: Griff Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.93.21.100 |
The Lurking Fear - GcW | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.195.236.131 |
The Elder Gods were just giant flying genitals, weren't they? | ||
| Griff (Griff) Username: Griff Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.18.171.201 |
I've been reading some of your stuff on the Ligotti board from 2005. Interesting. | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.195.236.131 |
Really? I can't think that far back. Not since the transplant and those eggs I laid. | ||
| Griff (Griff) Username: Griff Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.18.171.201 |
Are you going to end up living in the park with a piece of twine holding up yer tracky, Albie? | ||
| Gcw (Gcw) Username: Gcw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.156.42.111 |
"..The Lurking Fear - GcW" Wha? gcw | ||
| Griff (Griff) Username: Griff Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.18.171.201 |
You know. When you were found in that blokes garden after dark. | ||
| Gcw (Gcw) Username: Gcw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.151.123.101 |
Don't. start. gcw  | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.161.241.208 |
It's already arrived! What a marvellous looking book! Just too easy to make dirty fingerprints on the cover. Not looked through yet to see if it mentions Nemonymity. If it doesn't, it hasn't covered all the ground. Seriously, this promises to be a read of a lifetime. Well my lifetime, anyway. | ||
| Allybird (Allybird) Username: Allybird Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 79.70.84.68 |
How much with postage and is it really worth it Karim and Des? | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.161.241.208 |
Well, I think it worth it. Looks a heady brew. But I haven't read it yet. Perhaps worth it just for the dead monkeys! It cost £14.73 in total from Amazon. | ||
| Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 87.62.5.130 |
Ally I received my copy as a gift from a friend. I'm enjoying it, but it is an academic collection of essays and should probably be taken in, in small doses. There is some good black and white photography in it as well. I have read four or five of the essays and they have all been interesting. The Ligotti piece is from the essay The conspiracy against the human race'. The dead monkeys are great and unsettling. The copy is fragile and as Des says, it is easily dirtied by fingerprints, but a really good looking book. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.161.241.208 |
Of course, the fingerprints don't matter, if you don't exist. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.161.241.208 |
"The 'wavering Zero' is the generative core of being and slime." --Iain Hamilton Grant from "Being and Slime: The Mathematics of Protoplasm in Lorenz Oken's 'Physio-Philosophy'" "Ligotti's work as a fictional realisation of Metzinger's nemocentrism." --James Trafford from "The Shadow of a Puppet Dance: Metzinger, Ligotti and the illusion of Selfhood." From COLLAPSE Vol IV (Urbanomic 2008) | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 218.168.194.134 |
I think I'll pass on this and spend the time reading these authors' stories again instead -- at least I understand those (I think... )! ;-) | ||
| Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 83.92.216.182 |
Still better than reading Photoshop and After Effects manuals at five a.m. Huw :-) They should have photographs of stuffed monkeys in those manuals as well. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.219.8.243 |
This volume sounds awful to me. A load of pseudo-intellectual posturing. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.161.241.208 |
You'd like the portrait photos of dead monkeys in the book, Gary. Maybe even find an affinity with them. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.219.8.243 |
The only simians I have an affinity with are live ones. My chimp brothers and I will soon unite and take over the world. | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.195.236.131 |
It will be basically like Bugsy Malone, but with our shit in place of pies. And Scott Baio will die first. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.147.51.96 |
What? The cast of an old musical taking over the world? Planet of the Bugsy Malone Cast? Hmm. | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.195.236.131 |
Except we will be apes. Ok, it's just apes throwing cack at people. No Scott Baio. No musical. You had to point out the one single flaw... | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.147.51.96 |
You see that Girl in the Box thing on Five recently albie? The weird bloke who kept a girl in a coffin under his bed, kept her as a slave? | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.219.8.243 |
I saw that, Tony - he used to let her out to go to work and she was so terrified she'd return every evening and get back in the box. The guy's wife knew about her, but went along with it so she didn't have to submit to his weird sexual demands. It was really unsettling. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.147.51.96 |
It was the 'bubble of reality' feeling, another world not like ours but existing within it that got me. It was actually quite frightening in that respect; the guy made his own world and got people to go along with it. | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.195.244.67 |
Let's hope the girl was so stupid that it won't greatly have damaged her. That's the bubble. Stupidity. God I hate the world! You can't get a simple burger and onions anymore! | ||
| Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 83.92.216.182 |
'This volume sounds awful to me. A load of pseudo-intellectual posturing.' Why the resistance to a critical approach? I'll burn all my Douglas Winter books then - I enjoy reading his work more than the authors he discusses sometimes. And Bev Vincent, Joshi, lets get rid of Campbell's Probably while we're at it. And after that, lets really make sure that there is no critical discussion what so ever on the horror field. Then we'll remove the last two so called horror books from the Thriller section, and have fanboys say 'That was cool man' and then we'll move on to the next 'un. Just playing the Devil's advocate here. I agree Zed, sometimes it can be too much, but surly it must be nice that someone out there takes the time to have a second or a third look at something and uses some of their time in investigating what makes us tick ;-) But why worry, if people aren't even reading too many books these days, then surly there is no danger of the academic ones reaching an audience. Finally, why have literary awards? Why have readers gather annually and discuss the strongest work, think about it, then celebrate the authors who sweat over the work. I had a university student contact me because he was writing a paper on my collage films. I didn't even agree with his reading of my work, but I thought it was cool. It is scary and fun to have someone do that kind of thing... Rant over. See what happens when you read too many computer manuals. Ha! | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.147.51.96 |
I agree Karim. I Used to read Monthly Film Bulletin at college and really, once you've read that stuff like Empire (fun as it is) just seems like so much blather. That mag used to make me think, make me try and understand what I liked and how to try and do things properly when I finally came to do it myself. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.147.51.96 |
Albie - the girl was nice and bright. She's about fifty now and seems like quite a together person, relatively speaking - more so than that weird woman who was 'possessed' in the Enfield case. | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.195.244.67 |
You have to wonder if any horror writer really has any of these high brow philosophical ideas at the back of their minds when they are writing stories....or are they simply manipulating words to touch upon emotions they feel. MR James and Quantum Vampires? Sounds interesting. But is it simply an examination of coincidence, as analysis often seems to be. (we can only read it to find out)Yet, ultimately, we can never know. We can't produce James to ask him. So in the end what do you have but a theory that examines the author's skill with these subjects. I refer you to my examination of THE MAN IN THE UNDERPASS as evidence of the dangers of over-analysis.  | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.195.244.67 |
>>Albie - the girl was nice and bright. She's about fifty now and seems like quite a together person, relatively speaking - more so than that weird woman who was 'possessed' in the Enfield case. Then I have no sympathy for her. She had plenty of chances to run. She must have liked it on some level. | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.195.244.67 |
Unless she was experiencing a form of terror that I wouldn't understand. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.219.8.243 |
Karim, I have nothing at all against the critical approach, as long as it's within reason. To me, something like "Ligotti's work as a fictional realisation of Metzinger's nemocentrism." is - to coin a phrase - simply a load of old bollocks, and reads like someone trying to impress themselves. :-) Douglas Winter is a fine example of critical appraisal done well. He doesn't try to baffle us poor uneducated proles with jargon and esoteric concepts, and puts across his thoughts and opinions in a sensible and accesible manner. "Finally, why have literary awards?" I ask myself that same question every year? Maybe because they look nice on the winners' mantlepiece? ;-) | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.147.51.96 |
But she was locked in boxes for up to 22 hours at a time, whipped and stuff. She was brainwashed. Like we are, to buy kit kats when we see the kit kat logo. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.147.51.96 |
The idea of awards makes me want to write better, if it means anything. I don't want the award - just what it means, that some folk liked my stuff. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.161.241.208 |
as long as it's within reason Reason is as long as a piece of string. The articles (as things) in COLLAPSE represent Horror in itself as well as being about it. I was having nightmares about some of them last night. Seriously. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.219.8.243 |
Des, are those quotes typical of the kind of writing inside the book, though? I'm a bit thick, you see, and prefer things to be more accesible. :-) Product of the British Comprehensive system, that's me. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.219.8.243 |
"I don't want the award - just what it means, that some folk liked my stuff." Nice comment, Tony. And one I agree with. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.161.241.208 |
It is a heady brew, Gary, but having met you I reckon you are man enough for it. :-) | ||
| Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 83.92.216.182 |
Zed I actually agree with what you say, just playing the devil's advocate. ;-) And there is of course quite a big difference between say Winter's approach in Faces of Fear, to one of these critical essays. But it is still nice to see that stuff is coming out. Some of the stuff is over the top, for example I think that Lovecraft is an awful writer, but his vision of cosmic terror etc is of course now stuff of legend, so the phenominon of Lovecraft and the discussion of this in a larger context is more interesting than his writing for me atleast. I quoted the titles of the essays because they are over the top, but I could imagine they might hold some interest to members of this board. In fact the Mieville piece should prbably be taken with a grain of salt: it is clearly an essay that highlights his own forthcoming book rumoured to be about the Kraken. | ||
| Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 83.92.216.182 |
But is it a bloody good essay IMHO- :-) | ||
| Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 83.92.216.182 |
And this could be an interesting book to use for college courses and then push some good stuff onto students. | ||
| Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 83.92.216.182 |
And finally, before I return to those bloody manuals, I was being too harsh on Lovecraft above, not awful exactly, but more a fan of his vision than his writing is all. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.149.134.59 |
Karim, I tend to agree about Lovecraft – but no writer of 'cosmic horror' since then has come anywhere near, so perhaps there's more to his writing than meets the eye – narrative structure, underlying metaphors, etc. Lovecraft stories work better for me when I've just read them than when I'm reading them. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.161.241.208 |
, so perhaps there's more to his writing than meets the eye Magic Fiction (as opposed to Magic Realism)} | ||
| Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 83.92.216.182 |
I enjoy listening to the audio recordings of his work and you get that impression. Sometimes his writing style seems to work better for me when it is dramatically read out loud I find. And Del Toro is very welcome to do The Mountains of Madness feature...Like this generation's Alien...and in 3D. And there would be the most amazing Lovecraftian action movie in history if someone did a post Aliens Quake... | ||
| Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 83.92.216.182 |
And Lovecraft's stuff therefore also works quite well in computer games. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.161.241.208 |
There were composite cones and pyramids either alone or surmounting cylinders and cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids, and occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters of five. All of these febrile structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges. --H.P. Lovecraft (At The Mountains of Madness) | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.195.236.131 |
I don't get the cosmic horror thing. Is it horror but in space? Or just big horror? | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 129.11.76.215 |
It's the horror of realising that even though our mums think we're great, we really just don't matter. | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.195.244.67 |
Suppose someone turned up the presence factor on your coat. Like twisting a knob to full. Would you be being haunted by it? | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 129.11.76.216 |
Only if it was a ca-ghoul. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.149.134.59 |
That was Gary, folks. So get off my case.  | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.149.134.59 |
Albie, I struggle to get the idea of 'cosmic horror' as well. It's a sense of vertigo, or disorientation, or lostness, or something like that, based on slipping from the human scale to the vast emptiness of space and time out there in the cosmos. But if you just accept that the cosmos is big and cold and empty, it's hard to be horrified by the thought. You might as well write horror fiction about the structure of a quartz crystal or the waveform of ultraviolet light. Where's the horror? I think 'cosmic horror' works best when there is a traumatic shift from one framework to another, as in alien abduction stories. The X FILES film and Lovecraft's masterpiece 'The Shadow Out of Time' have much in common. Perhaps they influenced each other (let's not be confined by linear assumptions about time). | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 129.11.77.197 |
Joel, you're just sour cos I got there first. :<) | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 129.11.77.197 |
I still stand by my definition of cosmic horror above. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 129.11.77.197 |
Thomas Hardy was in to cosmic horror, you know. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.149.134.59 |
Did you know that an interviewer once asked Lovecraft where he got his sense of cosmic awe from? He said "From a meteorite in the back garden." | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 129.11.77.197 |
I'm looking for a pun there, you know...nope, can't see one. Your reputation procedes you. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.161.241.208 |
Was that Hardy's THE DYNASTS, Gary? From my vague memory of that, it is. awe = ore | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 129.11.77.197 |
It's just Pun City here. No, I was thinking of an early book of his in which a guy is hanging off a cliff and he sees a fossil in the cliffside; he starts speculating on what his life is really worth in the great scheme of things. Many of his later novels have an element of cosmic fate infringing upon the lives of his wilful characters, too. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.23.233.246 |
I get it. I mean, cosmic horror. It's not so much supernatural as an intense version of awe at space, the cogs of the universe, and not just the material aspects. Dr Who and Alien have touched on it, as well as stuff like L'avventura. Books I'm not so up on - there are lots and yet not at the same time. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.161.241.208 |
I think Mark Samuels fiction is very good on cosmic horror. | ||
| Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 83.93.30.31 |
Des' quote from MOM (no pun intended on Gary's definition on cosmic horror which is also spot on) really makes you want to hear that read aloud. 'composite cones', 'curious clusters'...sounds great. Joel's point on cosmic horror is spot on as well to perhaps understanding the concept. Transition or collision of worlds, traumatic and with unimaginable consequences... | ||
| Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 83.93.30.31 |
Tony 'Dr Who and Alien have touched on it, as well as stuff like L'avventura.' Absolutly, especially Alien. You really get that existential dread of the crew alone in the vastness of space, and then the first apocalyptic contact with the Alien. There is also a distorted notion of space time in it, in that the crew are literally months of hypersleep from salvation. brrrr | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.164.143.204 |
In Alien the mere titles alone have it. I believe it's one of the few movies that do, actually - everyone involved was tapped into something. Star Wars nudged them there, I believe, cos it had a bit of awe about it, too. | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.195.236.131 |
Right, so cosmic horror/awe wasn't specifically linked to his cthuhlu stories. Because I never got anything substantial off them. Unlike THE MUSIC OF ERIC ZAHN. Although I thought the sense of vertigo I got from that was due to the fact the story was set up high anyway. Physically high. Over looking a town. I suppose space would achieve that. Although slimey monsters that aren't even really seen seems a different type of creep out. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.149.134.59 |
It's a great story, Albie. Always loved that one. No melodrama, no xenophobia, no tentacles. Just the fear. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.161.241.208 |
I notice this review of COLAPSE mentions: the nemonymous horror of Ligotti’s fiction http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/010426.html ??? | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.161.241.208 |
I think that is the first general use of the word 'nemonymous' since I invented it in 2001. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.161.241.208 |
BTW, I discovered the following John Fowles quote in 2002 after I had used the word 'nemonymous' in 2001 (when, incidentally, there were no Google hits for the word 'nemonymous' at all): "The nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am; the nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utilizing the nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrified by lightning. We run screaming from this mysterious shape in the middle of our town, even though the real terror is not in itself, but in our terror at it." -- John Fowles 1964 (from 'The Necessity of Nemo' in 'The Aristos') The quote was then printed in Nemonymous Four (Glass Onion). | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.195.236.131 |
Nemo as in nobody. To think just half an hour ago I was dreaming I was with William Shatner in a sunny countryside dreamworld...with a public toilet. | ||
| Griff (Griff) Username: Griff Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.93.21.74 |
Did you break into the library and spend the night there then? | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.22.230.9 |
Does the word actually . . . er . . . MEAN anything? | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.161.241.208 |
Here is another interesting article (not about COLLAPSE but associated with it): The Horror of Something: commentaries on the littered universe and the weird | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.147.50.180 |
Ack! My word power is so low this comes across as literally a foreign language! | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.161.241.208 |
I think you may have hit the nail on the head, Tony. It "renders objects irrevocably weird in that objects perpetually evade us and recede to utter unintelligibility". Words are objects. And that brings me back to Hubert's point above about the word 'nemonymous'. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.110.190.61 |
As I've commented elsewhere, the principle of nemonymity – you don't know somebody's name until after your significant encounter with them – is not unlike a one-night stand. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.161.241.208 |
Here's Joel's poem entitled 'Nemonymity' from 2004: http://www.nightshadebooks.com/discus/messages/201/1804.html?1078520886 | ||
| Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 83.92.216.182 |
Thats an excellent piece. Some other good ones there as well. | ||
| Tom_alaerts (Tom_alaerts) Username: Tom_alaerts Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.244.133.100 |
so meanwhile I received Collapse 4. Are there others who agree with me that most of it is a load of pretentious pseudo-intellectual crap? | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.161.241.208 |
A heady brew - how I would prefer to describe it. I enjoy reading philosophy. It's got some good pictures. I'll get my coat.... ;-) |