<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html><head><title></title>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css">
<style type="text/css"><!--
body {
margin: 5px 5px 5px 5px;
background-color: #ffffff;
}
/* ========== Text Styles ========== */
hr { color: #000000}
body, table /* Normal text */
{
font-size: 12pt;
font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode';
font-style: normal;
font-weight: normal;
color: #000000;
text-decoration: none;
}
span.rvts1 /* Heading */
{
font-size: 10pt;
font-family: 'Arial';
font-weight: bold;
color: #0000ff;
}
span.rvts2 /* Subheading */
{
font-size: 10pt;
font-family: 'Arial';
font-weight: bold;
color: #000080;
}
span.rvts3 /* Keywords */
{
font-size: 10pt;
font-family: 'Arial';
font-style: italic;
color: #800000;
}
a.rvts4, span.rvts4 /* Jump 1 */
{
font-size: 10pt;
font-family: 'Arial';
color: #008000;
text-decoration: underline;
}
a.rvts5, span.rvts5 /* Jump 2 */
{
font-size: 10pt;
font-family: 'Arial';
color: #008000;
text-decoration: underline;
}
span.rvts6
{
font-size: 11pt;
font-family: 'tahoma';
font-weight: bold;
color: #ffffff;
background-color: #0000ff;
}
span.rvts7
{
font-size: 11pt;
font-family: 'tahoma';
}
span.rvts8
{
font-size: 8pt;
font-family: 'arial';
font-style: italic;
color: #c0c0c0;
}
a.rvts9, span.rvts9
{
color: #0000ff;
text-decoration: underline;
}
span.rvts10
{
font-size: 13pt;
font-family: 'times new roman';
}
/* ========== Para Styles ========== */
p,ul,ol /* Paragraph Style */
{
text-align: left;
text-indent: 0px;
padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
}
.rvps1 /* Centered */
{
text-align: center;
}
--></style>
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello!</p>
<p><br></p>
<p>On 15 października 2008, Ryan Bonneville wrote:</p>
<p><br></p>
<div><table border=0 cellpadding=1 cellspacing=2>
<tr valign=top>
<td width=12 style="background-color: #0000ff;">
<p><span class=rvts6>></span></p>
</td>
<td width=864 style="background-color: #ffffff;">
<p><span class=rvts7>Hi all,</span></p>
<p><br></p>
<p><span class=rvts7>I finished An Evil Guest and I'm looking to read some HPL for background. There's a lot of it and it seems like it's all sort of tenuously connected. Any suggestions for a reading list or order?</span></p>
<p><br></p>
<p><span class=rvts7>Best,</span></p>
<p><span class=rvts7>Ryan</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<p><br></p>
<p><br></p>
<p>I would suggest a less popular story: "The Mound", written with (for?) Zealia Bishop.</p>
<p><br></p>
<p>http://terror.snm-hgkz.ch/lovecraft/html/</p>
<p><a class=rvts9 href="http://terror.snm-hgkz.ch/lovecraft/html/mound.htm">http://terror.snm-hgkz.ch/lovecraft/html/mound.htm</a></p>
<p><br></p>
<p>I think it best explains the real, waking fear of Lovecraft: the destruction or corruption of the Western civilisation. He is afraid that the modern discoveries will replace it from within by something monstrous. The people of K'n-yan are pretty clearly his vision of the future of America, and Tsath rather resembles New York. </p>
<p><br></p>
<p>"<span class=rvts10>Zamacona caught his breath at the great sweep of peopled landscape, for it was a hive of settlement and activity beyond anything he had ever seen or dreamed of. The downward slope of the hill itself was relatively thinly strown with small farms and occasional temples; but beyond it lay an enormous plain covered like a chess board with planted trees, irrigated by narrow canals cut from the river, and threaded by wide, geometrically precise roads of gold or basalt blocks. Great silver cables borne aloft on golden pillars linked the low, spreading buildings and clusters of buildings which rose here and there, and in some places one could see lines of partly ruinous pillars without cables. Moving objects skewed the fields to be under tillage, and in some cases Zamacona saw that men were ploughing with the aid of the repulsive, half-human quadrupeds. </span></p>
<p><span class=rvts10>But most impressive of all was the bewildering vision of clustered spires and pinnacles which rose afar off across the plain and shimmered flower-like and spectral in the coruscating blue light. At first Zamacona thought it was a mountain covered with houses and temples, like some of the picturesque hill cities of his own Spain, but a second glance shewed him that it was not indeed such. It was a city of the plain, but fashioned of such heaven-reaching towers that its outline was truly that of a mountain. Above it hung a curious greyish haze, through which the blue light glistened and took added overtones of radiance from the million golden minarets. Glancing at Gll'-Hthaa-Ynn, Zamacona knew that this was the monstrous, gigantic, and omnipotent city of Tsath. "</span></p>
<p><span class=rvts10><br></span></p>
<p><span class=rvts10><br></span></p>
<p>For comparison, here is a description of the New York as imagined by Lovecraft in "He":</p>
<p><br></p>
<p>"<span class=rvts10>Coming for the first time upon the town, I had seen it in the sunset from a bridge, majestic above its waters, its incredible peaks and pyramids rising flowerlike and delicate from pools of violet mist to play with the flaming clouds and the first stars of evening. Then it had lighted up window by window above the shimmering tides where lanterns nodded and glided and deep horns bayed weird harmonies, and had itself become a starry firmament of dream, redolent of faery music, and one with the marvels of Carcassonne and Samarcand and El Dorado and all glorious and half-fabulous cities. Shortly afterward I was taken through those antique ways so dear to my fancy-narrow, curving alleys and passages where rows of red Georgian brick blinked with small-paned dormers above pillared doorways that had looked on gilded sedans and paneled coaches - and in the first flush of realization of these long-wished things I thought I had indeed achieved such treasures as would make me in time a poet. </span></p>
<p><span class=rvts10>But success and happiness were not to be. Garish daylight showed only squalor and alienage and the noxious elephantiasis of climbing, spreading stone where the moon had hinted of loveliness and elder magic; and the throngs of people that seethed through the flume-like streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes, shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the scenes about them, who could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man of the old folk, with the love of fair green lanes and white New England village steeples in his heart. "</span></p>
<p><span class=rvts10><br></span></p>
<p><span class=rvts10>And it's future:</span></p>
<p><br></p>
<p>"<span class=rvts10>And as he snarled the phrase under his breath he gestured anew bringing to the sky a flash more blinding than either which had come before. For full three seconds I could glimpse that pandemoniac sight, and in those seconds I saw a vista which will ever afterward torment me in dreams. I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows. And swarming loathsomely on aerial galleries I saw the yellow, squint-eyed people of that city, robed horribly in orange and red, and dancing insanely to the pounding of fevered kettle-drums, the clatter of obscene crotala, and the maniacal moaning of muted horns whose ceaseless dirges rose and fell undulantly like the wave of an unhallowed ocean of bitumen. "</span></p>
<p><br></p>
<p><br></p>
<p>Here, as in "Horror at Red Hook" he imagined the corruption as coming from the outside, caused by immigration or conquest. In "The Mound" he clearly began to see the inner cause of corruption. In fact, it is interesting to consider how he would look at the modern civilisation, I think he would be dismayed to see his predictions coming to pass much earlier than he guessed.</p>
<p><br></p>
<p><span class=rvts8>-- </span></p>
<p><span class=rvts8>Best regards,</span></p>
<p><span class=rvts8>Stanislaus B.</span></p>
</body></html>
<TABLE cellPadding="3" bgColor="#ffffff"><TBODY><TR><TD style="font: 12px Courier New, Courier, monotype.com; padding: 3px; background: #ffffff; color: #000000">----------------------------------------------------------------------
<BR>
Drinkomat - aplikacja na telefon!
<BR>
Pobierz >> <A href="http://link.interia.pl/f1f38">http://link.interia.pl/f1f38</a> </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>