My dear “Prince James Zaleski” (aka) it ill behoves a self-described Corbynista to smear and damn impoverished and proletarian authors as both “far-right, etc. etc.” and “small press” when “evil capitalist corporations” unapologetically publish avowed Marxists and socialists in the global mass marketplace. Or have I missed some vital first principle here?
Mark S.
… which I didn’t realise is now located in the Land of the Rising Sun. They’re very keen on William Hope Hodgson it seems (well, I’ve seen Matango, even if you haven’t).
Anyway, it’s a delight to announce that my first story to be translated into Japanese will be “Court of Midnight” in issue #19 of Night Land, that splendid country’s only weird fiction magazine. I’ve sort of lost track of all of my foreign language translations (I recall some German, Spanish, Russian et al) but this will be definitely the first time I’ve landed up in print on Nippon’s noble shores.
Here’s a link to the aforementioned magazine.
http://athird.cart.fc2.com/ca8/264/p-r7-s/
Mark S.
Nice.
Mark S.
From correspondence back in 2016, here’s an insight into certain TLO thought-processes wherein politics supposedly trump metaphysics. Which they never can do, of course.
“Thanks for your email.
Sorry to hear that your back isn’t healing well and you’re still laid up. How’s the eye coming along? Some improvement there, at least, I hope. I think I’d go completely nuts if I were laid up as you are right now. I need to get out of this cell every single day for a long walk or else it’s the old cabin fever pretty rapido.
I went up to Mass on the hill earlier (I suppose I could charge myself with a venial sin or two since my last communion on Saturday night, but nothing a confession would need to fix) which was unusual. The priest rattled through the ceremony. Very quiet and meditative though. Only around a dozen worshippers. Anyway, I offered up some prayers for you, having read your email earlier in the day before setting out.
Mention of [name redacted] only fills me with shudders. You’re a better man than I am to turn the cheek so many times. I’d rather avoid him than engage with him. But, as you say, I don’t think he’s entirely in control of his actions. I’ve done and said things in the past I’ve regretted while on the sauce, and was caught off-guard at a really bad moment, but I’ve not reached his degree of concentrated, goal-directed malice towards someone else. What must only aggravate any underlying mental health issues is that I think his SJW crowd are so narrow-minded and self-righteous they can actually feel comfortable dehumanising their ‘enemies’ and describing them as ‘scum’ and regard any slur, smear or insinuation as a tactic justified for ‘the greater good of the cause’. My conscience would tear me to bits if I did that to others. Even writing these remarks I get a pang of self-accusation of “well, who are YOU Mark S – you pompous ass – to judge anyway??” Gulp! Anyway, do I think [name redacted] will change? Nope. He’ll roll on doing the same thing repeatedly until some terrible crisis intervenes. What he needs is to get off the internet, but more specifically the TLO (at least [name decacted] has figured it out, btw!). The attention he gets there is too much like a drug-hit for him, as it is, doubtless, for many other SJW types.
If these callow youths spent more time honing their craft as writers instead of instigating political witch-hunts they might make a valuable contribution to the future of weird fiction. From what I see of the generation coming up behind me, there’s little to hope for in that line. They’ve all taken a wrong turning and want to turn the legacy into a “it’s not how good your writing actually is that counts any more, it’s whether your face and your politics now fits our brave, quota-driven new world”. Sure, straight white guys who chant the same PC mantra will get through, at first. But that tributary will consist only of those straight white guys who chant the same mantra even more loudly than their “we are more equal than others” comrades. Eventually, of course, even the dupes will be a target. Later on it will be made clear to once-useful idiots that it was always the case that all straight white men, even those who accept they are historically the ‘oppressor’, are required to stand aside en masse so that final social justice prevails for the ‘oppressed’.
Ligotti will come in for this treatment too, sooner or later. Maybe not right now, but it will happen eventually, as his profile rises. At some stage another wave of SJW people are going to accuse him of (at least) ‘thought-crimes of omission’. Why no empowered female characters in his work? Why no black characters? Why no gay role models? What is “The Small People” really about? Sure, he says he’s against corporate America; but so were the Nazis. Look at the revenge fantasy against that woman co-worker in “My Work is Not Yet Done”, its possibly a rape thing. He never married? Does he hate women? Hmm. Why is his fiction so dark and Eurocentric – hell, Germanic – anyway? Didn’t he collaborate with the band Current 93? That’s a ‘problematic’ minefield right there. He can’t not have known his close collaborator David Tibet’s earlier music concerned itself with references to Francis Parker Yokey’s Imperium and with Swastika imagery? Hell, what about that C93 track “Hitler Comes As Kalki”?? etc etc etc. Ad tedium. Ad nauseum.
Enough of this endless virtue-signalling nonsense.”
Mark S.
Cultural commandos, do not despair. We were always beyond the pale. And now, at last, final victory is within our sight.
Their bourgeois ignorance, dismissal and condescension is all to our advantage.
Mark S.
The infinitely tedious cry-bully “Prince James Zaleski” (aka) now carrying the whole of the TLO comment section through a one-man Trotskyite analysis of weird fiction in “glorious” yet isolated hegemonic splendour?
I mean, really? Really? Is this what the TLO has finally come to?
Apparently so. Congratulations TLO Controller. Well done.
Mark S.
If you do you won’t hear the end of it.
Let them try and kill you first.
Mark S.
