Re: Lord Dunsany Revisited: The Modern Library Books
Posted by:
Sawfish (IP Logged)
Date: 26 July, 2021 10:45PM
Dale Nelson Wrote:
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> Hespire, to start with CAS vs. Dunsany:
>
> 1.I want to thank ED folk for your hospitality in
> that you have made me welcome even though precious
> little of what I've written has been about CAS,
> and it's probably been evident that he is not one
> of my favorite authors. Any time you think I
> should pitch my tent somewhere else on that
> account, let me know.
Not accepted.
You *have* to stay Dale.
>
> 2.Several years ago I set myself to read a fair
> bit of CAS and posted comments online, either here
> or at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Chronicles
> Forums. Guided by J. D. Worthington, I read
> enough of his stories to realize that there was
> more to his fiction than I tended to think. I'd
> have to look to see if I could find the remarks I
> posted. My sense is that Dunsany seems to make a
> point of the insubstantiality of his little tales
> where CAS doesn't.
>
> By the way, I think that habit of Dunsany's gets
> things off on the wrong foot with me any more. I
> mean, Dunsany calls various stories of his
> "dreamer's tales." But when you are dreaming, do
> your dreams seem evanescent, as it were shiny soap
> bubbles? I don't think they do, and I've actually
> had a practice -- kept in only a desultory fashion
> -- of writing down my more interesting dreams. I
> see I haven't added to the document since last
> December!
>
> So, anyway, we eventually realize that Dunsany's
> "dreamer's tales" work within an existing literary
> convention of his time, in which an artistic-type
> person, perhaps after supposedly smoking
> "Hasheesh," has a dream of some vaguely Oriental
> setting very different from his humdrum London
> residence.
>
> This type of story might be an attenuated
> descendant of a rather powerful book, Thomas de
> Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.
> I recommend the old Penguin Classics edition with
> the dragon on the cover if you can get hold of it.
> De Quincey's dreams are not various Dunsanian.
>
> Oh, by the way, here's a note jotted 18 April 1982
> that records an actual dream of mine -- about
> Dunsany. Perhaps others have dreamed of authors
> whom they have read.
>
> ----Just awoke (alarm clock) from a dream about
> Lord Dunsany. He was a lovable old man. Had a deep
> voice. He was very old but apparently was a friend
> of the family... maybe he was family? ...I was
> just beginning to tell him that his writing had
> given me a lot of pleasure for years ... when he
> pulled out a sort of wallet and took out some sort
> of and showed it to me and reminded me that I
> owed him 7.03 -- for a bus ticket (?) to
> "Pasadena" I had as a kid bought, I think. So Dad
> (I think) and I chuckled and I took out some
> money, first paying him 4 cents ("interest") then
> going into the paper money -- I had pounds,
> dollars, and roubles all mixed together. Then I
> woke up.----
>
> I wouldn't be able now to say whether I'd been
> reading anything by Dunsany lately, but I'd read
> Mark Amory's biography of Dunsany about a month
> previously.------
>
> And, fellow EDers, I have actually dreamed about
> Lovecraft once. Here are the notes:
>
> -----11 Oct. 2020: waking about 4:03 a.m.: I
> dreamed that H. P. Lovecraft had borrowed, by
> mail, a book from the collection of the Oregon
> Historical Society about a sea captain…. Now, I
> found the book on a shelf of a library, perhaps
> the Ashland public library, with an Oregon
> collection, and in it, sure enough, was a slip
> with Lovecraft’s name, address (I think
> Providence was abbreviated as Pice), and the
> date(s) he had borrowed it, perhaps in the early
> 1930s. I think Chautauqua (probably not spelled
> correctly), Ashland, was stamped in the book.
> “Chautauqua†isn’t a Lovecraftian entity but
> a word referring to a late 19th-early 20th-century
> adult education movement. In the dream it seems I
> got, as it were, a vision of the former location
> of the library from which the book that Lovecraft
> had borrowed had been mailed, which had an element
> of Ashland’s Lithia Park and perhaps of the
> massive Foellinger Auditorium on the University of
> Illinois-Urbana campus. I think it did seem, in
> the dream, that the book’s present location was
> less grand than its former one, but perhaps they
> were the same. I waited for many hours to type up
> this record from the notes I scribbled when I
> woke.-----
>
> It was a pleasant dream.
>
> 3.CAS seems to me more interesting than Dunsany
> biographically as regards Smith's location. I
> used to live not all that far from Auburn,
> California, when I lived in southern Oregon. And
> it's kind of intriguing to think of Smith writing
> while living in this small former Gold Rush (?)
> town. Dunsany seems to have been something of an
> aristocratic idler. I'm not interested in that
> Abbey Theatre business although I keep meaning to
> read more of Yeats's early poetry at least. It
> seems like Smith must have coped with some
> interesting factors.
--Sawfish
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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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