Once again, material I have rather enjoyed over the last month.
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Don't know how it happened, but this is the first time I've read any Hoffman. One had a certain remote image of what went into his works, and a notion that the Sandman was involved, but that doesn't really compare to the reality. I read an old translation by J.M. Cohen, released in the wake of the Powell and Pressburger film in 1952.
It's good - an excellent blend of mitteleuropan domesticity and exterior threats. 'The Lost Reflection' and 'The Sandman' are perhaps the most up-front memorable ones, but the others are just as powerful, in their fashion - the slow draw of the underworld in 'The Mines of Falun', for instance or the interweaving of artistic impulses in 'The Jesuit Church in Glogau'. 'Gamblers' Luck' is perhaps a little too much in the way of moralising melodrama, but taken as part of the whole I had no objections.
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Le Cercle Rouge is a 1970 film of Jean-Pierre Melville. It's a heist film with a fairly simple plot - but it looks absolutely gorgeous. There's something seasonal about the long wintery shots of the French countryside for the first-act manhunt - it has that lack of gloss that I associate with my own drab eyesight, combined with a clarity sufficient to display the action.
It's a heist film: police and thieves alike scheme and clash: third parties have hidden motives. The plot isn't simply an exercise in cliches, but I wouldn't necessarily say you are here for it over anything else.
Costume and sets are fairly lavish with the imagery of France at the time, which is something of a delight. I'd be interested to plug this into the Maximalist Weird Fiction Industrial Era material over on Grand Commodore. And speaking of which...
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The City of the Dead. Read this late November, a month after it's debut. It's the tale of a city falling to revolution and invasion - already a poignant and perilous setting - with one man trying to escape through it. Anyway, I knew that HCK could bring together the Maximalist 1920s pulp, but what it lacked was a necessarily fantastical element (Starling and Shrike are fantasy trope-like without being necessarily 'magic'). Anyway, as it turns out HCK can fit that in pretty damn well: there's an excellent pivot in this.
More to the point, there will shorlty be a full recording of this online: see this latest post. That's two ways for you to enjoy this.
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Rose Macaulay already had my attention with The Towers of Trebizond (those who know this work are even now reciting the first line) and kept it with several of her others (even if they circled the same themes and ideas). They Were Defeated is her historical novel set just before the English Civil War (I wouldn't call Told by an Idiot a historical novel - it covers the life of a family over something quite like Macaulay's own life).
They Were Defeated was published in 1932; my edition is from 2002 with a 1959 introduction by CV Wedgwood (of Thirty Years War fame). It's written in the language of the 1640s: in Macaulay's own phrase 'I have done my best to make no person in this novel use in conversation any words, phrases, or idioms that were not demonstrably used at the time in which they lived; though I am aware....that any attempt must be extremely inadequate'. Given that a great many of the characters in They Were Defeated actually existed (e.g, Robert 'Gather Ye Rosebuds' Herrick), there is a certain onus to try and get them right which Macaulay seems to have felt.
All that said, why do I enjoy it? The tone is ideal, living and swimming in the countryside and university of 1640s England. The restricted language referred to above makes this feel more definitively of another age - in addition to occasionally being quite fun: I would not object to the term 'she-darling' making a reappearance in popular usage.
In terms of historical weight - I quite enjoy the discussions of contemporary verse and it makes me ashamed I don't know Herrick and Cleveland and Milton better. The episode of the witch-hunt (coming in Part One, Bucolick - Cf. Academick and Antiplatonick) is particularly arresting as (variously) depressing, addressed by even the sympathetic, reasoning characters as basically necessary, drab and anti-climatic. If you aren't taking a turn for the pulpy, exploitative or melodramatic, this is how it should be done: I know everyone likes The Crucible, but not necessarily because it deals with the 17th century honestly.
Anyway, go and read more Rose Macaulay.
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BPRD: The Devil You Know: in which the Hellboy story lopes into a finale. I'm glad - amazed, almost - everything wrapped up and that the promised apocalypse was formally delivered. Is it a little overstuffed? Yes. Does this reduce the weight of certain given moving parts? Yes. Could I have done with some more art by Mignola himself? Yes. Was it worth reading? Not on its own.