Fungi from Yuggoth Haunts Again

[hopfrog]

I was so haunted by an audio reading of Fungi from Yuggoth that it inspir'd me to write what I think of as my finest book, SOME UNKNOWN GULF OF NIGHT, a delirious experience in which I wrote the entire book in a matter of six weeks. I have never experienced such an aesthetic thrill as I did while under the hypnotic trance of Lovecraft's sonnets and my attempt to comment on them in my own prose-poems and vignettes. Everything else ceased to exist.

I have a hankering for Lovecraftian chatter, but most of the Lovecraft forums online are rather boring. I don't find the people active there very literary, nor the discussions very mature in tone. Then I remember'd TLO, where one can find intelligent literary discourse, where one can find people who actually like poetry, great Yuggoth! So I am here to chatter about my new aesthetic spell, inspir'd by yet another reading of Fungi from Yuggoth, this time by Paul Maclean (aka Paul of Cthulhu), and available for download at his magnificent site, yog-sothoth.com. I am, in many ways, such a snob; and part of that snobbishness comes in preferring my Shakespeare acted or recited by British voices. I often find Yankee voices irritatingly flat. The British voice almost always enchants me. (The one exception to this is the American author, David Case, who wrote one of my favorite weird novels, Fengriffen -- and who has read hundreds of books for Books on Tape. His reading voice is my all-time favorite.) Paul's new reading of Lovecraft's sonnets is simply superb--and, for me, transporting. And as I listened to it I felt that aesthetic ache, and I knew that I had to write yet another book inspir'd by HPL's sonnets. And so I am working (trying to work) on Monstrous Aftermath, a wee collection of weird tales inspired by Fungi from Yuggoth, a book that I shall dedicate to Paul.

I wish there was, in print, a single volume definitive edition of Fungi from Yuggoth. Such a volume is forthcoming from Hippocampus Press, although Gawd knows when. It will be an annotated edition edited and annotated by David E. Schultz,and it will be fantastic. Illustrated, too. However, S. T. has David so swamped with editorial chores that work on this new edition of Lovecraft's sonnets is very slow-going. Lovecraft's collected poems will see a new edition when Night Shade Books reprints the newly-revised edition of Joshi's The Ancient Track, but that huge tome is too bulky for constant work-table consultation. Happily, I have the slim Arkham House edition of Collected Poems that was publish'd in 1963; I bought my copy of the book from Tom Ligotti, who sold it on Amazon. Knowing that it came from Ligotti's personal library adds an additional magick to the book, coupled with the magick that comes from early Arkham House editions. I became a weird fiction writer because of Arkham House, from buying as many Arkham House books as I could in the early 1970's, after having returned to America from serving time as a Mormon missionary in Ireland. I am shaped, absolutely, as a writer by the Arkham House catalog, so much of which came from the Golden Age of Weird Tales.

Some of Lovecraft's sonnets seem rather silly to me, works of little depth. Such a sonnet is VII: Zaman's Hill:

The great hill hung close over the old town,
A precipice against the main street's end;
Green, tall, and wooded, looking darkly down
Upon the steeple at the highway bend.
Two hundred years the whispers had been heard
About what happened on the man-shunned slope--
Tales of an oddly mangled deer or bird,
Or of lost boys whose kin had ceased to hope.

One day the mail-man found no village there,
Nor were its folk or houses seen again;
People came out from Aylesbury to stare--
Yet they all told the mail-man it was plain
That he was mad for saying he had spied
The great hill's gluttonous eyes, and jaws spread wide.

Say what? I smirk and roll my eyes. And yet, when I wrote Some Unknown Gulf of Night, this sonnet mightily affected some portions of my book.

Expressing Fungi from Yuggoth in a prose narrative is something that H. P. Lovecraft himself try'd to do, when he penned the wee fragment known as "The Book." People have refuted the idea that Lovecraft's sonnet sequence forms a narrative whole and tells a tale--and yet Lovecraft try'd to do just that, it seems, when he rewrote the first three sonnets (which do indeed tell a connected story) into prose form:

"My memories are very confused. There is even much doubt as to where they begin; for at times I feel appalling vistas of years stretching behind me, while at other times it seems as if the present moment were an isolated point in a grey, formless infinity. I am not even certain how I am communicating this message. While I know I am speaking, I have a vague impression that some strange and perhaps terrible mediation will be needed to bear what I say to the points where I wish to be heard. My identity, too, is bewilderingly cloudy. I seem to have suffered a great shock--perhaps from some utterly monstrous outgrowth of my cycles of unique, incredible experience."

The entire fragment of "The Book" may be found in the Arkham House title, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, or in the now-corrected text of the Barnes & Noble edition of Lovecraft's Complete Fiction. Within that paragraph is everything that stirs my Lovecraftian soul and shocks me with the intense ache to write my own Lovecraftian weird fiction. It is irresistible! And so I return to Fungi from Yuggoth, with the Arkham House edition of Lovecraft's Collected Poems that once sat in ye library of Thomas Ligotti beside me. I open that enchanting book and read again those intoxicating sonnets, and my eyes linger on the brilliant illustrations by Frank Utpatel -- and I muttered prayers to dark dead gods that I am able to write yet another book of Lovecraftian horror stories before ye death of this year. Selah.

	TLO THOMAS LIGOTTI ONLINE

[helios1014]

Having just listend to you read a portion from "SOME UNKNOWN GULF OF NIGHT", I would just like to say your prose had the excellent effect of drawing me forward to a destination not yet clear to me. I defintly agree with your sentiment that Lovecraft's earlier sonnets have that same momentum that other, more awkward, sonnets lack.What I tend to find amazing is Lovecraft's ability to elicit from me a sense of alienation even in an enviroment that is already strange.Also, damn you for writing the first of what will probably be many purchase from your opus. W. H. Pugmire Reads From SOME UNKNOWN GULF OF NIGHT Miskatonic Books Blog

[hopfrog]

This is the aspect that, for me, keeps really GREAT Literature eternal. It never dulls with rereading, but expands in power and effectiveness as I mature. Ligotti's masterpieces have exactly that effect--they are eternal. I find it true for Shakespeare and Henry James and Kafka as well. (I am woefully aware that I lack women in that list.) It is this aspect of eternal renewal, of being able to appreciate Lovecraft more and more as I mature and understand the workings of Literature as a writer, that keeps my Lovecraftian obsession burning with ever-brighter ignition. I am a total Lovecraft fanboy, more and more obsess'd by the power of his work, and its hold on my imagination, as I age. It feels almost like a madness, this constant need to return to Lovecraft, to understand more clearly his art, and to express my fixation with his Works by writing book after book of homage. I love this lunacy, rooted as it is in the creation of literary art.

"...a destination not yet clear to me" is wonderful, helios1014--it is the destination of your dreaming coupled with mine own, perhaps. It can never be a solid foundation but always ethereal, unnatural, sans borders or boundaries. That is my hope. Thanks for ye purchase, & hope ye enjoy my wee book.

[helios1014]

Someone else I might add to that list is Michael Cisco. Never have I seen a prose that is so well crafted to a close read while not forcimg me to hit the encyclopedia on every other page (I am still not done with Ulyssese).

[Joel]

While Lovecraft was, for the most part, a very boring poet – one only has to compare his 1920s poetry with Frost's already published North of Boston to sense how far Lovecraft was from the living world of poetry – the Fungi From Yuggoth sequence has considerable merit, because he worked hard to encapsulate his core themes and ideas within the form. It's not a narrative sequence, but it is a sequence that echoes the form of some of his major stories: identifying a route into the uncanny, providing examples of it, touching on a few dreams, building up a mythology, and finally dealing with its impact on his life and outlook. The sequence is certainly worthy of an illustrated mass-market edition, and (assuming the copyright issues could be worked out) the Utpatel illustrations from the Arkham House volume would be ideal. Any larger collection of Lovecraft's poetry is a bumpy ride at best. But PS Publishing (in its Stanza Press imprint) made a nice job of collecting Lovecraft's poems from Weird Tales in a slim volume, Hallowe'en in a Suburb, that is worth having.

[Gray House]

For the past week or so I have been reading two or three sections of Some Unknown Gulf of Night each day. I am only about halfway through, but already I consider it to be one of the very best of Lovecraftian fictions I have read. Glad to hear there will be more!

[klarkash]

The Fungi from Yuggoth brings people together.

I met Mr. Charles Schneider via TLO last year. He was (briefly) living in Brooklyn so we arranged to meet outside the apartment building where Lovecraft (also briefly) lived during his NYC sojourn.

Without planning it beforehand, we had each brought along our 70's Ballantine paperbacks of TFFY. So we snapped a couple of photos, hung out for an hour or so, and read selections aloud (Charles also read a bit of "The Horror at Red Hook," which is set not far from Lovecraft's Brooklyn apartment.)

The poems sounded beautiful there in the autumn twilight outside 169 Clinton. And we managed all this without getting beaten up!

	TLO THOMAS LIGOTTI ONLINE

[hopfrog]

Quote Originally Posted by klarkash

The Fungi from Yuggoth brings people together. I met Mr. Charles Schneider via TLO last year. He was (briefly) living in Brooklyn so we arranged to meet outside the apartment building where Lovecraft (also briefly) lived during his NYC sojourn. Without planning it beforehand, we had each brought along our 70's Ballantine paperbacks of TFFY. So we snapped a couple of photos, hung out for an hour or so, and read selections aloud (Charles also read a bit of "The Horror at Red Hook," which is set not far from Lovecraft's Brooklyn apartment.) The poems sounded beautiful there in the autumn twilight outside 169 Clinton. And we managed all this without getting beaten up!

I would love to see those photos! I took my copy of the Ballantine pb edition of Fungi from Yuggoth and Other Poems with me when my chums took me on a three-week tour of New England and New York. During our four days in Providence, S. T. Joshi was in town, doing work on Clark Ashton Smith poetry volumes, and he took us on a long trek of Lovecraftian sites. As we stood before 10 Barnes Street I scribbled in my pb edition of ye Fungi that I was standing with S. T. before the house where HPL penned his poetry. It was a moment of fabulous magick, never yet replicated -- the happiest moment of my too-long life. On the evening we landed in New York, Derrick Hussey of Hippocampus Press took us on a walking tour that included the apartment that HPL shared with Sonia after they were married, then 169 Clinton Street, and then we went to the Dutch Reformed Church (1796) on Flatbush Avenue that HPL visited with Kleiner in ye evening of 16 September 1922, and from which Lovecraft chipped off a bit of stone from one of ye antient tombs, an event that inspir'd Lovecraft to write "The Hound." My gawd, what delicious Lovecraftian delirium I experienc'd, roaming that haunts once trod by HPL!

	TLO THOMAS LIGOTTI ONLINE

[Fenris Technique]

I have always had an inexplicable appreciation for HP Lovecraft’s Fungi From Yuggoth. My fascination began sometime in the early 2000’s when I obtained a semi-complete recording of the work accompanied by music I would describe as hallucinatory. It occurred to me that listening to the piece while drifting off to sleep might have unpredictable effects on my dream life or perhaps even heighten the range of my imagination. For the next five years I listened to it regularly at bed time.

As a brief aside, I was especially pleased to see that I’m not the only one that found Fungi From Yuggoth to be a compelling work. It seems to take a drubbing by the Literary elite whenever mentioned, but Thomas Ligotti himself said:

“And I’ve never taken Lovecraft as model either because of his obsession with writing poems in the style of the eighteenth century, with the exception of course of what I consider one of his greatest works, The Fungi from Yuggoth. I think if I had one work of Lovecraft’s to preserve it would be this loose cycle of poems. They include most of his major themes and, in my opinion, have an atmosphere to them that is far more haunting than that of his stories. “

http://lovecraftzine.com/2015/10/14/...homas-ligotti/

As the years passed I became increasingly curious over who had done this reading and why. Who had scored the bizarre, transcendental music, and was this work still available for purchase somewhere all these years later? At the time there was almost no information available on the recording. Multiple searches only succeeded in turning up mimics, enthusiasts, and pretenders to the throne - each trying to replicate or take credit for the piece . . . yet the original artists remained beyond my Googling grasp.

Fast forward to 2016, it looks like the company who created the work has re-asserted their rights over the piece and finally made it available in its entirety. The reading was done by John Arthur, and the music by Mike Olson. The double CD is available from Fedogan and Bremer Books, here: https://www.fedoganandbremer.com/pro...uxe-2-disk-set



Glad to see this unique piece making a comeback!

[hopfrog]

The double cd set is wonderful! Disc 1 is ye Fungi; but disc 2 has some really fascinating things, such as the Harold Farnese music to two of Lovecraft's sonnets, "Mirage" and "The Elder Pharos". There is also "Lament for H. P. Lovecraft," music by Alfred Galpin. The booklet accompanying the discs is fantastic, 24 pages and reproducing many of the Frank Utpatel illustrations for ye Fungi that he did for ye Arkham House edition of Lovecraft's poems.

I think I've reported here or elsewhere that Fedogan & Bremer will soon release a new recording of FUNGI FROM YUGGOTH, with readings by Will Hart and music by Graham Plowman. I've heard the entire thing and it is brilliant!