K-Punk

catalog

Well-known member
I liked the way capitalist realism oscillated between serious theory and personal memoir. Very un-academic in that sense, therefore quite fizzy to read. I think the first time I read it though, I did find it very bleak and maudlin. Was better second time round.

I've found the odd blog post good as well, but there's far more that I've started but not finished. Did he do the first burial interview? That was a good one, good intro to that whole vibe for a year or two.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Never read any ligotti but keep hearing about him. I don't like horror tho.

Is it the Molloy trilogy? Never read him either but I did enjoy Lee Rourke's 'the canal' and he said he nicked his entire style from Beckett. I saw 'happy day' and it was a right laugh.

Yeah sometimes you wanna get a bit bleak. It's all comedy really.
 

version

Well-known member
Never read any ligotti but keep hearing about him. I don't like horror tho.

This one's nonfiction.

In Thomas Ligotti’s first nonfiction outing, an examination of the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life through an insightful, unsparing argument that proves the greatest horrors are not the products of our imagination but instead are found in reality.

“There is a signature motif discernible in both works of philosophical pessimism and supernatural horror. It may be stated thus: Behind the scenes of life lurks something pernicious that makes a nightmare of our world.”

His fiction is known to be some of the most terrifying in the genre of supernatural horror, but Thomas Ligotti’s first nonfiction book may be even scarier. Drawing on philosophy, literature, neuroscience, and other fields of study, Ligotti takes the penetrating lens of his imagination and turns it on his audience, causing them to grapple with the brutal reality that they are living a meaningless nightmare, and anyone who feels otherwise is simply acting out an optimistic fallacy. At once a guidebook to pessimistic thought and a relentless critique of humanity’s employment of self-deception to cope with the pervasive suffering of their existence, The Conspiracy against the Human Race may just convince readers that there is more than a measure of truth in the despairing yet unexpectedly liberating negativity that is widely considered a hallmark of Ligotti’s work.


Is it the Molloy trilogy?

Yeah - Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable. There's a volume of all three on Amazon atm.


41MauZxXm9L.jpg
 

catalog

Well-known member
Beckett's a bit like Burroughs innit. Guilty all his life cos of what he did to Joyce's daughter. I believe alan Moore's 'jerusalem' dishes the dirt. The ligotti does sound pretty good.
 

version

Well-known member
We were on about this in another thread a while back. You mean the whole thing of him just dropping her because he was only interested in getting close to Joyce?
 

catalog

Well-known member
I've been steadily working my way through the blogs from the beginning, also got a copy of Capitalist Realism on the way for Christmas. Have to say it felt a bit grim ordering a book like that from Amazon of all places.

Can't remember if you've already posted about this yourself?

 

version

Well-known member
I did. There are clips of people reading Deleuze in French as ASMR too. It seems ripe for a conspiracy theory, I can see people on 4chan etc saying stuff like 'ASMR channels brainwashing by reading leftist propaganda'.
 

version

Well-known member
Swarmachines Rewind

Unheard since (and arguably even at) its performance at a conference at The Hacienda in 1996, this recently rediscovered cassette tape containing an audio version of Swarmachines, featuring the voices of Sadie Plant, Angus Carlyle, Mark Fisher, and Nick Land machinically integrated with some premium mid-90s jungle, is a very early production of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU).

https://www.urbanomic.com/podcast/swarmachines-rewind/

swarmachines-768x540.jpg
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
I mention all this partly because I don’t think it’s possible to understand the sharp inflection points of Mark’s intellectual trajectory without taking note, in some way, of his emotional makeup, which was somehow simultaneously volatile and trenchant. The person who in 2013 wrote Exiting the Vampire Castle was a touchy sod, reacting in a very characteristic way to the behaviour and comportment of other touchy sods, mixing up a heartfelt plea for consideration and comradeliness with a rhetorical belligerence that could only ever have had the effect of energetically escalating the situation. Altogether too many people found, and by all appearances continue to find, that escalation hugely rewarding, a motherlode of dark energy. It was less a political intervention than a psychic detonation. But there was something of this quality to the best of Mark’s work, too (in case it isn’t obvious, I don’t think of Vampire Castle as belonging to this category). “Libidinal” was one of his favourite words, but not in a swashbuckling sex-pest sort of way: he meant the sort of charge that lifts you off your feet when you read something really mind-bendingly good, listen to a record that instantly wires you into an anonymous multiplicity of people whose lives are all being transformed, at that very moment, by what they are hearing. He continually lamented the scarcity of such electrifying experiences in a drained, pacified media landscape; but I think it was as much a feature of his own internal landscape that things were either barren, or blazing with resurgent energy. (And then again: his “cold rationalist” understanding of the forces shaping psychic experience did not allow for a hard distinction to be made between “inner” and “outer” in this way).

https://thelastinstance.com/posts/broken_links/
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Interesting to read about the background with that Atzmon book, I didn't know about any of that stuff. It was a stupid position to get into, to be fair to you and the other letter-signers.
 

luka

Well-known member
Imagine being so much of a drip that you feel threatened cos someone has an opinion about a record
 
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