I seen the man that made it all

[sovay]

I went right back to not sleeping. I haven't been this exhausted without respite in a very long time. I keep having to remind myself that it is not an emotional symbol, it's just the physical effects of too little sleep and a schedule that interacts badly with everything else about my life, but it is both not very pleasant and familiarly boring. It leaves me feeling I don't have much brain to do anything with. I did manage to attend the opening night of A Man for All Seasons, which was a good strong start, and then came back with my parents (who were celebrating their thirty-ninth anniversary) for the second night, which was even better. This afternoon is the matinée and derspatchel's on his own. Have some things.

1. As far as I can tell, From Hell (1999) is the first book by Alan Moore I have uncomplicatedly liked. It may be a book I had to wait for: I can remember looking through an early edition in the Million Year Picnic when I was in college, but it didn't grip me then; I remembered scattered frames and sentences, but nothing of the structure or the spiraling conspiracies, absolutely none of the psychogeography which I wouldn't have known the word for at the time anyway. This time I just admired. The footnotes aren't even the best part. I borrowed rushthatspeaks' copy; I need to find my own. I need to track down Iain Sinclair's early work.

2. Solmate Socks are just as good as everyone recommended. I bought two pairs from Firefly Moon on Tuesday (Equinox and Nebula) and ordered two more; they are why my feet weren't worse off the night Rush and I waited forever at Kendall Square. Rob and I are time-sharing a pair of Luna, since he can't really wear more than one sock at a time right now. They are warm and sturdy and handmade and weird; this covers most of my criteria for clothing.

3. I think Robert Aickman's "Ringing the Changes" is one of the most refusing stories I have ever read. It's not just that it doesn't explain anything. Any sufficiently elliptical narrative can do that. It's that at numerous points throughout this one, events present the opportunity for explanation (why Holihaven, why bells, how does the sea figure, what the fuck happened last night) and each time the story simply walks on by. I did what had to be done. I hope I was in time. The emotional effect produced by this technique is not quite like anything I've encountered in other authors. The first few times, it's almost too obvious: it feels coy, a textbook exercise in denying expectations—yes, Aickman, I see what you're not showing me there. By the end of the story, however, it seems only a natural consequence of the events described therein. It's not deliberate withholding; it's more like resignation, or fatalism, or just plain indifference. Explanations wouldn't help. The protagonists wouldn't be better off knowing and neither would you. Things happen; you live through them or you can't. You go on honeymoon and the dead rise. What can you do? (But then, one of the protagonists has not behaved from the start as we would expect her to—as her husband did, irritation giving way to dread as the bells rang on relentlessly in this crumbling little seaside town. We'd have been frightened, too, wouldn't we? What if the problem isn't with her, it's us?) In other news, it does not at all surprise me that the cover illustration of the edition of Cold Hand in Mine (1975) Rush lent me is by Edward Gorey.

I should go out. Too much of my life lately has been running around, which is different.

Comments

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

From Hell ♥

I love it to pieces and it only gets better with reread. So many amazing things, from the sheer amount of the research that went into it to the way it doesn't actually matter whether the magic is "objectively" real or taking place in Gull's brain, since the effect is exactly the same. This most recent time I noticed, with delighted unsurprise, that Gull is speaking in meter for the entirety of the tour of London that makes up issue four. I also remain very fond of Eddie Campbell's art, with its occasional air of letting us peer at murky old photographs through pools of ink, its chiaroscuro and sudden clarities.

It also gains more resonance the more of the lumber room of British literature and personalities I get into my head; the first time I read the thing I was young enough that I didn't know quite how hilarious it was for Aleister Crowley to accuse Madame Blavatsky of being the Ripper, and then I came back years later, having hit the Spiritualists from another direction, and hurt myself laughing. From Hell is not how I found Iain Sinclair-- that would be Angela Carter's loving review of Downriver-- but it is one reason I looked so hard for his work after it proved not to be readily findable, why it stayed on the list for years until I got to places I could locate rarer books.

[sovay]

This most recent time I noticed, with delighted unsurprise, that Gull is speaking in meter for the entirety of the tour of London that makes up issue four.

I did not notice that, but of course he is. I love that Netley pukes at the point where the reader can't take any more sun-and-moon secret history, either.

I also remain very fond of Eddie Campbell's art, with its occasional air of letting us peer at murky old photographs through pools of ink, its chiaroscuro and sudden clarities.

It is wonderful art. I don't find it beautiful, but I don't believe I am supposed to; I love how it lets its faces shift between very recognizable and human and sometimes lovely to very recognizable and human and sometimes awful to barely recognizable and hardly human and neither of those irrelevant things. It is meticulous about its architecture, which is always recognizable. (I believe Moore admits in the notes that as fast and loose as the novel plays with the possibilities of the Ripper case, its London is as accurate as he and Campbell could get it.)

From Hell is not how I found Iain Sinclair-- that would be Angela Carter's loving review of Downriver-- but it is one reason I looked so hard for his work after it proved not to be readily findable, why it stayed on the list for years until I got to places I could locate rarer books.

Lud Heat (1975) and White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987) are the ones I really want now. In other news, it doesn't actually surprise me that one of Sinclair's novels from the '90's was illustrated by Dave McKean.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

I didn't know quite how hilarious it was for Aleister Crowley to accuse Madame Blavatsky of being the Ripper, and then I came back years later, having hit the Spiritualists from another direction, and hurt myself laughing.

This is a favorite trick of Moore's and shows up very obviously in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen where, if you're at all familiar with Victorian books for children, and Victorian 'underground' literature, you can absolutely hurt yourself laughing at the Invisible Man sequence.