Bran the Blessed

So I haven't checked out this new relaunch yet due to reasons of geography but if they are gonna do the same shit like they did in the original series, specifically Swamp Thing showing up, may I ask what the point is to have a new one ? : P

You didn't like Adventures in the Skin Trade?

 

That's funny, I usually find that those involved with the occult are some of the best practitioners of horror and fantasy.

It doesn't seem like Theosophy attracted the number of writers that the Golden Dawn did though. Almost all of the Golden Dawn's members were writers or artists, while Theosophy often tended to exert more of an influence indirectly on the world of fiction. You can see its influence on writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard, Lovecraft and his circle....even though they weren't directly involved with any occult movements.

Now, if you're talking all occultism, the Golden Dawn produced some of the finest writers of horror and fantasy fiction, in my opinion.

Guy Endore was also involved with Theosophy.

The novela itself was fine, everything else was a confused mass of incomprehensible gibberish.

And I've really not had any luck with this sort of think.

And I wouldn't go that far based off of this collection which incidentally is available online at

http://www.dailytheosophy.net/0001-home-2/03-literature-2/03-2-secondary-theosophical-literature/the-secret-mountain-and-other-tales-2/table-of-contents-2/

So I finished Kenneth Morris' The Secret Mountain and Other Tales. I was a bit warry at first since I've seen him linked to mysticism/theosophy online and let's just say people linked to these kinds of movements have written some of the worst and or most disappointing fiction I've read (Dylan Thomas' Adventures in the Skin Trade for one and Mrs. Peeke's Born of Flame for another) but this was a pleasant surprise. It also presented various different mythologies at their face value rather then being hostile or at best condescending towards the "poor ignorant savages not knowing any better but to follow a cultic offshoot of a bronze age mythology from a people who were subjugated to foreign rule for most of their history and thus clearly their God is one to look out for".

Yes that was a long time coming and was very cathartic.

Anyways the stories range from okay if a bit on the thin side to genuinely bittersweet or even tragic. The only story which I say doesn't exactly work is The King and the Three Ascetics, mostly for being so thin on much actually happening, though the repetition, if somewhat dragging in this story, is very much on point, as is the general structure of the thing as a whole, copying perfectly the composition of a folk legend straight out of Baital Pachisi. It's only too bad there wasn't more meat or emotion applied to this story.

Finished The Statue in the Air by Caroline Eaton Le Conte. If someone wants to read a short, entertaining narrative that is a new story in the garb of a Greek Myth, with the genuine Olympians accounted for, then you should read this book, as it deals with the theme of mythological battle against the forces of Chaos quite well, given the short length.

He did, but his book isn't half as good as M John Harrison's Climbers: if you fancy a novel about mountain climbing, that's probably the one to to go for.

I'm not really sure why I would.

Seems a bit overly....specific : P

Hmm I like this kinda stuff but not sure I could make it through 600 pages.

And Crowley wrote about Mountain climbing ?

Wow no one's posted here since the end of August.

You uncultured swines !

Kidding kidding : P

Just finished Number 56 and other stories by Catulle Mendès. The title story was a bit formulaic, and even with a few pages missing in the scan there was nothing really missing to the story, as it is just an in depth look at how far one person's denial can go, rather amusing but so obvious in how it will end it must have been written so intentionally.

A Wayside Village reminds me very much of Der Stationsberg from Oskar Panizza's Dämmerungsstucke, and it has Villiers de L' Isle Adam as a character, though barely.

The Cough, well, it's just about some guy who encounters a mysterious coughing sound at night on a deserted river island....and then it ends.

Luscignole, the final story, however well.....the comparissons to Poe at his most grotesque are well warranted in this story. If anyone here remembers me going on about how reading Doctor Arnoldi made me feel, then be warned as this story made me feel very similarily.

One is given pause at the fact this is apparently common knowledge in these parts : P

Never read any of the Doctor Who fiction, in fact many of these seem to be a rather obscure thing to get one's hands on, unless there's some sort of online releases of the older stuff I'm not aware off.

Oh right, the adaptation of The Daleks, that's the one where they changed stuff and never established where the characters came from right ?

Only bit of Audio Drama that doesn't seem to focus on the Doctor much that is Unit, but I haven't listened to that. Got it along with a few other old ones that Big Finish were giving away for free, including the one that's mostly a woman getting the plot infodumped her way via Collin Baker calling her up on the phone.

Bit of a stretch but maybe "Our Island Story" by H.E. Marshall ?

Ah no, it wasn't historical and I'm pretty sure the author was a guy.

I've read most of Jack London's fiction, and those stories don't seem to be triggering any memories of London.

The majority of London's writings can pretty much be divided between science fiction and "man vs. Nature" survival stories.

 

When you mentioned "Russian", it wasn't possibly Nabokov, was it? I remember he had some story about a barber, but I never read that one by him.

No, it was an english author, I believe I found an online version on Gutenberg many years back as well. It only came out with russian (or polish/czech maybe but that one isn't as likely ?) notes on the text to explain phrases and whatnot.

Wouldn't be a Jack London collection, would it?

I'm pretty sure it wasn't. It may have been, but I'm 98 % sure it was someone else.

I don't think anyone here's heard of this but here goes

I've been frantically trying to remember the name of a book I've read a long time back. It was a short story collection written, I'd assumed, in the 19th or early 20th century by an author with an english name that I think was a bit posh sounding but I'm not 100 % on that.

The two/three stories I remember is

The first one started out about this barber who was shaving a ludicrous amount of people for a small fee, not sure if it was done for the prison or not.

Not sure if this next was a continuation of it, but I do know it featured a woman who I believe was widowed and was being evicted, and this one man decided to marry her.

The third one was about a man stopping an old fashioned horse drawn carriage in London (maybe ?) which may or may not have been given an older sounding or dialect term for it, but the point of the story is the driver is very old and constantly brings in very small amounts of money back to his wife who is not happy about it, and he keeps saying that people don't care about horse carriages (or whatever other word the story used for it instead) anymore, because of more modern transporation.

I do think at least one story in the collection is called "Courage" or something similar, but that does't really help.

The whole lot was very melancholy and bordering on the sad if memory serves. I read an ancient booklet of it, without the cover, which was a word book sort of thing you were supposed to read in english and read the notes in the other language that this was ostensibly for, to help as an english learning tool.

I can't begin to scrape up anything more about this, the more I try, the more I just think of stuff in the russian Adventue Stories Collection from 1970 and that's not it.

Wow. I....I was not expecting that.

Condolences.

I haven't gotten around to read most of the Moore Swamp Thing but...didn't he do the Swamp Thing looks for Abigail Arcane story ?

what is too much?

When you get burn marks ? : P

Didn't Jean Van Hamme spend several years retiring but still making stuff anyway ?

I dunno, I can't exactly imagine a John Constantine not having that as his source of baggage but then again I marathoned the whole series and that kinda keeps coming up.

Personally not a fan of this animation style either, everyone is super stilted, bug eyed and stretched worse then an El Greco painting.

This made me chuckle:

Charity Bookshop begs not to be donated any further copies of 50 Shades...

I wonder what this fort looks like under a blacklight?

And so people will send copies to charity shops to be dicks.

Huh. I was not aware of these goings on.

Is Section 8 like early 90's Ennis or more like his non-Max Punisher run ?

Well, I just finished in about two days "A Night with Alessandro" by Treadwell Cleveland. Not a bad affair, though it does chronicle the events of a single night, and thus not as much of the reign of the penultimate Medici in Florence that I would have liked but I have to be gratefull someone wrote a historical piece centering on this period at all. The fact that a Medici other then Il Magnifico was focused on is, I think, a small miracle, especially outside of Italy.

So I just finished Rondah or Thirty Three Years in a Star by Florence Carpenter Dieudonne. This is a very, very strange novel. A bunch of folks get catapulted to a planetoid with living volcanic islands, talking bird men grown in pods, catastophic cataclysms, including angels and demons, an underground community from Atlantis and a seeming lack of any ageing or death, no matter how mutilated one becomes.

It doesn't become Doctor Arnoldi in Space, mind you, but the author does skip or only briefly summarises rather important sounding things and details. It does have sort of a mystical atmosphere, you know, where you don't have events happen quite logically but instead you see it as through a filter of thick glass, if I can describe it like that. Kinda reminds me in that way of Meyrink's Green Face, but this is both much more insane and is kind of worse in the writting department. Mind you it's kinda sad that the author hints at a massive war between Bird Men and evil Elves and then the Bird Men up and fuck off before that ever happens.

after reading what you wrote about "the city of beast"... you could spin that pitch into a metaphor for eradication of humanity (plagues) started by a religious zealot (the hebrew) to save the enviroment (atlantis).

Well, it's a lot more infuriating when the author thinks the guy doing this is a good guy.