well i've never kippled haha

i cannot abide kkiplings poetry or prose, mostly cause its so fucking english, so hey fellow well met. and dull, a boys own adventure writ large, and if... is bad advice. but the just so stories were charming.

He does have a "disgustingly cheery" default mode sometimes, and a lot of his narration devices involve fellows well met in bars and clubs — i think he may have invented this as a device actually — but beyond that he has a huge range of subjects and tactics (if you think it's boys own adventure then you obviously never read any of THAT anthony: it's all moralising sentimentality, whereas RK is almost never struck down by this — he can switch into stuff which is just more memorably nasty than far more self-adoring transgressive contemporaries.

(I'll have to look up which story it is, but there's one set in the trenches, which describes how the mudwalls are buttressed up with frozen corpses, which creak as you move past them... anyway, the story's name is not to mind, but that image is, for good.)

"Mrs Bathurst" is told in a bar in South Africa, but the story that gets told — or half told, really — is creepier and grislier and harder to grasp than anything by David Lynch (even the good things).

Definitely Stalky and co are the opposite of most school stories. And many of his stories from 'the colonies' are fantastic adventure or suspense stories. Better than Wilkie Collins.

I don't like the poetry so much. But "I say she is demanding and she says I am a brute" is a great all purpose explanation for any breakup.

I sat at his desk and touched the very keys of the typewriter he used, and got one of those "someone just walked over my grave" moments. This was in Raffles Hotel in Singapore, so my sudden shudder may have been the result of one-too-many Singapore Slings I suppose.

I have always liked Kipling.

"When the flush of a new-born sun fell first on Eden's green and gold,
Our father Adam sat under a tree and scratched with a stick in the mould;
And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart,
Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves, "It's pretty, but is it Art?"

i'm sorry mark-boys own adventure for canucks feature lots and lots of gore and people dying, and not a lot of moralizing- ie farley mowat, mrs mike et. al- perhaps the genre has varritions according to region, i have not read alot of kipling-kim, the jungle book, selected poems, maybe a dozen short stories- borges talked of his power and so did hitchens, and now you- i must read again.

(i just tht you meant the kinds of stories that were in the Boys' Own Paper, specifically)

Kim is great: almost his only novel proper (I never read The Light that Failed). I just leafed through the Faber poems, with the intro by Eliot: I wd still find this very hard to read, I think — same as I did when I wz 15.

kim i thot was colonial,patronizing,india as angloplayground.

India *was* a colonial anglo-playground: it's the degree to which Kipling seems to consider mere "Englishness" (in fact Kim's dead father had been Irish) somehow incomplete on its own which makes it so powerful, and so odd, really. Kim plays the Great Game through the bulk of the book, but it's not where he ends, or what drives him at the end.

mark-i am now going to play studity and re read the fucking book. you always make me feel like i dont know shit.

sorry anthony it's my extra-contrarian nutball-geek specialist topic

i've only ever tried reading The City Of The Dreadful Night (that title!) and it's filled with that too. it's also the only instance i can recall of not being able to finish a book out of a confounded inability to grasp the writer's political angle. the prose was fine - sharp, simple (another great image near the beginning: an old top-hat lost in a tree has become a wasps nest which hatless englishmen come to look at when they're homesick) - but it described race-relations in calcutta in such a backward-seeming way that my mind kept defaulting to satire mode to process it. before long i got so frustrated with not being able to get a fix on him - and for feeling like i needed to - i gave up. i might have to give him another try as well.

i liked kipling before i even read him 'cause my dad's copies of his bks had these neat logos on em with a elephant head & a swastika (they were from the early 30s, the later ed'ns had no swastika)

I only read Kipling in the context of my "history of british imperialism" class where we looked at the cultural aspects quite a bit. My prof's specialty was architecture but he also loved citing kipling ovah and ovah. I wrote a paper which I still quite like on Burmese Days and Orwell as Kipling's heir.

I totally agree with mark on the "ambivilant prescience" thing & i quite like reading british lit as tending to fall in his shadow because of it.

For example the trip to india in Mills' "Orient Express" is clearly borne from a tradition (or reacting to, perhaps) Kipling spawned.

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