|
|
Post by Knygathin on Oct 7, 2018 5:36:43 GMT
Walter de la Mare was a writer of "strange stories". Oblique perhaps, but only because most people are too materialistically oriented to grasp the subtleties of his spiritual perspectives. Aickman and la Mare were on equal level of artistry, Aickman perhaps being even better, but de la Mare was probably more mature of soul.
|
|
albie
Devils Coach Horse
Posts: 134
|
Post by albie on Oct 10, 2018 15:41:25 GMT
Read GROWING BOYS for the first time the other day. Wow. So absurd. Really makes use of the ambiguity of words. Just how big were those boys?
|
|
|
|
Post by cauldronbrewer on Oct 10, 2018 22:27:07 GMT
Read GROWING BOYS for the first time the other day. Wow. So absurd. Really makes use of the ambiguity of words. Just how big were those boys? This one stands out in my memory as my least favorite Aickman story, though I can’t recall why. Maybe it wasn’t spooky enough. Then again, perhaps it’s my materialistic orientation combined with the immaturity of my soul (I’ll own up to all of that). |
|
|
|
Post by Knygathin on Oct 11, 2018 5:42:33 GMT
Ha ha, ... I might add that I don't pretend to understand most of Walter de la Mare's stories. But to read him (likewise so with the poetry of C. A. Smith for example) feels like being in the presence of someone with vast intelligence who towers above me. I may not fully grasp their meaning, but it still rings of truth. That is fascinating. I might also add that I am very demanding of myself, and of others, and think we should always aim for the very best, not mere idle entertainment. I get bored when authors do not explore the uttermost fringes of their mental abilities.
|
|
albie
Devils Coach Horse
Posts: 134
|
Post by albie on Oct 11, 2018 9:57:03 GMT
Read GROWING BOYS for the first time the other day. Wow. So absurd. Really makes use of the ambiguity of words. Just how big were those boys? This one stands out in my memory as my least favorite Aickman story, though I can’t recall why. Maybe it wasn’t spooky enough. Then again, perhaps it’s my materialistic orientation combined with the immaturity of my soul (I’ll own up to all of that). My tastes stem from the surreal as well as the spooky. I'm happy to have either but especially both. The story provided both for me. It inspired the usual Aickman feeling. I wonder if it is the same feeling we all receive when we read this scribe. |
|
|
|
Post by Knygathin on Jan 27, 2020 9:52:01 GMT
Two earlier editions of The Wine Dark Sea and The Unsettled Dust, evidently another attempt at an Aickman 'Best of ...' Robert Aickman - The Wine Dark Sea (Mandarin, 1990)  Christopher Brown
The Wine Dark Se
The Trains
Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen
Growing Boys
The Fetch
The Inner Room
Never Visit Venice
Into The Wood
The original hardbound edition of The Wine-Dark Sea (Arbor House, 1988) has eleven stories in it, and an unusually well conceived, and satisfying, Aickmanesque cover painting.
I thought "Never Visit Venice" was beautifully written. A psychologically capitulating self-study. It is also a wonderful attack on modernity (Aickman understood some of the deceit going on which we are all victims of). And actual observations blend and drift smoothly into dreamy historic past and spirit. It is bittersweet.
|
|
|
|
Post by weirdmonger on Jul 16, 2021 9:07:12 GMT
 WOOD by Robert Aickman“…of course there is an enormous difference between Suffolk and Norfolk, and between both and North Essex.” I look at my own wide shallow bungalow house in North Essex where I have aged and shared with my wife, and at this house’s matching log cabin and shudder at what fate draws us to which. This WOOD, of course, is a fiction classic, if a disturbing and reprehensible one. A story of a best man (who had been knocked out during action in the war at the precise moment Wilfred Owen was killed, then became an architectural writer) whose availability for a registry office wedding seemed to dictate its date. The groom is a vexed ex-Inland Revenue man called Munn who, when we first meet him, makes straw men on his “mill” over the sub-post office he runs, and he is due to marry an undertaker’s daughter. A transpiring story of this particular marriage and of Marriage itself, of Woman herself (“woman’s). Munn…”), and the house the undertaker built for them to match the ‘englutinating’ of such institutions of couplement and eventual de-coupling by merging with whatever essence that any boxed wood caskets possessed, a house imitating a cuckoo clock with alternating rain-sensitive puppets that manipulated the metaphorical strings of themselves till the very end. Even their only child spotted inside the house as clock. “When the woman’s blindly scraping / Then’s the hour for blows and raping” – part of verse handwritten on a scrap of paper pasted on a wall within this story. This strange and worrying work cannot be airbrushed because it is an astonishing literary absurdism bordering on an assumed artistic madness, worth condemning, if ever madness can be condemned but only admired or pitied, by alternating turns, for its pangs of eventually constructive creativity that would not otherwise have been constructed at all. It also mentions a story by Maurice Baring, but I don’t think it is the same Baring story that Aickman included in his Fontana Ghost series, a series that I reviewed in detail recently. All the Aickman choices for that anthology series need factoring in and out of his own work, in order to reconcile its difficulties and explain some of its minutiae — entertaining and inspiring difficulties and minutiae for the weird fiction lover. The pantomiming best man’s gift to the couple at the wedding is an envelope (with a ticket inside) as sealed with scarlet sealing-wax. The cackling nature of the bride’s parents is off-putting, and the bride herself, all three of them described gnomically. The father called Pell is a man of “timber and satin”, as I think I have mentioned already. The nature of the town where the Munns settle, with their Daphnes and Daffs, is unsettling, a place with sporadically heavy wet weather to bring the best out in them. |
|
|
|
Post by weirdmonger on Jul 16, 2021 11:34:55 GMT
WOOD by Robert Aickman[…] It also mentions a story by Maurice Baring, but I don’t think it is the same Baring story that Aickman included in his Fontana Ghost series, a series that I reviewed in detail recently. All the Aickman choices for that anthology series need factoring in and out of his own work, in order to reconcile its difficulties and explain some of its minutiae — entertaining and inspiring difficulties and minutiae for the weird fiction lover. […] The plot recounted in WOOD (as a putative Maurice Baring story or play) about a man in a romantic relationship who reveals his secret of being the hangman, to his loved one’s shock, reminds me of a story I read recently, but I can’t yet place it! Any ideas? |
|
|
|
Post by Dr Strange on Jul 17, 2021 19:28:15 GMT
The plot recounted in WOOD (as a putative Maurice Baring story or play) about a man in a romantic relationship who reveals his secret of being the hangman, to his loved one’s shock, reminds me of a story I read recently, but I can’t yet place it! Any ideas? by John Keir Cross? |
|
|
|
Post by weirdmonger on Jul 18, 2021 5:23:09 GMT
The plot recounted in WOOD (as a putative Maurice Baring story or play) about a man in a romantic relationship who reveals his secret of being the hangman, to his loved one’s shock, reminds me of a story I read recently, but I can’t yet place it! Any ideas? by John Keir Cross? Thanks for that. Very interesting as Aickman did include the AMAZING Keir Cross story, Esmeralda, in the Fontana ghost series, but I don’t think I have read the one you mention, so that can’t be the story I am thinking of and still can’t remember, |
|
|
|
Post by weirdmonger on Jul 18, 2021 8:48:10 GMT
MARRIAGE by Robert Aickman
“It was hot has Hell.” (sic)
It has much Hell today, too, for me where I live!
Meanwhile, anyone who has read this story, will probably believe this is Aickman’s most remarkable story. Some will think it is his worst, others his best. Some his most salacious, or most politically incorrect, or most scandalously absurdist in a very good way that opens our eyes. In a very bad way, too. I think I am in all camps. It leaves me hot, it leaves me thankfully cold.
The story of a man called Laming (a Christian Name) and I note that ‘Taming the Shrew’ is mentioned later on in the story. Except he is the one arguably being tamed, tamed by three shrews, Helen Black, Ellen Brown and his Mum like the Mum in ‘The Fetch’ yesterday. There are a number of sexual elephants in the room of this story involving, not only metaphorical elephants that are now airbrushed by me in this review but also literal ones that become various large heavy parcels and other burdens. Sciatica, Bayreuth et al.
Arbitrary errands of delivery punctuated by bouts of paranoia and acts of stalking as well as coincidences of encounter in theatres, cafes and parks.
The answer to life, the universe, everything — especially at “Forty-two Washwood Court, North West six”? But it must be hot in London today, even hotter than it is here where I write this beside the story’s “immense divan.”
|
|
|
|
Post by weirdmonger on Jul 22, 2021 12:18:27 GMT
GROWING BOYS by Robert Aickman
“…and there were the two boys blocking the way, tall as Fiona Macleod’s lordly ones, muscular as Gogmagog, rising above the puny banks of earth.”
As a counterpoint to Daphne du Maurier’s own ‘Lordly Ones’ (equally based on Fiona Macleod) and their effect on a neuro-diverse boy, this is Aickman’s outlandish prophetic satire that involves a co-vivid dream, via a fortune-telling crystal ball, of cannibalism by twin sons eating their own father. A father who had moved to North Zero to become a Liberal political candidate.
Each time one reads this story, the more outlandish it seems to become! The final time I read it in the future, I predict the two boys will have grown so monstrous that they will fill my brain and burst it!
The story of Millie, their mother, meanwhile, is highly poignant as she is exploited and coerced by the boys’ father, and sexually importuned by her uncle (who seems to keep lots of weapons in his house from the war as well as lots of waistcoats with sagging pockets) and she is also sexually importuned by a female fortune-teller who is a classic fiction character to marvel at!
The ‘huge, gluey toffees’, the Lavender Bag cafe, the big black stool that had once belonged to a potentate who had waded through blood up to his knees, and ‘some kind of schoolboy muck’ that had blocked the barrel of Millie’s uncle’s machine gun, and much more, all included and connected, no doubt, with “the freaks and zanies that people urban and suburban areas in the later part of the twentieth century.”
I know where Aickman was coming from, I guess.
“I never dared to read horror stories and ghost stories,” Millie says here, somewhere, but I now forget the meaning of its context. My brain is surely still recovering!
|
|
|
|
Post by weirdmonger on Jul 27, 2021 15:30:16 GMT
Robert Aickman - The Unsettled Dust (Mandarin, 1990) THE UNSETTLED DUST by Robert Aickman “It’s only in fiction that there’s anything really dangerous.” The Historic Structures Fund — that employs the narrator as its Special Duties Officer, for whom I shall now use the first person pronoun — regularly takes over downtrodden country houses and gets them going again, and allows the owners to stay living there as the property’s ’dummies’, a word used resentfully by Agnes, one of the two Brakespear sisters, about their role as custodian of the house they once owned. The two sisters are Olive — horse rider and pianist, a woman at least slightly attractive to me when visiting their Clamber Hall both as a guest and as the Fund’s representative ‘owner’ of the Hall (seeming to be more a ‘model’ to me than a structure) — and Agnes herself the more unapproachable of the sisters. We of course already know about various things in this story — about the dust that accumulates in rooms and on surfaces, even with no cement works nearby, dust like ‘toy snow’ — about the ghostly male figure one sees only once, except perhaps when he is outside and inside the room at the same time by dint of some peculiar reflection at night in the room’s window — the ever prevailing ‘grey’ Elizabeth Craw, supposedly the servant (but the dust is repeatedly called ‘grey’, too) — the dust ‘globe’ that I see once lightly bowling round the grounds, and I think again of the wheeling rooks like burnt newspapers — the legend of the car accident years ago involving the lover of one of the sisters and the acrimony resulting in their ongoing relationship — and about many other accumulating things… But, to cut a long list short, I am here to work on the River Bovil project in the nearby grounds along with a man called Hand and his helpmates, so it is not for me to worry about the dust or these sisters, yet when I gash my own hand, I do think again…. Like earlier “pushing through endless thickets of dead bramble and dogrose”, my nightly conversations, indeed, are dry and unproductive with the sisters, and thus they go to waste… “…what an odd way it was for people of opposite sexes to spend the evening when, after all, there was nothing ahead that any of us could be sure of but infirmity, illness and death. It is strange that people train themselves so carefully to go to waste so prematurely.” Perhaps that now gives a clue as to why this Aickman story is often criticised for having an abrupt, unsatisfying and, yes, premature ending? |
|
|
|
Post by weirdmonger on Sept 12, 2021 10:19:05 GMT
LE MIROIR by Robert Aickman“Genius, however, comes normally in inverse measure to the capacity to impart. The two things are strongly opposed.” Unless one can balance them — as in Niemandswasser’s bi-polarity backdropped by time’s slowth — the latter being the ever-durability summoned by Aickman’s own lasting genius, here in Celia become paramount. Lasting beyond death with the rats eating you now transcended by a self-harming, an obsession as aided or abetted by insidious mirrors with many of which she had been brought up — and eventually by her own choice of knives and their durable threat of the final cut of all. The gangrene of time cut out or cut off from the body literally and from the ageing mind metaphorically to hopefully help create the truth of youth again — while somehow swaddled by the celebratory figures of various Arts, both geniuses and mediocrities, as named here. A version of Dorian Gray? So, what of that sense of immortality’s nullity? With Time itself to become the “divine benediction” of Celia’s “soft stole.” Or a sharp flaying and flensing? This a culmination of what I have found so far in Aickman’s work? Or is there never such a culmination when genius is involved? Beautifully and complexly couched portrait of a well-bred young lady artist sent to the ateliers of Paris, a new life away from her very very old father, a new era for her as disarmingly launched by the meal she once had with the family solicitor’s chief clerk. A meal that is later seen as having been as a ‘romantic’ one by such an inferred male mediocrity…? “Time flies when we watch it, but has no need to fly when we ignore it.” …which perhaps evokes again that different version of Dorian Gray? “…that last payment she was able to make and had made more prematurely than ever, came to be overlooked altogether.” **** My other ongoing Aickmeanderings: dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/robert-aickman/
|
|
|
|
Post by weirdmonger on Sept 20, 2021 14:12:01 GMT
|
|
