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Post by Middoth on Jul 27, 2021 20:00:38 GMT
A Lot of Thanks Helrunar and Dr Strange!
You helped me understand the best of possible ways.
As Home Secretary, Butler introduced the 1959 Street Offences Act that aimed to crack down on street prostitution by increasing the penalties for soliciting.
Does Aikman prefer writing about the times of his youth?
It seems much of his stories occur in the 50th.
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Post by Dr Strange on Jul 27, 2021 20:55:15 GMT
Does Aikman prefer writing about the times of his youth? It seems much of his stories occur in the 50th. Possibly. He seemed to have quite a negative view of the modern world in general, I think - whether it was architecture, art, music, or social relations (e.g. between men and women). |
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Post by Swan on Jul 27, 2021 21:03:09 GMT
"in those days, and before Mr R. A. Butler's famous Act, there were streets in the immediate area where it was far easier to pick up a woman and do what you liked to her than to pick up a taxi." As Home Secretary, Butler introduced the 1959 Street Offences Act that aimed to crack down on street prostitution by increasing the penalties for soliciting. The act grew out of the Wolfenden Report (Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution) of 1957. Wolfenden himself recommended early on that, in order to spare the blushes of the ladies on the committee (there were three including one from the Glasgow Girl Guides), they use the terms Huntleys and Palmers (Huntleys & Palmers was a well known firm of biscuit makers), when referring to homosexuals and prostitutes. Rab Butler was one of the great figures of mid-20th century British politics. |
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Post by helrunar on Jul 27, 2021 21:13:45 GMT
That's amusing and for some gut-wrenching about Huntleys & Palmers. I choose to be amused. My gut has enough to deal with these days.
Simon Raven--NOT an author I recommend, and yet I read him voraciously--some would say compulsively--wrote a brilliant essay in 1960 on varieties and classifications of male prostitutes (those would be your actual Huntleys) in London.
H.
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Post by Swan on Jul 27, 2021 21:41:37 GMT
That's amusing and for some gut-wrenching about Huntleys & Palmers. I choose to be amused. My gut has enough to deal with these days. Simon Raven--NOT an author I recommend, and yet I read him voraciously--some would say compulsively--wrote a brilliant essay in 1960 on varieties and classifications of male prostitutes (those would be your actual Huntleys) in London. H. John Wolfenden, who chaired the committee, had a son Jeremy who was homosexual, and seems to have struggled with coming to terms with Jeremy coming out in the beginning, but I don't know enough details about this. He is certainly regarded, probably correctly, as a gay rights hero. It took ten years for his recommendations to be implimented, so he was sailing against the wind of accepted opinion. And he must have suffered in parts of the press and institutions like the church (not all it should be said) for this. Low battery so I'll talk more about this tomorrow. |
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Post by Dr Strange on Jul 27, 2021 22:22:38 GMT
Yes - famously the Wolfenden Report of 1957 stated that there "must remain a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law's business" and that "homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be considered a criminal offence". This was debated in parliament, but a motion to implement this part of the report was lost. The legislation implementing these recommendations was eventually passed in 1967 (in England and Wales - the law didn't change in Scotland until 1980).
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Post by helrunar on Jul 28, 2021 1:05:55 GMT
Someone who was quite a sweet chap and is now on the other side (he was noted amongst other things for his skillful sewing and repair of children's teddy bears) reported on a visit to Glasgow or Edinburgh, can't recall which, that once entering a park, the bushes and shrubs proved to be full of cheerful lads very ready, willing and able to offer enthusiastic hospitality to a visitor in search of some special warmth. Cheered me up no end to hear his account of it. I still need to visit Scotland someday but as an elderly bookworm, will mostly just be admiring the scenery.
H.
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Post by andydecker on Jul 28, 2021 7:57:33 GMT
Below are the Aickman stories I have recently re-visited in detail, as posted elsewhere on VAULT. If I should die tomorrow, which other Aickman story should I squeeze in before I do!? The Inner Room The Trains Meeting Mr. Millar The Visiting Star Residents Only THE SWORDS THE CICERONES THE SAME DOG THE HOUSES OF THE RUSSIANS RINGING THE CHANGES THE WAITING ROOM THE STAINS WOOD INTO THE WOOD THE FETCH NO TIME IS PASSING MARRIAGE GROWING BOYs RAvissante PAGES FROM A YOUNG GIRL’S JOURNAL THE UNSETTLED DUST I read a few Aickman story in the last year or so. Without looking it up the ones I remember and liked are The Same Dog and The Inner Room. Ravissante didn't work for me at all, I thought it a missed opportuinty, and I would be hard pressed to share the love for The Trains. The same goes for Ringing the Changes. |
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Post by andydecker on Jul 28, 2021 7:59:07 GMT
As Home Secretary, Butler introduced the 1959 Street Offences Act that aimed to crack down on street prostitution by increasing the penalties for soliciting. The act grew out of the Wolfenden Report (Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution) of 1957. Wolfenden himself recommended early on that, in order to spare the blushes of the ladies on the committee (there were three including one from the Glasgow Girl Guides), they use the terms Huntleys and Palmers (Huntleys & Palmers was a well known firm of biscuit makers), when referring to homosexuals and prostitutes. Rab Butler was one of the great figures of mid-20th century British politics. thanks for the info! Always interesting to know such things. |
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Post by Swan on Jul 28, 2021 12:32:56 GMT
Yes - famously the Wolfenden Report of 1957 stated that there "must remain a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law's business" and that "homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be considered a criminal offence". This was debated in parliament, but a motion to implement this part of the report was lost. The legislation implementing these recommendations was eventually passed in 1967 (in England and Wales - the law didn't change in Scotland until 1980). It seems the majority of the senior church figures supported the report's recommendations, including, perhaps surprisingly, those of the Roman Catholic Church, however both the Church of Scotland and Church of Ireland were opposed. As Dr Strange's post suggests, opposition among the public in general in Scotland was particularly strong. It was the rank and file of the churches that were the most vocal in their opposition to it. One MP, the Ulster Unionist H. Montgomery Hyde was deselected by his local constituancy for supporting the reports recommendations. |
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Post by weirdmonger on Jul 28, 2021 13:56:20 GMT
If I should die tomorrow, which other Aickman story should I squeeze in before I do!? "The Breakthrough"? Thanks! A great choice that I had somehow forgotten all about. ==================== The ship’s captain had “a black uniform set out with rusty gold lace”, but surely gold doesn’t rust? — from my recent review of ‘The Ghost Ship’ by Richard Middleton, a story chosen by Aickman for the Fontana Great Ghosts series. THE BREAKTHROUGH by Robert Aickman“‘I’m not sure that gold does rust, Slow,’…” This story’s gold does also rust, as slowly as what I have recently discovered to be Aickman’s instinctive absorption by Zeno’s Paradox in his writing of fiction and editing of Fontana, a story’s rusting, that is, from the gold of the first three-quarters towards its final quarter? My contention is that the first three-quarters approximately of this story represents the finest horror or strange or weird or ghost story in literature; and it would now be lauded as such high and low, but only if Aickman had rounded it off before reaching the more ludicrous aspects in the last quarter, aspects of purging or catharsis, leadership-and-individuals, the ‘crowd power’ of pitchfork locals who are out for hangings or murder, and the narrator’s clumsy dealing with a particular woman or philosophising about women in general… Meanwhile, therefore, I deal below with the earlier main body of this work, one that is intrinsically disturbing and revelatory: the Aickman masterpiece, in fact. We slowly become aware of the narrator, Mr Walmen van Goort, “a man difficult to surprise either by angel or by devil”, being the village’s educated man, a man of the world, who had travelled in many cities, like loving the ladies of Madrid and having what he describes as his “years of illusion”, and much more — and we also meet the nose-prominent, shrimp-like Reverend Mr Stooling, and the dogged ‘Old Slow’, both classic characters. We also learn of the vital reconstruction of the church and the huge heavy lead globe that the workmen accidentally drop to the church floor, smashing the floor and releasing what fell force by such a fell breakthrough? … I then sense a clinching redefinition or prophecy, here, of what exactly the nature of today’s co-vivid dream is, and it firstly resides between these two items of dialogue: “‘Then, you are telling me that all these different fully grown people are having the same nightmare, and a child’s nightmare at that?’ ‘No. In this case it is a nightmare for none. It is a reality for all. A reality that is new to most. It is the nightmare come to life.’” And then this dialogue is interrupted by the narrator seeing a big bee “reclining in the deep dust of the table.” The co-vivid dream then is said to be “Also about forms of whom people see only the backs and never the faces. Also about rooms turned inside out or upside down: rooms moving from the ground floor to the floor upstairs, or substituting what had been a window for what had been a door.” All of us can visualise what we see in this story, our own bespoke ghosts, beasts and other horrors — as the characters in the story also do. And we are made to see theirs, too. Horrifically or spiritually nightmarish at the highest point of this master’s conception. Recognising Hell, while realising you are still in it. “The truth was so greatly worse that he had suggested, and so greatly different from it, and so greatly greater in all ways.” Whether the distance of time or the division into quarters are exact, I still wonder. From gold to rust. “‘I’m not sure that time is the essence, Slow,’….” *** PS: a quotation from what I consider to be the apocrypha of this story’s final variable quarter: “‘No, sir,’ said Lewis. ‘It’s not that. We all know that’s in good hands.’” |
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Post by weirdmonger on Sept 10, 2021 11:19:47 GMT
 HAND IN GLOVE by ROBERT AICKMAN“Absurd, absurd.” …whereby Aickman indeed doubles up on absurdism, an impish angel-demon version of Aickman hand in glove with the other side of Aickman in Society, but only to become a lost property that we all seek today from his words, well, at least I do. If you don’t leave words meticulously yet wildly couched behind you, what else of you is left, I ask? Only dying memories of dying people. Meanwhile, here we have two disarming Aickman women as in Trains or Go Back At Once etc, visiting for a picnic an Essex that seems right that it is Essex as I was born and still live there. One woman Millicent jilted by — or, rather, jilter of — some man called Nigel and she apparently needs a dose of tender loving care from her spinster-destined friend Winifred …and near their proposed picnic site, a derelict church (“The whole structure was in a state of moulder”) and an Essex woman called Pansy Stock in the ‘vicarage’ or ‘rectory’ and, also, a scenario containing not a Black Mass but a black mass shape ominously threatening, and sudden mushroom growth, and many strangely smelling flowers left over from an equally sudden funeral passing through unseen, and cows in a field that take over Miliicent’s Dreamcatcher mind and these cows (if not bulls) somehow bloodily gore a visitation by Nigel in person….and another visitation later where his traditional routine pre-Midnight telephone call to Millicent (even at Winfred’s house) ends up with him in person metaphorically if not bloodily goring Millicent to the heart, a heart tired by tramping round Essex, I infer. From where they went back at once. From the kissing-gates et al, instead of having passed through them, but gone back at once to what? When read alongside the absurdistly or deceptively slow-motion Marriageable, Possessional, Essexual and other themes of his canon of stories, this one gradually takes on a gestalt meaning that you cannot share with other people, but only share with yourself. Hand in glove. This review is the very best I can do for all those other people. If not good enough. “There was an embarrassing blank in time, while an angel flitted through the room, or perhaps a demon.” My other reviews of Robert Aickman: dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/robert-aickman/ |
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Post by weirdmonger on Sept 19, 2021 14:48:01 GMT
THE NEXT GLADE by Robert Aickman
“‘Have a chocolate finger?’ she said,…”
…not said by Noelle to her husband, the ambidextrous Melvin, but to her prospective fancy man with a fancy name whom she picked up at a party….
I have two editions of this story, the original, and a reprint, whereby in the latter, perhaps significantly, the boy Agnew is actually ‘misprinted’ twice as Agnes. ‘Agneau’ in French is the word for ‘Lamb’: “ Hoodwink’d with faery fancy; all amort, / Save to St. Agnes and her lambs unshorn,…” from the famous Keats poem about St. Agnes, and see also the famous painting of Judith shearing off a man’s head, and this is a deadpan story about the loose marriage conducted by Noelle and Melvin (the latter with career frustrations and rivalries) and their two children Agnew and Judith, a marriage so loose that Noelle allows herself to be cuddled by a fancy man with a strange morphing double-barrel of a name when they are alone together in the suburban woods near the marital home at the time Melvin is away on difficult business abroad in the New World.
Men who sort of come and go like Stepford Husbands almost mindlessly in a farrago of leanings that lead to a visionary epic in a pit forever near or within the ever-next glade, a Blakean or John Martin epic of commercial double-dealing exploiting the labouring men and typing women (an epic bodily interweaving a human panoply not unlike the vision in BIND YOUR HAIR), all amidst the gluey resistances of passage while wading through them wearing shoes and boots as in the same BIND YOUR HAIR story appropriately reviewed by me just before this one, in fact this story and that one are kindred stories that somehow deal with the complex relationships and jobs and mindless pretensions that both men and women conduct. Toward family ruin et al.
Here Melvin’s downfall (even before the men in white coats could come for him first as he feared) takes place when he is childishly role-playing a sort of Wild Bill Hickok scenario in the woods with a deadly lumber knife…. And then thoughts of ‘an infection poisoning his brain.’ But who shears whom, and by what means? Whose ‘fine fabric’ business suit becomes just another Mr Millar mistexturing?
“It seemed to Noelle that the din was rising in a degree entirely out of proportion with the distance she was covering, as presumably she advanced towards it.”
“In the stream of light from the passage, Noelle could see Agnew’s wild head.”
Noelle as a sort of female Christ or Christ’s Mother? Her Lamb of God pressed against her breasts at the end. Time itself, meanwhile, had to have exactitude when children were involved, this story says.
“Men and their dreams!” — Eskimo carpet and Australian boomerang stretching as if globally? Any “conjectural rats”, notwithstanding. But never any butterflies.
No Fragonard or Watteau — nor even this story’s mention of wigs or ribboned shepherd crooks — involved. But the trees are mysteriously architectural. As we readers struggle with dark meanings always hovering halfway through to the next glade of light. At a time when colour TVs needed to be specifically called, as in this story, colour ones, to differentiate from black and white.
“‘I’m sure the whole thing’s a fantasy, as I said before.’
‘It is, and yet it isn’t,’ said Noelle.”
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Post by weirdmonger on Sept 22, 2021 14:18:57 GMT
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