Other things that we should be reading....

[whpugmire]

I've just started The Dream World of H. P. Lovecraft by Donald Tyson.  Although I have been a past practitioner of ye occult arts, it annoys me when people seem to downplay Lovecraft's genius as an original writer by claiming that he was writing of an arcane reality that he knew to be true, or some such thing.  I hate how idiots refuse to believe that the Necronomicon is a fictive invention, created by a genius in ye genre.  S. T. Joshi has assured me that Tyson's book on Lovecraft is a fairly straightforward biography of Lovecraft and well-done, and indeed we find this quote of ye back of ye booke:
"The Dream World of H. P. Lovecraft is a thought-provoking and intellectually stimulating book.  It's fusion of sound biographical knowledge and critical insight makes it a must-read for Lovecraftians  who want to explore the genesis of Lovecraft's bizarre, imaginative world.  --S. T. Joshi."

The theme of the book seems to be exactly as its title propounds, an investigation into Lovecraft's dreams and how they influenced his art.  This idea has me on fire!  There has yet to be a significant or lengthy discussion of Lovecraft's dream-life, although we have had collections of his dreams (from Necronomicon Press in ye form of H. P. Lovecraft's Dream Book) and tales that had been inspired by or evoke his dreaming (ye delightful 1962 Arkham House collection, Dreams and Fancies).  Tyson's Introduction to ye booke begins thus:
"The purpose of this biography of H. P. Lovecraft is to show the role dreams played in the genesis of his fiction, and how the mythology he evolved in his body of work became the basis for a system of modern esoteric practice."  I have much interest in the first and none whatsoever in ye second.  Still, I think this will prove a fascinating book and I look forward to continuing my reading of it.  I have the author's mammoth novel, Alhazred: Author of the Necronomicon, but have not yet had ye time to read it.

[rhorsman]

Johannes Cabal the Necromancer. There is a funny scen in this book where the title character confronts a dime-store Joseph Curwin and the results are laughable.

I'm vaguely remembering a reference to The Statement of Randolph Carter in here too. Something about finding a coil of telephone wire in the cemetery where one of the characters is first encountered?

[helios1014]

Night shade books has a complete collection of Clark Ashton Smith's short stories. The first volume cannot be found on amazon but it can be found here.

[MAS]

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson is a great read.

Yes, absolutely!  I just finished reading The Haunting of Hill House after getting the tip from Yog-Radio #42 (ish).  I flew through the book finding the characters intriguing, a level of skepticism and a very well presented "house" as the lead character.  There's no silly horror story here, it's very well constructed.  I don't know whether the way the characters interacted at times was a very 1950's thing, if they were odd people, or if they were just under the influence of the house?  It's an intriguing read all the same.

When reading about Shirley Jackson afterwards I learnt that she had gained most of her fame following publication of a story called, 'The Lottery' in The NewYorker (I think it was???).  Having enjoyed THoHH so much I quickly downloaded and read this short story.  It doesn't stand up in 2010.  The twist can almost be picked by reading the title of the story.   

Stick to THoHH - it comes in a tidy hardback version for about $20 at the Book Depository...well worth it!

[Genus Unknown]

You're joking, right? "The Lottery" is an absolute classic. Your opinion sucks.

Shirley Jackson is one of my favorite writers ever. If you want some good agoraphobic creepiness, check out We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

[MAS]

You're joking, right? "The Lottery" is an absolute classic. Your opinion sucks.

Is this your even handed, well mannered, moderator approach to tell me so blatantly my opinion sucks?  
I stand by my comment.  I don't think the twist does stand up in 2010.
A weird fiction tale called the lottery, where a crowd of villagers gather to draw lots...were you expecting them to win a prize?

I think you should note I didn't say anything about the skill of her writing or the impact of the story back in the day.  I think if you look even more closely you may note that I posted my comments to say what a good writer Shirley was after enjoying THoHH so much.  

I'll just take my sucky opinion elsewhere, I guess.

[Genus Unknown]

Dude, it was a joke. I meant no offense.

"The Lottery" is a great story though, and you're wrong not to like it. 

Keep in mind that this wasn't presented as "weird fiction" (though it is fiction, and it's kind of weird). Shirley Jackson never traveled the same circles as Lovecraft, even intellectually. Hell, "The Lottery" was first published in The New Yorker, not the pulps.

She was a literary writer, not a "genre" one, and she wasn't writing some kind of M. Night Shyamalan twist ending. "The Lottery" is a slow burner. You get signs that something bad is going to happen. You don't know what, but you know it's coming, and then it comes, and it's gut-wrenching and disturbing. Everything else is setting, character, and suspense. It's a brilliantly evocative piece, economical in its language and plot, rich in its atmosphere, daringly original, and uncommonly disturbing in its ending and the view it takes of human nature. It's just great.

[Nvision]

Any Ramsey Campbell fans hereabouts?  I had read some of S.T. Joshi's praise for his work and how he was sort of a spiritual successor to ol' H.P., so I wanted to give his books a shot.  Thus far, I've read 'The Overnight' and 'The Parasite'.  Both were quite enjoyable, and I can certainly see the influence coming through, though I'd have to give a slight edge to 'The Parasite' because of the inclusion of secretive cults, half-glimpsed monstrosities, and sanity (and memory) blasting evil.  'The Overnight' is quite interesting simply because of the unconventional and quite modern, almost sterile setting of a franchised book store for a haunted house story.  There are a lot of characters in it, and the chapters are divided among them, so this one bears careful consumption.

I absolutely love 'The Willows' by Blackwood, and read it on a somewhat regular basis.  I'm still toying with the idea of adapting this as a graphic novel one day, if I can find the time...

A few people had mentioned Ligotti, and I have read 'The Last Feast of Harlequin,' but I found it a little too derivative of 'The Festival' to really enjoy it.  Do any of you have other suggestions of his works that might be a little more distinct in flavour?

[helios1014]

On Ligotti I would recomend "the Frolic" or "Dr. Locrian's Asylum." There is also a collection of his, Teatro Grotesco, that containes a really strange story about a town whose leader is never seen [can't remember the name].
On the Ramsey Campbell front, I just started reading Hungry Moon. 

[old book]

Colin Wilson, From Atlantis to the Sphinx

[old book]

This might be interesting to Chard or Sich in the run-up to At the Mountains.

It's from the Immoral Mapping section of Denis Cosgrove and Veronica della Dora's book High Places: Cultural Geographies of Mountains, Ice and Science:

"... Antarctica’s dynamic ice processes are always working to erode the possibilities of a seemingly stable form of accounting for geographical space. Wråkberg argues, ‘The slow pace of Antarctic exploration as a whole also indicated that there might be more to this than just adjusting field practices developed elsewhere to extreme polar conditions. The grand geographic project of the nineteenth-century Western culture seemed to have struck difficulties of a more profound nature in its encounter with the vast ice mass in the far south’. What this Antarctic excess suggests is that there are entropic forces at work within the making of all maps. The hallucinatory capacity of landscape phenomena, such as the mirage, works to re-inscribe the very notions of geographical fact within these processes of accounting for spaces. As vision sagged under the weight of ‘snow’, this formlessness demanded a new order of knowing and observation, and a new order of knower that could contend with how the landscape was realised through speculation.

"For Wilkes, speculative vision is a troubling thing. His visions have the ‘appearance’ of land that cannot be taken as an assumption of fact. In this zone of troubling atmospheric phenomena, vision is a space of speculation. Yet it is also the place wheremastery is realised through graphical inscription (map, image, sighting). Representational practice is the site of dialectic between cartography, narrative and image, and thus is a critical site of enunciation in the geography of place. Wilkes had been meticulous in controlling the production of narratives and objects from his expedition. In order to restrict counternarratives, he reduced the number of scientists included in the expedition from twenty-five to seven, and he prevented them from examining their specimens below deck. All specimens had to be placed in his care. Allmembers of the expedition were to keep journals as part of the performance of their duties, and to submit them to Wilkes for editorial approval at the end of the voyage. To counter the charges of ‘immoral mapping’ levied against him, Wilkes published his Narrative as an official account of the expedition. In the realm of the visual, the graphical practice of rendering an image of the continent may have brought phsychological resolution to Wilkes’ speculative sighting, but once the location given by that sighting had been sailed over by Ross, doubt was cast on the production of all the geographical knowledge Wilkes had attempted to secure, and onWilkes as a curator of that knowledge. The forms of production to which his voyage had given expression were already circulating freely, and Wilkes’ speculative vision had given rise to a number of other speculative geographies. The pictorial plates of Wilkes’ Narrative formed the basis of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). Melville’s novel, as well as Jeremiah N. Reynolds’s Mocha Dick (1839), Symmes’ speculative ‘Hollow Earth Theory’, James Fenimore Cooper’s Sea Lions (1849), and Edgar Allen Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1837), all enlarged upon and made fictitious use of the facts Wilkes had so scrupulously attempted to control."

Wilkes was brought up on charges of "immoral mapping" by the US Navy I think in connection with the land he claimed--Wilkes Land--to have seen and mapped at the Southern Antipode. Cosgrove and della Dora point out that what Wilkes saw was a superior mirage, the image of land further off refracted in the atmosphere by cold layers of air so that it appeared nearer than it was. They also talk about sensory deprivation--the lack of human-scale objects and intuitable landscape forms in the Antarctic--causing hallucination. The limits of human sensitivity and discovery in the Antarctic are mirrored in the failure of cartographers and surveyors--the dominant arbiters of physical reality in the century of rationalism, the 19th--to map the Antarctic, and how this represents a breakdown of sorts of Western colonialism, since you can't claim land you can't see.

I'd never heard of Mocha Dick before, but I'm (rationally) positive Poe used Wilkes' Narrative for his Arthur Gordon Pym and the whole situation Wilkes found himself in does seem positively (rationalistically) Lovecraftian: "You claim this and this and this, and yet ... No one else can find this this you claim to have not only seen, but mapped!" Dagon rising, etc. etc.

[old book]

Umm apparently a book by Julius Evola, the traditionalist philosopher/intellectual apologist for Italian fascism etc. etc. called Introduction to Magic: Rituals and Practical Techniques for the Magus contains earlier magical and occultic corpora including something called De Mysteriis. It can be found in an incomplete edition on library.nu

The table of contents says Excerpts from De Mysteriis, page 329. Apparently this is a real text from Alexandria, attributed to neoplatonist Iamblichus. Someone named Tikaipôs supposedly translated it from Greek to Italian, "from the edition published by Th. Gale, Osconni, 1678". Someone named Thomas Taylor did the English translation used in this book.

The book is translated into English from Evola's original in Italian called Introduzione alla Magia quale scienza dell'Io. The translation only comprises volume I of Evola's multi-volume work in Italian.

The section following De Mysteriis is called The Message of the Pole Star and is signed in the late 20s in Alexandria. Another earlier section is called Beond the Threshold of Sleep. The Introduction talks much of Rene Guenon, among others. Evola and Guenon seem particularly interested in refuting weak, modern and fashionable occultism, particularly Theosophy. Therefore this fits into the general picture of occult polemic and counter-polemic that would have attracted HPL if he had access to it. Evola and Guenon also seem to read, borrow from and perhaps inspire Oskar de Lubicz Mi?osz, writing mainly in French and considered a symbolist and metaphysical poet. Milosz "lent" his boyarnymic Lubicz to R A Schwaller de Lubicz, who did some strange things with glass, alchemy and heiroglyphs. At least two of the above-mentioned moved to Egypt; Guenon died there and was known as a Sufi sheikh by an Arabic name. Schwaller simplified his name to AOR (or was it AUR?). Evola was pretty much rejected after WWII for his support to Fascism but is still revered by a certain set of neo-Fascists. Oskar de Lubicz Mi?osz decided to reclaim his (mixed) Jewish heritage just when it was becoming highly irregular in polite society and downright dangerous, and died before World War II broke out, having predicted it as the "conflagration universelle." His cousin Czes?aw Mi?osz went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (I believe it was for lit) for his book on Marxism, Communism, Poland, Eastern Europe and decadent Eastern philosophies called The Captive Mind. He also went on to write many other books and did much work on Polish literature. One thing he and his uncle agreed upon was condemnation of the worldview of Edgar Allan Poe who "discovered Hell in his native America."

It seems somehow related and yet ... mysterious.