'Tis the Season = M.R. James

wikipedia on the de la gardies then and now:
The family's social status in France is uncertain; the founder, Ponce d'Escouperie, son of a tradesman, came to Sweden as a mercenary in 1565 and took the name Pontus De la Gardie when registered by the House of Knights. He was given the title friherre in 1571 and married Sofia Johansdotter Gyllenhielm, an illegitimate daughter of king John III in 1580.

The baronial title ended with his eldest son John De la Gardie. Pontus De la Gardie's second son, Jacob De la Gardie, was given the title count of Läckö in 1615; his grandson Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie became a favourite of Queen Christina and married her cousin, Countess Palatine Maria Eufrosyne of Zweibrücken (a sister of Charles X Gustav of Sweden).

The De la Gardie of Läckö comital lineage is extinct. The current head of the family, Carl Gustaf De la Gardie (1946– ), lives outside Linköping.

linköping is the swedish for microwave

CM is the one where Chorazin is referenced isn’t it? For all those Spectre vs Rector fans out there.

yup

chorazin-ah as MES refers to it 😇

pronouncing it convincingly would've been a good idea too

it has the same root as chorizo: he was on the black pilgrimage there to meet the prince of the air SPICY MEDITERRANEAN SAUSAGE

its-a me magnus

brb going to chatgpt for spector vs rector in the style of joe dolce.

https://mario.wiki.gallery/images/thumb/b/b5/Blooper_-_MarioPartyStarRush.png/1200px-Blooper_-_MarioPartyStarRush.png

Magnus's companion, earlier today

"as I sit here in my room noting these facts, I ask myself (it was not twenty minutes ago) whether that noise of creaking metal continued, and I cannot tell whether it did or not. I only know that there was something more than I have written that alarmed me, but whether it was sound or sight I am not able to remember."

from Wormwoodiana blog:

At the Cambridge University Library Special Collections website* Clarck Drieshen discusses the authentic medieval magical document, held by the library, which was deployed by M R James in his New Year's Eve 1931 ghost story 'The Experiment'. A fresh look at the manuscript identifies it as one known in other collections of 15th and 16th century magical texts and, by comparing these and re-examining the text, he reveals that James may have mis-read the name of the presiding spirit.

As he observes: "This changes the nature of the ritual from an angelic to a demonic one". The misinterpretation sounds itself like an incident that might have occurred in a Jamesian story, no doubt with drastic consequences . . .

(Mark Valentine) *https://specialcollections-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/?p=24166

it's true that james mis-decrypts a demon's name (""assaell", elsewhere known as "azazel") for one ordinarily associated with angels ("raffaell") -- he indicates his uncertainy with a question mark in the text and didn't have time or opportunity to go back and check as the story was on deadline and the library had closed for christmas -- but i am unconvinced james ever saw this ritual as in any routine way "angelic"! or perhaps more accurately that he would even have considered "angelic" a shorthand for things only nice and good: this is magic and it requires the advice and assistance of those we should not treat with, and it is always evil

in fact the otherness and predatory peril of angels (yes fallen, but they're still angels) sat directly within his purview as a scholar -- he himself had discovered or recovered a section of the latin translation of the biblical (or more accurately apocryphal) book of enoch, in which all this is expanded at some length. azazel even gets a passing mention (as a kind of sauron-when-still-fair figure):

Chapter 8
1 And Azazel taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made
known to them the metals of the earth and the art of working them, and bracelets, and
ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly
stones, and all
2 colouring tinctures. And there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and
they
3 were led astray, and became corrupt in all their ways (…)

cheers for that Azazel

Am now very worried for this instagrammer, who may not have read any MR James. LEAVE IT BE, MIKE, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT’S HOLY pic.twitter.com/cV2HfD5Qbe

— Helen Macdonald (@HelenJMacdonald) January 4, 2023

just watched Schalcken, it's on iPlayer until Saturday. loved all the Flemish art references

The climax is a little ripe I think - and I like expressionism over realism! - but the journey to it has lots of beautiful creepiness and creepy beauty, yes. And on reflection the whole thing, like all Flemish art, is about accountancy

I listened to the Christopher Lee readings over the last couple of days. God he's good. As ever with good readers, it's the way he manages silence.

I say 'listened to' as they make some nice use of different props and you get a sense of the ordering and layering James is doing with different narrative perspectives and devices but the re-enactments are largely pointless as drama.

any word of a new wrong-headed James adaptation on the BBC this year?

Oh that reminds me - the latest Blacklisted is an MR James special: https://www.backlisted.fm/episodes/199
The most excellent Andrew Male is the main guest.

I say 'reminds me' because my first thought when I saw the episode was 'don't let it be Gatiss'.

How is that as a podcast? The books they cover look like a really good range, but I'm a bit worried about general Media Liberal conservatism.

They do cover good books and I've discovered lots of great things through them but yeah, it's a bit Mojo for books.

i know andrew a little -- literally reviews editor for mojo, gave my book a nice thumbs up -- and (relatedly but anyway) i like him

I didn't mean to give the impression that any of that was about AM! I know him a little too (if one day record shopping and a few beers talking about Larkin counts) and totally agree. He's great and easily one of the best guests they have on Backlisted.

And the podcast is good! Just a bit what emil.y said, basically.

i enjoyed the podcast! thanks for sharing it

> any word of a new wrong-headed James adaptation on the BBC this year?

apparently the Christmas schedule is published (in drips and drabs) from start of December. i guess anything like this will be in the can already but I've not heard.

drama costs are sharing though (see cancellation of doctors) and i can see this being something they would cut (even though it's probably less than strictly's glitter budget)

sharing - soaring

decided last night it was that time of year to start a re-read, at least until i get distracted by something else

so, my first thought/question. in "Canon Alberic" exactly how long has the sacristan been successfully dodging that demon? feels like it's not as lethal as one would suppose

Canon Alberic himself managed a few years before it got him in bed, which also raises some questions

so as someone who will never not be thinking abt these stories, i think there's several possible things going on here (possibly all at the same time)

to establish the jamesian ground, you will perhaps recall that there is a story later in the first collections where the inconvenienced afterwards afterwards admits that the inconveniencer might have had no real power except to scare; being a threat only to the weak of heart (maybe)

well, the demon may only have the power to harass -- like a bully repeating the same annoying phrase over and over, the demon erodes the sacristan's sense of self and safety and the sacred simply by never letting up and always being there no matter how often or where he he prays

also (possibly): the sacristan is the caretaker of the church in which the scrapbook is housed rather than the actual owner of the book?
thirdly (maybe): scrapbook, sacristan and demon are all in the actual church, which acts as a general protection against the worst?

alberic by contrast was the maker of the book and in bed (hence presumably not in church lol); possibly also ill and weakened? (tho it also says his departue was "rather sudden" or similar, which speaks against any vulnerability others had observed… )

(or a bed-ridden ?) of illness)

the sacristan keeps the book in his house - this is where he takes it out of the chest when offering it to Dennistoun. the picture of King Solomon with the demon does show a victim with what seems like a broken neck tho without looking back that might be vague in a Jamesian way. "the power only to harass" still feels like a plausible read tho

like i don't want an actual canonical (thousand apologies) solution, i think it's just the first time i've thought about this specific thing

the detail that Dennistoun burns the original picture but has taken and keeps a photograph of it feels like it wants to be a relevant hint

This year's bbc ghost story for christmas appears to be

"Kit Harington and Freddie Fox star in Mark Gatiss’ adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Ghost Story for Christmas: Lot No.249."

( https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/mediapacks/bbc-christmas-whats-on-tv-iplayer-2023 )

"The Residence at Whitminster" last night. goes on a bit.

important related poll: Daddy Longlegs

that's right

general thought now i'm halfway or so thru the stories: James experiments with lots of different ways of narrating (despite his alleged conservative grumpiness). he chops the viewpoints of the stories up thru manuscripts (obv), reported accounts, narrator's voices, hints at and deferrals of plot developments. i guess i knew this but looking at it now i wonder if this presents an impediment to suitably Jamesian film adaptations - the need to tell a straight story flattens out the experience of reading them

what if his entire body of work is in fact the scrapbook of canon alberic

uh this is my strong view fwiw. james uses framing devices because seeing ghosts directly is hard - for good reason. framing devices - that is to say a manuscript within a story, an engraving within a tale told by an innkeeper - is much harder to manage in film in a consistent way. you need to use sepia tints, or visibly different clothes or whatever. in a story the tone and medium is the same. the frame is permeable and natural and not evident.

time to re-up my laborious essay on framing devices in ghost stories i guess sorry not sorry

https://diasyrmus.com/2009/10/29/mr-james-r-kipling-d-welch-three-ghost-stories-for-all-hallows-even/

excellent, and apologies if i've seen this before and forgot it in classic "my head" style

not at all. i think i diffidently offer it every now and again, but v much in “a link?” way. nothing to do with your head.

Thanks for the link Fizzles. I enjoyed it. The contemporaneous (ish) nature of those three writers would signal something? I think of Freud writing 'The Uncanny' in 1919, haunted by an entire continent of ghosts and James, in his role as provost, having to write letters of consolation to the parents of boys in his college.

I also wonder if the frames *produce* the ghosts somehow. A kind of slippage between worlds: the time is thrown out of joint and the ghosts come calling.

James reading the stories to his Christmas audience is yet another frame of course

i think the 'frames produce the ghosts' is right, at least in the terms i wrote in that piece - as i say 'frames are also portals'.

interesting point about the period. it is of course well known that the boer war had a direct impact on MR James, Arthur Conan Doyle and Kipling, and generally led to a long victorian period of seance and table tapping. I'm also reminded of W Benjamin on Leskov in The Storyteller

With the WorId War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent - not richer, but poorer in communicable experience? What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth. And there was nothing remarkable about that. For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.

i'm not sure any passage has better described what changes after generational death, and psychologically, spiritually, what it does. the ghost stories are both entertainments but also the psychological environment was propitious. imagination requires that is not a simple transaction though.

sorry, i'm post christmas part and i'm aware that's not v lucid! will try and do better tomorrow.

TPTV tonight 20:30 the stalls of barchester 1971
13th a warning to the curious 1972
15th lost hearts 1973

(all under the banner of 'a ghost story for Christmas'.

i noticed fopp was selling these as well, the bfi boxed sets. not particularly cheap though.

)

This one is pretty comprehensive I think. The bfi price is on the high side given that it's DVD rather than BR, but plenty of other places seem to have it for ~£20.

https://www2.bfi.org.uk/blu-rays-dvds/ghost-stories-christmas-expanded-six-disc-collection#:~:text=This%20expansive%20edition%20collects%20over,of%20the%20Ghost%20Stories%20for