Letters from Zothique

Dispatches from a Doomed Land

[Letters from Zothique @KlarkashT]

Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;
I crown me with the million-colored sun
Of secret worlds incredible, and take
Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar,
Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume
The spaceward-flown horizons infinite.

-Clark Ashton Smith

[Letters from Zothique @KlarkashT]

I thought the last issue of W.T. rather punk, apart from the verses and one or two fine passages in Howard's tale. I couldn't stomach this last as a whole that bloody battle stuff is so stale that it gives me what Sterling called "the Molossian pip." [REH, BOTD in 1906.]

[Letters from Zothique @KlarkashT]

I believe the late R E Howard and I would have had a grand time together lambasting civilization; that is, if I have not been misinformed as to his views. Barbarism, barbaric art, barbaric peoples, appeal more and more to me. [REH, BOTD in 1906.]

[Letters from Zothique @KlarkashT]

Mushroom-Gatherers

When our pails were brimmed,
Mushrooms white and brown
Clustered where the slope went down.

[Letters from Zothique @KlarkashT]

Unique, was the thrill with which I discovered for myself the poems of Poe in a grammar-school library; and, despite the objurgations of the librarian, who considered Poe "unwholesome," carried the priceless volume home to revel for enchanted days in its undreamt-of melodies.

[Letters from Zothique @KlarkashT]

"The Outsider" is a masterpiece of shadowy cobweb horror, with illimitable suggestive values and overtones. Honestly, I think it more successful than two-thirds of Poe!

[Illustration by Belle Goldschlager Baranceanu (1902--1988), her third and last for Weird Tales]

[Letters from Zothique @KlarkashT]

Something beyond and above the mere words and images seems to well from the entire fabric of the work, like the "pestilent and mystic vapor" which, to the narrator's fancy, appeared to emanate from the melancholy House of Usher and its inexplicably dismal surroundings.

[Letters from Zothique @KlarkashT]

In much of Poe's best work, the atmospheric elements are so subtly blended, unified and pervasive as to make analysis rather difficult.

[Letters from Zothique @KlarkashT]

The true lover of mysteries is not likely to feel any lasting interest in detective stories. Not the least proof of Poe's genius is that he abandoned this genre of writing as soon as he had mastered it.

[Letters from Zothique @KlarkashT]

It is damnable to reflect that America has either killed her finest artists or has driven them into exile. Poe certainly died from hardship rather than drink; and Bierce and Hearn were impelled to flee the country.

[Letters from Zothique @KlarkashT]

I have been re-reading most of Poe lately: his best things seem even better, and his poorer ones worse, after a lapse of years.

[Letters from Zothique @KlarkashT]

[Edgar Allan Poe, BOTD in 1809, with his raven and his cockatoo (courtesy of Gahan Wilson).]

[Letters from Zothique @KlarkashT]

Happy Birthday to Clark Ashton Smith, who would have been 131 years old today!

[Stefan Dziemianowicz @StefanDz11]

You can't get much farther off-Broadway than Zothique

[Letters from Zothique @KlarkashT]

Ripe Mulberries*

Under the spreading mulberry tree
When the purple fruit was falling free,
I got horny and had some nooky
With my hot cooky
And she had some with me.

*God damn! the cleaner's bill!

[Letters from Zothique @KlarkashT]

Sanity is the madness of the greatest number.

[Letters from Zothique @KlarkashT]

A woman dies, willing her skull to her sweetheart on condition that he should keep it always with him. He is gradually transformed into a morbid neurotic; and one day he is found stark mad, kissing the teeth of the skull, after having decked it with a lace nightcap.

[Letters from Zothique @KlarkashT]

A red moon, ominous and gibbous, had declined above the terrace and the crags; and the shadows of the cedars were elongated in the moon; and they wavered in the gale like the blown cloaks of enchanters.

[Letters from Zothique @KlarkashT]

O meaningless and sterile wars!
O senseless virtue! stupid sin!
Our puerile drama will not win
The hoots or plaudits of the stars.

O world, with vulture beaks a-gape!
What god will care to curse or bless
Nature, the crouching leopardess,
Or man, the maniacal ape?

[Harry Stephen Keeler 🐀 @HarrySKeeler]

[And here it is! The--uh--spanking erotica that Clark Ashton Smith sold to Harry Stephen Keeler in 1924.]

https://t.co/B3JydfRH8G

[Letters from Zothique @KlarkashT]

Turning, I saw that several greyish vapoury masses, which might have been either clouds or smoke, were drifting about the summits that overlooked the pass; and one of these masses, rearing like a limbless figure, upright and colossal, had interposed itself between us and the sun.