Interesting read, and forgive me, for I only discovered movies properly when I lived with a film student in Vegas who sniffed abstraction so hard that they absolutely hated the Maltease Falcon being assigned as a film. None the less you captured something that I've felt with A24 and strangely, weird fiction/horror short stories.
It's funny to mention Thomas Ligotti because he's a good example. I always found him to be strange, I love his stories, but then they always go off too far (Mrs. Rinaldi's Angels could've stopped halfway and been excellent.) sometimes I feel like that one "grog can only understand surface level themes" meme. But that's okay because you know it's there and grab onto tendrils. You can work out what things meant, you can "stew" in a sense. The Lighthouse, was a good example, because I kept chewing around all the myths and knowledge had to place symbols. In the pizzeria around the corner, we spent hours talking about it, a nice cross section between my background and a friend's cinema background. We were both lost at sea, but it was a nice feeling.
On the other hand you have John Harrison whose "weird fiction" short stories are a mess - of trying to do something bigger but being banal and reduced to either absurdity (Cicisbeo) / or boring lazy metonymy (Missiles) and I do feel a lot of the A24 things end up slipping into this category. Enemy was a good example and it seems Heretic does the same. Getting lost in the sauce can just flush away everything you set up and it's almost frustrating.
I've been reading Joel Lane's The Anniversary of Never and it's probably the closest to Eggs but for modern times. I've never found a short story that really shows the abyssal state of my hometown in England, and it's almost sickening to me in a good way. I gave the story to my friend and they came back with this whole theory of the nature of death and a world that has been neglected. He sold this bubbly, Wes Anderson loving creature a surprisingly accurate feeling and horror of the abandoned towns of England.
Yet I find it absolutely impossible to navigate this space, and the same with A24 even talking to cinema or weird fiction fans alone. Sometimes I feel like "grog" and I've missed some literary or cinema technique, but sometimes, sometimes it is just bit shallow and messy. That's a little refreshing.
Perhaps The Substance is also a good litmus test to see if you've gone too far one way or the other.
Thank you for such an in depth and fascinating post. 'The Anniversary of Never' sounds terrific! I live near Felixstowe (where Mark Fisher moved in the latter years of his life) and I love thinking about the M.R. James stories inspired by it when visiting there. It is, like Lowestoft, deeply rubbish and dreary in many ways now... but it is almost as though its true state is asserting itself, perversely.
I think I disagree with you on Ligotti... but I definitely wouldn't have done when I first encountered him. For me, he's even more monomanical than Lovecrft in pursuing his vision of the universe, which necessitates that his stories almost always end in dissolved boundaries that feel like a collapse into abstraction. I've just finished reading Bill Brown's 'Other Things' and this passage happens to chime with what I take to be Ligotti's weird materialism:
"objects ventriloquize us. The point is less that the object assumes priority over the subject, and more that the humiliated subject has become a kind of subject-object; it is as though the human being has become the object’s sujet petit a, perceived and longed for as the missing/completing component of itself. The simple inversion of the subject-object relation both expresses a kind of horror at the monstrosity of the material world and suppresses the dialectical disintegration and reintegration of the subject in its object relations."
Thus his obsession with puppets and ventriloquists' dolls!
In terms on an ambiguous/ ambivalent approach to allegory, have you read any Robert Aickman? I discovered him through Hard Fox of the Residents and Reece Shearsmith of The League of Gentleman and I love how his stories always //feel// like allegories without it being very obvious what precisely they are allegories of!
Interesting read, and forgive me, for I only discovered movies properly when I lived with a film student in Vegas who sniffed abstraction so hard that they absolutely hated the Maltease Falcon being assigned as a film. None the less you captured something that I've felt with A24 and strangely, weird fiction/horror short stories.
It's funny to mention Thomas Ligotti because he's a good example. I always found him to be strange, I love his stories, but then they always go off too far (Mrs. Rinaldi's Angels could've stopped halfway and been excellent.) sometimes I feel like that one "grog can only understand surface level themes" meme. But that's okay because you know it's there and grab onto tendrils. You can work out what things meant, you can "stew" in a sense. The Lighthouse, was a good example, because I kept chewing around all the myths and knowledge had to place symbols. In the pizzeria around the corner, we spent hours talking about it, a nice cross section between my background and a friend's cinema background. We were both lost at sea, but it was a nice feeling.
On the other hand you have John Harrison whose "weird fiction" short stories are a mess - of trying to do something bigger but being banal and reduced to either absurdity (Cicisbeo) / or boring lazy metonymy (Missiles) and I do feel a lot of the A24 things end up slipping into this category. Enemy was a good example and it seems Heretic does the same. Getting lost in the sauce can just flush away everything you set up and it's almost frustrating.
I've been reading Joel Lane's The Anniversary of Never and it's probably the closest to Eggs but for modern times. I've never found a short story that really shows the abyssal state of my hometown in England, and it's almost sickening to me in a good way. I gave the story to my friend and they came back with this whole theory of the nature of death and a world that has been neglected. He sold this bubbly, Wes Anderson loving creature a surprisingly accurate feeling and horror of the abandoned towns of England.
Yet I find it absolutely impossible to navigate this space, and the same with A24 even talking to cinema or weird fiction fans alone. Sometimes I feel like "grog" and I've missed some literary or cinema technique, but sometimes, sometimes it is just bit shallow and messy. That's a little refreshing.
Perhaps The Substance is also a good litmus test to see if you've gone too far one way or the other.
Interesting read, Thank you,
Thank you for such an in depth and fascinating post. 'The Anniversary of Never' sounds terrific! I live near Felixstowe (where Mark Fisher moved in the latter years of his life) and I love thinking about the M.R. James stories inspired by it when visiting there. It is, like Lowestoft, deeply rubbish and dreary in many ways now... but it is almost as though its true state is asserting itself, perversely.
I think I disagree with you on Ligotti... but I definitely wouldn't have done when I first encountered him. For me, he's even more monomanical than Lovecrft in pursuing his vision of the universe, which necessitates that his stories almost always end in dissolved boundaries that feel like a collapse into abstraction. I've just finished reading Bill Brown's 'Other Things' and this passage happens to chime with what I take to be Ligotti's weird materialism:
"objects ventriloquize us. The point is less that the object assumes priority over the subject, and more that the humiliated subject has become a kind of subject-object; it is as though the human being has become the object’s sujet petit a, perceived and longed for as the missing/completing component of itself. The simple inversion of the subject-object relation both expresses a kind of horror at the monstrosity of the material world and suppresses the dialectical disintegration and reintegration of the subject in its object relations."
Thus his obsession with puppets and ventriloquists' dolls!
In terms on an ambiguous/ ambivalent approach to allegory, have you read any Robert Aickman? I discovered him through Hard Fox of the Residents and Reece Shearsmith of The League of Gentleman and I love how his stories always //feel// like allegories without it being very obvious what precisely they are allegories of!