December 18, 1999. . . It may just be my imagination, and I risk making a sexist statement here, but it seems to me that women in general do not care for Aickman. That's no reflection on Ms. Pardoe or upon women either, just an observation. . . I nabbed several paperbacks of THE WINE-DARK SEA one year to give out as presents, and found out later that hardly any of the female friends I gave it to cared for it at all. Some of them actively *disliked* it. And I'm not talking women in any cliched romance novel-reading, sentimental sense, either; I'm talking women who read real literature and tell me dirtier jokes than I tell them.Common remarks were: 'This is STUPID' (incisive critical acumen, that), 'This is BORING (the unforgivable sin in any reading matter, for anybody), 'This is too precious' (um, well. . .), and 'I don't like writers who make me feel like I'm ignorant'. I was frankly nonplussed by that one. All good writers make me feel like I'm ignorant. I can't afford to take it personally. But somehow I don't think any of these reasons was the real one.
Viva la difference, or am I way off base here?
rbadac, putting on a helmet
oOo
December 21, 1999
. . . The observable data itself may be thus affected. For all I know, the male friends I gave Aickman books to may have been more reluctant to admit it if they didn't like them. It's probably a case of how individual taste deals with deliberate obfuscation, of which Aickman is undeniably guilty, which doesn't make me like his writing less, I might add, but more. I see it as a legitimate device for combating a reader's 'scout logic' (the tendency to try and guess what is going to happen next), and also to infuse uncertainty in atmosphere. In fact, I've seen few more aggressive examples of a writing style in this genre that made such an effort *not* to mean anything in specific, while desiring to maintain a construct as if it did. This is a good thing, in my view, for strange stories.And his characters are likewise complex, but are they so because of their gender, or because they would be anyway. For example, if you were to simply change the sex of any given one while maintaining everything else the same, would it create any psychological clash in the story?
oOo
December 23, 1999
. . . My thinking on Aickman's characterization in general was that most of the inner thoughts of his folks were not confined to gender, though the character's places in the stories certainly are.ooOoo