Recent Reading

[qcrisp]

Current reading, or most of it:

The Letters of Abelard and Heloise
A Voice Through a Cloud, Denton Welch
The Interpreted World, Ernesto Spinelli (about phenomenology in psychology)
Floating Clouds, Hayashi Fumiko
The Qur'an

I first read Welch, probably, back in about 2007, and he's been well worth returning to. As with Hayashi Fumiko, I think he is one of those who, for me, is not a sudden discovery, but for whom I slowly acquire a deepening taste.

There are some quite startling passages in the letters of Abelard and Heloise.

[Arthur Staaz]

After more than five decades on this planet, I'm finally reading Nabokov's Lolita. (I guess I get excused for the first decade.) It's amazing to me to see some of the style that Ligotti has so deftly carried over to cosmic horror. In particular, I see Nabokov's wordplay in "The Frolic". I've also got to give Nabokov's short fiction a read. Loving Lolita, though some of the modernist love of lists get's a little wearisome at times.

[marioneta]

Almost on a par with the book's age, after six decades plus five, I am reading finally LOLITA by Nabokov. It lives up to its hype. I can see why Ligotti was inspired by Nabokov's writing. As I read, the futility of HH is so evident and pathetic...all that Lolita nonsense. Yet he is all so human in his futility..

Everything that is engenders, sooner or later, nightmares. Let us try, therefore, to invent
something better than being.
E.M. Cioran

[Bleak&Icy]

Lately nothing I read seems dark enough, no work penetrates deeply enough into the horror and absurdity of existence. I have zero interest in most horror fiction that is written in third person and features average wives and husbands who are consumed by common everyday concerns. I feel rather like the unnamed poet in the opening of "Drapeau," who asks himself, "Where is the writer ... who is unstained by any habits of the human, who is the ideal of everything alien to living, and whose eccentricity, in its darkest phase, turns in on itself to form increasingly more complex patterns of strangeness... Where is the writer, the one whose entangled hallucinations could be accommodated only by the most intimate of diaries? And this diary, the journal of the most unnecessary man who ever lived, would be the record of the most questionable experiences ever known, and the most beautiful [my ellipsis]."

For my summer reading I have assembled a number of books which have been on my wishlist for years, but for one reason or another I have not got around to reading them. I hope that amongst the following books I discover at least one that comes close to satisfying these "rather severe prerequisites."

Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl
Bonaventura, The Nightwatches of Bonaventura
Horacio Quiroga, The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories
August Strindberg, The Defence of a Madman
Paul Leppin, Severin's Journey into the Dark
Paul Leppin, Blaugast
Ladislav Klima, The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch
Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte
Georges Rodenbach, The Bells of Bruges

If anyone would like to suggest similar titles that I can add to my reading list, please do so.

[marioneta]

Bleak&Icy, I would suggest the works of E.M. Cioran, if you have not read them already. Very dark, but also ecstatic and funny in a black way. Example:

Ishi, the last American Indian of his tribe, after hiding for years in terror of the White Men, reduced to starvation, surrendered of his own free will to the exterminators of his people, believing that the same treatment was in store for himself. He had no posterity, he was truly the last.
Once humanity is destroyed or simply extinguished, we may imagine a sole survivor who would wander the earth, without even having anyone to surrender to. . .
-The Trouble With Being Born

[gveranon]

Quote Originally Posted by Bleak&Icy

Lately nothing I read seems dark enough, no work penetrates deeply enough into the horror and absurdity of existence. I have zero interest in most horror fiction that is written in third person and features average wives and husbands who are consumed by common everyday concerns. I feel rather like the unnamed poet in the opening of "Drapeau," who asks himself, "Where is the writer ... who is unstained by any habits of the human, who is the ideal of everything alien to living, and whose eccentricity, in its darkest phase, turns in on itself to form increasingly more complex patterns of strangeness... Where is the writer, the one whose entangled hallucinations could be accommodated only by the most intimate of diaries? And this diary, the journal of the most unnecessary man who ever lived, would be the record of the most questionable experiences ever known, and the most beautiful [my ellipsis]." For my summer reading I have assembled a number of books which have been on my wishlist for years, but for one reason or another I have not got around to reading them. I hope that amongst the following books I discover at least one that comes close to satisfying these "rather severe prerequisites." Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl Bonaventura, The Nightwatches of Bonaventura Horacio Quiroga, The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories August Strindberg, The Defence of a Madman Paul Leppin, Severin's Journey into the Dark Paul Leppin, Blaugast Ladislav Klima, The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte Georges Rodenbach, The Bells of Bruges If anyone would like to suggest similar titles that I can add to my reading list, please do so.

I read Octave Mirbeau's In the Sky a few weeks ago and intended to post here about it but couldn't figure out what I wanted to say. This novel was translated by Ann Sterzinger and recently published by Nine-Banded Books. I can't speak to the accuracy of the translation, but the English prose is always eloquent and compelling, with a slightly archaic feel, feverish and nearly hysterical at times. Despite the clarity of the prose, the novel is somewhat bewildering in ways that I am still thinking about. In her Translator's Note, Ann Sterzinger mentions plot incongruities and bizarre structure. (She also brings up Ligotti in her comments.) I was especially thrown off by a seeming switch of first-person narrator. Mirbeau is up to some things here that I can't quite divine. Anyway, J. P. Drapeau might find something in this to slake his awful thirst. Now I am wondering: Mirbeau, Drapeau...

[Hideous Name]

Quote Originally Posted by Bleak&Icy

Lately nothing I read seems dark enough, no work penetrates deeply enough into the horror and absurdity of existence. I have zero interest in most horror fiction that is written in third person and features average wives and husbands who are consumed by common everyday concerns. I feel rather like the unnamed poet in the opening of "Drapeau," who asks himself, "Where is the writer ... who is unstained by any habits of the human, who is the ideal of everything alien to living, and whose eccentricity, in its darkest phase, turns in on itself to form increasingly more complex patterns of strangeness... Where is the writer, the one whose entangled hallucinations could be accommodated only by the most intimate of diaries? And this diary, the journal of the most unnecessary man who ever lived, would be the record of the most questionable experiences ever known, and the most beautiful [my ellipsis]." For my summer reading I have assembled a number of books which have been on my wishlist for years, but for one reason or another I have not got around to reading them. I hope that amongst the following books I discover at least one that comes close to satisfying these "rather severe prerequisites." Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl Bonaventura, The Nightwatches of Bonaventura Horacio Quiroga, The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories August Strindberg, The Defence of a Madman Paul Leppin, Severin's Journey into the Dark Paul Leppin, Blaugast Ladislav Klima, The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte Georges Rodenbach, The Bells of Bruges If anyone would like to suggest similar titles that I can add to my reading list, please do so.

I would suggest "Aurélia" by Gérard de Nerval, "The book of disquiet" by Fernando Pessoa, and " Concrete" By Thomas Bernhard. Also i second Marioneta's comment about Cioran.

[Hideous Name]

I´m currently reading a very insightful collection of essays, interviews, public interventions and letters by Thomas Bernhard called "En busca de la verdad" ("Der Wahrheit auf der Spur"), And "The soul of the marionette" by John Gray.

I am reading actor Robert Blake's autobiography, entitled Tales of a Rascal. Interesting guy.

[Frater_Tsalal]

Recently I've been re-reading Kenneth Grant's Typhonian Trilogies, as research for the novel I'm currently working on. I read the first 3 books of the Trilogies this month (The Magical Revival, Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, and Cults of the Shadow), and next month I hope to read the second of the Trilogies (the second being my favorite of the three). It's been awhile since I've read many of these books (as far back as 2008 in the case of some of them) and I'm not quite as starry-eyed a fan as I was back then: I now find Grant's endless exaltations of magically consecrated vaginal fluids to be incredibly tedious, and I do detect traces of a subtle homophobia in some of his early books (despite claims to the contrary by some of his followers/students). But at least with the second trilogy he begins to move away from all the tedious tantric stuff and starts getting increasingly bizarre as he starts to incorporate more and more aspects of Lovecraft into his work. I'm especially looking forward to re-reading his book Nightside of Eden, which is the first book of his I ever read, way back in 2004. Great title, great cover art, great book all-around.