Five For Friday #16

It's already the second Friday of 2024—is the year running away out of control? Anyway, it's Friday, the day on which I will always try to post on this blog. In an ideal world (or if I were an ideal author), I would be posting exquisite, accomplished pieces of writing on a practically daily basis, but we're not quite there yet.

I am taking a different approach to the Five For Friday posts this year: instead of focusing on five connected things, I will mention five disparate items I have come across in the course of the week and that have piqued my interest or resonated with me in some way. A more serendipitous approach, and one that will be more cognisant of the gems crafted by other, more expert, toilers in the ateliers of the floating online world. 

So here goes…

1. Things Heard

A Weird Studies podcast on Algernon Blackwood's short story 'The Wendigo'

As with all masters of the genre, Blackwood's take on the weird is singular: here, it isn't the cold reaches of outer space that elicit in us a nihilistic frisson, but the vast expanses of our own planet's wild places -- especially the northern woods. In his story "The Wendigo," Blackwood combines the beliefs of the Indigenous peoples of the Eastern Woodlands with the folktales of his native Britain to weave an ensorcelling story that perfectly captures the mood of the Canadian wilderness. In this conversation, JF and Phil discuss their own experience of that wilderness growing up in Ontario. The deeper they go, the spookier things get. 

This episode recalled to mind Ann Tracy's 1980 novel Winter Hunger, which I had read many years ago.

2. Things Seen

Two episodes of The Avengers. 

Somehow, though knowledge of this iconic slice of TV history had managed to penetrate even the isolated fortress of my thought-world, I had never actually watched any of it. My editor, fresh from a trip to the lurid delights of the Big City, proceeded to remedy this sad state of affairs via a set from the 1965 series picked up in a DVD exchange shop. 

Daft, but ineffably stylish (the Avengers, that is, not the editor). 

3. Things Read

Trying to find a Corridor of Mirrors, a post by Mark Valentine, on the excellent Wormwoodiana blog, about a strange and elusive book by its equally elusive author, Chris Massie.

But where have all those copies of Corridor of Mirrors gone? Sometimes I entertain the thought that an obsessive collector has amassed them in his library lined with looking-glasses, so that nobody else can possess the book but he, and he can see them all, multiplied to infinity, as he stalks up and down in his scarlet smoking hat and velvet coat, and gloats.

I now have to twitch every so often in an attempt to shrug off the urge to embark myself on an obsessive search for this almost-lost work.

4. Things Recalled

For some reason, my mind strayed to the recollection of a sculpture I had seen years ago in the Hugh Lane Gallery. It was a work in stainless steel by Eilis O'Connell, a piece titled From a Place no Longer Imagined. Although not a figurative work, I would hesitate to call it abstract, so resonant was it with things tantalisingly just out of reach, enigmatic yet eloquent in its otherness, an artefact from a realm alien to but contiguous with our own. 

I don't know if it is among the current exhibits: I didn't see it the last time I was in the gallery. But I always look for it. 

5. Books I'm reading for pleasure or research

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