Angela Carter, “Black Venus”, Black Venus
[Text ID: “Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart.”]
As you’re pretty, so be wise
Wolves may lurk in every guise
Now as
then, ‘tis simple truth
Sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth.
The Company of Wolves (1984) dir. Neil Jordan
“October, crisp, misty, golden October, when the light is sweet and heavy.”
— Angela Carter (via quotemadness)
“His eyes are quite green, as if from too much looking at the wood. There are some eyes that can eat you.”
— Angela Carter, from “The Earl-King” featured in The Bloody Chamber & Other Stories
I. s01e02, “Amuse-Bouche”, Hannibal, dir. Michael Rymer, written by Jim Danger Gray
II & III. excerpts from the script of “Amuse-Bouche”
IV, V & VII. Phantom Thread, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
VI. “Phantom Thread”: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Furious Fusion of Art and Love, Richard Brody (x)
VIII. “The Erl King”, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Angela Carter
IX. mushrooms growing “in a way that makes them look like fingers reaching up from under a fallen tree” (x)
(graphic set) of THE BLOODY CHAMBER AND OTHER STORIES written by angela carter
“His wedding gift, clasped around my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.” - The Bloody Chamber
Not Your Fairy Godmother
The story Edmund Gordon tells in his superb new biography The Invention of Angela Carter isn’t the traditional once-upon-a-time kind, but it has a heroine as unforgettable as the ones in fairy tales.
Angela Carter was born on May 7th 1940 in Eastbourne, on the southern shore of England, the place to which her mother and older brother had been evacuated some months earlier. A few weeks later British forces were expelled from Dunkirk in France and retreated across the channel, making people realize that it had been a silly idea to flee the capital by moving closer to the front, and the family returned to London. Carter grew up there in relatively privileged circumstances, though she was oppressed by the generally stultifying atmosphere of post-war austerity and the smothering attentions of her overprotective mother. As she came of age, she developed a fierce independence; in the words of critic Joan Acocella, “she rebelled, went on a diet, and changed from a fat, obliging girl to a skinny, rude girl. She slouched around in short skirts and fishnet stockings, smoking and saying offensive things.”
For a young woman in those days the easiest escape was into marriage, and so at 20 she found an obliging partner who gave her little other than the last name under which she later made herself famous. It was during their troubled relationship that she started writing in earnest, but it was only when she abandoned him to travel to Japan that her artistic life really began. Drawing on English folklore, personal domestic experience, continental philosophy, a newly radical feminism, South American magical realism, and a touch of genius all her own, she produced a kind of fiction that no one had before.
Novels such as The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman and Nights at the Circus and story collections such as The Bloody Chamber and Burning Your Boats became staples of college syllabi in both English and women’s
studies classes and favorites of the general reading
public. As Carter’s fame grew (though it never reached the level she deserved) she won prestigious literary prizes, served on literary prize juries, and traveled the world teaching and writing. The cult-like devotion of her most avid followers, along with the eccentric fashion she embraced, encouraged the media to represent her as a sagacious earth mother figure, a role she ardently resisted, insisting as always on her independence. She did enter a mutually contented second marriage with a man eighteen years her junior and, at a later stage in life than most, embraced literal motherhood when she gave birth to a son in 1984.
In 1991, just after the publication of her novel Wise Children, she was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and died less than a year later in the prime of her career at the age of 52. The loss was immeasurable, though we can get a sense of it by considering the other writers she continues to influence. Without the work she left with us we probably wouldn’t be able to read Geek Love by Katherine Dunn or The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey or Swamplandia! by Karen Russell or Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link or The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern or The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender or Tenth of December by George Saunders or Brightfellow by Rikki Ducornet.
In an alternate universe Angela Carter would even now be an elder stateswoman for literature, and there’s no telling where her muse would have taken her–or us–during the intervening years. We should be grateful to Edmund Gordon and to Oxford University Press for giving us the best road map to those imaginary lands.
–James
theglintoftherail asked:
If you are into Seasonal Reads and also Antarctic Stuff, and you haven't read Endurance by Alfred Lansing, you GOTTA. It's nonfiction but if it wasn't, it could still go on my list of favorite novels, it's that well-written. Also read Winderdance if you want to see how the author of Hatchet 1. loves sled doggies and 2. appears to have a near-suicidal lack of awareness of his own mortality
I LOVE ANTARCTIC STUFF, and also have a serious soft spot for non-fiction! Thank you!!
chibisashimi replied to your post “okay so you probably have already answered this question but you have…”
i love this list! Did you also enjoy Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus? I have always felt that that book, with everything it says about artifice and presentation, would be a Hannibal Lecter book, so to speak.
Ooh I have not read that one, but it’s totally getting added to my own To Read list too!
amotleycrew asked:
okay so you probably have already answered this question but you have excellent taste so. might as well try. I have divested my local library of all books even remotely worth a shit. what are some fiction books you would recommend, please?
In fact I have not answered this, and I am so so flattered! Let’s see what I can do for you, dear!
First up, as a general note I am preposterously SEASONAL about stuff, so I hope you’re ready for some SEASONAL RECS.
Fall Reads
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Chabon, Michael
This is a fictional telling of the origin of superhero comics, rooted deep in the reality: that they were created by poor, queer Jewish boys in Brooklyn, NY during World War II, and are inextricably tied to all those facts. This is a vast and sweeping story, much like comic books themselves (oh Chabon!), heroic and sad and funny and human, thick with arcs and side-plots and the occasional dramatic setting change. There is one section in Antarctica that you could probably excise from this and then call one of my favorite short stories of all time.
Like a true saga this novel covers decades, but somehow, no matter what, it always kinda feels like it’s October. Good For Fall.
We Have Always Lived In the Castle - Jackson, Shirley
Let’s just let my godmother Shirley Jackson sell you on this slim, spooky, perfect story with her slim spooky perfect opening paragraph:
My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.
Is this the book for the morbid hermit in all of us? Absolutely. I am obsessed with it.
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories - Carter, Angela
Dark, bloody, feminist retellings of fairytales FOR YOU. Dives into the old world of myth and monsters and comes up like a gothic Final Girl dripping in rubies. Here is a quote by Angela Carter: “I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the bottles explode.” Nice. A fabulous Halloweentime candle read.
Rebecca - Du Maurier, Daphne
Intrigue! Unease! Chilly cloying class tensions! Too-big English country house for our too-young heroine! Come for the tense tea times, stay for the hauntings. From our BAMF Of Suspense, Daphne du Maurier, one of the beloveds of Alfred Hitchcock for having already designed exactly what he always wanted to do. Bonus: like half a dozen opportunities for femslash.
The Name of the Rose - Eco, Umberto
My old high school English teacher (showing up on my blog for the second time in a week) read this one with me in our two-person book club we established the year I was living back at home before moving to NYC. We nerded out over it extensively, which I think would have made Professor Eco very happy. I suspect this is the sort of book that is exactly as rewarding as the openness you offer it, showering treasures of both insight and humor on you if you are just patient enough with its philosophizing bent.
Anyway the plot might sell you all on its own and it should: in November of 1327, in a shroud of fog, the (actually tho) Sherlock Holmes of monks comes down from the British Isles to Italy for some sort of monk conference, but soon finds himself investigating a deathly mystery connected to a Borges’ Labyrinth of a monastic library. It is really, really beautiful and hella cerebral, but with this thread of sensuality tugging through all of it that will feel like it’s corrupting your soul but also setting your mind alight all at the same time? 10/10, Religious AF