Helrunar's House of Horror and Hilarity

[helrunar]

W. H. Auden's legendary (or infamous) poem providing an, ahem, blow by blow account of a sexual act with a well-built stranger, "The Platonic Blow" aka "A Day for a Lay." 

www.vulture.com/2008/03/how_dirty_is_that_auden_poem_t.html

Explicit language includes perhaps unduly celebratory evocations of the male physique.

H.

[pulphack]

Backtracking a bit - BS Johnson, Steve - don;t knwo if you know too much about him but he was an avant-garde novelist whose ideas were interesting but execution was, for me, deadly dull. Jonathon Coe, middle brow Brit novelist whose speciality is taking old stuff and putting new twists on it (House Of Sleep was a Frank King meta-rip for the Guardian reading generations, and What A Carve Up! a simlar trope on the old Brit comedy horror movie - that sounds like I don't like him, whereas I do a lot) wrote an award winning biography of him (Like A Fiery Elephant, which was something a kid wrote about him when he was a teacher, though Coe reckons it was 'Fairy Elephant' but Johnson couldn't face that). Johnson committed suicide, and there is a lot of shady rumour that he had got himself caught up in occult practises. Nothing but dark mutterings and no real proof, but it sounds like rather than 'proper' occult circles (so to speak), old BS ('for bullshit, obviously,' according to my mate Tone who also read him) got himself embroiled in one of those Alex Sanders 'got it all from the News Of The World' circles where people took all the crap bits far too seriously. Coe got interested in Johnson after seeing that 'fat man on a beach' programme when he was a kid and wondering who this bloke was and why anyone would pay him to do that? Interestingly, he considers Johnson's football reports when he was a journo to be some of his best work.

Excuse the rambling but it's early and I stumbled back on this and remembered I was going to comment at the time but got sidetracked (don't we all...)

[andydecker]

I remember Coe. He was quite successful for a while, also in translation. His last (?) novel at least sounded interesting, something about Billy Wilder, the director. I quite like Wilder, he had an interesting life. The plot - or maybe it is fact, I only read a blurb - reminded me on Godard's Le Mepris - Contempt - which I really liked. One of the first movies about movie making, fairly dark and bitter one of those self-loathing thing about movie making which has become the boring and tired norm, which I only watched it because Fritz Lang did a role, and at the time Brigitte Bardot was nice. Contempt is really funny and truly depressing, right down the downer ending.

[helrunar]

Thanks, PulpHack and Andreas--I'm quite intrigued by Fat Guy on the Beach. Maybe it will show up on the tube of you someday.

I'm sorry to hear that Johnson took his own life (I saw in a thread somewhere that suicide human rights lobbyists are telling us that they prefer "took his own life" to "committed suicide" because even dead people can have trigger reactions in 2021 or so it would seem). He sounds like an intriguing character. 

I know the name Jonathan Coe but can't recall just from where. He might have written a book about another favorite eccentric, Omm Sety.

H.

[helrunar]

One of my all time favorite films is Sunday Bloody Sunday, script by Penelope Gilliatt but very much the work of director John Schlesinger.

www.thewrap.com/gay-kiss-sunday-bloody-sunday-john-schlesinger-peter-finch-murray-head/

H.

[helrunar]

This looks interesting--1960s celebs were interviewed for some series or project which was never aired. Then 30 or 40 years later, they were shown the old footage and their reactions were also filmed. "Sex, Drugs & Rock N Roll"--a staggeringly original title. Celebs featured include Sean, Lulu, Tom Jones, Cilla (yikes), Davy Jones, Simon Dee... severe twee warning for some of this.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyE2FBZf5nA

H.

[helrunar]

Beautifully accomplished 22 minute documentary about the canonisation of St Derek Jarman by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in the 1990s:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCJN1R4sdnM&t=3s

Really more about the Sisters than Jarman... I found what the surviving members shared heartfelt and at times inspiring.

H.

[𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr]

Aug 18, 2021 15:18:37 GMT helrunar said:

From 1973: "BS Johnson was filmed in a single location on the bay of Porth Ceiriad on the Lleyn peninsular of Gwynneth, North Wales. The place was part of Johnson's personal mythology, where he climbed the four thousand foot mountain Carn Fadrun at dawn to strip and worship, in his own words, "some kind of female deity - that's the kind of place Lleyn is".
Not available to view outside the UK, unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your view of this kind of thing).

player.bfi.org.uk/rentals/film/watch-fat-man-on-a-beach-1974-online

shop.bfi.org.uk/you-re-human-like-the-rest-of-them-the-films-of-b-s-johnson-flipside-25-dual-format-edition.html

H.

I found the biography Like Aa Fiery Eliphant. The author says this about Fat Man on a Beach, when he saw it aged 13:

But there was a special
programme showing this evening, something that none of us wanted to miss. It
was going out on ITV (a channel we rarely watched, as a rule), was called Fat Man
on a Beach, and although we had never heard of the man presenting it, and al-
though its description in the television listings of the Daily Telegraph was enig-
matic to say the least, there was no doubt in our minds that it constituted essential
viewing. It was a documentary about Porth Ceiriad bay, a beach on the Lleyn penin-
sula in Gwynedd, north Wales. The place where we had taken our holidays every
year for the last decade or more. A place with which we were so familiar that I even
believe we had somehow come to feel – in a way not untypical of English
holidaymakers in Wales – that we owned it. That it belonged to us.
What did we expect from this programme? We expected to be flattered, I imag-
ine: to have our sense of familiarity and ownership flattered, played up to, with
shots of readily identifiable landmarks which would have us squawking, ‘There’s
the path to the caravan site!’ and ‘There’s the shop where we get the milk!’ Perhaps
we were even prepared, in a spirit of Reithian open-mindedness, to absorb a certain
amount of information about Welsh customs and the local population, which we
were at great pains to avoid during the two or three weeks of every year we spent
caravanning on the peninsula.
In the event, anyway, we got none of these things.
Instead we were expected to watch forty minutes of a fat man sitting in various
positions on the beach, and talking to us. And worse still, reading poetry! This man
appeared, on the surface, to be jolly enough: in looks and manner I have since
heard him compared variously to Max Bygraves, Tony Hancock and Tommy Coop-
er. His eyes seemed somehow wary and serious, though (‘The first thing I saw of
him when I opened the door was his eyes [. . .] their look that struck me as sad and
afraid’¹) and the things that he spoke about, when they were not simply baffling,
were often gloomy. He told a long story about a man being thrown off his motor-
bike, his body being cut in two by a wire fence ‘like a cheese cutter through
cheese’, and described this story as ‘a metaphor for the way the human condition
seems to treat humankind’. He wandered off into philosophical digressions, telling
us that life was ‘really all chaos . . . I cannot prove it is chaos any more than anyone
else can prove there is a pattern, or there is some sort of deity, but even if it is all
chaos, then let’s celebrate the chaos. Let’s celebrate the accidental. Does that make
us any the worse off? Are we any the worse off? There is still love; there is still hu-
mour.’ Somehow the man sounded uncertain of this, of the notion that chaos
could be ‘celebrated’. It was not said in a very celebratory way. There was also
some footage of a dead sheep, zooming in to a close shot of its bloodied head.
We didn’t like this at all. We got up and turned the television off before the pro-
gramme had ended. I made my way dutifully up to bed.

[helrunar]

I enjoy this song, Hymn to Herne, particularly at this season of the year.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_ttDLMuFWA&list=PLkKN4d4hugdP9dWdl3xyOgOhJN630qN1p&index=29

I keep meaning to write something about the novels of Chris Hunt, an author who published with Gay Men's Press in London between 1985 and 1999. Currently reading Thornapple which is set in 12th century Britain, France, Spain and elsewhither and has lots of interesting speculation about Pagan survivals, folk magic, herbalism, occultism and points beyond from Hunt's extensive reading. Most of her books are not on topic for the Vault so if I write something, maybe I'll just park it in this space for anybody out there who might be interested. All of Hunt's books seem to be available at a reasonable price via online used book sellers except for The Bisley Boy, a novel inspired by an old Yorkshire tradition that Queen Elizabeth I died at a young age of a serious illness and was secretly replaced by a male relative who looked enough like her, especially in the gender-concealing female clothing worn by aristocratic women in 16th century England, to be passed off as your actual Virgin Queen. (Quean?) That book goes for hundreds of dollars on various sites. I did read the library copy back in the 1990s and it was good, of its kind.

cheers, Hel (who's getting into a Samhain mood)

[Swan]

Shimmer, I recently found this Percy Grainger field recording of John Barleycorn, sung by a Lincolnshire man named William Short, dating from 1908:

sounds.bl.uk/World-and-traditional-music/Percy-Grainger-Collection/025M-1LL0010291XX-0101V0

Other recordings by Grainger:

sounds.bl.uk/World-and-traditional-music/Percy-Grainger-Collection

Interesting link to Grainger that I wasn't aware of:

steeleye.freeservers.com/sheetmusic.htm

[helrunar]

Thanks, Swan, for those links! Did I mention to you this fascinating documentary about Grainger I watched a few weeks ago--it dates to circa 1980, I think (date unknown):

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHxgChZiMy8&t=1s

I got into Grainger via Cyril Scott, another fascinating figure of that period. 

cheers, Shimmer

[𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr]

Oct 19, 2021 20:56:50 GMT helrunar said:

I enjoy this song, Hymn to Herne, particularly at this season of the year.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_ttDLMuFWA&list=PLkKN4d4hugdP9dWdl3xyOgOhJN630qN1p&index=29

I keep meaning to write something about the novels of Chris Hunt, an author who published with Gay Men's Press in London between 1985 and 1999. Currently reading Thornapple which is set in 12th century Britain, France, Spain and elsewhither and has lots of interesting speculation about Pagan survivals, folk magic, herbalism, occultism and points beyond from Hunt's extensive reading. Most of her books are not on topic for the Vault so if I write something, maybe I'll just park it in this space for anybody out there who might be interested. All of Hunt's books seem to be available at a reasonable price via online used book sellers except for The Bisley Boy, a novel inspired by an old Yorkshire tradition that Queen Elizabeth I died at a young age of a serious illness and was secretly replaced by a male relative who looked enough like her, especially in the gender-concealing female clothing worn by aristocratic women in 16th century England, to be passed off as your actual Virgin Queen. (Quean?) That book goes for hundreds of dollars on various sites. I did read the library copy back in the 1990s and it was good, of its kind.

cheers, Hel (who's getting into a Samhain mood)

Ooh, I found some on Internet Archive! I'm going to borrow soon. You need an account, but it's very easy to make one.

Mignon, Street Lavender, The Bisley Boy, and Duval's Gold! Which should I read first?

archive.org/search.php?query=chris+hunt&&and[]=creator%3A%22hunt%2C%20chris%22&and[]=creator%3A%22hunt%2C%20chris%2C%201962-%22

[helrunar]

Hi Princess,

Street Lavender was her first book, and I recently re-read it--it's about a teenager's odyssey in 1880s London into male prostitution. I think it would be a good one to start with.

Duval's Gold has to be one of her best novels--it seems to have been really well researched, and I learned a lot that wasn't covered in my 18th century British history class at University. It's quite a long novel--as all her books seem to be, but I love the feeling of entering the world of another time and place in what she writes.

Her books do involve sex but it's kept somewhat perfunctory. Still, I know Mother Superior would have a frowny-face if she knew you were perusing such work.

cheers, Hel

[𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr]

Oct 20, 2021 11:58:40 GMT helrunar said:

Hi Princess,

Street Lavender was her first book, and I recently re-read it--it's about a teenager's odyssey in 1880s London into male prostitution. I think it would be a good one to start with.

Duval's Gold has to be one of her best novels--it seems to have been really well researched, and I learned a lot that wasn't covered in my 18th century British history class at University. It's quite a long novel--as all her books seem to be, but I love the feeling of entering the world of another time and place in what she writes.

Her books do involve sex but it's kept somewhat perfunctory. Still, I know Mother Superior would have a frowny-face if she knew you were perusing such work.

cheers, Hel

What do you know about the author?

[𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr]

While looking for information on the author Chris Hunt, I found this. Most references seem to think the author is male:

masterofants.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/393332.pdf