Book club #3: The Music of Erich Zann (HP Lovecraft)

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he's anti-science therefore pro-transcendence - "here is a window such as Erich Zann's, beyond which lies a world more terrible than imagination can grasp, where science dwindles to zero and incredible passions rage as winds in a vacuum.... Where?"
 

catalog

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the rue d'auseil could be the white hotel (approx 30 mins walk from the uni, but could be a different universe)
 

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"The Rue d'Auseil lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick blear-windowed warehouses and spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark stone. It was always shadowy, along that river, as if the smoke of neighboring factories shut out the sun perpetually. The river was also odorous with evil stenches which I have never smelled elsewhere, and which may some day help me to find it, since I should recognize them at once."

very good description of the wlk to salford from mcr, which necissitates crossing the river irwell, possibly the darkest and most polluteed city river ever, there are no riverside areas
 

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"He was a small, lean, bent person, with shabby clothes, blue eyes, grotesque, satyr-like face, and nearly bald head"

er...

index.php
 

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"He did not employ the music-rack, but, offering no choice and playing from memory, enchanted me for over an hour with strains I had never heard before; strains which must have been of his own devising. To describe their exact nature is impossible for one unversed in music. They were a kind of fugue, with recurrent passage of the most captivating quality, but to me were notable for the absence of any of the weird notes I had overhead from my room below on other occasions."

maybe

 

catalog

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machen doesn't really have the foreboding sense of terror/wonder so much, but the language is very similar - "florid prose" s web put it
 

catalog

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i am trying to write something about slaithwaite at the moment and have a problem, perhaps you can help me.
 

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i mean, i think this is good

"It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not; but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth, and that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which I could hardly conceive as produced by one player."
 

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"I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleamed from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance of anything on earth. "
 

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"And I recall that there was no wind, and that the moon was out, and that all the lights of the city twinkled."
 
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