The Primary Task

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by Druidic

What appalls me is literary snobbishness.

Me, too. I consider myself to be eclectic as well as catholic (with a small c).
I would hate to be called a 'snob', but I don't mind being called 'pretentious'.

[bendk]

Quote Originally Posted by Druidic

What appalls me is literary snobbishness. Durrenmatt's hatred of it drove him to many creative and subversive acts such as rewriting Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus because "it wasn't horrible enough."

lol. Druidic, has that been translated? I would like to read it.

Poor Titus Andronicus. Shakespeare's pulp fiction always gets a bad rap. It's goofy and over-the-top but I like an occasional popcorn flick. I enjoyed Julie Taymor's film adaptation Titus with Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. It's silly, but so what. Everything doesn't have to be life and death. (maybe that's not the right phrase to use in reference to this play)

I just got done reading this humorous hifalutin criticism of the play on Wikipedia, including one by the King of Pomposity, Harold Bloom. He admires Kafka and Cormac McCarthy so I forgive him his trespasses.

In 1948, John Dover Wilson wrote that the play "seems to jolt and bump along like some broken-down cart, laden with bleeding corpses from an Elizabethan scaffold, and driven by an executioner from Bedlam dressed in cap and bells."

In his 1998 book, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom attacked the play on numerous occasions, calling it "a howler", "a poetic atrocity", "an exploitative parody, with the inner purpose of destroying the ghost of Christopher Marlowe" and "a blowup, an explosion of rancid irony." Bloom summates his views by declaring "I can concede no intrinsic value to Titus Andronicus." Citing the 1955 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production, directed by Peter Brook and starring Laurence Olivier, which is generally agreed to have provided the impetus for the twentieth century revaluation of the play, Bloom said that the audience laughed several times in scenes which were supposed to be tragic, and he sees this as evidence for its failure as Tragedy. He particularly focuses his criticism on the line when Lavinia is told to carry Titus' severed hand in her mouth (3.1.281), arguing that no play which contains such a scene could possibly be serious. He thus concludes the best director to tackle the play would be Mel Brooks.

Quote Originally Posted by Druidic

btw, I just came across an article on a site called the Defamer about the plagiarism charges. A couple weeks old, not worth reading, but it states Ligotti is a Professor at Wayne University. Is my Universe slipping? "Thomas Ligotti, meanwhile, a professor at Wayne State University, has remained mum on controversy surrounding his good name (Pizzolatto hasn't commented on the accusation either, for that matter)." --The Defamer.

That has to be a mistake. He graduated from Wayne but I doubt very seriously if he ever taught there. Not because he couldn't, of course, but if he did it would have gone viral at least in the horror community. Heck, I would have moved up there for a semester just to take the course.

[Nemonymous]

Could Ligotti have been working as professor at Wayne University incognito?
BTW, The Duchess of Malfi by Webster is far more Weird Fiction than Titus Andronicus by Shakespeare, I feel. TV's Big Brother, too.

[Nemonymous]

A further postscript: I suppose an equivalent to 'literary snobbishness' could be 'Weird Fiction centrism'?

[Druidic]

Quote

ol. Druidic, has that been translated? I would like to read it--bendk

No luck, ben. So much of Durrenmatt remains untranslated...He created a new character for Titus, a Goth, to enable the play to "reach its highest potential." Durrenmatt seemed genuinely fond of the play.
Personally, I would love to see it performed. Supposedly crowds were booing...There is a PDF file available in German titled "Halb Shakespeare, halb Durrenmatt--Durrenmatt's Titus Andronicus" but I could never download it. Half Durrenmatt would be a pretty good deal...

Ben, did you ever see "The Old Lady's Visit" performed? It's a great play. In America it became known as "The Visit" because Hollywood wanted the monstrous Claire to be played by a young and beautiful actress.Here's a trailer for that film with Ingrid Bergman and Tony Quinn. It's more horrible than you might imagine: they gave it a happy ending...also removed the most horrific elements such as Claire having the false witnesses blinded and castrated and keeping them as pets of a sort...Also, Claire is no longer an assemblage of grotesque prosthetic parts...but, worst of all, Claire's black panther (which she deliberately allows to escape for the townsfolk to hunt and kill) is now a leopard. Once she called her old lover her "black panther", he who now is marked him for death at the hands of the villagers...Changing the 'pet' to a leopard is incredibly stupid, robbing the film of a coherent if obvious symbolism.

YouTube

As for Ligotti teaching at Wayne? Yeah, I found that bit of 'news' to be suspect at best...


A story is not finished until it takes the worst turn. -- F.D.

[dr. locrian]

There were a lot of hilariously bad news and blogger reports to say the least. e.g. "Horror novelist Thomas Ligotti," "John Ligotti," "Ligotti is a professor at WSU," "Ligotti lives in Detroit," etc. etc.

The latter claim was notable in that it was written by Salon blogger Laura Miller. The only person who to my knowledge mentioned where Ligotti lives . . . and she gets it wrong, documenting that he "write[s] about the pointlessness and misery of existence . . . in (appropriately enough) Detroit." Someone should show Ms. Miller how to use Wikipedia.

It's exceedingly evident that many writers/bloggers covering the story didn't actually read the source article.

[bendk]

Quote Originally Posted by Druidic

Quote ol. Druidic, has that been translated? I would like to read it--bendk No luck, ben. So much of Durrenmatt remains untranslated...He created a new character for Titus, a Goth, to enable the play to "reach its highest potential." Durrenmatt seemed genuinely fond of the play. Ben, did you ever see "The Old Lady's Visit" performed? It's a great play. In America it became known as "The Visit" because Hollywood wanted the monstrous Claire to be played by a young and beautiful actress.Here's a trailer for that film with Ingrid Bergman and Tony Quinn. It's more horrible than you might imagine: they gave it a happy ending...also removed the most horrific elements such as Claire having the false witnesses blinded and castrated and keeping them as pets of a sort...Also, Claire is no longer an assemblage of grotesque prosthetic parts...but, worst of all, Claire's black panther (which she deliberately allows to escape for the townsfolk to hunt and kill) is now a leopard. Once she called her old lover her "black panther", he who now is marked him for death at the hands of the villagers...Changing the 'pet' to a leopard is incredibly stupid, robbing the film of a coherent if obvious symbolism. A story is not finished until it takes the worst turn. -- F.D.

That's unfortunate about his Titus not being translated.

I have never seen the "The Old Lady's Visit" or "The Visit." I will have to track them down.

Thanks

The primary task of every great horror writer is to expose the miscreation of this world and everything in it.
- Thomas Ligotti


A thought-provoking statement, and probably not far from the truth if you look at the most significant authors in the genre.

At another time and place in history this statement could easily have been construed as blasphemy - indicting the Creator of a miscreation. People have been killed for less. I realize that Ligotti is an atheist, but given his sense of humor I can't help but think that this might also be a smite to the face of the concept of God, or a pissing in his eye kind of thing. Not to mention an insult to theists. I like it.

[Druidic]

This review by Rex Reed of The Visit--The Musical is just too good to miss.

http://observer.com/2014/08/crazy-ex...-as-a-musical/



"The world turned me into a whore. I turned the world into a brothel." -- Claire, a woman of limitless wealth, power and malignity. From The Visit by Friedrich Durrenmatt

[cannibal cop]

Quote Originally Posted by bendk

What do you think of TL's statement: The primary task of every great horror writer is to expose the miscreation of this world and everything in it. -Thomas Ligotti

I like this very much, and agree. But I don’t interpret Ligotti’s words in a literal sense, as a call for didacticism. I see it as a statement of values.

Horror works best not when it inspires “positive” attitudes towards life and so on, like most other forms of fantasy entertainment, but rather when it undermines those attitudes and directly contradicts the worldviews they serve to promote. I don’t believe most horror writers set out with a conscious intent to achieve this, or that Ligotti is saying they should. I think good horror simply achieves this worthy aim as a natural consequence of the stories it chooses to tell and how it tells them.

And even less-than-great horror often succeeds at this to some extent. Even the humble Friday the 13th, for instance, entertains its fans by casting aside its vapid camp-counselor hijinks to reveal the soulless, merciless meatgrinder of life churning away hungrily underneath.