Musings

Ruthie Kornblatt-Stier

January 6th 2023

Écriture d'émaciation

This pervasive idea of female excess—or ridding oneself of female excess in order to fulfill a standard defined by male connotations—runs both ways, from a writer’s actual human form to the intangible prose and back. The paring treatment that female writers give to their work, the crafting of concise, controlled, tight phrases, is the same treatment they give to their selves and bodies...

Gregg Williard

November 25th 2022

The Slump

The image jumped out at me, crystalizing a specific posture, a way of sliding to the ground and propping up against a wall, a door, (or a car) that seemed to epitomize something in life and the world around the 1960's and 1970's and beyond. I've come to call it The Slump. The Slump occurs in certain key movies or moments when the characters (or yourself) face a reckoning, a metaphysical shock, a resignation, imminent or actual annihilation, or even strange victory...

William Dempsey

November 2nd 2022

On Thomas Ligotti's "The Town Manager"

...where Lovecraft is a fundamentally epistemological writer, Ligotti is something more like a fundamentally ontological writer. The inherent downfall not in what we are unable to know or understand, but in what we are unable to change—the state of affairs; the facts of the matter. Knowledge, for Ligotti, is at times an afterthought: we can recognize—disgustedly—the failure at the center of things, the entropy that does not hang on the world, but on which the world hangs, or from which the world metastasizes...