I'm on the final section, "Autopsy on a Puppet: An Anatomy of the Supernatural." We should get into some fiction writers now. I've been able to mark some passages that relate to True Detective, so I'm hoping that this will get me something helpful on Lovecraft.
Monday, July 18, 2016
Finishing Ligotti.
I'm on the final section, "Autopsy on a Puppet: An Anatomy of the Supernatural." We should get into some fiction writers now. I've been able to mark some passages that relate to True Detective, so I'm hoping that this will get me something helpful on Lovecraft.
Wednesday, July 13, 2016
So much to catch up here.
Catching up...
- My paper went swimmingly at NecronomiCon Providence 2016 (link goes to the updated page for 2017), and I'm pleased to announce that it has been accepted for publication as part of the proceedings. It's gratifying to have all the work I put into it rewarded. I'll refrain from posting it here, given that it's essentially in press, or will be as soon as I hear from the peer reviewers and address what they assure me are minor revisions.
- Reading: Lovecraft and the Gothic (Sigurdson 1993); HPL, Poe, and Bierce (Wheeler 1990); and an exegesis on hands in HPL (Waugh 1988), all in respective issues of Lovecraft Studies. Joshi's Four Decades of Criticism, with numerous useful essays by Faig, Joshi himself, Mabbott, and Leiber. Leiber's essay "A Literary Copernicus" is widely cited and rightly so. Leiber especially got me thinking about Faulkner and the Southern Gothic. I took more lengthy notes on Lauterbach, Mosig, and Cannon as well.
- Rene Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Yowza, what a text. It's a book-length conversation among Girard and two to three literary critics about his previous book, Violence and the Sacred, and how those ideas affect the status quo in sociology and anthropology. Difficult reading because I hadn't read Violence.
- Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred. I totally see where later writers took Girard's ideas and applied them to detective fiction. His notions of mimesis and the spread of violence are fascinating. Not an easy book, but not so hard as Things Hidden.
- Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti is erudite, and he wants to be sure you know it. His argument is based on a chain of reasoning, which is perfectly valid, and if you accept his premise--that "everything is not all right"--then what follow is one path of a logical derivative. I'm not yet done with this one. It's much easier going than any passage in Girard. Ligotti is a poet primarily; to my knowledge, this is his only work of nonfiction.
- I've got three books waiting for me at the UPS store, one of which is Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction by Christopher Pittard. That is the book that connects Girard with detective fiction.
After I finish Ligotti, I think I'm going to work on the chapter on Lovecraft and detective fiction. My plan is to make it do double duty as the NecronomiCon Providence 2017 paper, if accepted.
And onward.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)