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Episode 570 - Concerning Corinna (Patreon)

Published:
2021-11-05 01:27:55
Imported:
2022-01

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Content

We're shrieking into a month of SCARY FAIRIES with Concerning Corinna by James Branch Cabell, and we're joined by special guest Ken Hite!

Don't forget to get your volumes of Tour de Lovecraft at Atomic Overmind Press!

Very metal thanks to reader Erik Peabody of Viking Guitar Productions!

Next up: Kid Stuff by Isaac Asimov

Comments

Anonymous

Now THIS is a topic near and dear to my heart! And it's one that's sure to disappoint me, because the truly Weird Shee always seem to get neglected. So here's a game—I'll try to leave a description of one monstrous fairy you likely didn't know about under each episode this month. Starting with...the Nuckelavee! (Note to whoever reads the comment aloud: don't say "Nuckelavee." When you say "Nuckelavee," the Nuckelavee knows where you are, and It isn't happy.) The Nuckelavee is found in the sea depths around the Scottish isles of Orkney, a region whose cultural landscape still carries faded ghosts of the time it was settled by the Norse. This malevolent Fae is a crop-blighter and drought-bringer that breathes poison and loves to rend nightly wanderers with Its talons. It is also a titanic amphibious centaur with a single burning red eye set in Its head...oh, and It *doesn't have any skin.* Dripping fibers of muscle stretch taut in the open air, and exposed veins throb with black blood. Even calling It a centaur doesn't convey how monstrous It really looks, because it's more like a human torso whose arms were far too long was fused into the back of a horse. ...So anyway, that's the first example of the Fair Folk I'll provide for the month.

Jeremy Impson

Seeing as zombie Isaac Asimov is a member of Pitch Black Manor, it's about time you're covering one of his works.

Anonymous
>>71207967

Also, to establish scale, here's the first known illustration of the Nuckelavee: https://images.app.goo.gl/gWMKVRzwdRiPKj3s6

Anonymous

Always a pleasure to hear the three gents get together around the weird! Some years ago my father and I were discussing hardy flowers that might survive on his balcony. We got to talking about how odd it is that effeminate men were sometimes called "pansy" as an insult when the pansy is one of the toughest blooms out there. Certainly we could say something similar about "fairy". A creature powerful, alluring, and deadly to cross. There's at least the possibility of confusing that other F slur as slang for a cigarette - an accoutrement of soldiers, toughs, and cool cats. (I know this one falls apart on closer inspection, but - you know - rule of 3 and all that.) Anyhoozlebee, happy to get scary with some fairies.

Anonymous

I am so excited for this theme month!

Steve

Those who are able Call me Cabell

Steve

I'm a massive fan of JBC. He's very much the precursor to CAH, whose Averoigne is very much a more twisted sequel to JBC's Poictesme (the place where 18 volumes of Jurgen and other fun takes place). And of course JHV (Jack Vance to you) who writes very much in a similar register.

Steve

I've found a link between Flatland and Cabell. I'm not sure it's a safe place to live: https://flatland.co.uk/index.php?tpl=details&id=6323 And there is also a story by Cabell called Jurgen proves it by Mathematics: https://archive.org/details/fantasiamathp00clif/page/40/mode/2up

Anonymous

I love it when Ken comes on, as a regular listener to Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff, I get double the Ken in a week. He also has lots of information about weird people that I don't have to do the research on. I remember reading flatland, I didn't think about the politics so much as the physics but I see what was going on there.

Anonymous

This may be a little off topic. The discussion of Abbott's Flatland (a book I have long enjoyed) and the idea of fairies existing on a different dimensional plane immediately brought to mind both the advanced math in Dreams in the Witch House, and also L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. Odd that the same ideas Cabell introduces here are echoed in later tales that attribute them to witches, and not fairies. I wonder if there is a connection to be made here? Perhaps authors like HPL and L'Engle (that may be the first time they have ever shared a sentence in my experience) shifted the ideas about hyper-dimensionality from fairies to witches, but why this would be itself is interesting. Ideas? As always, it's a true pleasure to have the fourth Beatle aboard for the show (no, I'm not comparing Ken to Ringo, but I consider Andrew Lehman to be the third member of the podcast). Ken's insights are always enlightening.

Anonymous
>>71209467

"Pansy" comes from the French verb "penser," which means "to think." Perhaps the association came from the distinction between a thinker and a doer (the more modern interpretation being nerd and jock)?

Anonymous

Glad to see others bringing up Flatland. I last read it in high school geometry 25 years ago. It might be a good selection for Strange Stories at some point,given that there is a visitation by an extra dimensional being in the story. It’s maybe even more salient that the classical Oxford education which HPL envied always began with learning Classical Greek, not only so one might read the New Testament in its original language, but also Euclid’s Elements. All that horror derived from nightmarish architecture starts from the Proper Western Gentleman’s understanding that there is “correct” geometry known to the ancients, and there is only damnation for those who strive against it. All that to say, I’d read Flatland again to rediscover its nerdy Victorian goofiness.

Anonymous

If you have not read John Crowley's _Little, Big_, it is maybe the best fantasy novel of the 20th C. It is, in part, the story of 3 generations of a family which gets entangled with Faeries, which, as Crowley imagines them, are a bit like subatomic particles, where knowing one thing about them precludes knowing other things. It is beautiful and breathtaking and heartbreaking.

Anonymous

I have the same relationship with my dog that this man had with his pig, and I feel personally attacked right now.

Anonymous

Fairies ARE creepy. The first one that comes to mind is The Man With the Thistledown Hair from <i>Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel</i>, who is one of the great alien villains of modern literature, I believe. Like Chris going immediately to Star Trek when talking about upper dimensional beings, my mind goes to comics. Explicitly, Mister Mxyzptlk is exactly this, a four dimensional being operating in a three dimensional world, and although he's usually more irritating than scary, Mister Mxyzptlk becomes rather frightening in Alan Moore's "What Ever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" So yeah, put me down as someone else officially excited for this month's topic. Love scary fairies.

Anonymous

My first exposure to the concept of Fey also came from tabletop especially World of Darkness although i never read Changling (started on vampire and werewolf) and even then that only came about because of the bloodline/tribes that allow for segways into the other chronicles via the Kiasyd and Fiana respectively.

Anonymous

I would also appreciate Ken Hite reading and explicating my mac and cheese directions. I would learn so much about the history and cultural significance and true cosmic horror of my packaged foods.

Anonymous

Having grown up in Ireland I have always had a healthy fear of fairies/wee folk/good people. Despite the national cringe whenever stories come out about fairy forts or fairy trees being disturbed, the traditions still persist in a lot of ways. And, to be honest, I'm okay with any tradition that preserves sites of natural beauty/weirdness.

Anonymous

Yay bad fairies! In connection with the idea that the fae basically run a protection racket, I am moved to mention that in my late 90s Changeling game, the fae of Providence were ruled over by a gangster boggan named Robin Goodfella, the Fairy Godfather. In other news, I'm assuming that in real life the classically educated Herrick took the name "Corinna" from the Roman poet Ovid, who addressed love poems to a (probably fictional or at least heavily fictionalized) woman of that name, perhaps in turn borrowing the name from a real Greek poet, Corinna of Tanagra, who lived a few centuries before.

Jeremy Impson

I do love the Chasing Amy/Concerning Corrina-style naming trope, but i do not dispute nor defend against the criticisms levelled against it.

Anonymous

The fae are absolutely my jam! Just a guess, maybe the bullet got left behind when he was transported because of the folklore that iron repels the fae. Sort of like, that’s the only thing that couldn’t cross over. Super excited for this month! It’ll help with inspiration for some of the stuff I write for Changeling games 😄 White Wolf totally nailed it with Changeling the Dreaming and then again with Changeling ,the Lost.

Anonymous

Lang's Fairy Books contain plenty of disturbing and Weird stuff. A story in The Blue Fairy Book, called The Yellow Dwarf, even features a princess whose mere portrait is so beautiful it drives one of her suitors insane and makes another ill.

Anonymous

I always thought fairies were of the Tinkerbell variety. Then I saw an episode of Torchwood where they were deathly afraid of the fairies and were like “well, they got your kid, sorry. They’ll kill us all if we interfere”. Changed my view of things.

Anonymous

I'm delighted that you've covered James Branch Cabell! I became interested in him through Neil Gaiman, who mentions the Storisende edition of JBC's works in chapter 9 of "The Kindly Ones," one of the later story arcs of THE SANDMAN, and Robert A. Heinlein, whose novel JOB: A COMEDY OF JUSTICE evokes Cabell's JURGEN with its subtitle. (Speaking of Heinlein, I'd like to suggest his novella 'The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag' as a subject for a future episode.) Getting back to "Concerning Corinna," I've always wondered whether Herrick commits suicide because his memories of the other realm are terrible, or because they are so wonderful that he cannot bear the prospect of returning to his mundane former life, which seems like Hell in comparison?

Anonymous
>>71662367

What if it's both? I could imagine Elphame, with its Seelie and Unseelie Courts, to be more beautiful and terrible than tje human mind can grasp. Or, to quote a certain leather-clad pin enthusiast: "We are explorers in the further regions of experience. Angels to some, demons to others."

Anonymous

Thanks for dipping into the world of James Branch Cabell. Years ago I read his novel ‘The Cream of the Jest’ and was disappointed to find that it was not as pornographic as the title suggested. At one point in your excellent discussion Ken said that Cabell was the first writer he knew of to use the concept of hyperdimensionality to create secret worlds and/or entities who can pass through our world in mysterious and uncanny ways. One writer who beat Cabell to the punch here was the Russian, Andrei Bely, whose 1906 novel ‘Petersburg’ continually plays with geometry and dimensionality. One character, named Dudkin (played in my mind by a Russian Jeff Bridges), is tormented by a mysterious four-dimensional entity called Shishnarfne, who can pass in and out of our three-dimensional world like Cabell’s cube passing through a plane. In one nightmarish scene Shishnarfne manifests inside Dudkin's throat and speaks to him out of his own mouth. Bely’s hypergeometrical riffs can probably be traced back to his early training in mathematics and to the fact that his father, Nicolai Bugaev, was a famous mathematician.

Anonymous
>>71612919

The only flaw is that bullets are not (usually) made of iron, but of lead with perhaps a copper jacket depending on the time period. Of course who can say exactly what properties of metal the fae fear specifically. I'm curious of it was indeed a retained bullet from his body (this is usually foreshadowed by walking with a limp or somesuch) or if Herrick shot something in the room prior to his transformation(?)

Anonymous

I'm always excited for a return of Ken Hite - the enthusiasm and depth of knowledge he brings is contagious, and as usual I found myself enjoying the story a lot more after hearing him expound on it

Anonymous

When Ken is a guest, there’s an awful metamorphosis from a questioning and curious caterpillar-podcast to a self-congratulatory (and very very white in hue) mansplaining butterfly (I’m a man too ftr). I want so badly to listen to this story as covered by you two, but as with other Hite appearances, I found this episode straight up hard to listen to. After multiple attempts. (Ps i love you guys and how much you’ve grown and inspired me to grow over the years! Thank you for your creative vision and community building!)