You know, I know a lot of people who rate Ligotti very highly. I read "Songs of a Dead Dreamer" and I thought it was good but not great. I couldn't imagine putting it on par with Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, Clark Ashton Smith or any of the other top-flight weird fiction writers. I haven't read any of Ligotti's other books. (As an aside, I really love Clark Ashton Smith.)
I don't think I'd really compare Ligotti to Lovecraft in any real way. There's similarities there and he's said Lovecraft was a major influence, but the way he's approaching all this is pretty different/ I think Lovecraft more than anything was just terrified of change and he could never get over the fact that the culture he grew up in and was familiar with was sort of a relic and that the world was always a much bigger place. He hated himself and like a lot of modern incels took refuge in extreme reactionary ideology as a way of salvaging some sense of significance from that. Like, it's kind of an open secret that the "cosmic horror" in Lovecraft is really just immigrants.
Ligotti doesn't have those kind of hangups, his are worse to live with. He's literally got anhedonia, not only is he incapable of feeling joy he thinks joy is utterly delusional. Lovecraft's stories when you compare them to his life have a pretty sad element, in that it's a guy who really had extreme anxiety trying to work that out through his stories. I can call Lovecraft a racist asshole but more than anything he was just really depressed and confused. Lovecraft wanted happiness, he just had a terminal case of wrong generation syndrome and his insecurities always got the better of him. Ligotti in his mind though doesn't just think, he
knows that all of human history comes down to meaningless blobs of meat suffering and slithering around grotesquely desperately wishing to die and only kept alive through a genetic drive to reproduce. In Ligotti there was never any sanity to lose in the first place. The horror isn't some other from beyond space, the horror is that you're even alive reading this, you poor fucker.
Not everyone's cup of tea but if you get on his level he gets nightmarish in a way Lovecraft never does to me personally.
There's such an impossible amount of "must-read" literature stretching from the Iliad to "Infinite Jest" that it's difficult to imagine how you're supposed to fit it all in and still have room to read a bunch of new material as well. It's hard to tell if the state of literature today really is that bleak and directionless or if it's just how it seems in the moment. For all I know, today's Hemingway and Fitzgerald could be leading an exciting literary movement somewhere and I'm just too distracted or too chauvinistic to notice it.
As far as the shift toward worse and more minimalist writing goes, I think the main thing at work is attention scarcity diminishing the amount of time we're expected to devote things like books. Some works (like ads) function best when contemplated only briefly; with an ad, your appreciation is going to peak at about one second, whereas your appreciation for a pre-19th-century masterpiece painting is probably not going to peak until you've contemplated it for several minutes at least. Some writing seems to have become more ad-like in that it's meant to read well the first time at the expense of not reading well the fifth time, rather than vice versa.
Obviously someone like Rupi Kaur is low-hanging fruit, but take this for example: "the world/gives you/so much pain/and here you are/making gold out of it/there is nothing purer than that." Obviously, this poem is probably best the first time around. It suffers from being subjected to attention for more than a few seconds. But it wouldn't make it on Instagram if it were confusing at first but then rewarding after a few minutes' contemplation; by that point, everyone would have scrolled on.
Anyway, that's my take on it. I think social media is a plague on everything in our culture; I feel about social media roughly the way Noam Chomsky feels about the U.S. government.
A lot of books that get called "classic" were ignored during the authors life. I mentioned Moby Dick above, and that's a good example. One of the most well regarded novels in the American literary canon, and when Melville died it was out of print and it had a bunch of terrible reviews following it around.
I write in my spare time (when I have the energy anyway, and that kind of the hardest part of it for anyone). Literary agents always post for submissions on twitter and places like that, people are always looking for something new. But see what they want is almost always a checklist of things they know will sell well or look good on ad copy. Which can be pretty alienating if you're just not interested in writing a YA book about a transgendered kid in a dystopian society that's outlawed cunnilingus or whatever the fuck. People are also more literate and ironically have more time then ever to devote to writing, so there's just this absolute deluge of shit being written that people like Hemmingway never had to deal with. Consider that Tolstoy wrote war and peace by hand and ask yourself how many people at the time really had the energy to do that. So nobody wants to take risks on something that will almost certainly sell like shit when they can get 80 other novels that won't whenever they ask.
Personally, I've noticed something on the internet, which is that people reading shit I write usually take it a lot more seriously than I do. You can go through my post history and see page upon page of sperging, but most of it is actually just me getting high and lazily shooting the shit with people. Like I'm not "invested" in it but I get a lot of "lol calm down!" comments, or just people saying I sound like a pretentious ass. Alas, I have to admit my writing style pisses people the fuck off. Because I'm a longwinded motherfucker. Look at this shit! I'm on paragraph five! That's partially my fault (or all my fault, whatever) but my point is I feel like people don't have any patience for anything except "this is exactly what I mean in one sentence, and it means this and only this, and even a five year old can read it and know exactly what I mean". You're right, I think a lot of that is social media and our rhetorical ownage based public discourse that sort of encourages people to run from anything even slightly abstract. But I figure another reason people like Rupi Kaur got so popular is because she's basically just writing standard middle class woman shit in a way that's impossible to misinterpret, so it gives people the ability to read her and go "Yeah! You go girl!". Compare that to something like Dostoevsky where he really isn't giving you simple answers, or simple statements, or simple anything, and you realize you can't really get that. I don't think anybody's ever read Crime And Punishment and thought "Oh hell yeah, you go axe man!".
I feel like as the world gets more complicated people are less and less willing to devote their time to anything that makes it seem more complicated.
