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Author
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Comment
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Helen
Registered User
(8/10/02 5:59:54 pm)
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Thank you!
Dear Rebecca:
You're wonderful! Thank you - this will make my life a *lot* easier. The biography sounds fascinating, and is definitely going on the interlibrary loan list (Columbia seems to have some curious gaps in its collections ... for example, no physical copies of Marvels & Tales, and only the last three issues as e-journals, only one year of the _Year's Best Fantasy & Horror_ - the first one, now almost impossible to find, as the entire print run sold out and never reprinted, but still - no Marian Cox Roalfe, little Yolen or Zipes, and so on, and so forth ... my stay here is going to be largely devoted to rectifying this issue ...). And it is *very* good to know which year the Craft story stems from. I was envisioning scenes with all the nice people in the adult entertainment store looking at me very, very oddly.
Best,
Helen
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Charles Vess
Unregistered User
(8/12/02 6:48:32 am)
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A current "fairy" market experience...
Helen,
For what it's worth...
I just got back from the San Diego Comic Con International. This year with approx. 75,000 people in attendance I sat in huge cavernous hall along with Brian and Wendy Froud (and numerous other fantasy artists), life size statues of a Dark Rider on rearing horse from the LOTR movie, the actual actors that played the hobbits, every anime model and character you could name, book dealers, toy dealers, comic book dealers, self-publishers, mainstream publishers, toys and more toys and more than ever before, it became a veritable "fairy" market especially when some elfin sprite with gossamer wings would wander by.
A little over whelming to say the least.
I've been exhibiting there for at least the last twenty years and each year for all the work, turmoil and exhaustion it causes I return.
Perhaps I've eaten of the faerie fruit and thus tainted will always have to return?
Best,
Charles
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Kate
Unregistered User
(8/12/02 11:06:20 am)
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Playboy issues
Helen--
Believe it or not there are several good used book stores here in Portland that have lots of old Playboys. (The ones from the sixties and seventies are quite tame, you'll find--lots of women in boots and hats and peasant dresses--open at the waist of course, but hardly shocking, and rather soft-focus.) If you pin down the exact issue these illustrations might be in, and want me to try to find it, do let me know!
Also, you might email Playboy's archivists, as they are very good about giving information as to which images appear in which issues, by the way. They are used to that sort of request and have the information readily available.
Kate
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Helen
Registered User
(8/14/02 9:42:45 am)
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The touch of Faery ...
Dear Charles:
Rossetti transmitted the "taint" through ingestion ... and Bray through aural means (in the poem, "A Peep at the Pixies," which partially inspired Rossetti, one of her characters overheard pixie piping and swooned with the need to hear more) ... and now, you've got me thinking that it's transmissable through word of mouth. (And, that someone needs to write a novel concerning a character who stumbles across a faery tome and is afflicted with the need to read more ... "Goblin Library"... ) It sounds like a marvelous gathering ... the reward of attending sounds well worth any amount of trouble! [starts mentally calculating just how many servings of plain brown rice will shave enough off the food budget to cover a ticket to San Diego next year ...]
Rossetti used a familiar trope with the idea that, once you've tasted the fruit of faery, nothing else can ever fully satisfy. The common interpretation is that she equated that level of need with either sensuality or narcotics ... but, on the whole, looking at the genre of temptation by faerie and the fantastic across the board, the symbolism of the fruit is perhaps most aptly equatable with the fantastic itself, with the fruit serving as a synecdoche for the entire realm. It's almost funny, but have you ever noticed how few authors there are out there who successfully handle fantastic themes once and then stop? I can think of dozens, off-hand, who try their hand at it, and are sucked in, full force ... but the inverse is rarely true. John Ruskin is perhaps the most obvious case; wrote the hugely successful "King of the Golden River," and then, for reasons unknown, decided that it was but a trifle; he then proceeded to spend unconscionable amounts of energy criticizing other's forays into fantastic themes (Rossetti, MacDonald) when they came to him for advice. It almost suggests a kind of overcompensation (rather like our Mayor Bloomberg's actions on the tobacco front ... having eliminated the vice from his own life, he's determined to "save" everybody else as well). More commonly, you get people like Yeats, who devote their entire lives to the study of the field ... people like us. So, perhaps we're addicts of a sort, in that sense ...
Best,
Helen
P.S. - Kate, thanks! That hadn't occurred to me ... it should make life considerably easier to know exactly which issue has the Craft story, and maybe they have some sort of method for ordering back issues or photocopies, like the academic journals do? One can hope ...
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