I hear that Peter Lamborn Wilson is now with the angels. <\/p>\n
Doubtless some thumping great 650-page biography will, one day, proffer a paragraph that draws strange parallels between P.L. Wilson and H.P. Lovecraft. For instance, living as-if back in 1911, quitting New York City for the rural Hudson Valley, engaging playfully with the weird Fourier-ist backwoods of American history, dreaming of wandering mad Arab visionaries and Sufi dream-voyagers, seeking traces of lost Egyptian desert utopias, musing on the hermetic ‘will to power as disappearance’ in the service of eventual re-emergence and re-discovery in other places and at other times.<\/p>\n
But for now I plant a few quick signposts-in-the-sand, following a quick catch-up survey of where his post-2001 work might be found.<\/p>\n
His latest book appears to be Peacock Angel: The Esoteric Tradition of the Yezidis<\/em> (2022). Which should help clear up any misconceptions gained about them in Lovecraft’s “Red Hook”. This follows on from his Cauda Pavonis: Esoteric Antinomianism in the Yezidi Tradition<\/em> (2019).<\/p>\n His The Temple of Perseus at Panopolis<\/em> is a 400-page table-trembler which imaginatively and poetically… “aims to give a thick impression of a single Egyptian city, Akhmim, called by the Greeks Panopolis or ‘city of Pan’. As a time-machine, this book will take the reader back to the 5th century AD, when the last champions of Paganism were battling against the coming triumph of Christianity.” Sounds interesting. A little later on his heavier book False Messiah: Crypto-Xtian Tracts and Fragments<\/em> (2022) is said to prod at the various esoteric encrustations that have attached themselves to Christianity.<\/p>\n His fantastical fiction is to be found in Night Market Noodles & Other Tales<\/em> (2017) and his collection of Borgesian and Nabokovian hoax-fictions False Documents<\/em> (2015). I can’t find any other such collections. I’ve never read any of it, but it’s on the list now.<\/p>\n Riverpeople<\/em> (2014) is his “epic” mixed poetry and prose text, which appears to be akin to Moon’s PrairyErth<\/em> but shorter. It’s on the landscapes and people of his adopted home-place in the Hudson Valley, above New York City. The Esopus River, to be exact, which it appears Lovecraft knew in the form of his cherished “Esopus grist mills”. Riverpeople<\/em> is flanked by a book of essays arising from his interest in early American weird-history, The American Revolution as a Gigantic Real Estate Scam: And Other Essays in Lost\/Found History<\/em> (2019). Another sentiment with which Lovecraft might have nodded in agreement, if not quite agreeing with the romantic anarchist politics (the ponderous and un-readable fellow anarchist Murray Bookchin frowned on Wilson too, which I consider to be a Good Sign). Wilson’s related essays, such as “Back to 1911: Temporal Autonomous Zones” and “Caliban’s Masque: Spiritual Anarchy and the Wild Man in Colonial America”, are to be found in the miscellaneous clear-out collection Anarchist Ephemera<\/em> (2016). Which, since it’s Creative Commons, is on Archive.org as a PDF.<\/p>\n Like Lovecraft he was also a poet. I can find three chunky volumes of selected poems published in 2018, Lucky Shadows<\/em> and Vanished Signs<\/em> and Thibault or the Secrets of the Sea<\/em>. Said by Autonomedia to have all been selected from his “1999\u20132014” poetry, and then split into books distributed among three different publishers. A note on Vanished Signs<\/em> suggests a chunk of that volume is from his earlier Ec(o)logues<\/em> (2011), which was apparently an evocation of “anarcho-surrealist” bucolic ruralism. Sounds like News from Nowhere<\/em> for the Terrance McKenna generation. After that the poetry seems to swing a little darker with the final(?) School of Nite<\/em> (2015) which was a 60-page photobook with sombre photos and poems. <\/p>\n His essay collection New Nihilism<\/em> (2018) collected essays on comics-and-freedom (said to be excellent), evading the corporate media, and his enduring love of Celtic culture and history<\/a> (not the cringe New Age gift-shoppe variety) among other topics. Sadly he does not appear to have ever engaged with Lovecraft in essay form. That would have been an interesting long essay. But it’s one that we shall now never have.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I hear that Peter Lamborn Wilson is now with the angels. Doubtless some thumping great 650-page biography will, one day, …<\/p>\n