![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Bright as iron, swift as arrow, strong as oak. I am the land
Yesterday I woke up to the news that Robert Holdstock had died. He was not one of my formative writers, but one I resonated with: I discovered him in college, the summer I was unofficially teaching Latin at Belmont Hill and walked home past the same tiny used book store every day; they had the U.S. paperbacks of Mythago Wood (1984) and Lavondyss (1988) and their covers of masks and granite outcroppings must have caught my eye, because I kept picking them up, reading stray lines of prologue and weighing their weirdness, unsure whether they would be as wild and rough-barked as I was hoping or merely another iteration of crystally Celtic twilight. They were not the latter. My memory tells me that the school year had started by the time I finally brought Mythago Wood home and that I read Lavondyss by falling snow, but perhaps I associate the books so strongly with their presiding seasons that the story has changed inside my head. He wrote one of the three truest autumns I know. I am not pleased there will be no more in his timeless, blood-bronzed, shape-changing forests.
no subject
I know that Greer's work is another of your truest autumns. Who does the third?
no subject
I think you might like it very much. The newest book in the cycle came out in June and I didn't even know: I am going to find it now.
I know that Greer's work is another of your truest autumns. Who does the third?
Angela Carter in "The Erl-King." I grew up on Ray Bradbury and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) is a magnificent evocation of October, but his autumns are more agricultural than wildwood; I turned out to prefer the latter.
no subject
no subject
It's the fifth story in her extraordinary collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), which gorgeously, rowdily, darkly by turns retells fairy- and folktales from "Little Red Riding Hood" to "Puss-in-Boots" in a variety of times and settings, late nineteenth-century France, Romania on the eve of World War I, Italy of the commedia and a wood of wolves that exists nowhere but in the words Carter uses to create it. As you can tell, I recommend the book highly.
(Then you should read Robert Holdstock, too. Speaking of songs, Lavondyss has as a supporting character Ralph Vaughan Williams.)
no subject
I'll put out a call for it on interlibrary loan.
Ralph Vaughan Williams? Cool!
no subject
no subject
I think I envy you that. I am sorry he's gone.
no subject
no subject
For me, the two named here are his best; I would also recommend his collection The Bone Forest (1991), whose title novella really messed up my dreams.
no subject
no subject
I look forward to hearing what you think of it.
no subject
He walks in his ever-autumn. Winter will not come.
Nine
no subject
He might have read you.
He walks in his ever-autumn. Winter will not come.
A good benediction.
no subject
no subject
I like that it became an archetypal text for the handling of the mythos of England. That was very appropriate.
no subject
no subject
I feel very strongly about that kind of strangeness: it should exist in the world. And so should the people who write it.
Speaking of which, I DO highly recommend House of Leaves, if you haven't gotten to it yet.
I have a copy borrowed from
no subject
no subject
Yes!