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

Current Music: White Lung, "Take the Mirror"

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

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.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Oh wow, A Stranger Came Ashore was pretty huge for me, too. Finally found a copy in a used bookstore for three bucks a few years back--before that, I'd only ever seen it in school libraries.

Aw, man, I had no idea about that Big Lebowski showing. I will have to remember for next summer.

I may have to re-read John Bellairs

You are the second person today to mention Bellairs, I love his work, I have all his books, plus the onces that Brad Strickland completed. I wish the estate would let Strickland do more stories with the characters.

Now you have me interested in MR James, if that evokes Bellairs, I am all over it.

Finally found a copy in a used bookstore for three bucks a few years back--before that, I'd only ever seen it in school libraries.

What I didn't realize until relatively recently was how prolific she was. I've read nine or ten of her books and there's at least another dozen that turn up in bibliographies. I should just walk into a library and see what I can find.

In my living room, there is a shelf built into the wall, reserved for books which represent how I became the current version of "Andrija." Every John Bellairs book I own is tucked away in there. I went hunting for the original versions with the Edward Gorey drawings and frontspieces.

The Mummy, The Will, and the Crypt and The Curse of the Blue Figurine still stand behind me, their skeletal hands on my shoulders, whispering "There's something not right about the old house in the field..."

Now you have me interested in MR James, if that evokes Bellairs, I am all over it.

You should give James a chance. I would also recommend you read Sarah Monette's The Bone Key (2007) and Unnatural Creatures (2011), if you have not already.

Aw, man, I had no idea about that Big Lebowski showing. I will have to remember for next summer.

If I hear of another before then, I'll let you know!

I have The Bone Key in my TBR stacks... I have checked the Powells inventory, and they have James and the Hunter books, cuz I am all about the salty at times.

The Mummy, The Will, and the Crypt and The Curse of the Blue Figurine still stand behind me, their skeletal hands on my shoulders, whispering "There's something not right about the old house in the field..."

That is a wonderful description and entirely accurate.

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.

I did something very like this with books I was afraid of. I would often put them outside my room and under something heavy so that the bad things in the book couldn't get out.

Oooh, A Stranger Came Ashore. You bet your pelt I had a copy of that. I wonder where in my mother's house it must be these days.

Ah, well. "Count Magnus", "A Warning to the Curious", and "The Story of a Disappearance and An Appearance" still get me, particularly that last one.

Oh yes. I think Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean were paying close attention to 'A Disappearance and an Appearance."

I also found a not-bad Bellairs fic a few months back:

The Recipe for Disaster (http://archiveofourown.org/works/34577)

That is one of my favourite Gaimans.

Goddamn, I've just noticed the vanilla/perry float, and WHY CAN I NOT FIND THAT OVER HERE?

*drools*

I would often put them outside my room and under something heavy so that the bad things in the book couldn't get out.

That makes perfect sense to me.

You bet your pelt I had a copy of that. I wonder where in my mother's house it must be these days.

I didn't realize you didn't have a copy in the house. I'll keep an eye out in used book stores.

"Count Magnus", "A Warning to the Curious", and "The Story of a Disappearance and An Appearance" still get me, particularly that last one.

It's not included in this collection! I'll find it on the internet.

I had read "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" and "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book," but I think nothing else of James' before

handful_ofdust sent me this book; I'm not even sure why those two, except that one is famous and the other has Latin. "Casting the Runes" reminded me that I still haven't seen Night of the Demon (1957), despite the famous studio interference with the titular demon. (The writer and director wanted the audience never to see anything unmistakably supernatural; the producer inserted it anyway.) I just love the unidentifiability of so many of James' hauntings—they may have the names of demons or they may have been human once, but they work to their own purposes; they never behave like fictional ghosts. A number of them are strikingly tactile horrors, too, which I think of as less common than stomach-turning sights or time-disjointed sounds. They are the sort of thing you put your hands into unwittingly in the dark. Which then doesn't even do you the courtesy of biting them off—you're stuck with the memory of that damp, sucking cling of leather, or the dry billow of linen that bellies as you flail it off. Seriously, that man could write scary fabric.

Edited 2012-08-16 01:14 (UTC)

That is one of my favourite Gaimans.

All right, now I'm curious.

Goddamn, I've just noticed the vanilla/perry float, and WHY CAN I NOT FIND THAT OVER HERE?

I don't know! I thought your country invented perry!

(Come visit! It is an enticement like pomegranates, only meltier and more alcoholic.)

I also found a not-bad Bellairs fic a few months back

I didn't even realize that was a fandom. It's Yuletide. I don't know why I'm surprised.

On second thought, I think the work of hers which had the most influence on me was probably The Thirteenth Member, which re-tells the story of the North Berwick coven and their attempt on James the First and Sixth's life. I got a lot of the Five-Family stuff from that, really.

Night of the Demon looks far better than you think it might, big baggy demon and all. I also love it for providing a prime generative sample for Kate Bush's "Hounds of Love".

For me, I think the James stories that stuck around longest were probably "Lost Hearts" (that bathtub!) and "Count Magnus", but all of them have their attractions. The one with giant crane-fly, for example.

I remember when I found The Pushcart War at the library. I adored that book, enough to buy my own copy when I found it at the bookstore despite having a decided dearth of cash as a pre-teen.

I have not read enough Bellairs, which is a pity as I enjoy his writing. Finding his books pre-Internet was like hunting for unobtanium.

The Thirteenth Member, which re-tells the story of the North Berwick coven and their attempt on James the First and Sixth's life. I got a lot of the Five-Family stuff from that, really.

That's one of the ones I never read! I'll start with it.

I adored that book, enough to buy my own copy when I found it at the bookstore despite having a decided dearth of cash as a pre-teen.

I suspect mine was a present, although it has nothing written in it. I would happily take home a first edition with the original future dates if one ever showed itself in the wild.

I have not read enough Bellairs, which is a pity as I enjoy his writing. Finding his books pre-Internet was like hunting for unobtanium.

With the possible exception of The Revenge of the Wizard's Ghost (1985), at which I have no automatic flash of trauma when I read the title and therefore may have missed (although it might just not be that memorable a title when compared with The Eyes of the Killer Robot (1986), which would have done a penny dreadful proud), I think I read everything up through The Chessmen of Doom (1989), when presumably I maxed out or came to my senses. Between my elementary school and the now-defunct branch library where Arlington Community Media, Inc. is now located—hats off, moment of silence,

derspatchel tells me he was once interviewed there so I can't resent them as completely as I used to, but I still like libraries—I had a pretty good collection.

Amazon lists an edition from 1954; it's the earliest one they list. It has the artwork I remember dimly, including the cover art. I don't know if the library had a first edition or if theirs was a decade later, but it was an older one. Did they change the future dates from the early 1980s in later editions? I want to say 1984 was the future date, but my memory is a bit more spotty than I like.
"You know, for a big dope, you are a pretty good poker player."

It is very sad how towns and cities have cut back on branch libraries. 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. I admit I mostly went to the main one when I went to a Worcester library, but I did not like how they cut back on the branches.

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.

I hope you can get something at least a little bit like your pipe-dream.

...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.

That "half-reading*, half-enacting" thing in dreams is very strange. I'm sort of glad to know I'm not the only one who gets it.

This has been a hard week on authors of my childhood:

Mine as well. Hunter wasn't much part of my childhood, although I've a strange feeling of having read a book of hers and I'm thinking I should definitely read some now. But The Pushcart War was a huge thing in my childhood. I never saw New York City until I was twenty and my parents moved to Connecticut**, but the version with giant trucks and pushcarts and pea-shooters, that I have never entirely forgotten.

Jean Merrill. "By Hand."

Yes.

That float does sound delicious. I'm glad for the books, and I hope your afternoon plan was enjoyable.

*Or half-watching, as often happens to me.
**Dublin, Cork, London, York, San Francisco, Montréal, Québec, even Boston, all of these I saw before NYC, as I think on it. Chicago comes after, and Stockholm and Oslo, and I've still never seen Philadelphia or Glasgow or Edinburgh or Paris. For that matter, there are still places in New York City I should see, such as the place where the John Street Theatre was from 1767 until 1798, a theatre in which John O'Keeffe's The Poor Soldier and Charles Macklin's The True-Born Irishman were great favourites during the 1780s and 90s.

Edited 2012-08-16 06:38 (UTC)

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.)

I hope you can get something at least a little bit like your pipe-dream.

So far, no, with a dentist's appointment first thing on the docket for the morning, but I am nothing if not optimistic.

Okay, I'm generally not an optimist at all, but I really insist on this one.

Or half-watching, as often happens to me.

Also with me.

Hunter wasn't much part of my childhood, although I've a strange feeling of having read a book of hers and I'm thinking I should definitely read some now.

Major author of the Scottish (and occasionally Irish) fantastic. Selkies, kelpies, things that figure less often in mainstream American fantasy—I don't know if she invented the Grollican, but it's sort of like a Grendel of the Highlands, complete with mother—and fairies also written to an older strain, shape-changers, soulless, to be kept at bay by iron knives and the singing of hymns, but more beautiful than anything mortal and not wicked, because that is not a word that applies to the otherworld. You should read A Stranger Came Ashore, if nothing else. It has guisers.

"Mr Punch". Oh, that's wonderful. Failing seaside arcade, unreliable narration, family secrets, a mysterious Punch-and-Judy man. Beats the hell out of "American Gods" for me, but I'm perverse that way.

There are more than a dozen Jamesian influences on JB:
http://www.bellairsia.com/academia/james_mr.html

Failing seaside arcade, unreliable narration, family secrets, a mysterious Punch-and-Judy man. Beats the hell out of "American Gods" for me, but I'm perverse that way.

Nah, I have so many problems with American Gods, I suspect I'll prefer it. (Also, seaside arcade, unreliable narrator, Punch and Judy . . .) It's on the list.

[edit] And if you don't have it already, you have explained the existence of this song for me: Future Bible Heroes, "Mr. Punch."

Edited 2012-08-16 16:37 (UTC)

There are more than a dozen Jamesian influences on JB

Thanks for both the link and the research!

"Lost Hearts" (that bathtub!) and "Count Magnus", but all of them have their attractions. The one with giant crane-fly, for example.

. . . adding "Lost Hearts" to the list . . .

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

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

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject