John Coulthart's Blog, page 16

Weekend links 750

Cover art by Edward Gorey, 1964.

• Plenty of Halloween fallout as usual this week, but then Halloween here is a state of mind rather than a single day’s celebration. Leading off with an article by Smoky Man for Italian readers (and for auto-translators) at (Quasi), the first in what will be a series of reviews of each section of the Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic. I’ve been helping with this, answering questions about the book’s production. I may post my answers here at a later date but for the moment I’m happy to keep them exclusive. In other Moon and Serpent news, the Bumper Book was reviewed by Sam Thielman in the New York Times last weekend, and also subjected to a deeper exploration by Joe McCullough for The Comics Journal.

• Michael Atkinson explores the psychosocial dread at the heart of Japanese horror. One of the films I watched for Halloween was Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s brilliantly unnerving Pulse, a film which turns up again in Anne Billson’s evolution of horror in ten revolutionary films.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Short Fiction by Frank Belknap Long, a collection of science fiction and horror stories which opens with Long’s contribution to the Cthulhu Mythos, The Hounds of Tindalos.

Paracelsus’ quasi-scientific, quasi-magical worldview would profoundly influence scientists for centuries to follow. As historian Violet Moller puts it in her new book Inside the Stargazer’s Palace, “To our rational, orderly, 21st-century minds the 16th-century map of knowledge appears messy, a paradoxical and confusing place where magic was studied alongside geometry, people searched obsessively for the philosopher’s stone and astrology was fundamental to many areas of life.” But in this mixed-up cauldron of magic and nature, real science was forged.

Dale Markowitz on how the occult gave birth to science

• New music: Of Nature & Electricity by Teleplasmiste, and Tristitiam Et Metus Tradam Portare Ventis by Philippe Blache (Day Before Us).

• Adam Scovell dares to look inside Dario Argento’s dungeon-like museum of horror memorabilia, Profondo Rosso.

• At Little White Lies: Tyler Thier on Stan Brakhage’s autopsy film, The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Keisuke Oka’s Arimaston Building in Tokyo, made entirely by hand.

• At Bandcamp: George Grella on the pioneers of musique concrète.

• At Unquiet Things: Marci Washington’s midnight revelations.

• Typo 8: The International Journal of Prototypes.

• RIP Teri Garr.

• Pulse (1972) by Agitation Free | Pulse State (1991) by The Future Sound Of London | Pulse Detected (2021) by The Grid/Fripp

Richard Taylor’s Lovecraftiana

The Mask of Cthulhu (1958) by August Derleth.

To look at any of the cartoons drawn for the New Yorker by Richard Taylor (1902–1970) you wouldn’t suspect that the Canadian artist had spent a few years at the end of the 1950s creating a handful of book covers for Arkham House. I’ve never read much about the history of August Derleth’s publishing endeavours so I can’t say how Taylor came to be offered this work. An unlikely choice he may have been but he did a better job with his five covers than many of the artists in the 60s and 70 who attempted to illustrate the eldritch horrors of Lovecraft, Derleth and co. The hand-drawn titles and monochrome colours make the quintet an attractive series within the Arkham House catalogue as a whole.

The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces (1959) edited by August Derleth.

A collection of Lovecraft’s fiction fragments, some of which have been expanded by Derleth. Also remembrances of the writer by Lovecraft’s friends, plus essays and other material.

Dreams and Fancies (1962) by HP Lovecraft.

A cover I’ve known for years as a result of its being featured in that cult volume of mine, The Fantasy Book by Franz Rottensteiner. (Previously.) I used to wonder about the contents of this book, Dreams and Fancies being an unfamiliar title that was absent from the paperback reprints of Lovecraft’s fiction. The title piece is another Derleth fabulation, a collage of Lovecraft’s transcribed dreams as they were recounted in letters to various friends. This is followed by some of the short fiction and poetry that reworked these dreams. The collection ends with the aeon-spanning novella, The Shadow Out of Time, which Tayor has taken as his subject for the cover art.

The Trail of Cthulhu (1962) by August Derleth.

The Horror from the Hills (1963) by Frank Belknap Long.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The Lovecraft archive

The Return of the Sorcerer

The story’s first appearance in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, September 1931. No illustrator credited.

Rod Serling’s Night Gallery is a series I’d have happily watched if one of the UK channels had rebroadcast it in the 1980s, the way that Channel 4 did with the original Twilight Zone. This weekend I watched for the first time the opening episode of Night Gallery‘s third and final season, an adaptation by Halsted Welles of Clark Ashton Smith’s The Return of the Sorcerer. Smith is a writer whose works are still mostly neglected by film and television but he was in good company in Night Gallery, a series which featured adaptations of stories by a number of fellow Weird Tales writers including HP Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber and Robert Bloch. The story is one of Smith’s modern-day horror tales in which a poverty-stricken translator is offered a lucrative position at an old and sinister house, a place where a fearful occultist requires translations of an ancient volume. The Arabic text turns out to be passages from an early edition of everybody’s favourite forbidden tome, the Necronomicon, and Smith’s story, which was published in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror in 1931, is the first outside Lovecraft’s own to mention the book, thus beginning the expansion of the Cthulhu Mythos by other hands.

The Night Gallery adaptation was broadcast in 1972. Unlike the first two seasons, where episodes ran for an hour, the third season reduced the running time to under 30 minutes which doesn’t give director Jeannot Szwarc (credited as Jean Szwarc) any time to build up the suspense, if he was capable of such a thing. If you’ve ever seen any of Swarc’s feature films you know not to raise your expectations. As a compensation for the absense of atmosphere we get some striking set designs and a decent cast. The fearful magus, John Carnby, is played by Vincent Price, encountering the Necronomicon for the second time in his career after he’d earlier used the book to summon an eldritch monstrosity in Roger Corman’s The Haunted Palace. Bill Bixby plays the wary translator, while Patricia Sterling is Carnby’s toad-loving partner in Satanism, an addition to the story by Halstead Welles, whose presence adds an extra dimension to the proceedings. The episode could never be considered a lost classic but I enjoy seeing stories by the Weird Tales writers making their first infiltrations into the wider culture. This one is worth watching for Vincent Price and the magical decor alone. I think I ought to go looking for more Night Gallery episodes.

More of those Cocteau hands-through-the-wall. Bixby’s character doesn’t seem very perturbed that the scarlet hall is filled with mysterious vapours.

Mystical decor: on the left, Frieda Harris’s Ace of Discs from the Thoth Tarot deck; on the right, The Ancient of Days by William Blake.

Mystical/Satanic decor: the painting in the background is Frieda Harris’s Ace of Cups from the Thoth Tarot deck.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Cthulhu Mythos in the pulps
• Illustrating Zothique
• The Plutonian Drug
• More trip texts
• Yuggoth details
• The Garden of Adompha
• The City of the Singing Flame
• Haschisch Hallucinations by HE Gowers
• Odes and Sonnets by Clark Ashton Smith
• Clark Ashton Smith book covers

Weekend links 749

Fantastic Sea Carriage (1556) by Johannes van Doetecum the Elder & Lucas van Doetecum, after Cornelis Floris the Younger.

• “Preiss and McElheny have acknowledged the influence of Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘The Library of Babel’ (1941), which offers a brilliant, brain-scratching disquisition on bibliotecas as conduits both of infinity and meaninglessness. I also found myself thinking of Arthur Fournier, in D. W. Young’s documentary The Booksellers (2019), who spoke of ‘the psychic dreaming that paper allows.'” Sukhdev Sandhu on The Secret World, a film by Jeff Preiss and Josiah McElheny about the books collected by Christine Burgin.

• Most people know Burt Shonberg’s paintings—if they know them at all—from their appearance in Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films. But Shonberg had a career outside the cinema, something explored in Momentary Blasts of Unexpected Light: The Visionary Art of Burt Shonberg, an exhibition currently running at the The Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles.

• Warriors (1996), an ad for Murphy’s Irish Stout directed by the Quay Brothers. Samurai warriors in an Irish pub scored to the theme from Yojimbo.

The Grand Jeu group have been neglected, at least in English-speaking history, from the general consciousness of “Surrealism” but they remain among its most interesting dissidents. The teenage Simplistes, led by [René] Daumal and [Roger] Gilbert-Lecompte, collectively experimented with consciousness and investigated wildly syncretic modes of destroying and recombining selves: diverse hermetic and occult systems, extrasensory perception, trances and somnambulism, mediumistic practice and collective dreaming.

[…]

The Grand Jeu was a project of paradox: artistic and ascetic, indulgent and severe, political, and mystical, ecstatic and negating, egoistic and selfless, graceful and violent. It sought to continually weave between collectivity and individuality, of art and life, multiplicity and unity, fed by a brew of political radicalism, inspired by Rimbaud’s germinal poetics of revolt and illumination, a utilitarian embrace of occult traditions and ideas, drug experimentation, Hindu sacred texts (Daumal would become an expert in Sanskrit) and some of Bergson’s philosophy. They were, in their own words, “serious players.” It was a mad mix, and in retrospect, clearly doomed to a short life—so, it turned out, were most its members.

Gus Mitchell on the “experimental metaphysics” of the Grand Jeu

• At Smithsonian magazine: Lanta Davis and Vince Reighard on the sculpted monsters and grotteschi that fill the Sacro Bosco at Bomarzo, Italy.

• At Bandcamp: George Grella compiles a list of “spooky sounds and spooky music, things to haunt nights and dreams”.

• At Colossal: Kelli Anderson’s amazing pop-up book, Alphabet in Motion: How Letters Get Their Shape.

• “The play that changed my life: Jim Broadbent on Ken Campbell’s electrifying epic Illuminatus!”

• DJ Food browses some of the many album covers designed by the versatile Robert Lockhart.

• Winners of the 2024 Nikon Photomicrography Competition.

• Mix of the week: XLR8R Podcast 873 by Andy Graham.

• The Strange World of…Lou Reed.

• The Internet Archive is back!

• Warriors (1990) by Jon Hassell | Red Warrior (1990) by Ronald Shannon Jackson | Bhimpalasi Warriors (2001) by Transglobal Underground

Short films by Hideki Inaba

Berg.

One of Scotto Moore’s recent newsletters pointed to Flow , a short video by Japanese animator Hideki Inaba whose collection of similar works may be seen at YouTube. Inaba’s specialty is bewilderingly complex scenes of kaleidoscopic metamorphosis. His older films like Berg are populated by clusters of fungal forms or simple organisms that look like refugees from some of Haeckel’s zoological studies, writhing or dancing together in a manner and style that wouldn’t be out of place in an old Disney cartoon. His more recent works tend towards greater abstraction with a sharper edge, although the most recent one, Time Tides, takes an unexpected change of direction at its very end.

Tape, a music video for Canigou.

Flow.

Time Tides.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The teamLab experience

In the footsteps of The Soul

Adeline Carr, aka “The Soul”, wandering through the streets of Holborn while worrying about her future. Her dress is an Erté creation with curiously complicated sleeves.

After checking out of my Bloomsbury hotel on Saturday morning I decided to walk over to the nearby Atlantis Bookshop, London’s oldest occult bookseller, which is located in Museum Street close to the British Museum. I know the shop well but this visit was different since the route would take me past a number of locations mentioned in the fiction serial which runs throughout the Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic.

The Dweller in the Abyss is a story about “The Soul”, a young woman in the 1920s who was originally going to be a kind of occult investigator for a comic series Alan Moore and I were planning for ABC in the late 1990s. This didn’t work out for a variety of reasons but The Soul has been reborn in the new book, with her character reinvented in order to demonstrate the personal evolution of a neophyte entering the world of magic. Adeline Carr, “The Soul”, is an artist’s model who lives in the first-floor flat above the Atlantis shop. I won’t go into detail about the story, the whole thing needs to be read with the complementary material surrounding it, but Adeline’s wanderings around this quarter of the city take her to a number of well-known locations which you can visit today, and which I illustrated to a greater or lesser degree.

1: Russell Square

The first location I encountered—although my drawing of it appears near the end of the story—is the park in Russell Square, one of two such parks in the Bloomsbury area. It was raining on the morning I was there but Adeline’s walk through the park takes place on a sunny spring afternoon. The real place is rather more wooded than I showed it (there are more trees on the page which faces this one) but artistic licence is in operation here, and the park has been reorganised once or twice since the 1920s.

2: The British Museum

The next location is one I didn’t photograph, the British Museum. If it hadn’t been raining I might have walked through the gates to get a corresponding shot of the portico but the rain was heavier at this point and a large mass of umbrella-wielding tourists were crowding the entrance.

3: Museum Street

Into Museum Street and the Atlantis shop where the Bumper Book of Magic is visible in the window! This view shows the windows above the shop where Adeline lives. (Adeline’s windows aren’t a precise match but artistic licence again… Also, windows get replaced, especially after the wartime bombing that London endured.) The shop hadn’t opened yet so I walked round the corner into Bloomsbury Way to face the imposing bulk of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s church.

4: St George’s, Bloomsbury

To date, this building and Christ Church, Spitalfields, are the only Hawksmoor churches I’ve visited in person. The church is an important location in Adeline Carr’s journey into magic, being the place where her spiritual revelations begin and reach their eventual climax. The pyramid-capped tower looks slightly different to the one I was drawing. The steeple, which is based on Pliny’s description of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, was originally decorated at its base with statues of lions and unicorns but these were removed during a restoration of the building in the 1870s. Like many London buildings, the church suffered from the ravages of neglect, wartime bombing and air pollution during the 20th century (Hawksmoor’s St John, Horsleydown, was destroyed entirely during the Blitz). Restoration of St George’s began in the late 1990s, a process which included the return to the steeple of the missing lions and unicorns. (See this website.) Visiting the place this time I was hoping to get a view of the tower from the passage that runs along the side but the gate to this was locked. You can, however, see the church from the rear via a narrow road where the steeple rises over the dingy back rooms which fill out the plot.

5: The Atlantis Bookshop

And so to the Atlantis shop again. It was a genuinely magical moment seeing the book in the window after spending so much time thinking about this very location and the events that take place in the flat above. By coincidence (or is it? etc), the book sitting next to it is by Gary Lachman who I’d been with the previous evening for the book launch. After the shop had opened I talked for a while with the proprietors, showing them the place on page 39 of the Bumper Book where their establishment is mentioned. The Atlantis isn’t the only occult bookshop in London (or even the only one in Bloomsbury…Treadwell’s is nearby) but if you’re in London it should be your first port of call if you’re looking for a copy of the Bumper Book.

• The Atlantis Bookshop

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Moon and Serpent Rising
• Serious houses: The Lud Heat Tapes, 1979
• London churches of the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries
• The Cardinal and the Corpse
• Terror and Magnificence

Weekend links 748

• In Tate Britain yesterday afternoon I finally got a proper look at Frederic Leighton’s An Athlete Wrestling with a Python (1877). It’s been part of the Tate collection for years but I never used to see it there, my only sighting being a view through a glass door into a locked gallery where the exhibits were being rearranged. I put the statue into my adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu in 1988 (see this post). Virgil Finlay also borrowed the pose for a Tarzan illustration in 1941.

• At Smithsonian magazine: See the first section of the largest-ever cosmic map, revealed in stunning detail by the Euclid space telescope.

• At The Daily Heller: Your Next Stop, The Twilight Zone. An interview with Arlen Schumer about the TV series.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on Punch and the Surrealists.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – October 2024 at Ambientblog.

• New music: A House Where I Dream by Mattias De Craene.

• RIP Lillian Schwartz, pioneering computer animator.

• At Bandcamp: The Acid Mothers Temple Dossier.

• Where to start with Alan Garner.

• Jim Reid’s favourite music.

• The Twilight Zone (1963) by The Ventures | The Twilight Zone (1979) by The Manhattan Transfer | Twilight Zone (1998) by Helios Creed

Leaving the Cafe

A good café. Budapest, 1930.

I have a new shop portal page, a deliberately low-maintenance affair which links to Etsy (where a few problems still need addressing), Redbubble (a brand new account), and the page here for Skull Print T-shirts. All the former links to CafePress have been removed. I’d been wanting to move away from the unsatisfying CafePress service for some time but before doing this I needed to arrange suitable replacements. Last weekend I finally disentangled my website from CafePress, something that involved stripping links from more pages than I expected, after which I closed my account there.

I opened an account at CafePress in May 2001 so I must have been one of the first users of their print-on-demand service. This was always a sideline not a business, a convenience for people who wanted something of mine on a print or T-shirt without having to pay the costs demanded by high-end printers like the one I use for the Etsy prints. My earnings from this were minimal at best, usually $50 a year. The rare exception was when my Alice in Wonderland calendar received a mention at Boing Boing during the time when that site had a substantial readership. After a short-lived spike of interest things returned to the usual $50 a year but even this meagre sum began to decline when the pandemic hit in 2020, becoming so sporadic it became evident there was little reason to keep the account open at all.

Beyond the meagre earnings there were others reasons for shutting things down. The front end of the site has always been dominated by the CafePress brand, while the back end, where sellers have to upload artwork and maintain their “shops”, never improved very much from its crudely designed beginnings, something I suspect was a legacy of CafePress having been one of the earliest successful print-on-demand outlets. After I’d got in the habit of putting together a new calendar each year they went and removed that product format, changing it to one that didn’t suit my work at all. And in later years they developed a bad habit of plastering your artwork on products you hadn’t approved of, so I’d find something of mine layered across a shower curtain, say, with no thought given (because none had been applied) as to whether the artwork or its ratio suited such a thing.

I’ve only been with Redbubble for just over a week so I’ve no idea whether I’ll earn anything from their service either but the seller process is a lot quicker and easier to set up than CafePress. As before, this is mainly for people who’d like a print of something at a reasonable price. I still have to add more designs so I’m open to requests. I used to have T-shirts available at CafePress but from now on I’ll only be doing these through Skull Print, a genuine small business who I’m happy to support. I’ll be adding more designs to the T-shirt page as well.

In other consumer news, the Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic is now on sale in the USA and Canada, with the UK edition being officially published tomorrow. Take a look if you see it in a shop somewhere, it’s a beautiful thing.

Eldritch Art Nouveau: Lovecraft at Ballantine

Ballantine Books published a number of Lovecraft and Lovecraft-related titles in paperback in 1976, all with uniform cover designs featuring a bold Art Nouveau-style border. I’ve seen these covers on many occasions but hadn’t paid the artwork much attention until I was browsing Fontinuse last week and realised that artist Murray Tinkelman had borrowed his dragons and scowling fish from a book by Anton Seder, Das Thier in der Decorativen Kunst, a collection of animal designs for artists and craftspeople. (See below.) Writing about Seder’s book a couple of years ago I referred to “piscine grotesques that I’ll be looking at if I ever have to draw the inhabitants of Innsmouth again”, unaware that another artist had already plundered the book for just this reason.

Murray Tinkelman (1933–2016) was a versatile illustrator but he was better suited to science fiction and other genres, horror doesn’t seem to have been his forte. This kind of Art Nouveau styling doesn’t really suit Lovecraft either, the design being more a result of Ballantine following prevailing trends than anything else. You could make something like this work for Lovecraft if you were determined, with a border design and font choice more suited to the subject. The writhing convolvulus-like shapes favoured by Victor Horta come to mind, while one or more of the typefaces of the occult revival might be useful for the title designs.

Seder’s book of animal illustrations may be browsed at the Internet Archive although at the time of writing the site is offline for maintenance following a series of hacking incidents and DOS attacks. Here’s hoping it returns soon.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The Lovecraft archive

Weekend links 747

Eden Flag with Solar-Anal Emblems and Hexes (2017) by Elijah Burgher.

• A note for regular readers that I’ll be in London for a couple of days next week, so the weekend post may be delayed by a day, if it arrives at all. I’ll be attending this event at The Century Club, Shaftsbury Avenue, a talk about The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic which will be published here and in the USA a few days from now. I’m told that copies of the book will be on sale if anyone wishes me to sign a copy.

• “Published two years before André Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme (1924), which delineated the contours of the capital-S Surrealism movement, Les Malheurs represents a proto-Surrealist experiment par excellence.” Daisy Sainsbury on Les Malheurs des immortels (1922) by Paul Éluard and Max Ernst.

• “It has been two decades since Japan’s tidying boom began, and the nation remains as cluttered as ever. I know this because I live here.” Matt Alt in a long read exploring the Japanese cultivation of clutter. Don’t be shamed by minimalist interiors.

…with the Bumper Book, we wanted to present what we hope are lucid, coherent and joined-up ideas on how and why the concept of magic originated and developed over the millennia, a theoretical basis for how it might conceivably work along with suggestions as to how it might practically be employed—and, perhaps most radically, a social reason for magic’s existence as a means of transforming and improving both our individual worlds, and the greater human world of which we are components. And we wanted to deliver this in a way that reflected the colourful, psychedelic, profound and sometimes very funny nature of the magical experience itself. That, we felt, would be the biggest and most useful rabbit to pull out of the near-infinite top hat that we believe magic to be.

Alan Moore talking to Rob Salkowitz about the Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic

• “When it comes to pure cinematic terror The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has no equal,” says Mat Colegate. I’d avoid being quite so definitive but it’s a film I’d put in a list of my favourite cinematic horrors.

• At Smithsonian Magazine: See 15 winning images from the Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest.

• At The Quietus: Lara Rix-Martin on the heavy existentialism of Soviet science fiction. Previously: Zone music.

• New music: Decimation Of I by Meemo Comma.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Exentrica.

• Hex (1971) by Gil Mellé | Hex (1978) by Jon Hassell | Hexden Channel (2012) by Pye Corner Audio