Aickman’s FONTANA Great Ghosts books

[𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr]

May 28, 2021 15:21:20 GMT Shrink Proof said:

May 28, 2021 15:03:07 GMT 𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr said:

Wine-Dark Sea is from Homer isn't it. It's like something Dylan Thomas would say. Apparently the ancient Greeks didn't have a word for blue.

I was taught that it was Κυανος (kuanos) from which we get cyan in English.

I think they had a word for light-blue too. but I can't remember (and can't be bothered to look).

I'm not saying they didn't see blue.

[Dr Strange]

May 28, 2021 16:08:00 GMT 𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr said:

May 28, 2021 15:21:20 GMT Shrink Proof said:

I was taught that it was Κυανος (kuanos) from which we get cyan in English.

I think they had a word for light-blue too. but I can't remember (and can't be bothered to look).

I'm not saying they didn't see blue.

Wasn't there something about "bronze skies" as well in some ancient Greek epic? I think the explanation is that they tended to describe things in terms of their brightness rather than their hue. So a "wine dark sea" is dark and murky, and a "bronze sky" is bright and shiny.

[𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr]

May 28, 2021 16:29:58 GMT Dr Strange said:

May 28, 2021 16:08:00 GMT 𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr said:

I think they had a word for light-blue too. but I can't remember (and can't be bothered to look).

I'm not saying they didn't see blue.

Wasn't there something about "bronze skies" as well in some ancient Greek epic? I think the explanation is that they tended to describe things in terms of their brightness rather than their hue. So a "wine dark sea" is dark and murky, and a "bronze sky" is bright and shiny.

Yes. We will go with this explanation. Don't want another thread to wander off. I need to learn to keep my mouth shut. Ha.

[weirdmonger]

THE FIRMIN CHILD by Richard Blum

“I’m going to make it go away. Daddy. I’m going to make the ocean drown the noises down. The noises go way in the water. I wave the waves, wave the sounds. Good-waving soundbyes. The fish will drown. Go down. Round with the sound. Down to drown. […] The ocean is wrong, Mommy, the waves are too noisy. It’s too deep and nobody can swim. The fish don’t play anymore, but I’ll wave them away. Then Floppy can play and it won’t scare me like the devil sometimes or an animal.”

This is not only an insidious story by dint of its plot, but increasingly insidious by dint of its infecting us today. A couple give birth to what they eventually call a “nutty” child by the name of Tommy, the latter insidiously tainting their marriage and their neighbours with his ritual pre-Geller spoon waving and his apparent clairvoyance and Floppy his toy monkey, dancing with whom he makes a “spastic Balinese dance”. And the story involves a ‘coloured’ lady who is seen by his mother to have an evil fetid mouth. Thinking about it, in hindsight, however, the coloured lady is the only real decent person in it? A nutty story in itself that is otherwise well-written but continues to leave a bad taste in my mouth, with my fearing that our own era today has retroactively infected the perceived aura of Blum’s era, not that this story’s aura has proactively infected us the other way about?! Not only Tommy’s mother, but Mother Nature itself…

“It was as if her whole self as possessed of that mysterious instinct of organs which recognise their kin but reject alien tissue, building antibodies against it. Antibodies generated themselves in her without her willing.”

[weirdmonger]

THE RED LODGE by H. R. Wakefield

“Directly I had shut the door I had again that very unpleasant sensation of being watched. It made the reading of Sidgwick’s The Use of Words in Reasoning — an old favourite of mine, which requires concentration — a difficult business. Time after time I found myself peeping into dark corners and shifting my position. And there were little sharp sounds; just the oak-panelling cracking, I supposed. After a time I became more absorbed in the book, and less fidgety, and then I heard a very soft cough just behind me. I felt little icy rays pour down and through me, but I would not look round, and I would go on reading. I had just reached the following passage: ‘However many things may be said about Socrates, or about any fact observed, there remains still more that might be said if the need arose; the need is the determining factor. Hence the distinction between complete and incomplete description, though perfectly sharp and clear in the abstract, can only have a meaning—can only be applied to actual cases—if it be taken as equivalent to sufficient description, the sufficiency being relative to some purpose. Evidently the description of Socrates as a man, scanty though it is, may be fully sufficient for the purpose of the modest enquiry whether he is mortal or not’—when my eye was caught by a green patch which suddenly appeared on the floor beside me, and then another and another,…”

I think the above section from it undertows not only this famously and truly terrifying work but also much of Aickman’s work. Indefiniteness and Ambiguity being the heading for one of its sections. The parents and small son and the nanny and other servants are staying for three months at the eponymous Lodge about which we are told straight from the start that they left before completing their stay because of its haunting qualities, involving patches of slime, and I dare not tell you about one particular entity that will give you “pure undiluted panic” if you tell anyone else about it without their having read the story first. I can tell you about the mysterious door in the garden, though, and the nearby knighted gentleman who comes to their assistance, and the little boy’s lack of fear of the sea previously in Frinton but his utter fear today of the river at eponymous Lodge. Seriously, this story is disturbing and will no doubt affect you even more adversely if you divulge too much to those who have not yet read Red Lodge. (The most I could dare do was reproduce an example edition of Sidgwick that was not red.)

[weirdmonger]

… from the above insight into Nature regarding the previous story above, the next one, a famous novelette, includes these words concerning a mesmeric power or Brain or Gestalt also first known in the India of the Rajahs: “…it would not be against nature, only a rare power in nature…”

THE HAUNTED AND THE HAUNTERS by Lord Lytton

“— a dog of dogs for a ghost.”

Sorry about the loyal dog. Animals and humans differentiated by their reaction to such powers as the power of this very eccentric work by a literary bulwark called Bulwer. Yet, it is in many ways a very frightening haunted house story, with colours and bubbles and globules and larvae of ghostly activity, with spectral footprints and self-moving furniture and a servant more scared than his foolhardy master the narrator who is investigating the haunted house and underlaid by a backstory of past characters generating such a power, but later transmogrified by a wildly theosophically scientific RANT disguised as fiction with dialogue, and concepts that relate to the gestalt of the Brain as a preternatural explanation for the supernatural. The connections and cross-references of electric or Odic cross-wiring in the mesmeric ether generated by one such a power of human agency to outdo mortality by means of some version of the Null Immortalis…
I sense that my empirical reliance upon the gestalt in foolhardily scrying such power-driven literature, a real-time enterprise like the narrator’s in the so-called haunted house, yes, my own perhaps naive instinctive reliance that weaves through such endeavours does teeter on some brink that this Lytton work brings me ever closer towards! A ‘fiction’ work that is often officially and notably subtitled, “The House and the Brain.”
I wander again through its magnetic text….
“…write down a thought which, sooner or later, may alter the whole condition of China.” Then the whole world? Human brain to brain covividly? Mention of a “certain password”. And of “amber that embeds a straw’’…. “The vision of no puling fantastic girl, of no sick-bed somnambule.” — “Well, observe, no two persons ever experience the same dream.” — “…I half-believed, half-doubted.”
Like the narrator, I must get out my Macaulay to read and give up such dubious self-frights.

Full context of above here: dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/16/the-8th-fontana-book-of-great-ghost-stories-edited-by-robert-aickman/#comment-21811

[weirdmonger]

THREE MILES UP by Elizabeth Jane Howard

“The alternative is to go up as far as the Basin, and then simply turn round and come back, and who wants to do that?”

I can quite appreciate what is implied there. I experienced, many years ago, having to turn round unexpectedly in a narrow boat on a canal ring. This whole story’s canal ambiance rings true with me, even the main story within that ambiance, having read it many years ago, too. But it comes up darkly fresh and seems even more telling than I remember it, a classic ghost story, no mistake, one that will haunt you forever, and then re-haunt you anew and differently! The story of two men who argue with the frustrations such travelling entails, as well as its slow motion chugging pleasures, two men who are well-characterised and individual, finding it hard with all the coping and catering, and they somehow pick up a chance young female as a foundling called Sharon who helps them by being allowed to travel with them, affecting them differently in emotional terms with gender issues (“‘She is what women ought to be,’ he concluded with sudden pleasure; and slept.”), as they find a third fork of the canal that, according to the map, should not have been there at all, as they chug slowly along it into a territory of pent-up ghostliness that each village they think they see on the bank is eventually not there at all; and the grey old man from the previous story curtly and darkly appears on that bank and later becomes a little boy on the towpath, a journey that can only be experienced by those reading this and travelling with them, “….stretching their time, and diminishing the distance” towards a distance that never diminishes but infantilises as well as infinitises. But they did want to ‘explore’, as Sharon said — as we all do. This work itself is a special byway of literature that we all need to explore at least once. Trees and banks becoming heavy and black. A little white mist hanging over the canal. Black huddles of would-be cottages. This work also possesses the Zeno’s Paradox ‘half-measures’ of Le Fanu, plus the grey fungal absorptions of Hodgson, “Half wilderness, half marsh, dank and grey…”, “Clifford had begun to hate the grey silent land”, the sunken feet to reprieve the embedded shoes in the Hartley, “his shoe sank immediately into a marshy hole”, later the boy with no shoes. And like the “fiancée” amid the grey fungus of Hope as well as of Hodgson, how should we interpret what happened to Clifford’s ration of Sharon? The search for the ultimate winding-hole, I guess.

Full context of above here: dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/20/the-1st-fontana-book-of-great-ghost-stories-edited-by-robert-aickman/

[weirdmonger]

LORD MOUNT PROSPECT by John Betjeman

This must have been a major influence on Aickman. It is a masterpiece of absurdism involving obscure Irish Peers, and a strange religious sect in North London, a rhinoceros, a Gilbert and Sullivan opera and a vision of the ruined Taj Mahal in an Irish bog where Aickman’s propensity — that I recognised earlier in these Fontana reviews – to being gluily stuck in Zeno’s Paradox is rife!
No half measures though (!), as I give you the whole of this story to read here: dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/lord-mount-prospect-by-john-betjeman/
Sorry if there are any textual glitches. When I got rid of some, others appeared! On and on and on…again and again!

[helrunar]

Weirdmonger, those wretched textual glitches are implacable, aren't they? So insidiously nerve-wracking.

This is my favorite poem by John Betjeman, read by the author--"The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel." It's such a deftly achieved portrait of Wilde, and the whole mood of fin-de-siecle reverie in the 1890s.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfnjYTlN76s

There's a marvelous recording of this by the enigmatic Micheál Mac Liammóir, but it's only available on y.t. as part of his one man show about Wilde (which is sublime).

H.

[weirdmonger]

Lord Mount Prospect is A story included by Aickman in his Fontana Ghosts Book no. 5

[weirdmonger]

Jun 9, 2021 13:32:10 GMT helrunar said:

Weirdmonger, those wretched textual glitches are implacable, aren't they? So insidiously nerve-wracking.

This is my favorite poem by John Betjeman, read by the author--"The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel." It's such a deftly achieved portrait of Wilde, and the whole mood of fin-de-siecle reverie in the 1890s.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfnjYTlN76s

There's a marvelous recording of this by the enigmatic Micheál Mac Liammóir, but it's only available on y.t. as part of his one man show about Wilde (which is sublime).

H.

I love Betjeman.
Lord Mount Prospect is the first story of his I’ve read.

[David A. Riley]

Jun 9, 2021 13:50:01 GMT weirdmonger said:

Jun 9, 2021 13:32:10 GMT helrunar said:

Weirdmonger, those wretched textual glitches are implacable, aren't they? So insidiously nerve-wracking.

This is my favorite poem by John Betjeman, read by the author--"The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel." It's such a deftly achieved portrait of Wilde, and the whole mood of fin-de-siecle reverie in the 1890s.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfnjYTlN76s

There's a marvelous recording of this by the enigmatic Micheál Mac Liammóir, but it's only available on y.t. as part of his one man show about Wilde (which is sublime).

H.

I love Betjeman.
Lord Mount Prospect is the first story of his I’ve read.

I always love listening to John Betjeman. He can make anything sound fascinating.

[𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr]

Jun 9, 2021 13:50:01 GMT weirdmonger said:

Jun 9, 2021 13:32:10 GMT helrunar said:

Weirdmonger, those wretched textual glitches are implacable, aren't they? So insidiously nerve-wracking.

This is my favorite poem by John Betjeman, read by the author--"The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel." It's such a deftly achieved portrait of Wilde, and the whole mood of fin-de-siecle reverie in the 1890s.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfnjYTlN76s

There's a marvelous recording of this by the enigmatic Micheál Mac Liammóir, but it's only available on y.t. as part of his one man show about Wilde (which is sublime).

H.

I love Betjeman.
Lord Mount Prospect is the first story of his I’ve read.

Wasn't he a marvellous man. He saved so much great architecture from destruction too.

[weirdmonger]

As well as being an equivalent to Oliver O’s Oleronous beckoning enchantment, this Oliphant is a novelette with a figurative ‘elephant-in-the-room’ transpiring to be a diamond ring that bites and stings — and do please compare this with the ring that I coincidentally (!?) read about yesterday in ‘Him We Adore’ here: dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/26/through-the-storm-rosalie-parker/#comment-22041

THE LIBRARY WINDOW by Mrs. Oliphant

“Or was he thinking, still thinking, of what he had been writing and going on with it still?”

“It is a longing all your life after — it is a looking — for what never comes.”

…being that gluey never-ending or nullimmortalis that attracts Aickman so much in the stories he chooses for this book series. Here, the so-called window opposite, in the library, that — in this work’s wonderfully evoked conditions of changing light — often looks less like a window at all, and the well-characterised naive girl narrator, amid older ladies as companions, including her aunt, gradually begins to see a man writing endlessly, and beckoning, and waving to her from deep within it, amid the narration’s stray thoughts of enchantments and fairy folk and the conjured covivid bubble of dream and reality. Intensely and incrementally haunting not only for the girl but also for us, as we piece together the intriguing backstories behind it. Her agonising pangs become ours.

Full context of above here: dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/06/07/the-5th-fontana-book-of-great-ghost-stories-edited-by-robert-aickman/

[weirdmonger]

THE SWORDS by Robert Aickman

“And I don’t mean I just wanted her body. That comes later in life. I wanted to love her and tousle her and all the other, better things we want before the time comes when we know that however much we want them, we’re not going to get them.”

“That night I really grasped the fact that most of the time we have no notion of what we really want, or we lose sight of it. And the even more important fact that what we really want just doesn’t fit in with life as a whole, or very seldom. Most folk learn slowly, and never altogether learn at all. I seemed to learn all at once.
Or perhaps not quite, because there was very much more to come.” (my italics)

I have always thought this story to be the most tawdry one in literature. Now it takes on an even greater power of attrition in the context of what I have discovered to be the prevailing Gestalt of this series of Fontana Great Ghost Stories as chosen by Robert Aickman. The gluey torpor here of the callow, sexually inexperienced narrator, a commercial traveller in seedy digs in seedy townships and currently staying in a “nasty bedroom” in Wolverhampton. I once had the ‘pleasure’ of attritionally having to struggle through 30 locks in a canal boat through a relatively short distance in Wolverhampton, at first looking forward to later visiting more scenic sights on the canal ring, but was unexpectedly made to laboriously turn the boat in a winding-hole and struggle back through the same 30 locks because of weather conditions! This feels like the Words of The Swords. The narrator’s witnessing, at a seedy fairground, a woman being somehow penetrated, and later being given himself the same chance to do so to the same woman in the nasty bedroom of his digs. The inability to unburden himself of a “silly pie”, as a metaphor for something else he can’t rid himself of. The dead meat of the woman to be penetrated, with her too easy dismemberment. Her unpromising burdensome blouse and her other garments. The disarming nature of the seaman and the seamen’s trousers, ‘seaman’ as a homophone?
I, Des, wonder if Mr. Edis actually got to hear the full story to quench his vicarious desires.
“Suddenly it had all become rather like a nightmare.”
Only the actual reality around you can be LIKE a nightmare. Nightmares themselves can be woken up from.
Just like that silly pie, I can’t get this story out of my brain’s ownership. It teases and ‘tousles’ away at me like an endless worry.

Full context of above here: dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/06/07/the-5th-fontana-book-of-great-ghost-stories-edited-by-robert-aickman/