I Just Finished Reading...

[Acutely decayed]

Quote Originally Posted by orwell84

unquestionably justified.

?

[Doctor Dugald Eldritch]

I completed reading Stapledon's Last and First Men, certainly a tremendous feat in cosmic imagination. Unlike Lovecraft, Hodgson, Sterling, and Smith, Stapledon is not a poet transcribing the faery and ethereal wonders and demoniac horrors of an unknowable cosmos; he is not concerned with ''the terrors that underlie many things''; rather, he is an historian of sorts charting down the rises and falls of eighteen different species of men in the far future, and eventually all life in this universe. For unity of philosophy and imaginative vision, Stapledon is now another idol of mine.

[miguel1984]

I reread a lot of Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, Darkness Calls, The Wild Hunt, The Storm, The Fury, Hellboy in Hell and The Midnight Circus, some short stories, like The Mole and An Unmarked Grave, plus Baltimore, Frankenstein Underground and The Amazing Screw-On Head, also by Mike Mignola. Hellboy is slowly becoming my favorite comic book.

[bendk]

Quote Originally Posted by miguel1984

I reread a lot of Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, Darkness Calls, The Wild Hunt, The Storm, The Fury and Hellboy in Hell, plus Baltimore, Frankenstein Underground and The Amazing Screw-On Head, also by Mike Mignola. Hellboy is slowly becoming my favorite comic book.

I enjoy Mignola's work a lot. I am also a fan of Richard Corben. They teamed up for some Hellboy stories some years back. I tracked more than a few of them down. A couple of favorites are "The Crooked Man" mini series and the one shot "Hellboy in Mexico".

[Kevin]

"KL A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps."

[Doctor Dugald Eldritch]

Yester-day I finally finished reading William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land. It was a very tough book to read, with the unsuccessful attempt at archaic language, the parasitic, clinging sentimentality and romance, and the general repetition and tedium (quite literally every paragraph begins with ''and''); but in spite of this, it remains one of the most powerful and daring books ever written: the imagery of a black, sunless Earth with the majority of mankind ensconced in a mighty pyramid whilst outside, in the vast, rock-accursed dead world, monstrous and evil entities and forces -- from bestial Horrors perhaps developed from terrestrial life and Silent Ones and stupendous Watchers, living mountains of pure evil, of wholly alien dimensions -- prowl the starless, primeval landscape, awaiting to invade the pyramid, remains unrivalled in all art.
Hodgson, of course, is no prose stylist or poet in the league of Machen, Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Dunsany, Bruno Schulz, or Poe; but, rather like Algernon Blackwood, Olaf Stapledon, and David Lindsay, his strength rests on his imagination, ideas, and vision as opposed to his writing style. Though he did not discover him until 1934, I feel that Hodgson was Lovecraft's true predecessor. Machen and Blackwood's weird work was often diluted by their mysticism, and Poe often concentrated on horrors of a terrestrial nature; Hodgson, on the other hand, had a remarkably similar vision to Lovecraft: both were fascinated by the latent supernatural evil in things, often from the stars or from the sea; both supposed that anything ab-human or supernatural must essentially be antagonistic towards man; both conceived of a quasi-mythology that fused the trappings of occultism with science; and both were atheists (so I have read elsewhere). Other than The Great God Pan and The Willows, there is nothing more proto-Lovecraftian than The House on the Borderland, with its haunted, desolate region as a focal point for ultramundane horrors, its indifferent, ancient gods ''that underlie many things'', and its cosmic, epic visions of time, space, and the universe collapsing into infinite nothingness. I also feel that Hodgson's entities -- from monstrous fungi to sea monsters to vast terrors from the stars and beyond -- are the most menacing and chilling in weird literature, for Hodgson manages to preserve their awful mystery and cold nature whilst still having them engage in human conflict. Of course, these are mere opinions. And as I have said before, though his prose leaves a lot to be desired, one can see that through his fascinating, striking, and original ideas, Hodgson was a poet indeed.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

I actually really like the romance (although some of the attitudes about relationships can get annoying) but the repetition is indeed punishing.

[bendk]

I recently dug this book out of storage and ended up reading it. The Silence of the Body by Guido Ceronetti.

I don't remember Ligotti mentioning him, but I read somewhere that Cioran liked him and cited him in his book Anathemas and Admirations. There have also been a few mentions of him here at TLO.

The book contains darker musings on the body. It is aphoristic like Cioran's work. It also contains thoughts from others that resonated with the author, not unlike some of CATHR. Some of TL's work touches upon the intersection of physical pain and illness with thought. I found this book worthwhile.

Here are a few passages:

"Do faces belong to the body? Sometimes I have my doubts. They seem to lead independent lives, meeting each other unburdened by the rest of the body. Faces come from the demonic and from the angelic, from the depths and from the heights; there rest is merely terrestrial."

"We throw into these vessels-all of the soul's excretions, all the minds diseases, all of the blackness of life-and we call it love. And if this poison of ours does not turn into a being that resembles us, we feel imperfect, mortal, helpless."

"To keep us from seeing in the active forces of destruction the God whom we seek and love, a fiction like Satan is extremely convenient, for it screens the unbearable truth."

"We are hovels and ratholes, inhabited by an occult face that bears no resemblance to us."

From a description of Parkinson's disease: "The face is often fixed and rigid, and when the patient hints at a smile, he or she does in a persistent manner." Nothing should last longer than the second required by its need to exist: a smile that persists instantly becomes a lugubrious grimace. All pointless perdurance, even without rigidity or trembling, is Parkinson's."

Searching around the net for more work by Cernotti I found this interesting photo.

Guido Ceronetti

Biographical shard: Ceronetti (1927- ) is co-founder of the Teatro dei sensibili, a traveling marionette theater. Here he is with his actors.

	TLO THOMAS LIGOTTI ONLINE

	CATHR The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

[MTC]

Le Horla et autres contes d'angoisse by Maupassant, first volume of his horror short stories. Maupassant's tales are brutal, hallucinatory and profoundly pessimist. I find his works comparable to Bierce or Aickman and just as good.

[Zaharoff]

Bukowski, Charles - Notes Of A Dirty Old Man

Rollicking collection of Bukowski essays from Open City and Los Angeles Free Press.
Women, crazy, drunken women, as well as stable types he is clearly unsuited for.
Politics of the day. What holds for 1968, holds today. Our choices are akin to eating cold #### or eating warm ####. To a soul, horrible, self-serving hallroom monitors.
Different locations: New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Texas. Doesn’t matter. People are the same, jobs are the same, outcomes are the same. It’s pointless. Los Angeles is preferred.
(Why you ask? My wife used to work for “social agencies” in Los Angeles back in the day. A common explanation for mass migration to the City Of Angels ran along the lines of, “Better to be hungry or homeless in a warm environment rather than a cold one.”)
Now and then, he’ll get lucky. With horses, with a girlfriend, with an apartment. Nothing lasts.
His humor, and to be honest, his humanity, tend to soften the edge off a bleak, despairing outlook.
Bukowski is the voice of the battered observer, still striving amidst a preordained fate.

This book was a gift, which I have mixed feelings towards. The “giver” had clearly studied my shelves (I have a lot of Bukowski) and picked a title I did not own. Plus, these are good stories, early works.
The publisher is City Lights, though, a place I dislike. I have been inside that bookshop numerous times; there are rarely women working there. It is sexist.
Moreover, the bookshop founder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, had often tried to lure Bukowski away from Black Sparrow, the press that had saved him and given him carte blanche. Bukowski always declined. Plus, Ferlinghetti, to the end, included Bukowski with the Beats. Bukowski had nothing to do with that crew. He was Los Angeles to the bone.
Nonetheless, this is a terrific book. Even if you have the same qualms I have, get it.