/lit/ - Literature

>>19527571
>The major obscurity with the horror genre and lovecraft is specifically the genealogy of weird fiction [such as decadence/aesthetic/classics/Romanticism]
Interesting. I think you're right. But I think Lovecraft was also inspired by Poe (who was, yes, all those things, but also more) to the extent of even using science fiction (which Poe was a pioneer of).
>The three major weird fiction writers in my mind are lovecraft, clark Ashton smith and Robert e Howard for who all of this is true, but even if we go to obscure dudes like Henry S. Whitehead this is still true.
I need to read more Clark Ashton Smith (got any recs?) but I feel like Howard is perhaps the most Classicist out of them because his stories are like an Archaeologist digging up and telling a story, or something akin to Herodotus' histories. On the other hand, I really like Soloman Kane as it feels more like a Romantic work recapturing the past, with all its emotions and passions.
>Weird fiction is what happens when you take the romantic fixation on the sublime, then it develops into the decadent fixation with the fabricated and the evil
I agree. I tried to bring up something similar to this about Lovecraft with an academic and they kinda didn't listen. I thought Kant's Sublime was inverted or made Dark by Lovecraft, who tries to find the Evil within the incalculable. I think it's very interesting Lovecraft does this as I said before he explores science fiction, which is a speculation about technology (broadly construed).
>Dunsany's fin de siecle mythology
I think that's a very Romantic project. Have you read William Blake's mythopoeia? I really like it but I don't understand it fully; it could very well be seen as the same as the 1700s were ending and the Age of Reason was emerging.
>I think weird fiction which strives to just lifelessly imitate lovecraft, lifelessly ape his philosophy or throw in tentacles or use his characters, I think that’s nothing but cheap and unrelated to what the historical genre is like for both the big names and for the lesser knowns like William M Ferrar, J.B Harris-Burland, and the fabulous MP-shiel (who really should be remembered, lovecraft certainly considered him an influence.)
Yeah, I think he would turn in his grave to see he is only known for Cthulhu (with all its games, plushy toys, and merchandise), but I think Lovecraft was bound to be a tragic figure; he'd a shit life and tarnished legacy ("problematic white author" in geek culture).
>I think the reason why so many people will read lovecraft and say he somehow has bad prose
I only thought this when I picked up his juvenalia (like the story with the man-beast in the cave and the immortal alchemist), but to be fair every writer goes through a learning process. I do agree that he's much more erudite than people give off, and it's a fault of the people who don't read.
>Ligotti in weird tradition
I'll try to reread it more thoroughly.

Inasmuch as science is observational or perceptual in nature, the goal of providing a scientific model and mechanism for the evolution of complex systems ultimately requires a supporting theory of reality of which perception itself is the model (or theory-to-universe mapping). Where information is the abstract currency of perception, such a theory must incorporate the theory of information while extending the information concept to incorporate reflexive self-processing in order to achieve an intrinsic (self-contained) description of reality. This extension is associated with a limiting formulation of model theory identifying mental and physical reality, resulting in a reflexively self-generating, self-modeling theory of reality identical to its universe on the syntactic level. By the nature of its derivation, this theory, the Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe or CTMU, can be regarded as a supertautological reality-theoretic extension of logic. Uniting the theory of reality with an advanced form of computational language theory, the CTMU describes reality as a Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language or SCSPL, a reflexive intrinsic language characterized not only by self-reference and recursive self-definition, but full self-configuration and self- execution (reflexive read-write functionality). SCSPL reality embodies a dual-aspect monism consisting of infocognition, self-transducing information residing in self-recognizing SCSPL elements called syntactic operators.