HP Lovecraft – { feuilleton }

Existence no longer exists

Yesterday was HP Lovecraft’s birthday so here’s some cosmic horror of a sort. It’s debatable whether a narrative can still be classed as horror when the constituent elements are rarified and abstracted to this degree…maybe weird SF would be better? Or theory fiction in the form of 5–10 minute YouTube videos? So far there are four of these things credited to “Unorthodox Kitten”, the first one being a kind of introductory chapter which includes algebra in its explication; by the time we reach the fourth chapter we’re told that “Math never existed” although the links on some of the notes take you to papers which contain copious equations, including an argument that returns us to the first video…

What does it all mean? My introduction to the quartet was via Scotto Moore’s newsletter in which Moore suggests that the videos may be a part of some ARG, or Alternate Reality Game. One for recreational mathematicians or quantum physicists, no doubt. This is certainly possible given the links to Fermat’s Library, but I’m happy to take the things as they are, mysterious fragments freighted with dire implication. I imagine Eugene Thacker would approve.

Infinity, Singularity and The Rapture (10:10)

The OHR EIN SOF
The painters, who are the product of a new cycle of fragmentation, despite their almost divine ability to paint everything at will, are merely lifeless hypothetical concepts compared to their predecessors from the previous cycle. These predecessors perceive them as weeds that must be eliminated, not out of fear, but as a principle to maintain nonexistential silence.
the war of the iterative gODS has begun.
the incomplete jump occurred.
IT must be stopped, iT can’t be stopped,
only the INFINITE filling all existence,
there is only the iNFINITE filling all canvas,
artificial lethal sEA with an infinite IRON,
trying to see the INFINITE through yOu,
no light, just colors.
iT came but YOU were not here when iT arrived,
iT gracefully retreats, yet the essence remains unchanged.
Can existence exist without nonexistence?
Are yOU afraid of non-existence, now? :)

Everything is happening at the same time (5:44)

the CYCLE, THEIR god. IT wasn’t there, but Theirs TOOL Existence is the wonderful place beyond oUR reach as a portrait of everything possible. yet, yOU were given no colors and yOU still were able to paint a masterpiece of non-existence. YOU don’t have to :)

The External Reality of Finiteness (4:39)

the battle of the gODS lasted a fraction of an instant.
They did not even realize They no longer existed.
Their cREATION was Their doom, the cREATOR’s doom.
as just a mere painting of the Infinite from the bLIND nonexistent view of iTS.
Nothing is out of oUR reach.
The Physical Impossibility of Non-existence in the Existence of something Existing.
Before the jump, the celebration orbs were sent, now working as cREATOR’S last echoes.
the luxury of the future Majority to not exist at all.

Existence no longer exists (10:02)

The shells of long-abandoned artificial stars, held together by autonomous anti-expansionary devices, were destined to fade into obscurity along with the rest of the universe. It was only a matter of time before the corpse of the Laniakea supercluster followed suit to make space for a new cYCLE.
gOds are dead, the cYCLE is broken. theY tried to be iT.
theY wanted to free themselves from their finite torture.
finding the horrifying truth of their existence with a forcefully finite painted INFINITY of iterations.
tHEY created it to find the solution, theY did. you just haven’t gotten to that point yet.
tHEY are now infinite INFINITY, with a finite original goal of theirS.
with noonE to see iTS infinite torture They made for iT in iTS infinite portrait of inlimitation.
forever alone in an instant of ITS, IT paints and paints, not knowing the nonexistent palette of iT is just another iteration of IT in an infinite fractal of instantless existence with an end as finite as infinity.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• From Beyond
• Eco calls on Cthulhu

Weekend links 735

The Adventure of the Giant Squid (c.1939) by NC Wyeth.

• Mix of the week is a superb XLR8R Podcast 860 by Kenneth James Gibson. Elsewhere there’s DreamScenes – July 2024 at Ambientblog, and Deep Breakfast Mix 267 at A Strangely Isolated Place.

• A trailer for a restored print of Time Masters (1982), the second animated feature by René Laloux, with character designs/decor by Moebius. Now do Gandahar.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Music From Elsewhere: Haunting Tunes From Mythical Beings, Hidden Worlds, and Other Curious Sources by Doug Skinner.

Not only a prolific lyricist, Lovecraft considered his main vocation to be poetry. And at its best, his verse can be judged an apt expression of his philosophical vision, in which cosmic horror embodies the predicament of all sentient beings in a meaningless universe. That Lovecraft’s poetry never reaches the heights attained by such Modernists as T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound should not diminish the fact that his is verse that, in the most archaic of ways, advances a startlingly modern metaphysic, a poetic encapsulation of what Thomas Ligotti in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race describes as an affirmation that the universe is a “place without sense, meaning, or value.” Lovecraft, with his antiquated prosody and his anti-human ethics, presented readers with a type of counter-modernist poetry. Ironically, he is the radical culmination of William Carlos Williams’s injunction of “No ideas but in things;” he is an author for whom there are only things. Graham Harman in Lovecraft and Philosophy describes Lovecraft as a “violently anti-idealist” who “laments the inability of mere language to depict the deep horrors his narrators confront.” Unpleasant stuff, for sure. It is verse that at best exemplifies something that controversial poet Frederik Seidel called for in the Paris Review: “Write beautifully what people don’t want to hear.”

Ed Simon on The Unlikely Verse of HP Lovecraft

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, by HP Lovecraft.

• At Spoon & Tamago: An ethereal bubble emerges from a Japanese townhouse.

• New music: The Head As Form’d In The Crier’s Choir by Sarah Davachi.

• Mabe Fratti’s favourite albums.

• Bubble Rap (1972) by Can | Bubbles (1975) by Herbie Hancock | Reverse Bubble (2014) by Air

Weekend links 728

Composition: Cones and Spirals (1929) by Edward Alexander Wadsworth.

• “Repeating items over and over, called maintenance rehearsal, is not the most effective strategy for remembering. Instead, actors engage in elaborative rehearsal, focusing their attention on the meaning of the material and associating it with information they already know.” John Seamon on the vicissitudes of memory, and how actors remember their lines.

• “Mary McCarthy described it as ‘Fabergé gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers, a cat-and-mouse game, and do-it-yourself novel’, among other things.” Mary Gaitskill on the pleasures and difficulties of Nabokov’s greatest novel, Pale Fire. Also a reminder that I ought to read it again.

• New music: Movement, Before All Flowers by Max Richter; A Thread, Silvered And Trembling by Drew McDowall; Unspeakable Visions by Michel Banabila.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Ulysses by James Joyce.

• The latest cartographical design from Herb Lester Associates is Facts Concerning HP Lovecraft and His Environs.

• At the Daily Heller: A look back at the craze for poster stamps.

• Mix of the week: A tuning mix for The Wire by Tashi Wada.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Michael Lonsdale Day.

• Annie Hogan’s favourite music.

• Clockworks (1975) by Laurie Spiegel | Tin Toy Clockwork Train (1985) by The Dukes Of Stratosphear | Clockwork Horoscope (2008) by Belbury Poly

Monaco on Resnais

After watching Providence again I yielded to further temptation and ordered a copy of the book that first introduced me to the film itself and to the Resnais oeuvre as a whole. I’d been itching for some time to re-read James Monaco’s study to see if it was as good as I remembered. In many ways it’s a lot better, especially now that I’ve been able to see most of the films he examines. Alain Resnais was published in 1978 which means it only covers the first third of the director’s filmography, but all of these films were mysterious and intriguing to me in 1983, a period when I was busy looking for items of interest on the art and film shelves at Manchester’s Central Library. The other key discovery in the film section was A Cinema of Loneliness by Robert P. Kolker, the book that introduced me to Martin Scorsese’s films at a time when most of them were difficult to see. Kolker also deepened my interest in Robert Altman and Arthur Penn, while replacing my flagging interest in science-fiction cinema with a new curiosity about film noir.

An essential text, and a better book about American cinema in the 1960s/70s than the gossip-filled pages of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.

The science-fiction interest may have been flagging by this point but it was actually a book about the genre that alerted me to Alain Resnais in the first place, as I noted here. Je t’aime, Je t’aime is the Resnais film that involves a time-travel experiment but descriptions of the mysteries and formal elegance of Last Year at Marienbad were of greater interest, even more so when I found a copy of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay. The films themselves, however, remained frustratingly out of reach. One of the things I really don’t miss about the 1980s is being able to read about films such as these, or others like El Topo (or Taxi Driver, or Night Moves, or Performance…), while wondering when I’d ever get to see them.

Monaco’s book provides an overview of the first few decades of Resnais’s career, from his early start in the 1940s (two lost Surrealist experiments are mentioned), to the documentaries of the 1950s, ending with Providence in 1977. Much of the detail originates from conversations with Resnais himself, and while Monaco doesn’t avoid interpretative speculation he’s never tiresomely academic. One of the more valuable chapters concerns some of the films that Resnais was trying to make in the 1970s. (And one of the minor revelations is reading about a director with his reputation struggling to get his projects financed.) The only detail I remembered about the unmade films was his plans to direct a script he commissioned from Stan Lee. That’s Smilin’ Stan Lee of Marvel Comics fame, inventor of all those vapid superheroes. Stan Lee working with Alain Resnais sounds like some kind of sarcastic postmodern joke but Monaco says that The Monster Maker would have been “a grand and exuberant compendium of all the cliches of the B movie which have thrilled and enthralled audiences for fifty years: science fiction, sentimental romance, horror, revenge, and cataclysm…” We’ll never know what this may have been like, and maybe that’s for the best. Monaco refers to the director’s lifelong love of comics—one of the Resnais films of the 1980s, I Want to Go Home, was about a comic artist—but I still find the Stan Lee project a step too far, especially when there were so many great comic artists and writers working in France in the 1970s. Resnais wasn’t unaware of these; in my post about Je t’aime, Je t’aime I noted the presence of a Druillet drawing on the wall of Claude’s apartment. More promising than The Monster Maker was a script about the Marquis de Sade written with Grove Press boss Richard Seaver, and a tenuous plan to make a film about HP Lovecraft with William Friedkin producing. This apparently fell through when Friedkin left to direct The Exorcist but the interest in Lovecraft further reinforces the Lovecraftian suggestions in Providence, something that Monaco says were explored in a review by Richard Corliss for New Times magazine. I’ve not been able to find this online, unfortunately.

All of which reminds me that I’ve still not seen Resnais’s first feature, Hiroshima Mon Amour, nor any of the post-Providence films with the exception of Smoking/No Smoking which I saw on TV years ago and didn’t enjoy very much. The latter is an odd thing for Brits to watch, being based on an Alan Ayckbourn play which means it concerns a cast of typical middle-class English types (with names like “Celia Teasdal”) except that here they’re all played by French actors speaking their native language. This makes for distracting viewing but I now feel ashamed for not having given it more of a chance. It’s one more film to go looking for in the future.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Providence on DVD
• Art on film: Je t’aime, Je t’aime
• Art on film: Providence
• Marienbad hauntings
• Les Statues Meurent Aussi, a film by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais
• Toute la mémoire du monde, a film by Alain Resnais

Weekend links 720

The Poet and the Siren (1893) by Gustave Moreau.

• “Some books become talismans. Because they are strange, wildly different to the common run of literature; because they are scarce, and only a few precious copies are known to exist; because, perhaps, they liberate by transgressing the moral limits of the day; because their authors are lonely, elusive visionaries; because, sometimes, there is an inexplicable glamour about the book, so that its readers seem to be lured into a preternatural reverie. This book possesses all those attributes.” Mark Valentine in an introduction he wrote for a 1997 reprint of The Book of Jade (1901) by David Park Barnitz. The book’s author was an American writer who died at the age of 23 after publishing this single volume, a collection of poetry inspired by his favourite Decadent writers. Praise from HP Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Thomas Ligotti has since helped maintain the book’s reputation. The Book of Jade turned up recently at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts. Also the home of an increasingly eclectic list of publications.

• At n+1: The Dam and the Bomb by Walker Mimms, a fascinating essay about the entangling of Cormac McCarthy’s personal history with his novels which makes a few connections I didn’t expect to see. Also a reminder that I’ve yet to read McCarthy’s last two books. Soon…

• The latest installation from teamLab is Resonating Life which Continues to Stand, an avenue of illuminated eggs on the Hong Kong waterfront.

• At The Wire: Symphony of sirens: an interview with Aura Satz, David Toop, Elaine Mitchener, Evelyn Glennie and Raven Chacon.

• At Unquiet Things: The Art of Darkness presents The Sleeper May Awaken: Stephen Mackey’s Unrestful Realms.

• RIP Marian Zazeela. There’s a page here with a selection of her beautiful calligraphic poster designs.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Tomona Matsukawa’s realistic paintings reconstruct fragments of everyday life.

• At Public Domain Review: Thom Sliwowski on The Defenestrations of Prague (1419–1997).

• Trinity (2024), a short film by Thomas Blanchard. There’s a lot more at his YouTube channel.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Lotte Reiniger’s Day.

• Sirens (1984) by Michael Stearns | Sirens (1988) by Daniel Lanois & Brian Eno | Siren Song (2009) by Bat For Lashes