flemmings | (no subject)

Couch potatoing, plus pizza yearnings, plus grape wine drinkard-ing, and there is no health within us. I could at least have walked over to the pizza place but the weather page was saying rain and thundershowers, neither of which happened, so I ordered in and waited and called to the delivery guy as he was heading across the street because of course they had the address wrong. Some day I shall exercise, and maybe even garden, but that day is not today.

Returned a book to the library then went to check the holds shelf-- because I missed a hold on a book I wanted when a system glitch didn't tell me the hold was in, so now I no longer trust the system. Then as I was returning, saw out the corner of my eye a book entitled Ghostland, about the author and 'ghosts' in the English countryside as encountered in reading and (more than I'd have thought) on TV. Which is pretty much up my alley especially as he plunges right in with M.R. James's Lost Hearts. Didn't know that was set in the fenland but will believe it. Especially because of an unpleasant encounter with a John Gordon novel set in what I assume was the same area (yes: The House on the Brink set in East Anglia, with bonus possible! bog people and someone experiencing a sensation 'like graves opening', which phrase has haunted me for decades.) Of course he then segues into the more congenial Green Knowe books. Even though the original Green Knowe is also haunted.

This is fun even though I have to skip over all the bird and flora detail that goes right past a Canuck city child's knowledge. Brent geese? Grasshopper warblers? I can't recognize even our own urban birds by their calls though I think the pew-pew-pew birds are supposed to be cardinals? Anyway, in short order we're back to the master of the unheimlich, Robert Aickman, evidently also a fenman. Really, one wants again to quote Auden's stricture on flat places: Oh God, please, please don't ever make me live there.

Not helped that my other reading is The Haunting of Hill House because I've never read it and should. But. But. Jackson's stories are often enough allegories like Kafka, and as C.S. Lewis correctly said, rot him, if you know the plot of an allegory you don't need to actually read it. So I'm tempted just to wikipedia it. Or return to Paarfi, now that I've refreshed my memory of what Adron's disaster was. Or maybe finish Broken Homes: but I still can't envisage Skygarden and anyway-- well, yeah.