Re: Writer Nic Pizzolatto on Thomas Ligotti and the Weird Secrets of ‘True Detective’
 

You do not have to apologize for only answering to the points you find interesting! I tend to do the same. Also, I'm really derailing the thread here, so I will try to be a little more brief this time.

That is true of course, but I try to imagine a future for Ligotti's ouvre. I have no idea whether he himself cares about his legacy, but I suppose that most of us grew to appreciate his works in printed form, not because we read e-books or some short stories somewhere online. And I also believe that it would be welcome if his fanbase grew. Once the source of new editions has dried up and nobody is interested in publishing his works anymore, what happens?

It might of course be possible that he is going to follow in Lovecraft's steps: fade into (an even greater) obscury, only to resurface and grow tremendously important in half a century or so. Maybe a complete collection of his works will grace the personal library of horror-afficianados world-wide some day - but what if not? Lovecraft now has Cthulhu plushies and tabletop games, and in a paradoxical way, the fact that his cosmos has lost "purity" has kept his legacy alive. I honestly do not see anything like that happening to Ligotti's work, at least not once his works go out of print for good.

If I could pay Ligotti directly, I would gladly do it, and I think it is so ... romantic that you actually had the opportunity to do that! That is simply the best way to support an artist. But that is of course not an option for foreigners etc., so I feel reluctant giving so much money to private sellers, who know they can basically charge whatever they want, without the author himself seeing any of it.

I should of course direct my criticism at publishers directly, and perhaps I will. Or maybe I should simply look into buying an e-book reader...

Re: Writer Nic Pizzolatto on Thomas Ligotti and the Weird Secrets of ‘True Detective’
 

JBC your avatar is cute (I don't mean the dog), could you explain why this is so?

Re: Writer Nic Pizzolatto on Thomas Ligotti and the Weird Secrets of ‘True Detective’
 

[quote=JBC;100285]I just want to reply in saying that, for me, TG does in fact comprise Ligotti's best material---it is his masterpiece.

Re: Writer Nic Pizzolatto on Thomas Ligotti and the Weird Secrets of ‘True Detective’
 

The debate having run its course, I will make this my final post on the issue. There are, however, a few comments I feel I need to add in as a last response.

I feel the primary issue is that Ligotti has been many people's first exposure to Pessimistic philosophy and literature. This is leading some to attribute undue originality or uniqueness to Ligotti. It's one thing to admire Ligotti (or Ayn Rand, Marylin Manson, etc.) but distance should be taken unless you end up diminishing your own experiences through pigeon holing other works and ideas.

This is cherry picking. You are extracting one line from Pizzalotto's monologue and then using several different passages from the TCATHR to show how Pizzolatto supposedly took from them for his own writing. None of the statements you provided mirror the original sentences grammar or phrasing, as they did with the car monologue. Using a single word to link authors is very weak evidence for this sort of accusation. The only example I can think of is the use of the term "cyclopean" for Lovecraft - so far as I'm aware, Ligotti doesn't use the term "thresher" often or widely throughout his writing, and isn't an obscure word. This leaves coincidence as plausible: expressing similar ideas give rise to similar metaphors and terminology. Furthermore, the idea that Pizzolatto consulted several different passages from to TCATHR to write one line is highly questionable in and of itself due to the amount of time it would require. Note how much your attempt here differs from your analysis of the car monologue.

The Pessimistic theme of unfairly thrusting someone into existence are certainly shared - but Ligotti is not the first or even the most well known literary figure addressing this issue. I am not a fiction reader by habit - I mostly read philosophy, history, and mathematics, and I've skipped over many of the so-called classics (I've never read Salinger, Twain, or Hemingway, for example), but I'm aware of similar passages from The Book of Job, Shelly, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Conrad, Mann, Sartre, and Bukowski.

Re: Writer Nic Pizzolatto on Thomas Ligotti and the Weird Secrets of ‘True Detective’
 

I've just done a quick check on the status of Ligotti books for sale, prompted by the discussion on this thread (sorry to continue with the off topic theme).

Well, I can see that my Ligotti collection has definitely appreciated in value, but, yes, this is a shame for new readers and must be for Ligotti himself.

Having some experience in this area, I can say that, with Ligotti's co-operation, of course, the situation could easily be remedied. If necessary, an imprint even dedicated to Ligotti's work could be set up selling good quality print-on-demand paperbacks for reasonable prices.

This might not be the ideal option, in that the larger publishing houses also have more resources for marketing and so on, but it is in no way a mere pipe dream. All it takes is a little initial investment and some dedicated staff.

In the meantime, I've just pre-ordered the very reasonably priced The Spectral Link, anticipating that that, too, might go out of print quickly.

Re: Writer Nic Pizzolatto on Thomas Ligotti and the Weird Secrets of ‘True Detective’
 

Fortunately, I'm familiar enough with the works of other famous pessimistic philosophers/writers to be able to distinguish between their prose and Ligotti's. Thank you. As has been stated repeatedly, Ligotti's citation of specific philosophical ideas is impeccable. And his reprocessing of and commentary concerning those ideas is singular.

It's not cherry picking. The evidence that Pizzolatto used TCATHR as his major philosophical source is, in fact, overwhelming. Even if you discount the phrases and peculiar terminology (e.g., "human thresher"), you can't deny that the cited material is a direct paraphrase of the thoughts/ideas expressed in the TCATHR above. You're jumping through hoops trying to disprove what Pizzolatto himself has already admitted at least twice. I'm not sure what your beef against this idea is, but you appear to be raging against the machine.

Where there's smoke, there's fire.

For instance, Ligotti specifically wrote, in multiple passages (cited above) about the blasphemy of pulling a soul out of nonexistence into the thresher of human existence. And, yes, it's telling that Pizzolatto's dialogue shares not only paraphrased ideas but specific language in common with Ligotti.

I have quite a bit of experience doing this sort of research incidentally. My wife is a university English professor and often has had me check her students' papers for plagiarism. I've done this regularly for well over a decade. This I've learned: if you catch a student plagiarizing once, 99% of the time you will find multiple instances of plagiarism throughout their work, often cleverly disguised ones. If Pizzolatto was a student and TD was a paper, he would have immediately receive a zero in the class if not worse. Now I know that scholarly papers and screenplays are two entirely different beasts with entirely different ethical expectations, but there is an analogy to be made here (especially given that writer's tendency for unattributed "quotes"). I suspect Pizzolatto thought Ligotti was an obscure enough writer that no direct connection would be made between his dialogue and TCATHR. He got caught and called out on the carpet. And here we are.

You could make the same claim in any plagiarism case (and many have tried). General originality of idea is not the issue or the point. Specific interpretation of ideas, unique phrasing, and imagery is.

I would be delighted to see those specific quotes and compare them against the evidence I've compiled.

Speaking Mute, your argument wouldn't be so flimsy if it wasn't for these facts:

1. Pizzolatto has already admitted to reading TCATHR and being heavily influenced by it.
2. There are two cases of Ligotti-specific, word for word plagiarism/"homage" in Rust's lines (which Pizzolatto lamely claimed were a kind of shout out to Ligotti readers).
3. Multiple monologues from the first three episodes could've come straight from TCATHR and use similar (and sometimes identical) language, phrases and imagery. Some were actual paraphrases from TCATHR.
4. Many episode titles sound like they could've been ripped straight from Ligotti's own poetry/prose (e.g., "The Secret Fate of All Life"; After You've Gone)
5. Pizzolatto mentioned that one of the episodes--"Who Goes There"--explicitly came from TCATHR's section title of the same name. He was not apparently aware that this was a short story title originally

Your argument for the past week or more has been--in essence--that Ligotti's TCATHR wasn't really a significant influence on TRUE DETECTIVE. You may continue to repeat this argument here for as long as you wish, but--evidence-wise--you don't appear to have a leg to stand on.

Re: Writer Nic Pizzolatto on Thomas Ligotti and the Weird Secrets of ‘True Detective’
 

For the scene where Rust discusses his attitude toward's his daughter's death - which is what you were attempting to shown was drawn directly from Ligotti - you simply brought forth several passages that addressed the same philosophical topic without showing any parallel phrasing or structural similarity that indicate copying or paraphrasing. You selected one line from the scene based on the single word. This is "cherry picking" evidence - or selective confirmation if a more technical term offers less offense. The rest - the car monologue being drawn from TCATHR for instance - was not under dispute and irrelevant to my original statement that the scene I deemed the most poignant expression of Cohle's pessimism wasn't taken from TCATHR.

Re: Writer Nic Pizzolatto on Thomas Ligotti and the Weird Secrets of ‘True Detective’
 

Ok, let's take just take one quote from TCATHR:

"Why should generations unborn be spared entry into the human thresher?" CATHR, p. 74

Now we know that Pizzolatto based Cohle's worldview on CATHR for multiple aforementioned reasons (not the least the author's own admission to that effect).

Is it really a stretch that the quote above informed this bit of dialogue and was a logical extension of it?

“I think about the hubris it must take to yank a soul out of nonexistence into this meat… Force a life into this thresher.”

Of course, CATHR is full of such material. What I found was only the tip of the iceberg. Specifically anti-natalist and full of unwilling, unborn souls being forced "into the human thresher."

If you have a more applicable quote or series of quotes from another author closer to Rust's musing above, please use it to change my mind. And, yes--btw--I think calling human existence a "thresher" is an important clue. If you know of other instances in which this term was used in that specific way, please enlighten me. I'm serious. I'll be the first to acknowledge my error in thinking it's an unusual if not unique metaphor.

Re: Writer Nic Pizzolatto on Thomas Ligotti and the Weird Secrets of ‘True Detective’
 

Dr. Locrian,

Depending on region, "thresher" is the more common term for a "combine" or "harvester", and "caught in the/a thresher" is a colloquialism for being in a painful or impossible situation. I suggest the expression might seem more/less unique depending on dialect - for myself, "thresher" and its metaphorical use in Ligotti's quote isn't particularly distinctive or original. More over, you're still comparing a single statement that condemns having a child as arrogant to a single rhetorical question setting up an general anti-natalist thesis; the structure and usage simply doesn't match very well, and there's no other support for anything else in the scene. At the very least, I hope you can see that this is a much more tenuous link than the one you established in the car monlogue where multiple sentenced pared up with continuous passages in TCATHR, and differed only by synonyms and transpositions.

Finally, thematically speaking, Cohl'e statements in this scene are a variant of Job's Lament - the major difference being the "Better Never To Have Been" and "Better to Die Young and Ignorant" complaint is transferred to his daughter. Regardless of one's religious beliefs, you know you can't profess much originality when the ideas are in a well known Biblical passage. And dramatically speaking - which, personally at least, I think trumps the originality of how certain philosophical points are phrased in an particular essay - I'm unaware of any of Ligotti's story where a detective, being interrogated by other detectives who suspect he may be involved in a ritual murder casually confesses that he is happy that his daughter died before she could see what a horrible place the world was. I could be wrong - I may have missed a great story by Ligotti, but it seems this, as well as much else in TD, was a lot more than Ligottian pastiche.

Now I promise that this will be my final comment on the subject lest Dr. Locrian brings a better analysis of the particular scene to light - where I'll cheerfully concede.

Re: Writer Nic Pizzolatto on Thomas Ligotti and the Weird Secrets of ‘True Detective’
 

Best to agree to disagree then. The two of us aren't finding much common ground.

Onwards!