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

Des, I know you say "somehow" here but, please, if you have the time explain this statement a little more.

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

I should have said - to suit the nature of MY pessimism. Sorry. As I have said before, to fathom the mind or the nature of existence from within the same state of 'mindness' and existence being fathomed is problematic. We all have that problem, I guess. I have been living with that concept since I was 18 in the 1960s (something that started as a literary theory by Wimsatt and extended into my Nemonymity in 2001). I think there are various forms of pessimism, and my view is that to make pessimism authorial or polemical damages any force that pessimism has naturally got all on its own.
It seems illogical for pessimism to carry the weight of positivism. It is intensely negative. It is self subsuming. It is futile to call life futile, because it is. Nothing can be done about it. Not that I feel that way all the time as I said on the current 'Futility' thread. Life can be lived as life, and even with a purpose, when I feel twinges (pains?) of a purpose when engaged in art and creativity, and caring for those I find I love. Not sure I can believe anything beyond that, as a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist.

PS: I agree with Speaking Mute's last post above.

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

You are excellent at expressing yourself, Speaking Mute. This response mirrors most of my own feelings about NP and TD, which I could not have put into words half so well as you do here.
For all TD's flaws, I think it was a fascinating show.
I went in thinking I wouldn't become very interested in it and abandon it after a 3-4 episodes (like I did with Hannibal). That was before I had watched the first episode, mind you. This prejudice was mostly due to the hype on here on TLO, actually--I believe one doesn't need Ligotti in the mouth of a television character, when one can pick up and read Ligotti (to much greater effect). However, I appreciate the fact that certain TLOers are interested in proselytizing.
For me, the fact that Rust and Marty were such contrasting characters who never truly became "buddies" but formed more of an "uneasy alliance", aside from the surprisingly low-key aesthetic, was what I found most compelling about the show--I did think the "love triangle" was a little tacked on and obviously just there to stir the plot.
I despise gender-readings of works of art, as if artists produced works just to please everybody all the time. For example, there IS a division between men and women in the real world. There is also a separate world which is distinct for each--which the other usually has limited access to. Why would an artist, seeking to set a story to the backdrop of the "real world", ignore this obvious reality and instead choose to depict some Utopian vision where relations between the sexes were perfectly equitable? Whether the artist, in reality, enjoys this (sad) state of affairs is something else entirely. It all seems to me almost scandalously absurd.
I despise most tv shows, especially when they attempt to handle so-called "serious subject matter" and especially when they attempt to depict "darkness"--tv usually vomits up some pretty tawdry "darkness" in its most superficial aspects: commercial "goth" look, etc.
All in all, TD didn't make me throw up visually, additionally it conveyed enough idiosyncratic touches to make it stand out and remain memorable, as compared to most of what is seen on television.

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

Thank you for this, Des.
I feel I know better what you are driving at now. I almost said "I feel I feel better".
I, too, am a pessimist at heart but I either lack the courage of my conviction or I never had any to begin with. I'm not a very consistent person but I would say that pessimism--if anything defines me--defines me best.
I just don't care to take my pessimism to its "logical" conclusion.
Sometimes I just think, I just might be mad--not in the cool way, either.

I think that optimistic or pessimistic we are all wild at heart.

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

Thanks, Murony.
I think the following quotation also exemplifies my stance and, from what I can gather about 'True Detective' with my only having watched it through the eyes of TLO members, also exemplifies the stance of that TV show's ethos:

“From the cosmic point of view, to have opinions or preferences at all is to be ill; for by harbouring them one dams up the flow of the ineluctable force which, like a river, bears us down to the ocean of everything’s unknowing. Reality is a running noose, one is brought up short with a jerk by death. It would have been wiser to co-operate wih the inevitable and learn to profit by this unhappy state of things – by realising and accommodating death! But we don’t, we allow the ego to foul its own nest. Therefore we have insecurity, stress, the midnight-fruit of insomnia, with a whole culture crying itself to sleep. How to repair this state of affairs except through art, through gifts which render to us language manumitted by emotion, poetry twisted into the service of direct insight?”
from ‘The Avignon Quincunx’ by Lawrence Durrell (‘Constance’ 1982)

My photos taken today also somehow seem relevant to this discussion!
A Misty Grove of Yieldingtrees | NEMONYMOUS:

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

This extraordinary claim requires solid and specific evidence.

Here are some of the quotes in question:


CATHR is one of the most meticulously annotated and painstakingly researched, scholarly manuscripts I've ever read. I had the honor of being one of Tom's readers from the early 2000s when he first started working on the project so I'm more aware than most of the dozens of drafts he produced over the course of years and how careful and serious Ligotti was when creating this singular work. Any paraphrases or quotes from Schopenhauer or any one of the many other philosophers/writers whose work he explores are cited appropriately and at length. CATHR is nothing if not thorough and ethical in its execution. And much of CATHR (including many of the quotes above) represent a highly personal and utterly distinctive original response which could've been written by no one but Thomas Ligotti.

So, where is the evidence to support your claims above, Speaking Mute? Prove me wrong.

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

I think the last few minutes of the show (the hospital really) would have worked better if they hadn't done a three-seven day time jump. Specifically, the coma needed to be shown in order to earn the last words from Rust and his sudden conversion to, let's just say, a sunnier disposition. He wades through a patch of swamp thick with overgrowth and sees the little girl in her white dress as well as a blurred image of a man gently resting his hands on her shoulders (Pops). For a character that has expounded at length about the futility of existence with words, we need something more substantial to believe that change than a couple cast off sentences. In film or TV, that's the effective use of sound and image.

Other than that, I had been satisfied before reading through this thread. The issue of attribution is a damper. I really thought the fourth episode title- Who Goes There - would have indicated the level of indebtedness NP has for CATHR. Apparently this isn't the case.

As to the ending, anyone else think that turn your frown upside down would have worked with a more fleshed out hospital stay? Or would it ring inauthentic regardless.

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

I must emphasize that I am not accusing Ligotti of plagiarism or shoddy scholarship. So far as TCATHR goes as philosophy, Ligotti stated in both the book itself and the Antinatalist Attack! thread that he is not engaging in rigorous critique. And given that much of the text is structured as a survey of previous authors, I doubt Ligotti would press his own originality on this matter.

So far as what TCATHR owes to Schopenhauer, directly or through intermediate authors, a summary list:

1. Pessimism defined as the view that non-existence is preferable to existence

2. The idea that existence, in and of itself, is suffering. On a side note, Buddhism, or more exactly, the major Buddhist sects/schools, never equated existence itself with suffering (I'll elaborate only if asked - but the gist is that suffering in Buddhism is generally viewed as ignorance of reality's transient nature); this misconception actually owes quite a bit to Schopenhauer being one of the first major Western philosophers to address Buddhism.

3. Following 2, the idea that we are deluded about our own suffering, and tolerate it only through various forms of denial and distraction. Ligotti mostly analyzes Zapffe on this point, but Zapffe is just giving a tidy classification to Schopenhauer's extensive discussions on how religion, work, nation, family etc. keeps us ignorant of our suffering.

4. Epiphenomenalism and "Consciousness as aberration" - Schopenhauer doesn't just deny free will in favor of biological determinism, he takes the position that self-awareness plays a limited role in our existence, and that that role is essentially one of self-torment, guilt, and needless duress. It is purely accidental in origin, and actually burdens our survival through opposing biological drives. Freud took this up at length before Ligotti.

5. Antinatalism explicitly based on concern for the suffering of descendants rather than asceticism

Schopenhauer's position was quite unprecedented in these five respects - and they are the ideological foundation of TCAHR, as well as the points that Rust dwells on in True Detective. Every other major tenant forwarded in TCAHR - the views on suicide, our perceptions being shaped by our brain's "wiring", the illusory nature of self/individuality, humans as puppets/automatons, even horror as uncovering reality - are found in Schopenhauer (though not unique to him).

There are, of course, other Pessimists who took different views on these points or came to a pessimistic worldview by completely different routes. But Ligotti either didn't mention them in TCATHR (Leopardi, Spengler, Stirner etc.) or classified them something other than true Pessimists because they don't fit Schopenhauer's mold ( no. 1 above). The only thing that Ligotti does that I don't recall Schopenhauer ever doing is analyze some case histories of brain damage. The only explicit disagreement is Ligotti's distaste for Schopenhauer's Kantian framework. Ligotti's fine in doing this so long as TCATHR is treated as a personal testament - but if this issue were pressed (this is what I mean by the books lack of rigor), much of TCATHR's thesis is logically incoherent without some sort of Anti-Realist metaphysics/epistemology to back it up (For an example of this, see Malone's "Philosophical Sophistry" thread on denying the self's existence and my response from a standard Anti-Realist position)

So, as I said, Ligotti's views are essentially Schopenhauer's. You can't accuse Pizzolatto of stealing ideas from Ligotti when those ideas weren't Ligotti's in the first place.

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

SoSometimes packaging is everything, Speaking Mute.
I could well be wrong but I seriously doubt if Pizzolatto spends much time reading Schopenhauer. He's gone on record saying Rust's beliefs are not his so why would he trudge through difficult philosophical texts on pessimism?

On the other hand, I have no doubt he's read, at least in part, CATHR. Rust's statements on the bleakness of existence sound like Ligotti. Check out the episode titles: They even sound like Ligotti. No doubt you're right, there's nothing new under the sun, but the ways in which Rust's pessimistic thoughts are 'packaged' are more like Ligotti than any other single writer/philosopher...at least to my ears.

And Pizzolatto didn't deny it. When finally confronted he was forced to admit that Ligotti was an influence. I'm betting CATHR is the only Ligotti work he's familiar with.

I'm not claiming anyone 'stole' anything. But I think it's undeniable that Ligotti was the influence for Rust's character. And just maybe Pizzolatto's strange and gratuitous remark about Weird Fiction was an expression of his displeasure at finally being forced to admit Ligotti's influence.

Your post was a good reasoned one; but I'm still going to have a time getting past those remarks Pizzolatto made!

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

Early on, I expressed similar doubts about Pizzolatto's exposure to Schopenhauer and other philosophers. Since then, however, Pizzolatto's stated that he's read Schopenhauer and Cioran. Whereas some think he's just name dropping, his use of Nietzsche's Eternal Return in the fifth episode as as analogy for remembering and reconstructing our past was enough to convince me that he's not a superficial or intellectually passive reader. Furthermore, so far as literary roads go, the path to Schopenhauer - pre-True Detective at least - was shorter and straighter than the one to Ligotti.

Given the Schopenhauer angle, I can't see much gain in him covering up his ties to Ligotti. Even if the mainstream press never caught on to TCAHR, he still wouldn't have gotten credit for a novel philosophy. Pizzolatto's "genius" was and is that he took a philosophical stance that most writer's would have used, if at all, for a particularly disturbing villain and translated it to a protagonist relatively free from moral ambiguity. The simplest way the show would have failed is if Rust turned out to be the killer afterall; and the show would have gotten far less interest if Errol Childress or Reggie LeDoux were the one's paraphrasing Ligotti. What was said was far less striking than who was saying it.

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

Very interesting, Speaking Mute, especially the part about Kantianism anent Schopenhauer and Ligotti. You might be right about CATHR needing some sort of Anti-Realist metaphysics/epistemology.

I didn't watch True Detective because I don't have HBO, but from comments in this thread and the YouTube clip posted by Malone, it seems that Dr. Locrian and Druidic are right that Pizzolatto was deliberately using Ligotti's "packaging." Rust Cohle's remarks are unmistakably Ligottian in style. Concerning Ligotti's packaging of Schopenhauer and Zapffe, I'm reminded of an anecdote from one of Asimov's volumes of autobiography. One day while Asimov was still employed as a biochemistry professor, he was working in his office on a pop science book with reference materials spread out around him. One of his colleagues walked in, looked over his shoulder and said, "But you're just copying this!" Asimov pushed the typewriter toward him and said "Care to continue?"

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

Well, quite a gaffe. My apologies to you and Malone. I corrected the original for anyone scrolling through later on...

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

Speaking Mute, I appreciate your thought provoking response, and I apologize for my confrontational tone yesterday.

I do think that claiming that Ligotti's prose (specifically, lifted by Pizzolatto) is simply a regurgitation of Schopenhauer's philosophy is reductive. Ligotti's ideas are informed by dozens of writers and thinkers and are really critical (and personal) responses more than anything. At any rate, as Druidic suggested, Ligotti's prose is highly distinctive and original in its style as well as its content.

Take this snippet from CATHR:

I challenge anyone--respectfully so--to point out a similar quote like that by any other writer.

There's a reason Pizzolatto copped to his Ligotti "influence" instead of merely stating that he was influenced by the same folks that Ligotti discussed at length in CATHR. The evidence that he paraphrased whole passages and in some cases lifted Ligotti's prose whole cloth is overwhelming.

Again, thanks for the enlightening and intriguing discussion, everyone.

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

I agree with that. As I said in my 2010 CATHR real-time review, I found the whole book 'beautifully true' or words to that effect; in fact it diminished my own pessimism at reading such a great book. I am not qualified to comment on its status as an original work of philosophy but, as I also said in my review, I did miss in the book an index and a formal bibliography.

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

Dr. Locrian, I'm not arguing the other "side" of this because I agree with what you said here, and that was the point of my including the anecdote about Asimov in a previous post.

The closest thing I'm aware of is the opening of Zapffe's The Last Messiah. No need for me to quote snippets; just follow the link and look at the first few paragraphs in sections I and II. There are striking similarities, although obviously, comparing passages, this is not a matter of plagiarism. And there is no subterfuge on Ligotti's part: He makes it clear in the first few pages of CATHR that he is presenting and working with some of Zapffe's ideas, even quoting passages of Zapffe alongside his own somewhat Zapffian epigrams. (By the way, I don't find that particular quote on p. 107 of CATHR.)

Edit: Aargh. Looks like I'll have to quote snippets after all. Linking to the Zapffe essay gets a "subscribers only" message. I can go directly to it from Google, and I'm not a subscriber to Philosophy Now. Hold on -- I'll get some snippets.

Okay, here are some snippets from sections I and II of The Last Messiah, as translated by Gisle R. Tangenes and first published in 1933:

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

That is very true. Well put.

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

Thanks for the response. No time to go in depth, but I'm working off of a PDF version of the book, so that's why the pagination is off.

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

As I have said before, people on the net have disqualified Cohle's ideas by deeming him mad, mentally ill or simply a nihilist (which "seems to be the word one throws at anyone who is deemed a threat", to badly paraphrase Friedrich Dürrenmatt).

Which leads me to a related question, that maybe has not been addresed here yet: If Cohle had simply read from an edition of or quoted from Schopenhauer approvingly, how would the general public have reacted?

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

Basically I think the average person/viewer doesn't really care if thoghts/ideas/attitudes that go against what they see as "common sense" can be attributed to some established and famous philosopher. For them it's all strange and sick. Maybe my view is too negative but I remember talking with a friend about gender theory some weeks ago and I was basically taking the piss a bit and while she was in no way a big fan of such theories either, she said to me: "If you worked with the kind of people as I do, you would be glad that people think about things such as gender." ;)

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

I've just finished watching Episode 4 of TD on the other side of the Atlantic. While I find the series watchable I must admit to not finding it particularly spectacular or wonderful. I find Cohle's pessimistic speeches to be a little too 'staged'. The action chugs along and it's as if the director periodically announces, "We will now halt while Cohle ascends the soapbox to discourse on the futility of life. We shall then resume with the murder plot". I feel it's a good vindication of the old 'show, don't tell' rule in art. Only artists of titanic stature like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky could get away with the kind of didacticism in TD, and even then there are plenty of clunky scenes in both those writers' work because of the preachy tone. I wouldn't put TD up there with, for example, Twin Peaks.

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

I have been thinking about that as well. However, the same argument could be made about The Yellow Jester himself, for example in MWISNYD, The Bungalow House, Our Temporary Supervisor and other stories which simply state ideas in between 'bits of plot'. I think that is fine in narrative fiction, but it struck me as flawed storytelling in the show.

The thing I asked would be the following: How would you convey antinatalism visually? Is it really possible to convey an idea as complex and as alien as that without misleading or confusing a large audience (most of which have never heard the term and could not grasp the concept without explanation)?

Then again, we do not get paid for an answer to that question, so the creators of TD should have answered it for us. Regarding Twin Peaks... well, I don't think there ever was a larger coherent philosophy underlining that show. Even Coop's 'spiritualism' is barely mentioned and never really relevant to the plot. Or is it?

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

That might be true. Then again, you can only win an argument with a dead philosopher I guess.

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

Whereas there's no equivalent one liner from Schopenhauer, Schopenhauer expresses the same ideas in "On The Vanity of Existence" in Parerga and Paralipomena - that humans are so unfit and strange to exist that we should think of life as unnatural. The passage is quite lengthy - and I have to cut and paste to compensate for different translator's omissions - so I posted it under the Pessimistic Passage of the Day so as not to throw a giant block of text into the middle of this thread:

Pessimistic Passage of the Day... - Page 52 - THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK

Now, the fact that I have to cite an extended passage of Schopenhauer to capture the sentiment Ligotti expresses in a single sentence goes to show that Ligotti certainly isn't "regurgitating" Schopenhauer. Ligotti distills Schopenhauer's point in an eloquent and memorable fashion, and this is valuable intellectually and as well as artistically - but it remains that Ligotti's philosophy only differs in exposition rather than content from Schopenhauer's. I'm not dismissing packaging in pointing this out. I also couldn't defend a show like True Detective if I thought very highly of originality.

Returning to True Detective itself, I doubt True Detective would have made a different impact on audiences if Pizzolatto mined choice statements from Schopenhauer rather than Ligotti (Schopenhauer definitely has his own one liners and "quotables"). This is doubly true given that many, like Malone, did not see Rust's philosophy spelled out in a few key statements but rather spewed out in rants.

This also brings me t o a good reason why Pizzolatto might be referring to Schopenhauer more in interviews than Ligotti: right or wrong, we expect authors to know the full history of the ideas they engage with and go back to the source firstahnd. For example, when someone uses Nietzschean concepts but attributes them to Ayn Rand or Marilyn Manson, they are usually written off as ignorant or just stupid. Regardless of what anyone here thinks of either Rand or Manson, this is unfair for numerous reasons I won't go into - but it is the way things are. It's entirely possible that Pizzolatto only knows Schopenhauer (or Cioran) through reading Ligotti, but if he refers to Ligotti the response would probably be something along the lines of "You're an idiot! Ligotti is just a horror writer. Surely you know that it's Schopenhauer's philosophy you're talking about."

[...and I must emphasize that I object to this sort of reaction - but it is one I know many "intellectuals" would have.]

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

Regarding people who dismissed or dislike what Cohle said in the show - well, it's to be expected. But there's also many people - and not just Ligotti fans or self-proclaimed Pessimists - who were intrigued by his character and what he said, and among those some who sympathized. It's no coincidence that TCAHR's sales spiked after the show premiered.

As for philosophy, it's introduction into fiction automatically causes a large segment of the audience to turn away in disgust. People in real life discuss philosophy - even rant and scream about it - all the time, but like death and sex, some feel it should only be alluded to or avoided altogether to avoid bogging down a good story. I always wonder what exactly is left over for a good story...as I see it, aside from sex and death, there's only philosophy...but different strokes, as they say, different strokes.

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

Addicts have a saying: Methadone is a lot stronger, but oxycodone is a lot more fun.
I don’t know if Schopenhauer is “a lot stronger” but I do know Ligotti is more “fun.” LOL.

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

I can agree to that - though on Schopenhauer's behalf, we are comparing a modern English-language fiction writer to a 19th century German-language philosopher. I've also been told by German speakers that English translations of Schopenhauer are horrendous and that he was actually a very conversational and breezy writer. But this is of little consequence to anyone not fluent in German...

...and, for the record, I do consider Ligotti's prose among the best I've read in English.

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

Actually, I like Schopenhauer’s prose…and you did a fine job with the Pessimist Quotation. I was thinking of Ligotti’s stories…which are really quite wonderful.

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

Excellent response.

But I think you're giving Nic Pizzolatto too much credit. The reason he didn't initially mention Ligotti is because he was directly paraphrasing whole paragraphs of his work (and--in some cases--lifting his passages word for word). Ligotti is a living writer whose work is copyrighted, but I suspect Nic P thought he would get away with it because he assumed Ligotti was an obscure enough writer that no one would notice.

If Rust had simply said "Life must be a mistake," or some other Schopenhauer quote, there would've been no controversy, and--I argue--the power of Cohle's establishing monologues in the first three episodes would've been greatly diminished. I suspect Nic P would have been very happy for everyone to have assumed that those monologues came straight from his own head--a remarkable distillation of Schopenhauer, Cioran, and--especially to my mind--Zapffe.

Indeed, most viewers have no idea who any of these folks are--let alone Ligotti--and probably still think something on the lines of, "Wow, the guy who wrote TRUE DETECTIVE is a freaking GENIUS!"

At any rate, we can definitely agree that Ligotti has written some of the best prose in the English language. And I'd argue that CATHR is no exception. Part philosophy, part philosophical criticism and response, part literary criticism, and a metafictional expression of horror -- I've never read anything like it, and I probably never will.

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

It's been interesting to witness all the occasional furor over TCATHR -- readers taking one position or another in response to it. I was surprised by nothing in the book, though, because a) Ligotti's fiction--especially the more metafictional examples--has always clearly projected a pessimistic take on the world and b) TCATHR itself is not just simply an extended philosophical or even philosophical criticism essay. It's also a parodoxically life-affirming work of art on par with and often exceeding any story he's ever written. That's always been the irony of Ligotti's work (to me) -- his expressions of extreme negativity act as a kind of balm to like minded or sympathetic readers.

And I can't imagine any new, sympathetic reader consuming TCATHR and not wanting to read every other word the man has written.

Note: I don't pretend to personally take Ligotti's worldview as scripture. But that's not the point. I do know this, though: Ligotti's worldview is utterly earnest and passionately expressed. It is not philosophical sophistry as some readers (e.g. Laird Barron) have claimed. That misguided take insults the writer, the man, and minimizes the impact of Ligotti's painstaking and ethically sound work.

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

True Detective even made it onto the pages of Germany's most respected weekly quality paper Die Zeit - even though the show is aired on a channel that only a tiny fraction of the population have subscribed to.
In the text the author writes about Cohle : "Like a dark monk he paraphrases the pessimistic voices of the 20th century, like Lovecraft, Cioran, Ligotti".
I'm wondering if he has actually read the authors he is enumerating or if he has simply just copied what he found on the Internet. Anyway, great to hear Ligotti mentioned in the German press.
But I must say the way he reads the ending -"After walking through Conrad's Heart of Darkness in eight episodes the light at the end of the tunnel seems dubious" - is something I cannot quite subsribe to. Nevertheless I must say that like some others here I enjoyed the show.

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

I think Pizzolatto deserves the benefit of the doubt on this point. Aside from the other reasons I've already stated, he mentioned numerous authors early on, including Lovecraft and Barron. He's also stated that he strongly disagrees with Ligotti's worldview. If he was only using TCATHR for some quick talking points to express Cohle's worldview, then his omission could simply be that he personally didn't think Ligotti was that important in the overall scope of True Detective. This also jibe's with him sharing Laird Barron's assessment of Ligotti.

Leeway should also be granted for using non-fiction in a fictional work. If True Detective, for example, featured a secret society called "The Esoteric Cabaret" that targeted artists, then not citing Ligotti would be a serious ethical failing; philosophy and politics, on the other hand, occupies a far more ambiguous space in literature. Otherwise we'd owe George W. Bush credit for the dialogue of dozen's of movie villains during the 00's.

Here our disagreement could ultimately rest on personal taste. Beyond this, I can only point out that Cohle's philosophizing was met with mixed reviews, and that this negative response wasn't merely people put off by a bleak viewpoint. For myself, the most potent expression of Rust's personal philosophy came out when he admitted he was happy that his daughter died young; so far as I am aware, this exchange was entirely Pizzolatto's own writing - although the ideas he expressed could have been taken from the exact passage of "On the Vanity of Existence" I quoted above.

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

Yes, Pizzolatto mentioned other writers and thinkers as influences, but he pointedly did NOT mention Ligotti until Michael Calia of the WSJ literally compared and contrasted Rust's establishing dialogue with passages from TCATHR. The evidence was undeniable, including some word for word sentences Nic P's show and TCATHR shared in common.

It was only after he started getting push back and talk of plagiarism started brewing that Nic Pizzolatto reached out to Mr. Calia and asked for an interview in which he spilled the beans on Ligotti's "influence" on his work.

He specifically stated that he is "about as far from a nihilist as you can get, though at times my personal philosophy would be deemed pessimistic." I could say the same about myself. And, in fact, I wouldn't call Ligotti a nihilist either, but that's a subject for another conversation...

Instead, though--as we know--Pizzolatto paraphrased and directly quoted from TCATHR. No other author had the profound influence on TD that Ligotti did. And--even more importantly--the words and ideas he lifted from Ligotti were used in the first two episodes of TD and were the ESTABLISHING monologues for Rust's character. They're the ones that HBO swooned over when he showed them the first two scripts (which got him the job). They're the ones that the viewing audience at large freaked out over.

He may have mentioned Barron and (obliquely) Lovecraft, but I didn't see TD with much in common with either author except in Barron's case the protagonists' were both chronic substance abusers, one of which hallucinates a lot.

But TCATHR is, by Pizzolatto's own admission, much more than a mere expression of philosophy. "For me as a reader, it was less impactful as philosophy than as one writer’s ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster."

I can requote all the passages and ideas Pizzolatto pulled straight from TCATHR if you'd like. Using another writers words and ideas without immense adaptation and/or attribution is verboten. Ask any professional writer.

No, those Ligotti cribbed scenes were met with overwhelmingly positive reviews throughout the media with a tiny handful of naysayers. Critics and audience members alike were blown away and delighted, particularly with Cohle's first series of monologues when Marty asks him if he's a Christian in that first episode. You know--the scene in which Cohle might as well be setting out Ligotti's thesis in CATHR point by point?

If you search on youtube for "cohle hart car" it's the very first hit. Plug in "true detective" and it's one of the very first clips too. That's little wonder since it's arguably the most famous and certainly the most iconic scene in the show.

Give it another look:


Nope. That one's central thesis is lifted from CATHR as well:

Even if calling human beings "meat" is nothing extraordinarily rare, surely calling the human condition a "thresher" is highly unusual and peculiar to Ligotti's cited work above.

And, of course, the specific line from that monologue (which is the hub of it) paraphrases Ligotti's own expressions almost word for word.

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

Take away Rust's specifically Ligottian worldview, and TRUE DETECTIVE becomes like practically any other buddy cop procedural with a King in Yellow subplot that never really pays off tacked on.

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

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

To be honest, I consider TCATHR much more powerful than any of his prose. I am probably one of only few people on this forum that never really got into his fiction, but I have only read TG and parts of MWISNYD, because those are the only ones available to me. I'm planning on re-reading them, because TCATHR will certainly help me understand them a little better, but I must confess that I consider Ligotti to be a much better writer of non-fiction than of fiction.

However, considering that even TCATHR is out of print, how would people go about reading more of what he's written? I think the fact that Ligotti is simply not available to people is a serious problem, especially now that he has risen to unprecedented publicity. Even NP mentioned that he couldn't find his works, and to him, they bascially were research for a high-profile job!

There is an almost complete collection of his work floating around on the Internet, but that is of course not a real alternative. The fact that fans had to compile and publish that themselves is a damn shame.

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

I feel all Ligotti's work, that many perceive variously to be separate fiction OR separate non-fiction, as a single accreting magnum-opus of "synchronised shards of random truth and fiction" - one that appeals to me a lot but not with any perceived label.

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

You're absolutely right. Unless you want to read his work via a Kindle or a Kindle web reader/app, you're going to shell out big bucks at this point. Now would be time for a mass Ligotti book reprint (or--better yet--a Complete Ligotti [to date] Collection).

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

That's a fine observation, Des, and one with which I concur.

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

Good points, Cynothoglys. I shouldn't have used the word "mass" as I wasn't referring to the big publishing shops. I think small press reprints would be just the thing right now and would be more than sustainable for, say, Subterranean Press. Hell, even a 500 print reprint of some of Ligotti's works would be welcome (and would--I think--sell out rather quickly).

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

I should mention that I am not an American citizen, but you have made some valid points. Also, I want to point out that my knowledge concerning the American book publishing system is very limited, so I might be out of my depth here.

However, I do not look at the subject from a collector's angle. I don't even have to read every word he's written, I just want people to enjoy Ligotti's art and maybe delve into his philosophy, and a cheaper omnibus edition would help people to take that first step. From my experience, e-books have not gained enough traction for people to make a blind buy, at least not on a larger scale that would make a financial difference. There is a lot of people like me, however, who gladly spent 10 bucks on TG in a paperback edition, but from what I've read, that book does not even comprise Ligotti's best material. And even TG seems to be out of stock now.

Also, we should not forget that Stephen King sells millions because, among other aspects, one can get his books for under 10 bucks; and of course, these editions are pretty cheaply made. However, you insinuated that the art suffers from poor presentation, but I disagree with that to be honest. That is an argument a publishing house would make to sell a Grimscribe edition for 40 bucks, because it knows there are people willing to pay for it.

Moreover, you can publish a few hundred pages of fiction for 20 bucks and do the art justice. Just look at the 2011 Barnes&Noble Edition of Lovecraft! Where I live, you can get it for under 20 bucks and it is simply marvelous. Of course, the publisher did not have to pay for the publishing rights, but the 1000 pages, harcover binding, cover image and paper quality are still costly, and yet they did it (by selling their souls I suppose).

Your argument about the low number of sold editions is of course valid. However, that argument goes both ways: Publishers don't print the books, so people can't buy them. And because seemingly nobody wants to buy them, they do not get published. Right now would be the best time to test how many people are interested in "pessimism without compromise". And even if people disregard his philosophy, they could still enjoy his prose (like so many others seem to do) and it would still send money his way.

Ligotti will certainly never appeal to a mass market, but horror rarely does. There are not a lot of Stephen Kings, and yet writers of weird fiction have been able to sustain themselves and find an audience. I think preserving Ligotti as "Horror's best-kept secret" is somewhat noble, but as a fan and admirer, I think it leaves much to be desired.


EDIT: You mention that you spent a lot of money on his works, but did Ligotti ever receive that money? Or did you give it to a private seller, who was fortunate enough to make a profit by selling the books to you? As far as I can see, most of the early works are simply not available as new editions at all, regardless of what price one is willing to pay.