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Only Aickman could use the word "chiaroscuro" twice in the same sentence and have it sound like the most natural thing in the world. Reading his sentence-craft is like watching the painting of a masterpiece.

I was not aware, until now, of Futurism's explicit links with fascism. I knew they were contemporaneous, but wasn't aware that the aesthetics of Futurism were tied in with notions of the "rush" of war. Interesting that those seeds were planted as early as 1909 in Italy. Still, no one saw the rise of fascism coming, or not as quickly as it did, by examining the tenants of Futurism in art.

I've read my share of treatises on linguistics and, in particular, arguments around the "Ur" language or Adamic language. I had often wondered why it was such a big deal. Seemed like a purely academic exercise, mental masturbation. Now, however, with Lachman's insight, I see that it is far, far more than that. It becomes a question of how we interface with "reality" and how it interfaces with us. It is profound!

Happy Bloomsday!!!

This section, showing how language has shifted from metaphorical, poetic usage to a more literal usage (with the advent of the scientific revolution) is quite good. Now I understand more clearly the impetus of the Romantic poets in using such flowery language. They were really revivalists or preservationists. They didn't strive for something new (though they effectively created it), they strove for the old tongue.

Now we get into the meat: Locke's and Decartes' agreements and disagreements, the inner versus the outer "self," and, most important to my mind, but only mentioned in passing, the fundamental difference between "fantasy" (collage-like constructions of what we observe) and "imagination" (something else entirely, something that emerges from within us, not as a collection of things from without).

One of the more straightforward and predictable stories of Aickman's tales, "The Waiting Room" makes up in execution (pardon the pun) what it lacks in originality. You know the plot (though I'm not going to reveal it), but you don't know with what exactitude and precision Aickman can write such a tried and true story until you read it yourself. Four stars.

Made it all the way to page 28 without having to read a sentence out loud multiple times in order to understand it. This is way easier than Deleuze! I think, though, that the philosophical morass is about to get thicker.

Jaz Coleman wrote a book? Looks like it might be extremely difficult to get a copy. But it might be worth it.

Left completely baffled by "Choice of Weapons". Is it a story of mesmerism? Vampirism? Hallucinatory madness? All of these? None? Lust and unrequited love, or a test of love, are at the heart of it, though there is an overtly political element to it, with its emphasis on caste and class. An engulfing story, especially at its twisted, unresolved ending. My brain is now churning. I love this vortex. Or maybe it's lust?

Just waiting for this escape to go horribly wrong. Not that it would be any more horrible than the current circumstance, at least in the mind of the narrator.

Mocked by the settlement's children and the ploughman, forced to shovel manure that was brought in just for that purpose - I'm waiting for this to go full-blown "Deliverance". I don't know how much more the narrator can take.

"Civilized" people seem to forget that getting back to nature means getting back to nature: Dirty, stinky, decaying, sweaty, scratchy, brutal nature. Careful what you with for.

I like the sprinkling of experimental grammar usage and prose poetry thus far. It's not so much as to spoil the meal, but it does much to enhance it. Nicely played.

By the way, if you haven't yet listened to the "Maps of the Lost" podcast, you're missing out on some creepy goodness.

"the urge to abstraction is the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of the outside world . . . We might describe this state as an immense spiritual dread of space."

In summation, existentialism breeds abstraction.

Interesting. I need to think about this for awhile. Seems to make sense on the surface, but I really need to meditate on that thought.

"Ringing the Changes" must have had a profound effect on David Lynch. Awkward, stilted conversation, the growing presence of a looming something, the unspoken, willfully-unacknowledged terrors felt by strangers in a community that seems to have "gone wrong," and the permanent, but unknown changes that come to those who have experienced true horror, are all Lynch's hallmarks. They are all present here.

Her expression indicated that she was one of those people whose friendliness has a precise and never-exceeded limit.

This is the sort of description that I love. I don't know that I could physically describe that expression, but I feel it.

I love that Aickman sees no need to explain Sally's "baby" in "The School Friend". This makes the reader split their fear between the lack of knowledge about the nature of the baby, the spectre in the house, and Mel's ambivalence about her decision to move or not to move to the Cyclades (not to mention whether or not she could trust Sally to remain sane). Splitting the horror causes gaps, and in those gaps is fear.

I like the historical contextualization of Picasso's Les Demoiselles and its critics, but the Freudian analysis is just way too much of a stretch for my tastes. I'm not big on Freudian critique of art (I agree with Jung here) and a good third of this essay takes the ridiculousness to the n-th degree. I hope there's not much more of this in here, but there's a lot of book to go, so I'm preparing for the worst.

Moving beyond the Quays' "Embellished Version of On the Deciphering the Pharmacist's Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets," past Holtzmuller's Liber Perutilis and on, now, to the Alfred Jarry texts on marionettes and puppets.

I also need to note the Quays' supposition on figure-8s, which are ubiquitous in their films, that their fascination with these figures is because of their natality.

I'm waiting for a jump.scare, but I haven't known Aickman to do jump scares. But I am getting creeped out about, well, everything. The house, Sally, the mutilated stuffed animals. It all makes me nervous. Amazing how Aickman can suggest that something is wrong at just the right moment, in just the right way, but so subtley that you forget he's done it until the sense of wrong grows again. Literary "cancer".

The claim that Matisse's Le Bonheur de vivre "opens the gates of twentieth-century art" seems a bit hyperbolic to me, at least in the context of an academic text like this one, but it's obvious that the painting served as a simultaneous collage (in the figurative sense) of and transition from the artistic trends that were moving immediately before it. It propelled 20-th century art forward, to be sure.

Note to self: Quote the interchange on p. 45 re: stories. It makes explicit what you love in the peripheral interstices of works you read and your writing, the shadowed recesses that are not always explicitly "plot," but that make the difference between adequate writing and enjoyable writing. The Quays make peeking into those crevasses their primary concern, but they exist in all truly great work.

There are 13 photos in here of the Quays' studio, which has now moved, according to the text. I have only seen glimpses here and there, so this is incredible, seeing the full-on photos of their workspace. It's as quirky as you would probably expect, a cinematic wunderkammer lab.

Note to future-self: Paraphrase or directly quote the section starting on page 8 regarding cinema, persistence, monotony, and physical objects. It is profound and insightful. Regards, your past-self.

The examination of Gauguin, Matisse, et al. exposes the Primitivism as, not a true account of "primitive" cultures, but a European interpretation of ideal "native" cultures through the distorted lens of "evolutionary anthropology," a rather condescending view of South Pacific, Asian, and African cultures with their accompanying distortions of form, which effectively dehumanize the subjects.

To win the secret of words, to make a phrase that would murmur of summer and the bee, to summon the wind into a sentence, to conjure the odour of the night into the surge and fall and harmony of a line; this was the tale of the long evenings, of the candle flame white upon the paper and the eager pen.

"The Purloined bibelot" is, well, a bibelot. At three and a quarter pages, it is a wisp, compared to the other work herein, but carries a powerful, if predictable punch, about the human need to damn another based on no evidence at all. This story punctuates the collection with another glimpse into the just plain rotten. Four stars, but given the context and the way in which it is used in the book, I bump it to Five.