Conspiracy release?

[Ascrobius]

I've had long discussions about that with Tom, and while I would never rule anything out entirely, and I certainly do not speak for him, I would not count on that any time soon. I don't want to say never (even though part of me feels that way) because things change and so do people's attitudes, but again, after discussing it ad nauseum with him in the past, I don't think Tom has the desire to produce fiction any longer. Not only that, but he literally doesn't even read fiction of any kind at all any longer. There are other legitimate reasons for not writing fiction that go well beyond simply not wanting to, which I won't get into. As a teaser, though, I will tell you that some time in the last year he said to me that he "almost felt the urge to write a story" but for whatever reason, he did not. I don't recall the context of the discussion, but it left me with a morsel of hope that some day, you never know... maybe he will reconsider his stance on that.

As an odd end to a post like this, on a site like this, dedicated to a guy like Tom Ligotti, hope springs eternal.

 

[Nemonymous]

I feel there is a very thin dividing line between truth and fiction.
The tipping-point is represented by writers like Ligotti.
Also I read much Ligotti fiction that has never been written. Every day.

 

[Ascrobius]

Thin indeed, Des.

 

[Malone]

Thanks again,Ascrobius,for giving us the inside track.In connection with the theme of philosophy being antithetical to fiction writing,I remember reading John Gray (author of "Straw Dogs") saying somewhere that the only great novel ever written by a philosopher was George Santayana's "The Last Puritan".Haven't read it myself,but if anyone has it would be good to hear some opinions on it.

 

[gveranon]

I remember reading John Gray (author of "Straw Dogs") saying somewhere that the only great novel ever written by a philosopher was George Santayana's "The Last Puritan".Haven't read it myself,but if anyone has it would be good to hear some opinions on it.

I've read and greatly enjoyed several of Santayana's books, and he's influenced my thinking in numerous ways, but I found The Last Puritan to be rather tedious and disappointing. That probably says more about me than it does about the novel. I read it nearly 20 years ago, and at that time I only partly grasped the cultural argument that Santayana was staging. If I read it again now, I would probably have a higher opinion of it, but I'm still not sure I would agree with John Gray that it's a great novel. It's certainly substantial, deeply reflective, and elegantly written, as all of Santayana's books are.

Persons and Places, Santayana's memoir, is far more colorful and engaging than his rather pallid and too-lengthy novel, in my opinion. Santayana was more a keen observer of life than a participant in it, but Persons and Places is really a fascinating memoir. Winds of Doctrine is a collection of opinionated essays on various topics. After reading it, and The Genteel Tradition At Bay, I had a much better sense of what The Last Puritan is about. Platonism and the Spiritual Life turns out to be a mostly anti-Platonist book, in which Santayana tries to retain a Platonic sort of spirituality despite his utterly materialistic and atheistic convictions. I'm not sure he succeeds in this, but the serenity and grace of his prose and the seemingly effortless unfolding of his lucid explanations make me think that he succeeded at least in his own mind. Little Essays Drawn from the Writings of George Santayana, edited by Logan Pearsall Smith with Santayana's help, is a great introduction to the range of his thought. These are pithy, representative passages extracted from his other books.

I'd like to give more detail to my opinion about The Last Puritan, but I think it would take me several hundred words, and I don't have the will (or the time) to go into all that now. And it's been a long time since I read the novel, so I can't be sure how accurate my memory of it is.