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Houellebecq and Lovecraft
 

offline Tony Danza from NAFO Suicide Hotline on 2019-09-11 18:00 [#02585083]
Points: 3647 Status: Regular



or, "Horrorism".

I got impatient and decided to read the Robin Mackay
translation. I do intend to get a hard copy eventually.
Anyhow.

Good stuff! He's very insightful and gives Lovecraft the
serious consideration he deserves. I have a couple of
quibbles. One, the idea that Lovecraft never addresses sex,
and that his cosmic horror isn't sublimated or symbolic
sexuality - The Shadow Over Innsmouth as a glaring example
is one endless conga line of fish fuckin'. Or the Dunwich
Horror - also full of sex, it just isn't between consenting
adult humans.

IMO one of the reasons Lovecraft's protagonist in Mountains
of Madness feels kinship and fellow-feelings towards the
Elder Things in the end is that they're dying out slowly in
a refined, respectable way, rather than breeding wildly like
the shoggoths and other life (us for example) that
inadvertently sprung from their creations. Just like
Lovecraft liked to consider himself the refined, gentlemanly
end of a patrician line.

I also think he doesn't situate Lovecraft's art properly in
his personal life, and that Houellebecq as a reactionary
himself has some blind spots.

Nevertheless, great reading, and I'm jumping up and down
with excitement and new ideas about how and why Lovecraft is
so important to the Nick Land etc. school of reactionary
thought.

Have you seen Graham Harman's book Weird Realism: Lovecraft
and Philosophy? That's next on my reading list.


 

offline RussellDust on 2019-09-11 19:12 [#02585088]
Points: 16065 Status: Regular



Someone is in the mood for a little: bromance!


 

offline Tony Danza from NAFO Suicide Hotline on 2019-09-11 20:41 [#02585090]
Points: 3647 Status: Regular



I wasn't kidding about having a yen for traditional English
faggots.


 

offline mermaidman on 2019-09-11 21:42 [#02585092]
Points: 8311 Status: Lurker



did someone say traditional english faggot?!


 

offline Roger Wilco from Mo's Beans on 2019-09-11 22:42 [#02585094]
Points: 2000 Status: Lurker



I will contribute to this properly later.


 

offline Tony Danza from NAFO Suicide Hotline on 2019-09-12 12:22 [#02585110]
Points: 3647 Status: Regular



p.s. not implying that only reactionaries have blind spots,
I mean I think Houellebecq is too close to his subject
matter in this case to see some things properly.


 

offline Tony Danza from NAFO Suicide Hotline on 2019-09-14 13:49 [#02585193]
Points: 3647 Status: Regular



Just wanna add, Michel is correct that Lovecraft's flights
of purple prose are one of his greatest assets, not a
weakness, and when he cuts loose in Entombed with the
Pharaohs it's gold, one of his best bits of writing.

I mean, fuck "good taste". Lovecraft was sui generis, did
his own thing and taste be damned.

But you'll notice that writers who are baptized as literary
figures are allowed to defy taste as much as they want, take
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow is purpler than anything
Lovecraft wrote and goes on like that for hundreds of pages.
Literary classic!


 


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