Cones in Art & Literature
 

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

Thomas Bernhard's Correction is about a man (dead by suicide) named Roithamer whose obsessive project was designing and building a cone-shaped house (called the Cone) in the middle of the Kobernausser Forest. Many consider this to be Bernhard's masterpiece. It is certainly Bernhard at his most forbidding. About 300 pages of unparagraphed prose as dense and intense as the Kobernausser Forest. The quest for perfection -- correcting his work again and again and again -- finally leads to Roithamer's ultimate self-correction. (I'm not giving away any plot developments here: Roithamer's suicide is revealed on the first page.)

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

Thanks!
And thanks to JJ Burke for this:

[T]he Great Race ... waxed well-nigh omniscient, and turned to the task of setting up exchanges with the minds of other planets, and of exploring their pasts and futures. It sought likewise to fathom the past years and origin of that black, aeon-dead orb in far space whence its own mental heritage had come – for the mind of the Great Race was older than its bodily form. . . The beings of a dying elder world, wise with the ultimate secrets, had looked ahead for a new world and species wherein they might have long life; and had sent their minds en masse into that future race best adapted to house them – the cone-shaped beings that peopled our earth a billion years ago.

—H. P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow Out of Time"

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

Coneheads (1993)... not art but a silly comedy.

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

The Haunting of Cone Manor


Horror writer Scott Nicholson's novel is based on Cone Manor.
http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/ConeManor.GIF
From this interview:
RS: “The Manor”, your third novel, is based on Cone Manor in Blowing Rock, which you have links to on your website. Had you heard stories of it being haunted prior to writing the book or just used the house as a model for Korban Manor because of how striking it is?
SN: Every old house has ghost stories. I’d attended a “Ghost Walk” they used to have there, with park rangers telling stories and then leading a walk up to the Cone graves. That was the spark of the story, though the setting and architecture offered plenty more detail to the story. I made it a little more isolated in my book, and the other folk magic elements dovetailed naturally with the setting.


And here is an article on the haunting of Cone manor from author's website:
Cone Manor

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

Thanks, Yellowish Haze.

Mustn't also forget your own brilliant example here:

THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK - View Single Post - The Launch of Megazanthus Press

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

There are many other similar passages in The Shadow out of Time with the word "cone":

"The Great Race's members were immense rugose cones ten feet high, and with head and other organs attached to foot-thick, distensible limbs spreading from the apexes. They spoke by the clicking or scraping of huge paws or claws attached to the end of two of their four limbs, and walked by the expansion and contraction of a viscous layer attached to their vast, ten-foot bases. "

"These steadily grew more solid and distinct, till at last I could trace their monstrous outlines with uncomfortable ease. They seemed to be enormous, iridescent cones, about ten feet high and ten feet wide at the base, and made up of some ridgy, scaly, semi-elastic matter. From their apexes projected four flexible, cylindrical members, each a foot thick, and of a ridgy substance like that of the cones themselves. "

"Surmounting this head were four slender grey stalks bearing flower-like appendages, whilst from its nether side dangled eight greenish antennae or tentacles. The great base of the central cone was fringed with a rubbery, grey substance which moved the whole entity through expansion and contraction."

"The objects had no clothing, but wore satchels or knapsacks suspended from the top of the conical trunk. They commonly carried their head and its supporting member at the level of the cone top, although it was frequently raised or lowered.

The other three great members tended to rest downward at the sides of the cone, contracted to about five feet each when not in use. From their rate of reading, writing, and operating their machines - those on the tables seemed somehow connected with thought - I concluded that their intelligence was enormously greater than man's."

"Retracting this neck and gazing down very sharply, I saw the scaly, rugose, iridescent bulk of a vast cone ten feet tall and ten feet wide at the base."

The Shadow out of Time should be a Cone Zero story!:D

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

Cone of Silence (1960)

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

Again, thanks, Yellowish Haze! Laughed my cones off!

Thanks, too, to Spencer Pate for:

"Donald Barthelme's story "The Glass Mountain" which features what is basically a giant cone of glass."