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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Apr 18, 2018 15:34:33 GMT
Ah - now I see she specifically chose tales not in the Faber set. It is still missing one of my favorites, "A Roman Question," also not in the Faber volumes. |
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Post by jamesdoig on Apr 18, 2018 21:04:52 GMT
Ah - now I see she specifically chose tales not in the Faber set. That's right, including the four stories not published in his lifetime: 'The Strangers', 'The Coffee House', 'A Disciple of Plato' and 'The Fully-Conducted Tour', written for the BBC and published in Wormwood a while ago. |
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Post by fritzmaitland on Oct 2, 2019 11:18:39 GMT
Mwa-ha! Recently obtained Cold Hand In Mine, to read The Swords and The Hospice, and watch the TV versions.
The Swords. Perhaps wrongly, watched the TV Version first. The Hunger : Series 1 , Episode 1. Introduced by Terence Damp (who's no David Bowie). Set in London of the 1990s and directed by Tony Scott in the manner of his film version of Whitley Streiber's The Hunger. The tatty funfair set in some bombsite in Wolverhampton is transposed to a glitzy West End fetish club with extras from a Jean-Paul Gaultier ad. Not a lot of Aickman, apart from the actual act of thrusting a sword into a young lady and not drawing blood. The ending is uncharacteristically twee for this series, and messes up the story royally. Kudos to Jamie Foreman as the show's MC,a tatty Elvis in shades and a powder blue drape coat. The most Aickmanesque thing about it has nothing whatsoever to do with the story - it's Timothy Spall as a rather camp presenter at a cosmetics conference - just the right side of not quite right. The story is unfortunately a tad dull.
The Hospice. Really enjoyed the story. Suitably creepy, with the creepiness conjured from nothing, and, much to my surprise, very funny - regarding the two chaps sharing a room, and the spectre of homosexuality hovering over them. "Do you want to do anything before we go to sleep?" The TV version is pretty faithful to the text, occasionally veering off-target (the music, over-use of the hulking Night Man and the attempt to tack on an ending where Aickman's story just finishes rather disappointingly) Lots of good along the way - kudos to Jack Shepherd and Alan Dobie.
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Post by andydecker on Oct 3, 2019 16:46:30 GMT
Also did a re-watch of The Hunger recently. Had mostly forgotten about it. Some of the material I found odd as a choice. Like Aickman. I was not convinced if that was the best possible adaption material. I expected something more subtle and skillful made.
But it was better then others adaptions. Karl Edward Wagner's is terrible, and some of David Schow's are truly mediocre. |
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Post by weirdmonger on Jul 26, 2021 13:58:43 GMT
PAGES FROM A YOUNG GIRL’S JOURNAL by Robert Aickman
“It is almost as if the nearer one approaches to a thing, the less it proves to be there, to exist at all.”
Aickman in the role of his most arched aching part…
If one slowly takes this young Derbyshire girl’s journal slowly enough it dawns on you, almost endlessly, what she is becoming, in an Italy where she literally crosses paths with Byron and Shelley. And she falls in fell love with a sporadic shadowy male figure (originally prefigured by one black candle amongst twelve that are white), arguably the same male figure that she previously spies secretly hugging the twelve year old daughter of an older Contessa (who also sexually importunes our journal-keeper, too, but fails in doing so) — all of this taking place in genius-loci where our journal-keeper is staying as part of a grand tour, along with her insufferably old parents. Until she becomes insufferably old herself? — “One cannot expect to enter the tournament of love and emerge unscratched:”
The richly Gothic real-time journal narration as exalted by deep adolescent pangs while passionately steeped with the blood of Romishness against the shallow Protestantisms of her parents. A narration that is “too prone to the insertion of unnecessary hyphens”, or not? — and “….fiction though it be, could hardly with sense have been written at all.”
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 14, 2021 12:59:53 GMT
THE REAL ROAD TO THE CHURCH by Robert Aickman
“…all things become symbolic of all other things. Not that that was in itself untrue: though it was only one truth, of course. And when one admitted that there were many truths existing concurrently, upon which of them could one possibly be thought to stand firm — let alone, to rest?”
…being akin to the art of fiction — and to today’s ‘alternate facts’ in politics, here presaged by Aickman.
This is the story of Rosa, now living at La Wide, the dislocated house to which, in this French speaking land, she has resorted, so as to escape a lifetime of misalliances with various men, men whom she figuratively parades in front of us, referring to the various behaviours of each rogue by his name, just after rubbing herself vigorously with a bath towel.
We learn of the community’s social categorisation, including the class of people who seem always to be neither drunk nor sober in constant bars and restaurants… The crop by which these people live are tomato-plants for the nurture of which by fuel of coal deprives Rosa herself of coal.
Rosa as a person lives for us fully by dint of Aickman’s artful characterisation and that includes the relationship with her ‘char’ called Mrs Du Quesne, a woman whose seeming connection with Hardy’s Tess defeated me.
Meanwhile, is often unladylike Rosa simply “sensitive” or “a sensitive”? — and such a quandary forms the backdrop to the main plot line of La Wide being sited upon the pathway’s point whereat “porters” change shift when toting coffins and their contents to a final resting place, about which ritual Rosa has a strange conversation with a darkly inscrutable cleric on a clifftop path before herself being involved (whether naked or not from her bath, I am not fully sure) in whatever happens during one of these haunting funerary transactions outside her house.
Is Rosa a Ghost or Goddess? Self or Doppelgänger? — questions that hang about in my mind after finishing this story. And whether or not the porters take Rosa onward, too, upon their path, and if so whether to a church or a temple? While her discarded clothes remain at La Wide hanging on pegs like vampire bats.
At the end, satisfyingly for me, time ticks more and more slowly… and I wonder if the whole of Aickman’s work was fundamentally geared to T.S. Eliot’s ‘still point of the turning world’ whereby the ill-resolutions and desires between genders, opposite or same genders alike, as well as all humanity’s hopes and despairs, can be parked at least for a while… a ‘while’ that is still transpiring even now as we ‘porters’, upon the pathway of life and death, change shift…
Which perhaps brings us full circle to the head-quote above.
“Daily life is entirely a matter of the pattern men and women impose upon it…”
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 15, 2021 14:36:18 GMT
MY FINAL AICKMAN REVIEW —
THE CLOCK WATCHER by Robert Aickman
I think I need to make this truly remarkable story the culmination of my reviews of specific Aickman stories, even though I still have many of his stories not re-read for my timely processes of gestalt real-time reviewing.
This one is a story that I cannot now step beyond. At least for the time being.
It completes a fitting, if chance, gestalt of the Aickman stories I have recently reread and also of other authors’ stories he himself chose for the Fontana anthology series — a gestalt of Time’s Slowth or Gluey Zenoism and now here it is in its starkest terms, a story that is also in relation to a topic that arises often in Aickman:- the nature of sexual urges with, as well as between, women, and the nature of marriage at the time Aickman wrote it. And also it reveals views of its time, its post-war time.
It is a story of Gluey Zenoism, in the same way as RESIDENTS ONLY is. Turning pages interminably until suddenly one is not.
It is staggeringly Aickman-absurd as well as frightening in itself, but it’s even more frightening in the context of the gestalt I have, perhaps unintentionally, now reached…
From my earlier post about it in 2007:
“I have often noticed in life that we never really learn anything – learn for the first time, I mean. We know everything already, everything that we, as individuals, are capable of knowing, or fit to know; all that other people do for us, at the best, is to remind us, to give our brains a little twist from one set of preoccupations to a slightly different set.”
Robert Aickman (from ‘The Clock Watcher’)
That certainly gave my brain a little twist! I don’t yet know why, but I feel that helps to ‘explain’ RA’s stories, if explanation is seen to be needed.
Today’s review…
A narrator who thinks: “Of course, the Jews are like that: once a friend, always a friend, if you go on treating them properly. I cannot help saying it was where the Nazis went wrong. There was a great deal to be said in favour of the Nazis, of course, in many other ways. The Germans wouldn’t have fought so hard and long, if it hadn’t been so, quite unbelievable actually.”
It starts with this male narrator — of whose wartime experiences, family backstory and subsequent civilian work we learn about — who thinks this unacceptable thought about Nazis, one who marries just after the war had finished and been tidied up by the likes of him, and he marries a German Catholic girl called Ursula, and their marriage is a mixture of being siblings and sex partners, but not necessarily at the same time.
Clocks were in her family, and Black Forest her own nest, I guess, and when the narrator tells us that a clock had accompanied them on their honeymoon, a clock that “had been constructed by the insertion of a very subtle and sophisticated mechanism into a more or less intentionally crude and commercial case” and it “purred like a slinky pussy”, I must say even that was not match for what later transpired with the exponential accumulation of Ursula’s various clocks, some caricatures of cuckoos clocks, one being called Kuckuck, I recall. “Little Attlee”, beware!
Yet, Ursula was not a stickler for these clocks’ accuracy of time and she dreaded wearing a watch. Where did these clocks come from? Apparently some clock man visited her with them from time to time, but the narrator failed to catch him at it. The sight of this clock man is described, however, to him by the village idiot, and if even half of the description is true, I am bound to have nightmares thinking about such a sight, the clocks themselves eventually erupting into all manner of disgusting organic material and there is so much more that I could tell you, but I’d better leave it at that. Cannot be “humpty-dumptied” again.
“There are no beautiful clocks. Everything to do with time is hideous.”
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A quote from another favourite author of mine —
“‘I’ll tell you something, Clara. Have you ever SEEN a minute? Have you actually had one wriggling inside your hand? Did you know if you keep your finger inside a clock for a minute, you can pick out that very minute and take it home for your own?’ So it is Paul who stealthily lifts the dome off. It is Paul who selects the finger of Clara’s that is to be guided, shrinking, then forced wincing into the works, to be wedged in them, bruised in them, bitten into and eaten up by the cogs. ‘No you have got to keep it there, or you will lose the minute. I am doing the counting – the counting up to sixty.’ . . . But there is to be no sixty. The ticking stops.”
From ‘The Inherited Clock’ by Elizabeth Bowen
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 16, 2021 14:18:25 GMT
MY FINAL AICKMAN REVIEW — THE CLOCK WATCHER by Robert Aickman All my many recent Aickman story reviews (including those of the total contents of each Fontana volume that he edited) can currently be found on a number of search pages by putting ‘Aickman’ into search on Vault. |
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Post by 𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr on Aug 16, 2021 17:29:11 GMT
MY FINAL AICKMAN REVIEW — THE CLOCK WATCHER by Robert Aickman All my many recent Aickman story reviews (including those of the total contents of each Fontana volume that he edited) can currently be found on a number of search pages by putting ‘Aickman’ into search on Vault. You need to start a thread with links to them. I would, but it wouldn't be today. I've already attempted two lists and failed. Three is too much. |
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 17, 2021 20:40:25 GMT
All my many recent Aickman story reviews (including those of the total contents of each Fontana volume that he edited) can currently be found on a number of search pages by putting ‘Aickman’ into search on Vault. Independent review on my latest Aickmeanderings … www.ligotti.net/showpost.php?p=159174&postcount=570 |
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 26, 2021 16:06:32 GMT
THE CLOCK WATCHER seems to me to be one of the most challenging stories by Aickman. Anyone else read it? My review as a result of recently re-reading it: dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/29651-2/ |
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Aug 26, 2021 18:28:20 GMT
THE CLOCK WATCHER seems to me to be one of the most challenging stories by Aickman. Anyone else read it? I have read everything, at one point or another, with the exception of GO BACK AT ONCE. I have even read THE RIVER RUNS UPHILL! But this story I have no memory of. |
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 26, 2021 18:34:14 GMT
THE CLOCK WATCHER seems to me to be one of the most challenging stories by Aickman. Anyone else read it? I have read everything, at one point or another, with the exception of GO BACK AT ONCE. I have even read THE RIVER RUNS UPHILL! But this story I have no memory of. It is the last story in Cold Hand In Mine. I have read the two other books you have mentioned above, and the title of The River Runs Uphill has taken on new significance for me in recent weeks! And Go Back At Once, for that matter! All my reviews of Robert Aickman so far, if anyone is interested: : dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/robert-aickman/ |
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Aug 29, 2021 19:46:47 GMT
It now occurs to me that that title could also be taken as an allusion to the Puccini aria. |
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 29, 2021 20:25:40 GMT
It now occurs to me that that title could also be taken as an allusion to the Puccini aria. Ha! Brilliant. |
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