Once you see it right, I'll take the mirror

[sovay]

I seem to have gotten into this pattern where I have a very intense few days, make some kind of short-cut, not very explanatory post about it afterward, and then the whole thing happens again. (This last one was not an emergency, like Readercon. Someone I care about was doing something very stressful. It all worked out. Everyone falls over now.) I have this pipe dream that the rest of the week will involve nothing more energy-taking than reading some books, watching some movies, seeing a very few people and then, I don't know, not doing much of anything this weekend. I am scheduled to show the original Norwegian Insomnia (1997) to lesser_celery tonight, which will be a lot of fun. I don't know why I dreamed first about seeing a massive retrospective of a nonexistent, Delvaux-like Surrealist at the Museum of Fine Arts and then about half-reading, half-enacting a loose variant on Return to Oz (1985) in a heavily Dickensian setting. I've never seen the movie; I read Joan D. Vinge's novelization sometime in elementary school and it scared the daylights out of me. rushthatspeaks has a copy and I'm not even sure how I feel about re-reading it.

I may have to re-read John Bellairs, because I did not expect to find him all over my new book of M.R. James, which I finished very happily over the weekend. There's a bit in The Lamp from the Warlock's Tomb (1988) that has to be a direct shout-out to "The Tractate Middoth": that face full of cobwebs freaked me the fuck out when I was eight. There's another apparition in "Rats" that I met first in The Spell of the Sorcerer's Skull (1984): a lolling scarecrow with its foot made of white bones. (Oh, hey, is that what that dream of Peter Wimsey's in Busman's Honeymoon (1937) always reminded me of. Thank you, brain. Making connections long after it would have been useful for me to know why, in high school, I found that image especially disturbing.) And then of course the general tone of antiquarianism, the curious or apparently ordinary objects invested with dread and the hauntings that are just wrong enough: "That guy at the high school wasn't alive. He was a ghost or something like that. Real live people don't have cobwebs all over their faces." ("'What sort of man?’ McLeod wriggled. 'I don't know,' he said, 'but I can tell you one thing—he was beastly thin; and he looked as if he was wet all over: and,' he said, looking round and whispering as if he hardly liked to hear himself, 'I'm not at all sure that he was alive.'") It's like I had a primer for James between the ages of eight and twelve and I didn't know it. I'm wondering what else I would recognize now that, at the time, only made me want to hide the book behind its shelves and hope it never took notice of me again.

This has been a hard week on authors of my childhood: Jean Merrill, Mollie Hunter, Harry Harrison. I admit I hadn't re-read the last of these in several years, but we were just talking about the Stainless Steel Rat at my brother's birthday last Monday. Mollie Hunter gave me A Stranger Came Ashore (1975) and The Mermaid Summer (1988), two early impressions of the sea and the beautiful, dangerous things in it that played by no human rules. But as soon as I saw sdn's link on Facebook, I went downstairs and took my copy of The Pushcart War (1964) off the shelf, because I read that book like nobody's business when it was reprinted in the mid-eighties. It reminds me now of Damon Runyon; then it went straight into my mythscape of New York City, no matter what I thought or didn't about a future in which there were still pea-shooters and hit polka tunes. Jean Merrill. "By Hand."

In conclusion, The Big Lebowski (1998) is a very entertaining thing to watch in a theater full of people who shout "Shut the fuck up, Donny!" and a vanilla float made with the ginger and blackcurrant perry from Fox Barrel Cider is a great idea and I am glad I have no plans to leave the house today.

[edit] And the mail just brought me copies of Caitlín R. Kiernan's Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (for which I wrote the afterword) and The Yellow Book, which I am greatly looking forward to. I have an afternoon plan.

Comments

[sovay]

Amazon lists an edition from 1954; it's the earliest one they list.

The earliest edition is 1964. The 1985 reprint (which is the one I own, currently on loan to derspatchel), looking back from the ten-years-on of 1996, gives the start date of the Pushcart War as "the afternoon of March 15, 1986, when a truck ran down a pushcart belonging to a flower peddler. Daffodils were scattered all over the street. The pushcart was flattened, and the owner of the pushcart was pitched headfirst into a pickle barrel." I want to say it was originally 1976, but I've never actually seen a first edition. I believe the interior illustrations remained constant throughout.

The town I grew up in could only support a single library, but the city next door (Worcester) had several branch libraries in addition to the main one.

Which town did you grow up in?

I know I must have missed something somewhere about Bellairs--maybe in a post from before my joining the journal. What makes his writing traumatic? I am assuming it was not the Gorey pictures that adorned several of them.

No, I've never really written about him before. I just found the sorts of things he chose to write about—not so much the grand schemes to bring about the end of the world, although the idea of a clock built to pull the universe into its decaying orbit as it ticks down has actual cosmic horror in it, but the shadowier, uncanny details like the car chase from the same book where nothing more is ever seen of their pursuers than "two cold circles of light" in the rear-view mirror, never gaining, never falling behind, exactly like the blank reflections of the glasses worn by the woman Lewis may accidentally have resurrected, until the car finally gets over a bridge and the lights, still exact, colorless, coldly burning, are left on the far side of running water, which magic cannot cross—very effectively frightening.

(I loved Edward Gorey.)