10 Books A Day: #16

James Branch Cabell and Richmond-in-Virginia...Edgar Macdonald...University Press of Mississippi

Falstaff...Robert Nye...Little, Brown

Faust...Robert Nye...Putnam

The Late Mr. Shakespeare...Robert Nye...Arcade

Mrs. Shakespeare: The Complete Works...Robert Nye...Penguin

Arthur Rex...Thomas Berger...Delacorte Press

The Pyrates...George MacDonald Fraser...Knopf

Boy In Darkness...Mervyn Peake...Hodder Children's Books

Letters From A Lost Uncle...Mervyn Peake...Methuen

The Gormenghast Novels: Titus Groan/Gormenghast/Titus Alone...Mervyn Peake...Tusk Overlook

The Circus Of Dr. Lao...Charles G. Finney...Bison/University Of Nebraska Press


Just some random notes: the illustration is by Frank C. Pape from James Branch Cabell's Figures Of Earth. Robert Nye's books are all written in the style of Thomas Urquhart's translation of Francois Rabelais...Thomas Berger is one of the few authors I have seen in the flesh..."King Arthur, who was never historical, but everything he did was true"...Fraser has written the best swashbuckling book ever, and the scripts for the old Michael York Musketeers movies that were popular in my youth...Boy In Darkness is an excised section from the Gormenghast books, recounting an adventure of Titus in the lost recesses of the castle...I looked for a copy of The Circus Of Dr. Lao for twenty-five years before I finally found one.

Mujina: A Story From Lafcadio Hearn's "Kwaidan"

MUJINA

On the Akasaka road, in Tokyo, there is a slope called Kii-no-kuni-zaka--which means the Slope of the Province of Kii. I do not know why it is called the Slope of the Province of Kii. On one side of the slope you see an ancient moat, deep and very wide, with high green banks rising up to some place of gardens;-- and on the other side of the road extend the long and lofty walls of an imperial palace. Before the era of street-lamps and jinrikishas[rickshaws], this neighborhood was very lonesome after dark; and belated pedestrians would go miles out of their way rather than mount the Kii-no-kuni-zaka, alone, after sunset.

All because of a Mujina that used to walk there.


The last man who saw the Mujina was an old merchant of the Kyobashi quarter, who died about thirty years ago. This is the story, as he told it:

One night, at a late hour, he was hurrying up the Kii-no-kuni-zaka, when he perceived a woman crouching by the moat, all alone, and weeping bitterly. Fearing that she intended to drown herself, he stopped to offer her any assistance or consolation in his power. She appeared to be a slight and graceful person, handsomely dressed; and her hair was arranged like that of a young girl of good family. "O-jochu (honorable damsel)," he exclaimed, approaching her--"O-jochu, do not cry like that!...Tell me what the trouble is; and if there be any way to help you, I shall be glad to help you." (He really meant what he said, for he was a very kind man.) But she continued to weep--hiding her face from him with one of her long sleeves. "O-jochu," he said again, as gently as he could--"please, please listen to me!...This is no place for a young lady at night! Do not cry, I implore you! Only tell me how I may be of some help to you!" Slowly she rose up, but turned her back to him, and continued to moan and sob behind her sleeve. He laid his hand lightly upon her shoulder, and pleaded: "O-joch!--O-jochu!--O-jochu!--Listen to me, for just one little moment!...O-jochu!--O-jochu!"...Then that O-jochu turned round, and dropped her sleeve, and stroked her face with her hand;--and the man saw that she had no eyes or nose or mouth--and he screamed and ran away.

Up Kii-no-kuni-zaka he ran and ran; and all was black and empty before him. On and on he ran, never daring to look back; and at last he saw a lantern, so far away that it looked like the gleam of a firefly; and he made for it. it proved to be only the lantern of an itinerant soba(noodle)-seller, who had set down his stand by the road-side; but any light and any human companionship was good after that experience; and he flung himself down at the feet of the soba-seller, crying out, "Aa!-- Aa!!-- Aa!!!"...

"Kore! Kore!" roughly exclaimed the soba-man. "Here! what is the matter with you? Anybody hurt you?"

"No--nobody hurt me,'' panted the other--"only...Aa! aa!..."

"--Only scared you?" queried the peddler, unsympathetically. "Robbers?"

"Not robbers--not robbers," gasped the terrified man..."I saw...I saw a woman--by the moat;--and she showed me...Aa! I cannot tell you what she showed me!"...

"HE! Was it anything like THIS that she showed you?" cried the soba-man, stroking his own face--which therewith became like unto an Egg...And, simultaneously, the light went out.

10 Books A Day: #15

The Selected Writings Of Lafcadio Hearn...ed.Henry Goodman...Citadel Press

Kwaidan: Stories And Studies Of Strange Things...Lafcadio Hearn...Tuttle Publishing

Oriental Ghost Stories...Lafcadio Hearn...Wordsworth Editions

Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey Of Lafcadio Hearn...Jonathan Cott...Kodansha International

The Mammoth Book Of Victorian And Edwardian Ghost Stories...ed. Richard Dalby...Carroll & Graf

The Mammoth Book Of 20Th Century Ghost Stories...ed. Peter Haining...Carroll & Graf

Collected Ghost Stories...M. R. James...Wordsworth Classics

Classic Victorian And Edwardian Ghost Stories...sel. by Rex Collings...Wordsworth Classics

Barlowe's Guide To Fantasy: Great Heroes And Bizarre Beings From Imaginative Literature...Wayne Douglas Barlowe...Harper Prism

Merlin: Shaman, Prophet, Magician...John Matthews...Mitchell Beazley


Lafcadio Hearn was born in 1850, the son of an Anglo-Irish soldier and a Greek woman, on the little island of Lafkado (hence his name; he was originally christened Patricio Lafcadio Tessima Carlos Hearn). He went to live with his father's family in Ireland at the age of two; at nineteen he came to live in the United States, where he settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. Here he began his career in journalism, and became popular as a vivid and sympathetic reporter on sensational crime, low life, and what we would call outsider culture, all the while cultivating his "erratic, romantic, and rather morbid" interests. His marriage to a black woman (at the time an illegal act) cost him his job at the paper and eventually forced him to leave Cincinnati. In 1877 he went to New Orleans, and for ten years wrote books and articles on the people and culture there; he is attributed with popularizing the concept of New Orleans as "a place apart" from the rest of the US, and his book on cuisine is still influential on the cookery there. As a journalist he would travel on commission to places to write about them; he left Louisiana in 1887 to spend two years in the West Indies, and then in 1890 he went to Japan. It was in Japan that he finally found his spiritual home. He found the charm of that ancient culture and the nature of the people so congenial that he married into a samurai family, became a naturalized citizen (taking the name of Koizumi Yakumo, by which he is still known in that country), and got a job teaching Western literature in a university there. He continued to write for Western readers, however, and displayed an unusual talent for mediating Japanese culture; most American and European concepts of Orientalism were of the faux "Chin-Chan-Chow" variety. Hearn's writing is delicate, grotesque, romantic, "fairy"; his stress is on the common humanity of his subjects. He died in 1904. He is still remembered fondly in Japan; there are university positions, bookstores, inns, and a memorial park named after him. The movie Kwaidan is an adaptation of four of his ghost stories.

10 Books A Day: #14

Boxing Stories...Robert E. Howard...Bison Books/University Of Nebraska Press

The Best Of Robert E. Howard Volume I: Crimson Shadows...Robert E. Howard...Del Rey

The Best Of Robert E. Howard Volume II: Grim Lands...Robert E. Howard...Del Rey

The Savage Tales Of Solomon Kane...Robert E. Howard...Del Rey

The Coming Of Conan The Cimmerian...Robert E. Howard...Del Rey

The Conquering Sword Of Conan...Robert E. Howard...Del Rey

The Bloody Crown Of Conan...Robert E. Howard...Del Rey

Kull: Exile Of Atlantis...Robert E. Howard...Del Rey

Bran Mak Morn: The Last King...Robert E. Howard...Del Rey

The Horror Stories Of Robert E. Howard...Robert E. Howard...Del Rey

I didn't realize until I came to make this list that I had ten other trade paperback copies of Howard's work. The "Best Of" volumes contain short stories of various kinds; the three volumes on Conan contain all Howard's work on his barbarian creation; Kull is Conan's precursor both in Howard's Hyborian World and in creation; Bran Mak Morn is the last Pictish king in the time of the Roman invasion of Britain; and Solomon Kane is the Puritan adventurer who gets to have one of the greatest operatic lines Howard ever wrote: "Some fires may be hotter than others, but all flames-save those of Hell-may be quenched in blood!" The Del Rey volumes are all illustrated throughout by modern artists, but in the pulp style.

Howard is a fascinating study of contradictory characteristics. As a writer in a small town in the "wilderness" of Texas, he had neither the resources of a "civilized" city to draw on or the unlimited free frontier of which he dreamed. He admired "urbane" writers like H. P. Lovecraft and James Branch Cabell, but struggled to create his own flexible, snappy, modern style. A man who lived by his own romantic code of honor, and believed that in the end if it could not be defended by less "sophisticated" minds it must still be upheld by brawn and blood if felt in the heart. This is, I believe, a peculiarly acute Texan characteristic, and does not always endear us to the rest of the world; it can be seen today, I think, in the attitudes of Hank Hill on King of the Hill.

10 Books A Day: #13

John Dee: The World Of An Elizabethan Magus...Peter French...Dorset

John Dee: Essential Readings...Selected by Gerald Suster...Crucible

The Queen's Conjurer...Benjamin Woolley...Henry Holt and Company

The Art Of Memory...Frances Yates...University Of Chicago Press

Giordano Bruno And The Hermetic Tradition...Frances Yates...University Of Chicago Press

Paracelsus: Selected Writings...ed. Jolande Jacobi...Princeton University Press

The Gnostic Scriptures...tr. Bentley Layton...ABRL Doubleday

The Druids...Stuart Piggott...Thames and Hudson

Magi: The Quest For A Secret Tradition...Adrian G. Gilbert...Bloomsbury

The Quest For Merlin...Nikolai Tolstoy...Little, Brown

Merlin...Norma Lorre Goodrich...HarperCollins

Merlin: The Prophet And His History...Geoffrey Ashe...Sutton Publishing

Ghosts: True Encounters With The World Beyond...Hans Holzer...Black Dog & Leventhal

The Encyclopedia Of Ghosts...Daniel Cohen...Dodd Mead

The Encyclopedia Of Monsters...Daniel Cohen...Dodd Mead

The Complete Guide To Mysterious Beings...John Keel...Doubleday

Cryptozoology A To Z...Loren Coleman & Jerome Clark...Fireside/Simon & Schuster

The Goblin Universe...Ted Holiday...Llewellyn

The Occult: A History...Colin Wilson...Vintage


The first half of today's list could very well be subtitled "The History Of Magic"; then it sort of shades into Fortean subjects, winding up with Colin Wilson's book,which is a perfect balance of the two.

Dr. John Dee (1527-1608) has been poorly treated by history for many years. For a long time either despised as a necromancer or pitied as the credulous dupe of Edward Kelly, some of the dirt that has accrued to his portrait has been cleared away and more arresting details of his life have come to the fore. He was one of the most learned scholars of his time: as an historian he first coined the term "Great Britain"; as a mathematician (at a time when that was virtually equivalent in the popular mind with the Black Arts) he was an expert on codes, and it is believed he might even have acted for Sir Francis Walsingham as a spy abroad under cover of his alchemical pursuits; as an astrologer he chose the most propitious day for Queen Elizabeth's coronation (and although it rained that day, the glory of her reign makes one wonder if he chose the right day, at that). Although he acted as Elizabeth's occasional counselor, he was in danger of burning both in the time of Catholic Mary and later under Scotch James, and when he died his house was looted and his library (one of the greatest private ones at the time, and containing much that had been salvaged from the dissolution of the monasteries) was raided and trashed. His "magic" was astrological and alchemical (disciplines undifferentiated at the time from astronomy and physics), and the invocation of angels through the practice of "scrying". It was through his efforts at scrying that he met Edward Kelly, who by degrees conned Dee until the "angels" suggested the swapping of wives; they parted ways soon thereafter. It was for these antics that Dee was remembered long afterward in gossipy accounts such as John Aubrey's; it is only after the researches of Dame Frances Yates that his associations with Elizabeth, Sir Philip Sidney, Drake, and Raleigh are recalled. But Dee may have made a more indelible image in popular culture after all; the character Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest is said to be based on Dee, and through this play the archetypal image of the wizard and magician influences all others after it in English literature.

Lot of good names from the field of the Weird Sciences here. Holzer, Cohen, Keel, Coleman, and Wilson have all published multiple volumes on outre and fringe subjects.

10 Books A Day: #12

The Complete Fairy Tales Of The Brothers Grimm...Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, tr. by Jack Zipes...Bantam

Great Swedish Fairy Tales...tr. Holger Lundbergh, ill. by John Bauer...Delacorte Press

Scandinavian Folktales...tr. and ed. by Jacqueline Simpson...Penguin

Russian Fairy Tales...collected by Aleksandr Afanas'ev, tr. Norbert Guterman...Pantheon

Irish Folk Tales...ed. Henry Glassie...Pantheon

Heimskringla; or, The Lives Of The Norse Kings...Snorre Sturlason...Dover

The Kalevala; or, Poems Of The Kaleva District...Compiled by Elias Lonnrot, tr. Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr....Harvard University Press

The Story Of King Arthur And His Knights...Howard Pyle...Scribners

Jack The Giant Killer...retold and ill. by Richard Doyle...Children's Classics Everyman's Library

Tyll Ulenspiegel's Merry Pranks...Moritz Jagendorf...Cadmus Books

The Adventures Of Baron Munchhausen...ill. by Gustav Dore...The Book League Of America

The Scarecrow: Fact And Fable...Peter Haining...Robert Hale/London


The main draw of Great Swedish Fairy Tales for me are the illustrations by John Bauer. As you can tell from the sample shown above, his great depictions of trolls influenced both their designs in the Rankin/Bass production of The Hobbit and Brian Froud's design of the Mystics in The Dark Crystal.

Tyll Ulenspiegel is a once famous European folk character, noted for his "sharp wit, keen wisdom, and rough pranks." His last name translates as "owl-mirror", and is sometimes listed as "Howleglass"; he was seen as lifting up a wise but playful mirror to the folly of the world. The old prank of "the horse with his head where his tail should be" is attributed to him, and many of his original "jokes" (not illustrated in this children's book about him) involve excrement. He has since gone the way of many an elderly vaudevillian, retired as hokey and crude, but still appreciated by a few.

I found the scarecrow book by Peter Haining while researching my post about scarecrows, and had to get it. Peter Haining is an uber-fan, a collector and collator, an editor of rare skill, and has put together some of the greatest anthologies of stories and illustrations that the world of weird tales has ever known. He is to be appreciated, revered, and magnified forever.

10 Books A Day: #11

The World Treasury Of Children's Literature, Vols. I, II, & III...ed. Clifton Fadiman...Little, Brown

The Random House Children's Treasury: Fairy Tales, Nursery Rhymes, And Nonsense Verse...ed. Alice Mills...Derrydale Books

The Complete Nonsense Books Of Edward Lear...Edward Lear...Castle Books

The Complete Tales Of Uncle Remus...Joel Chandler Harris...Houghton Mifflin Co.

100 Story Poems...selected by Elinor Parker...Thomas Y. Crowell Company

Indian Fairy Tales...Joseph Jacobs...G. P. Putnam's Sons

The Arabian Nights...ill. Earle Goodenow...Illustrated Junior Library

English Fairy Tales...Joseph Jacobs...Dover

The Oxford Book Of Carols...ed. Percy Dearmer, R. Vaughan Williams, Martin Shaw...Oxford University Press

Many children's stories and fairy tales today. The picture above is from English Fairy Tales, and shows the King of Elfland in the Dark Tower menacing Childe Rowland and his sister Burd Ellen. This story is referenced in King Lear, in one of the Fool's songs. An interesting thing I learned in the book of carols is that this type of song was not only for Christmas; there are Easter, summer, and harvest carols as well.