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Post by dem bones on Aug 22, 2010 14:39:45 GMT
Aleister Crowley - The Drug and Other Stories (Wordsworth Editions, September, 2010) With an introduction by William Breeze and a foreword by David Tibet.
This volume brings together the uncollected short fiction of the poet, writer and religious philosopher Aleister Crowley (1875–1947). Crowley was a successful critic, editor and author of fiction from 1908 to 1922, and his short stories are long overdue for discovery. Of the forty-nine stories in the present volume, only thirty were published in his lifetime. Most of the rest appear here for the first time.
Like their author, Crowley’s stories are fun, smart, witty, thought-provoking and sometimes unsettling. They are set in places he had lived and knew well: Belle Epoque Paris, Edwardian London, pre-revolutionary Russia and America during the first World War. The title story ‘The Drug’ stands as one of the first—if not the first—accounts of a psychedelic experience. His ‘Black and Silver’ is a knowing early noir discovery that anticipates an entire genre. ‘Atlantis’ is a masterpiece of occult fantasy, a dark satire that can stand with Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. Frank Harris considered ‘The Testament of Magdalen Blair’ the most terrifying tale ever written.
Extensive editorial end-notes give full details about the stories.we'll have to wait for the middle of next month for this, but here's the contents list, which i found at Lashtal. The Three Characteristics The Wake World T’ien Tao The Stone of the Philosophers The Drug Cancer? At the Fork of the Roads The Dream Circean Illusion d’Amoureux The Soul-Hunter The Daughter of the Horseleech The Violinist The Vixen The Ordeal of Ida Pendragon Apollo Bestows the Violin Across the Gulf His Secret Sin The Woodcutter Professor Zircon The Vitriol-Thrower The Testament of Magdalen Blair Ercildoune The Stratagem Lieutenant Finn’s Promotion The Chute A Death Bed Repentance Felo de Se The Argument that Took the Wrong Turning Robbing Miss Horniman Face Which Things are an Allegory The Crime of the Impasse de l’Enfant Jésus Atlantis The Mysterious Malady The Bald Man Black and Silver The Humour of Pauline Pepper A Nativity Every Precaution God’s Journey The Colour of My Eyes Dedit! Colonel Pacton’s Brother The Vampire of Vespuccia As You Were! Only a Dog The Virgin A Masque The Escape i reckon Wordsworth will shift a few copies of this one! looking down the list, i recognise very few from previous anthologies. Michel Parry resurrected At the Fork of the Roads, The Violinist and The Vixen for his Mayflower Black Magic series, and Peter Haining - exhumed The Dream Circean and the remarkable The Testament of Magdalen Blair for his Black Magic Omnibus and Nightmare Reader respectively, but i'm struggling to think of any more.
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Aug 23, 2010 4:48:45 GMT
On no, they've got me again. If this a well researched collection and so far we've no reason to doubt it will be, it just does all the work for you. On rare occasions I will buy a book that I am not going o enjoy and I suspect this will be one of them.
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Post by dem bones on Aug 23, 2010 7:56:12 GMT
On rare occasions I will buy a book that I am not going o enjoy and I suspect this will be one of them. yeah, that's a very good way of putting it Craig, although he might surprise you. i've been delaying a visit to Charing Cross Road until this one is published in the hope i can nab The Drug, Dead Of Night and In Ghostly Company in the one hit, and i know which i'm likely to fall upon first. Shame it doesn't include any of the Simon Iff stories, but perhaps Wordsworth are saving them for an Omnibus? It's not improbable that between them, Michel Parry and Peter Haining cherry-picked the best stories, but certainly the few i've read are uh, fun on their own terrible terms. The Vixen ("A story that the Marquis de Sade would surely have relished ... representative of a semi-serious desire on Crowley's part to shock and horrify less questing souls", as Michel Parry diplomatically puts it) revels in the destruction of black sorceress Patricia who periodically whips the pet girl she keeps lashed to a cross in a Priest's hole. The truly hideous revenge melodrama, At The Fork In The Road, trowels on the horrors to the point of hilarity as the defeated anti-heroine undergoes "the nuptials of the Pit". Testament of Magdalen Blair is just ....well, luckily Steve provided this thoughtful appraisal on Vault Mk I as no way could i do justice to the evil genius of the thing.
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Post by Dr Strange on Aug 23, 2010 10:50:36 GMT
Followed that link dem, and noticed you'd asked if Crowley "ever wrote any commentary on horror fiction", which reminded me again that I'd read somewhere that he used to write reviews of supernatural/horror fiction. I've tried to find out more with google, but only came up with a single line in this article by John Pelan - freepages.pavilion.net/tartarus/jepson.htmlI don't think I've ever come across Jepson, but there's some interesting tid-bits of info in there... Anyway, the relevant bit (third para from end) says "so successful was Jepson that the Great Beast, Aleister Crowley, compared the novel favorably to Blackwood's pantheistic works and indeed lifted much from #19 for his Hymn to Pan. Of course Crowley was notorious for the use of his reviews as grindstones for his various axes, and his dismissal of Blackwood is ludicrous". Which only piques my interest more... he definitely "reviewed" Blackwood then, and he must have reviewed others (I'm thinking Machen, for one). Any of our Blackwood/Machen fans got more info? Anything in the biographies of these writers?
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Post by andydecker on Aug 23, 2010 11:20:57 GMT
I pre-ordered it yesterday too, even if I know that I will read only the half of it. My interest in Crowley is a little bit stronger at the moment after reading Black Pearl. And after reading up the entry in the Wikipedia. I had totally forgotten that he got so old or was an acclaimed mountain-climber.
After seeing the cover, a strange question popped in my head. You always seem to see Crowley as this rather aged before his prime guy. I found the original photo in this bio I have and it says that he was only 37 at the time.
And I wonder if this picture is a wonderful embodiement of all the prejudices one has with all things Crowley. It is easier to believe that this is the satanic pervert who got high on drugs and sex than the slim and athletic youth.
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Post by Dr Strange on Aug 23, 2010 11:49:06 GMT
Yeah, I think that probably is the case - he just looks bad in that picture, which is what we want. By all accounts, though, he was pretty pathetic in his old age when he'd been more or less forgotten. When I was trying to find out more about his own reviews of other writers (see above), I came across a review of one of the Crowley biographies I've read - tinyurl.com/35k93vvThere's a couple of choice quotes in there - Christopher Isherwood's appraisal that the "truly awful thing about Crowley is that one suspects he didn't really believe in anything. Even his wickedness. Perhaps the only thing that wasn't fake was his addiction to heroin and cocaine", and EM Butler's description of the aged Crowley as "oppressive, boring, egotistical and narrow-minded, a seedy little man with thick spectacles and a yellow addict's face, a tear lingering in one corner of his eye". Almost makes you feel sorry for him. I seem to remember reading somewhere that at times he even suggested that he realized he'd made a mess of his life - that he thought that if he had concentrated on the mountaineering (and possibly even the poetry - though I'm not so sure on that!) rather than the "magick" he would have been a much happier man.
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Post by David A. Riley on Aug 23, 2010 12:12:29 GMT
He may well have made a mess of his life - in fact he almost certainly did - but he succeeded in maiking himself almost timelessly famous and an iconic figure, though I doubt if very much of what we see when we look at him mirrors reality. Not that this matters. I'm sure he would have been pleased if he had known how his fame would endure. What others dabblers in the occult arts in the last hundred years have become household names?
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Post by dem bones on Aug 23, 2010 12:16:57 GMT
Thanks so much for that, Dr. Strange. One book I'd like to dig up again is former Sounds journalist Sandy Robertson's Aleister Crowley Scrapbook (Foulsham, 2002). Robertson was one of the best writers they ever had - still remember a Velvet Underground /Lou Reed retrospective that ran over several weeks - and he and cartoonist Edwin 'Savage Pencil' Pouncey organised the campaign to fund a plaque to commemorate Montague Summers' resting place ("Tell me strange things" if i remember). This Scrapbook includes chapters on Iff, The Fictional Crowley, The Lovecraft/ Crowley Axis, Crapulous Contemporaries and (told you he was a music journo) The Filth & The Fury. Had it out of the library shortly after publication, wasn't interested enough in him to get the full benefit of the thing, but those headings sure look intriguing to me now ...
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Aug 23, 2010 12:27:39 GMT
Here's a nice shot of Crowley and his wife. Does have a bit of a gleam in his eye but mostly he looks like an affluent happy bloke. Doubtless this was well before he squandered a fortune. Again he always gets a terrible press. This image, more the sort we associate with the Beast is consistently used to show him as some kind of monster. In fact, its a picture of Crowley an old, druggie man who's been asked by some youngster to demonstrate some yoga poses. I think this is the laughing Buddha. He was reluctant to do this as he said he was well out of touch with the practice. From memory this kind of pose is suppose to evoke good feeling and lightness. Of course, at the time it would have been roundly condemned as some sort of heinous witchcraft by the Christian church. His writing is full of pitfalls but again from memory he was mostly writing fiction to scrape money together. I said I might not like this new anthology because a major problem with Crowley was being both ahead and behind his time. The easiest way to see this is look at his poetry which still used 'thou' when all the moderns had gone onto 'you'. His concepts poetically are always clever, sometimes ingenious and always full of depth but the mode of expression is old fashioned and weighty. I''m guessing it will be the same with the short fiction. Some startling ideas constrained by the weighty morality of his time.
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Post by cw67q on Aug 23, 2010 12:37:37 GMT
I don't think I've ever come across Jepson, but there's some interesting tid-bits of info in there... Anyway, the relevant bit (third para from end) says "so successful was Jepson that the Great Beast, Aleister Crowley, compared the novel favorably to Blackwood's pantheistic works and indeed lifted much from #19 for his Hymn to Pan. Of course Crowley was notorious for the use of his reviews as grindstones for his various axes, and his dismissal of Blackwood is ludicrous". :-) Jepson's novella "the Horned Shepherd" has just been republsihed in pb. I read it last week and thoroughly enjoyed it. I posted details on this thread: vaultofevil.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=gruesome&action=display&thread=3849I also highly recommend Jepson's later novel "the Garden at #19". - chris whenever I try to post a simply smile it comes out as a hysterical rolling on the floor laughter face, which mostly overstates the extent of my mirth
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Post by marksamuels on Aug 23, 2010 13:48:17 GMT
Which only piques my interest more... he definitely "reviewed" Blackwood then, and he must have reviewed others (I'm thinking Machen, for one). Any of our Blackwood/Machen fans got more info? Anything in the biographies of these writers? You're probably right, but the only one I'm aware of is Crowley's review of Machen's The Terror, in which he takes the piss out of Machen himself rather than his work. billheidrick.com/tlc2004/tlc0304.htmScroll down until you come to "Crowley Classics". I know Crowley was a huge fan of the The House of Souls and made his own copy "Magickal-annotated", which item is held at the Gerald Yorke library. Machen avoided Crowley like the plague, they don't seem to have ever met, and Machen obviously thought of Crowley as both an egomaniacal charlatan and a genuine degenerate. What references there are in Machen's letters are along the lines of "avoid this person and do not mention I say so" and "I'm surprised he's not been arrested". Mark S.
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Post by Dr Strange on Aug 23, 2010 14:24:42 GMT
I think I see what John Pelan meant when he said his "reviews" were really just axe-grinding exercises. I know Crowley was a huge fan of the The House of Souls and made his own copy "Magickal-annotated", which item is held at the Gerald Yorke library. That's A Fragment, The White People, Pan, and The Inmost Light (?) It would be very interesting to know what he had to say about those. What references there are in Machen's letters are along the lines of "avoid this person and do not mention I say so" and "I'm surprised he's not been arrested" Not surprising really...
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Aug 23, 2010 15:00:47 GMT
Crowley mentions that he shared Machen's views on poetry that it should exalt the spirit. He probably didn't know that Machen was avoiding him like the plague
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Post by marksamuels on Aug 23, 2010 15:40:44 GMT
Crowley mentions that he shared Machen's views on poetry that it should exalt the spirit. He probably didn't know that Machen was avoiding him like the plague I suspect you're right, Craig. One of Machen's best & oldest friends was A.E. Waite, with whom Crowley feuded. Also, Machen was obviously aware of the newspaper scandals attached to Crowley's name. Mark S.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Aug 23, 2010 16:53:35 GMT
Apropos of nothing, until recently I believed that Francis King, the author of really depressing novels such as ACT OF DARKNESS, was the same Francis King who wrote the biography THE MAGICAL WORLD OF ALEISTER CROWLEY. Oh, what a fool I was.
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