'Tis the Season = M.R. James

i have a *theory* abt it which i am waiting to deploy on freaky trigger

only five others to go first eh

ghost story anthologists love a john atkinson grimshaw - quite a few examples iirc.

oxymoronish oxymoranic obv, xp to self.

haha i have a social history of the london context of jack the ripper with a john atkinson grimshaw, called -- with a degree of bathos -- after the shower

only five others: actually it's the next one to go up (but the writer -- not me -- hasn't finished it)

good to hear the series is being exhumed yet again.

All the others have one perfectly formed memorably nasty element

i am willing to forgive a lot in james if there is one perfectly formed memorably nasty element but to me that is just where these are lacking. two doctors is also exceedingly obscure, googling 'bedstaff' does not help much.

This reminds me that I started jumping around in my various Penguin collections of a similar vintage (Machen, Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith) and never returned to James. I shall have to do that.

the chrysalis! the chrysalis!

i have no idea what a bedstaff is, tbh i picture a big stick with a bedsheet nailed to it and move on

i could list the moments i mean (w/o looking them up) but it's a bit spoilery and unfair to djh

I have a collection of his stuff but never really got far into it. What's a really great one to start?

despite the various opinions here, including that he gets deeper and richer as he goes on, which is right i think, i'm not sure it really matters? If I remember rightly I picked up his stories (the first copy i had was Ghost Stories of an Antiquary and More Ghost Stories, and I just picked stuff I liked the look of. then re-read every winter. Have read all of them now I think (inc those not collected in the collected).

i'd be hesitant to tell you start with my favourites, partly because getting into him and his tone i think means you savour the best even more. would for this reason say 'just start with Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book and go from there where your nose takes you' but as you've presumably already done that, then pluck one you like the title of.

christ my use or rather abuse of brackets is a constant source of shame.

The titular(*) whistle is basically a supernatural equivalent of "Do not throw stones at this notice".

(*) noun/verb confusion notwithstanding

i've always imagined that the Templars or whoever originally made it had some way of managing whatever it summoned

I picked up a cheapo best-of reprint this weekend and am looking forward to reading it. Some Gerhard-style crosshatch illustrations throughout.

This seems like an interesting writeup by P Fitzgerald but am avoiding until I've read some of the stories.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/dec/23/fiction.books

There's a good and complimentary biography review in the lrb, and a bad and dismissive review of the collected stories which overplays the fear of sex angle. Both paywalled but here's a bit of the latter:

We don’t need to have read any of the Freud which James would have run several miles from to interpret what Mr Dunning in ‘Casting the Runes’ finds when he puts his hand into the well-known nook under his pillow: ‘What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being.’

Jones [sic]detects a vagina dentata

I'm gonna go with 'nope' there.

i've always imagined that the Templars or whoever originally made it had some way of managing whatever it summoned

The fur/fla/fle/bis inscription, likely translation "oh thief, you will blow it, you will weep" suggests otherwise, that it was made simply to punish and not even to protect any other treasure.

Martin's Close on bbc 4 at 10pm tonight. I might be asleep by then...

(can't place this one...)

it's the one that's a report of a trial, the ghost is a spurned and drowned woman with learning difficulties iirc. definitely not top tier.

It's from "More..." but still unfamiliar. Maybe that'll make for a better TV experience.

I had a bunch of the 15 minute radio versions from bbc4extra and they'd shuffle up whilst jogging around the park and really kill the mood.

Dunno if I'll see it tonight or catch up on iplayer over the holiday. 30 minutes seems a bit skimpy, we don't get them very often so a 45 minute film would've been nice. Most adaptations bar Jonathan Miller's aren't exactly formally daring tho

it's one of my favourite stories in the books but as a version it wasn't great:they played judge jeffreys as a twerp, where i think he shd be irresponsible playful and funny but switching on the instant to scary and sinister -- p sure he commanded his courtrooms, which this guy really didn't :(

oh and the line-reading of "with a knife value a penny" was wrong -- this isn't meant dismissively, it's simply a record of the worth of the object by which the murder was done, as routinely entered in judicial records of crimes committed

viz per the medieval death bot tumblr FAQ, for the question (no.2) Why is the price of this thing mentioned?

"That thing – be it a pot or a knife – is called a deodand and it’s something that is believed to have caused the death of an individual. The price of each deodand is appraised and gathered for the crown’s treasury. The crown was then supposed to use this money for pious means, in the light that a deodand is, in purest form, something forfeited to god. The deodand was either paid by someone in the village or taken out of the deceased’s chattels."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deodand

They also skipped the bit about john martin's name being spelt wrong on the indictment which I think gives a good indication of his deceitful character and desperation, as well as hanging over the story like a chekhov's shotgun only to misfire at the end.

Yeah maybe the Beeb should let somebody less basic than Gattis have a go next time. This was mostly not quite adequate.

i liked the dark pokeyness of the inn but not so much the windowed smallness of the court (which i guess i imagined wd be more rumpole-esque)

there's some nice annotative details here at rosemary pardoe's pleasingly nerdy james fansite: including a note on the misspelling legal claim which ledge mentions, pointing out that this is almost certainly a reference to a similar occurrence and claim in the 1660 trial of the regicide henry marten/martin (which claim failed, tho marten was not in fact executed, partly thanks to his courageous and able self-defence)

MRJ's curious little legal history in-joke here is one of several things that make me think something is going on in his mind during this story which is not set out clearly: viz the date of the martin's close trial and martin's execution (via clues in the text) = late 1684, towards the very end of charles ii's reign (viz its 36th year, as measured from the death of charles i -- i.e. excluding the cromwellian interregnum). charles ii's successor, his brother james ii, acceded to the thone in feb 1685. the monmouth rebellion against james took place in the west country (= very much round where this story is set) this same summer, followed by the bloody assizes that made judge jeffrey's reputation, the grim consequence of this rebellion's defeat.

(the titus oates trial mentioned above -- actually a retrial -- also took place in earlyish 1685…)

all this (IMO) is mood music is MRJ's head during this story -- as jeffreys' backstory -- but very little of it is mentioned clearly and so i don't really know what to make of it all lol

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000cn0h

Ghost Stories From Ambridge: Lost Hearts

On a biting December night, Jim Lloyd enthrals Ambridge residents with the story of a young boy who arrives at the house of his generous benefactor to find all is not as it seems.

https://unbound.com/books/casting-the-runes/

Crowdfunding for a book of his letters

weird that this hasn't been done already

Yeah, some editions of his books have several letters included but it is weird there was never a dedicated book.

I've had the Collected for years but never read it. Reading a story a night and thoroughly enjoying myself. I've just finished the Ash Tree, which creeped the shit out of me. I'm also following along with the Freaky Trigger marginalia and thoroughly enjoying these, too. Hat-tip to Mark.

Stalls of Barchester on bbc4 tonight, 22:15 and which, according to iplayer, hasn't been broadcast since Christmas eve 1971, but i don't know how accurate that is.

(opposite it on ch5 is a ghost story about an antique book dealer...)

Mark V pitches in:

Thirty years ago this year, Rosemary Pardoe published The James Gang – A Bibliography of Writers in the M.R. James Tradition (1991). This provided a checklist of books and stories following in the antiquarian ghost story form perfected by James, as well as those (not necessarily in that style) by his circle of friends. Hugh Lamb, who had drawn up a “James List” for his own use in 1973, provided an introduction.

This soon became an invaluable reference source for any enthusiast repining that James’ stories are all very well, but there just aren’t enough of them. Rosemary has said she would like to see the list updated with similar work published since her list—but is not volunteering to do it! There would certainly be a lot more to list, not least because of Rosemary’s own work with the Ghosts & Scholars journals and anthologies.

The James Gang is organised alphabetically by author surname, but I thought it would also be interesting to arrange the main items (not all of them) chronologically, to get a sense of how the Jamesian story developed. I have here focused on books, or groups of stories, rather than individual stories, though these are included in the original booklet.
Here 'tis:
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2021/11/a-chronology-of-writers-in-m-r-james.html

Seems like she should have found another title: Thee M.R. The Merrier?

Bible Black and Starless? Geddit King James

Stalls of Barchester on bbc4 tonight, 22:15 and which, according to iplayer, hasn't been broadcast since Christmas eve 1971, but i don't know how accurate that is.

(opposite it on ch5 is a ghost story about an antique book dealer...)

― koogs, Sunday, 31 October 2021 19:19 (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Def not accurate, I used to have it taped from a mid-2000s repeat.

well i've bookmarked that list anyway, hope it's full of people who are good like MRJ not just boring cargo cult MRJ *cough*Susan Hill*cough*

yeah i swear i've watched Barchester on TV in the last few years

> (opposite it on ch5 is a ghost story about an antique book dealer...)

this was by Susan Hill...

i know that's what made me think of her

nb i have never nor will i ever read her work

I've taught The Woman in Black a few times. It's a bad book. The upsides are the film from 1988 and particularly the stage show, which is just terrific.

A Warning to the Curious starring Peter Vaughan is on iPlayer now, proper East Anglian uncanny

That story is the subject of the best episode (or two) of ‎A Podcast to the Curious, going into detail on James' experience of WW1 and how it plays into the story. Though they gloss over the strangely mutable dig site (Paxton takes a train back from the dig, then later on they all walk to it from the hotel in half an hour or so.)

the passage where paxton mentions the train is odder even than that really -- bcz he's clearly describing being shadowed on his walk back to the hotel! i wonder if what it means (but doesn't say at all clearly) is that he was aiming to catch a train first thing in the morning from seaburgh (since he now has the crown) but actually never does: instead he returns to the hotel and slumps there in despair

this allows the dig to be not far from the hotel on the outskirts of the town (of course coastal trains also had stops every two minutes in the 1900s)

Aye, you recall that too, friend mark.

he's clearly describing being shadowed on his walk back to the hotel! i wonder if what it means (but doesn't say at all clearly) is that he was aiming to catch a train first thing in the morning from seaburgh (since he now has the crown) but actually never does: instead he returns to the hotel and slumps there in despair

i thought he was being shadowed on his walk from the dig to the station? i guess he does say 'take a train back' which is ambiguous, but he mentions getting into the carriage, if he then got too spooked and jumped out again he probably would have mentioned that too. i think in the podcast they say he got the train to hide the fact of where he was digging but there's nothing in the text to support that.

this article shares my feeling that it's just a slip of james' mind, around which we are free to construct whatever spooky explanation we choose ("the sheer fear that Paxton experiences while being chased along the beautifully desolate beaches and forests forces the very logic of the topography to dissolve" suggests another article on the tv version):

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~pardos/ArchivePleasing.html

yes you're right i'd totally forgotten the bit abt the porter (possibly bcz it's a bit too like a similar passage in casting the runes)

the opening paragraph also strongly suggests that the burial mound is on the outskirts of the town (which is not very big even now)

Not sure the extent to which these were oral stories before they were published or whether that matters too much but I hadn't noticed and it's worth thinking about

many of them were written to be read aloud iirc

(funny that 'M R James' doesn't find this thread but 'MR James' does despite not being a match for title)

anyway, Lost Hearts on bbc4 tonight (and this has been recently repeated, assuming it's the same version with the creepy white children, but my recording missed the end)

I thought Warning to the Curious was great, and I don't think I'd seen it before

love the demon. such a good boy!