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Post by ropardoe on May 2, 2018 11:08:34 GMT
Bafflegab Productions, the audio company who have produced, among other things, The Scarifyers, a new version of Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart and an audio adaptation of Blood On Satan's Claw have recorded a modern day version of Casting the Runes, starring Anna Maxwell Martin, Tom Burke and Reece Shearsmith, with the story adapted by Steven Gallagher. Release date is to be in time for Hallowe'en. Thanks for this news, Dan. An adaptation by Steven Gallagher sounds promising. Looking at the Bafflegab site, I find the description of the Scarifyers' story "The Gnomes of Death" strangely alluring (despite the fact that I love both garden gnomes and Morris Dancers).
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Post by The Lurker In The Shadows on May 15, 2018 18:39:16 GMT
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Post by dem bones on May 21, 2018 6:10:10 GMT
Tuesday 22 May 2018, 12.30 - 1.00 AM, Radio 4 Extra (Channel 708). A Good ReadHosted by Sue McGreggor. John Snow and Christopher Frayling discuss books by Francoise Sagan, Alexander Masters and M. R. James. First broadcast, February 2006.
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Post by ropardoe on May 21, 2018 8:59:30 GMT
Tuesday 22 May 2018, 12.30 - 1.00 AM, Radio 4 Extra (Channel 708). A Good ReadHosted by Sue McGreggor. John Snow and Christopher Frayling discuss books by Francoise Sagan, Alexander Masters and M. R. James. First broadcast, February 2006. It was, of course, ace MRJ fan Christopher Frayling who picked Monty - specifically Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - as his "good read". In the News section of G&S Newsletter 10 I described the programme thus: [Frayling] "explained eloquently (but necessarily in rather generalised and therefore not entirely accurate terms) why he so likes ' the classic collection of English ghost stories'".
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Post by Michael Connolly on Jun 1, 2018 13:07:12 GMT
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Jun 1, 2018 14:11:05 GMT
I believe it says "Dear Sir Certainly you may take what photographs you like in the College Buildings. If you like to include the interior of the Lodge there will be no objection. Yours kindly M R James" I am really just guessing, though.
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Post by helrunar on Jun 1, 2018 14:32:35 GMT
JoJo, I agree with your reading.
Best wishes, Helrunar
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Post by Shrink Proof on Jun 1, 2018 15:59:33 GMT
That's what it says. MRJ could definitely have made it as a GP.
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Post by ropardoe on Jun 1, 2018 17:28:37 GMT
That's what it says. MRJ could definitely have made it as a GP. This is MRJ writing neatly! Yes, really. I'd love to know who the letter was written to, but there are no clues.
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Post by ropardoe on Jun 20, 2018 8:48:03 GMT
This isn't really M.R. James news, or only peripherally, so if it's in the wrong place, Kev, please move it to somewhere more suitable! "Wasn't that the house in Berkeley Square?", as the unnamed gentleman says at the start of "A School Story"... There's a new article on the House in Berkeley Square on the Mysterious Universe site: mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/06/the-bizarre-nameless-thing-of-berkeley-square/ I love that site and check it every day, although it can be a little too open-minded at times! The Berkeley Square article, by my favourite author on the site, does at least note possible fictional sources for the story, but doesn't go so far as to say that the whole thing is fictional, aspects of it influenced by Rhoda Broughton's "The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth". That's the theme of my Ghosts & Scholars article on the subject, reprinted in The Black Pilgrimage book. But I shall be forever in awe of a writer who can introduce the phrase "octopoid cryptid" into his article on the haunting. My essay is boring by comparison.
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Post by helrunar on Jun 20, 2018 16:06:56 GMT
"That house in Berkeley Square" reminds me of sometime last year when I re-read Lord Lytton's "House and the Brain," and there were some snippets online about the house that the story was reportedly based on. But I don't think the house was in Berkeley Square.
Also, I had a totally random and unplanned M. R. James encounter last night. While grooming my cat, I took down my copy of Clark Ashton Smith's posthumous essay collection Planets and Dimensions. I have the Mirage Press edition published in Baltimore in 1973. I'd forgotten that Clark wrote a short little appreciation of the Master in Fantasy Fan. I think the year of the original publication was 1934.
cheers, H.
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Post by ropardoe on Jun 20, 2018 17:36:28 GMT
Also, I had a totally random and unplanned M. R. James encounter last night. While grooming my cat, I took down my copy of Clark Ashton Smith's posthumous essay collection Planets and Dimensions. I have the Mirage Press edition published in Baltimore in 1973. I'd forgotten that Clark wrote a short little appreciation of the Master in Fantasy Fan. I think the year of the original publication was 1934. cheers, H. Yes, Smith was quite a fan. I think he was the person who recommended MRJ to Lovecraft.
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Post by dem bones on Jun 21, 2018 7:29:44 GMT
There a lot of this unplanned MRJ encounter stuff about. Am currently revisiting 'Best New Horror 10'. Very much doubt the G&S regulars are unaware that Tanith Lee's introductory note to Red and Yellow (orginally published in Interzone #132, June 1998), reads:
"I am a great admirer of, among others, M. R. James ... His influence on me, in this story is perhaps evident only to myself." More, perhaps, once I've read it (made a false start last night. Not sure it's especially 'Jamesian' in the telling, but plot certainly has something of The Mezzotint about it).
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Post by Michael Connolly on Jun 21, 2018 12:21:46 GMT
Also, I had a totally random and unplanned M. R. James encounter last night. While grooming my cat, I took down my copy of Clark Ashton Smith's posthumous essay collection Planets and Dimensions. I have the Mirage Press edition published in Baltimore in 1973. I'd forgotten that Clark wrote a short little appreciation of the Master in Fantasy Fan. I think the year of the original publication was 1934. cheers, H. Yes, Smith was quite a fan. I think he was the person who recommended MRJ to Lovecraft. Here's Smith's "The Weird Works of M.R. James" from The Fantasy Fan February 1934. The four books of short stories written by Montague Rhodes James, Provost of Eton College, have been collected in a single but not overly bulky volume under the imprint of Longmans, Green & Co. One can heartily recommend the acquisition of this volume to all lovers of the weird and supernatural who are not already familiar with its contents.
James is perhaps unsurpassed in originality by any living writer: and he has made a salient contribution to the technique of the genre as well as to the enriching of its treasury of permanent masterpieces. His work is marked by rare intellectual skill and ingenuity, by power rising at times above the reaches of pure intellection, and by a sheer finesse of writing that will bear almost endless study. It has a peculiar savour, wholly different from the diabolic grimness of Bierce, or the accumulative atmospheric terror and rounded classicism of Machen. Here there is nothing of the feverish but logical hallucinations, the macabre and exotic beauty achieved by Poe; nor is there any kinship to the fine poetic weavings and character nuances of Walter de la Mare, or the far-searching, penetrative psychism of Blackwood, or the frightful antiquities and ultra-terrene menaces of Lovecraft.
The style of these stories is rather casual and succinct. The rhythms of the prose are brisk and pedestrian, and the phrasing is notable for clearness and incisiveness rather than for those vague, reverberative overtones which beguile one's inner ear in the prose of fiction-writers who are also poets. Usually there is a more or less homely setting, often with a background of folklore and long—past happenings whose dim archaism provides a depth of shadow from which, as from a recessed cavern, the central horror emerges into the noontide of the present. Things and occurrences, sometimes with obvious off-hand relationship, are grouped cunningly, forcing the reader unaware to some frightful deduction; or there is an artful linkage of events seemingly harmless in themselves, that leave him confronted at a sudden turn with some ghoulish specter or night-demon.
The minutæ of modern life, humor, character—drawing, scenic and archaeological description, are used as a foil to heighten the abnormal, but are never allowed to usurp a disproportionate interest. Always there is an element of supernatural menace, whose value is never impaired by scientific or spiritualistic explanation. Sometimes it is brought forth at the climax into full light; and sometimes, even then, it is merely half-revealed, is left undefined but perhaps all the more alarming. In any case, the presence of some unnatural but objective reality is assumed and established.
The goblins and phantoms devised by James are truly creative and are presented through images often so keen and vivid as to evoke an actual physical shock. Sight, smell, hearing, taction, all are played upon with well-nigh surgical sureness, by impressions calculated to touch the shuddering quick of horror.
Some of the images or similes employed are most extraordinary, and spring surely from the daemonic inspiration of the highest genius. For instance, take the unnamable thing in The Uncommon Prayer Book, which resembles "a great roll of old, shabby, white flannel," with a kind of face in the upper end, and which falls forward on a man's shoulder and hides this face in his neck like a ferret attacking a rabbit. Then, in Mr. Humphreys and his Inheritance (one of subtler and more inferential tales) there is the form "with a burnt human face" and "black arms," that emerges from an inexplicable hole in the paper plan of a garden maze "with the odious writhings of a wasp creeping out of' a rotten apple." In The Tractate Middoth one meets an apparition with thick cobwebs over its eyes—the lich or specter of a man who, obedient to his own rather eccentric instructions, had been buried sitting at a table in an underground room. And who, upon reading The Diary of Mr. Poynter, can fail to share Denton's revulsion when he reaches out, thinking that a dog is beside his chair, and touches a crawling figure covered with long, wavy, Absolom-like tresses? Who, too, can shake off the horror of Dennistoun, in Canon Alberic's Scrap Book, when a demon's hand appears from beneath on the table, suggesting momentarily a pen-wiper, a rat, and a large spider?
Reading and re-reading these tales, one notes a predilection for certain milieus and motifs. Backgrounds of scholastic or ecclesiastic life are frequent and some of the best tales are laid in cathedral towns. In many of the supernatural entities, there recurs insistently the character of extreme and repulsive hairiness. Often the apparition is connected with, or evoked by, some material object, such as the bronze whistle from the ruins of a Templars' preceptory in Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad; the old drawing of King Solomon and the night-demon in Canon Alberic's Scrap Book; the silver Anglo-Saxon crown from an immemorial barrow in A Warning to the Curious; and the strange curtain-pattern in The Diary of Mr. Poynter which had "a subtlety in its drawing."
In several stories there are hints of bygone Satanism and wizardry whose malign wraiths or conjured spirits linger obscurely in modern time; and in at least one tale, Casting the Runes, the warlock is a living figure. In other tales, the forgetful and vanishing phantasms of old crimes cry out their mindless pain, or peer for an instant from familiar pools and shrubberies. The personnel of James' Pandemonium is far from monotonous; one finds a satyr dwelling in a cathedral tomb; a carven cat-like monster that comes to life when touched by a murderer's hand; a mouldy smelling sack-like object in an unlit well, which suddenly puts its arms around the neck of a treasure-seeker; a cloaked and hooded shape with a tentacle in lieu of arms; a lean, hideously taloned terror, with a jaw "shallow as that of a beast"; dolls that repeat crime and tragedy; creatures that are dog-like but are not dogs; a saw fly tall as a man, met in a dim room full of rustling insects; and even a weak, ancient thing, which being wholly bodiless and insubstantial, makes for itself a body out of crumpled bed-linen.
The peculiar genius of M. R. James, and his greatest power, lies in the convincing evocation of weird, malignant and preternatural phenomena such as I have instanced. It is safe to say that few writers, dead or living, have equaled him in this formidable necromancy and perhaps no one has excelled him.I think Smith covered everything.
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Post by ropardoe on Jun 21, 2018 12:53:12 GMT
Also, I had a totally random and unplanned M. R. James encounter last night. While grooming my cat, I took down my copy of Clark Ashton Smith's posthumous essay collection Planets and Dimensions. I have the Mirage Press edition published in Baltimore in 1973. I'd forgotten that Clark wrote a short little appreciation of the Master in Fantasy Fan. I think the year of the original publication was 1934. cheers, H. Yes, Smith was quite a fan. I think he was the person who recommended MRJ to Lovecraft. On checking, I think it may be the other way around to what I said: it was probably HPL who introduced Smith to MRJ's stories. Here's a quote from a letter from Smith to HPL (1933): "James repays careful study; and I find myself appreciating him even more than I did when you loaned me A Warning to the Curious and Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Also, I am very much taken with certain of the more inferential tales, such as 'Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance', which seem full of unfathomably baleful suggestion. Tour de forces [ sic!] like 'The Treasure of Abbot Thomas' knock one out at the first reading; and, of course, always retain their power; but the less overt yarns certainly grow on the reader. It is an object lesson in what can be done by skilful adumbration and by veiling more or less the main horror." So CAS was a particular fan of "Mr Humphreys", one of my favourites too and for much the same reasons (though whether the story's charms were deliberate or accidental - caused by it being written in a rush - I wouldn't like to say).
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