Matt Cardin's Interview with Thomas Ligotti

[mkUltra]

Matt Cardin's Interview with Thomas Ligotti
It's good of course, so check it out.

[matt cardin]

Hey, you beat me to the punch. Thanks for giving the link. I've had some trouble posting to TLO today. Slow page loads or messages about failures to connect to the server.

Anyway, yes, earlier today I posted an interview with Tom at my blog. It was conducted over the past week or ten days via email. Naturally, he gave fascinating responses to my questions. I focused in particular on his writing process and managed to elicit some information I hadn't heard before, and I'm familiar with most if not all of the available interviews. So I'm hoping this will be a treat for his fans, and especially for my fellow TLOers. It certainly was for me personally.

	TLO THOMAS LIGOTTI ONLINE

[darrick]

wow. that was quite the interview... and the downer! especially with the blue/grey/black colorscheme of the blog. but then what would a Ligotti interview be without a little soul-crushing melancholy?

actually, i just finished "Teeth" in The Children of Cthulhu book. i liked it. my favorite part was at the end...

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Over the years I have taken the time to read all of Lovecraft's "fiction," and I cannot understand how he saw so deeply into the truth and yet remained so sane.

makes me wonder if the Old Ones showed him the way yet prevented him from consciously believing it...

anyways, i look forward to reading Ligotti's Conspiracy, new stories, and old stories again.

thanks to Matt and Tom for the thought provoking dialogue!

Darrick Dishaw

[G. S. Carnivals]

Matt, your interview with Mr. Ligotti is superb. I had to pause a few times along the way to reflect and absorb. Only the stuff of substance gets me in this way...

[Dr. Bantham]

Excellent! I was taken to drift deep into waves of transcendence as much by Matt's introduction and introspective questioning as by purity and genius of Tom's fantastic responses. As a minor aside, I was floored when Tom quoted a lyric by "The Smiths"!

[barrywood]

Exceptional, Matt. Your questions and the answers are wonderful and I've already skimmed it. I'll be perusing the interview again many times.

I always enjoyed an interview when the questions were as interesting as the answers. Thomas Ligotti doesn't take the easy way out and he answers the questions in depth.

[darrick]

i wasn't going to post this, but what can i say... it bothered me not to.

not too many have posted responses to this interview, and i assume if i waited until there were a few more, then things would still be the same. praise and thanks and nothing more.

but from the few responses i've read (as well as the potential responses i am imagining) i can't help asking this: isn't anyone else extremely bothered by this interview? of course, Matt did a great job as i already mentioned. so did Tom. they got to the truth of Ligotti and his writing. but that's the troublling thing... Ligotti's whole world is not only beyond the lunatic fringe ( i can relate to that ) but it's BAD. really really bad. as in, i can't even imagine anyone living a more wretched, horrible, and just plain sad existence as Tom! i mean, it's worse than anything i can think of. even someone being tortured in a horror story really has more vitality and light and hope. and the fact that he just doesn't care...?!?

i don't know, i just can't get over it. maybe i'm the only one... perhaps i'm too sensitive? but this interview more than any other bothers me. ok, so that's one thing. but then no one mentions it. is it like some kind of gruesome car crash one's just witnessed that one just can't talk about? or maybe people have gotten so used to Tom's outlook that it has become a part of the natural scenery, it no longer stands out because it has always been there? maybe people don't see it as i do? or they see it but they also understand that everyone else on this board understands and so nothing needs to be said... it is already understood: this is the most melancholy and pathetic man living today... and we really love his writing.

are there answers? probably. i assume each person might have a different answer. in any case, the weight of his awful existence has really bothered me and i just had to say... something!

well, that's about it.

DDD

[Morpheus Laughing]

Personally I found that interview very therapeutic.

I appreciated the elaboration on the troubles and revelations of anhedonia, something that I feel I am privy to all too often. Actually the whole interview was enjoyable but it has been one of those days when Tom’s bleakness is the extra existential kick necessary to slot a personal sense of absurdity into a bigger framework, which while terrible, is oddly distracting due to the sheer incomprehensibility of it all. Maybe those horrors are endurable by switching through them like gears.

As for other content, I think I’ll need to reread it at some other point as there really is a lot to take in. All these new & different media outputs for Ligotti are something to look forward to! Now where are those “work not done” mouse mats for the office! Wasn’t it Ligotti that linked humour and horror as related masks for reality?

I hope I have not offended anyone with the switch of tone. I might have made a first and last post without realising.

C.Grim

[barrywood]

I'm enjoying this posting very much. And now I'm off to re-read Matt's wonderful interview with the great Thomas Ligotti.

Cheers.

[waffles]

The interview was absorbing. I think it's the best one yet. I'll have to go back and reread the others interviews.

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This is going to be a boring response because I haven’t anything writerly to say about this matter.

I don't envy TL's existence, but I love the way he can make something out of nothing.