I just don't get . . .

[Viva June]

a) M. R. James. Read a few stories, found them to be quite boring, couldn't care less about the misfortunes of gentleman scholars who take extended vacations in the Alps just to steal things from far-flung abbeys. Then I read them again, or I read some other ones, and I began to notice the attention James gives to details, such as how a ghost's nails may continue to grow in death and after, and the sense of crafted folklore, of realistic supernaturalism, so to speak, which pervades his work.

b) Not sure about this category.

c) Lovecraft.

[Joel]

a) Clark Ashton Smith – though actually I had an initial adolescent positive reaction based on seeing him as a Lovecraft surrogate. Then, for about a decade, I thought his work was stilted and lifeless. Coming back to him in my thirties I began to see the erotic and anti-clerical subtext and was duly impressed.

b) Jonathan Aycliffe – a good ghost story writer in formal terms but his reliance on the excessively gory payoff has disappointed me twice and I'm reluctant to give him another chance. Friends with good taste have told me I'm missing out, so one day I'll try again. Moral: if you build up a literary ghost story you need a denoument that is cerebral and complex, as in Leiber's longer stories, not one that says "OK, you've read the quiet stuff, here are some entrails as your reward."

c) H.R. Wakefield – and it's maybe not that I don't get him, rather that it isn't worth climbing over the snobbery, misogyny and cardboard characterisation to get to the undeniably impressive weird conclusion. It's like being trapped in a drinking club with a retired colonel who wants to share his opinion of 'women' with you. Moral: if you have a literary ghost story to tell you have to do so with intelligence and dignity from first to last, not just when you feel like it.

[MetaMortician]

Quote Originally Posted by Druidic

It's important not to confuse a nation's culture with its history. They are very different. As Shaw said, "We judge a criminal by his lowest moments, an artist by his highest." Think of culture as the Artist. Culture refers to a shared (implied) exposure to and love for the refinements of art; music, painting, literature. Even manners are considered a part of culture. But a nation's history is different. No one considers slavery as an episode of American culture; that would be the criminal at his lowest point. It's not really difficult to value one's culture if you realize its a separate thing from History..

This is all very strange. I am not quite sure that I am in any way obligated to esteem any culture or any history, including my own. The human condition seems to me a vast theatre of abject horror.

But to the original post:

A) Emily Dickinson - My cursory readings of her work left me feeling that the poems were merely lonely ramblings about birds and flowers and butterflies from a puritan spinster.

Not so now. Reading her through semiotic spectacles has drawn me into her otherworldly and thoroughly sorcerizing use of language.


B) Jorges Luis Borges - I want to want to like it, but I simply lack the coordinates to navigate many of his surreal worlds.


C) My list it too vast for this space. And to scornfully deride them by name would be pathetically impolitic given my unpublished status.