{ feuilleton }

Weekend links 854

Nightmare (c. 1940) by Rockwell Kent.

Happy Halloween. May all your horrors be cosmic ones.

• “At that time, I was into a lot of esoteric philosophical stuff, and he was very hungry to learn about that. I gave him a list of obscure books, which he sent his girlfriend out to buy from Atlantis Bookshop in Museum Street.” Bill Nelson talking about working with David Sylvian in the 1980s. This minor detail makes the Kabbalistic/alchemical appearance of Russell Mills cover art for Gone To Earth seem less of a coincidence.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Light From The North: Aleksandra Ionowa – Mediumistic and Visionary Artist, edited by Nina Kokkinen & Vivienne Roberts.

• At Little White Lies: Ryan Finnigan on the macabre convergence of FW Murnau’s art and life.

One reason to defend the dilettante, then, is for lexicological justice. The term has been unfairly burdened with an overly negative connotation. It wasn’t always this way. From the Baroque-era Italian dilettante, the term originally referred to someone who pursues an interest, particularly an artistic one, for the sake of pleasure, or “delight”. Even as the term evolved, it stayed largely neutral, distinguishing enthusiasts from professionals in a given practice. The pejorative connotation familiar to us today is more recent, shaped by what I’ll call a “deficiency” model, in which amateurism is viewed negatively as a lack of something: skill, seriousness, focus, expertise. This is the meaning ascribed by cultural gatekeepers like Theodor Adorno, who in 1929 dismissed the dilettante as one “unable to establish any standards”.

Jay Miller writes in praise of the dilettante

• At Public Domain Review: Wonderful Weather: Floods and Foreboding in 17th-Century Britain.

• MuGlobe: an interactive guide to the local music available via streaming services worldwide.

• Mix of the week: A guest mix by Solypsis for The Invisible College.

• At the BFI: Kelly Robinson chooses 10 great witch films.

• New music: Land Of Ice And Fog by Jeff Greinke.

• Andy Stott’s favourite albums.

• RIP Patrick Stewart.

• Nightmare (1938) by Artie Shaw And His Orchestra | Mysterious Semblance At The Strand Of Nightmares (1974) by Tangerine Dream | Nightmare (2015) by Rachel Mason

Three short films by Robert Morgan

A little nightmare fuel for the run-up to Halloween. Robert Morgan is a British animator whose filmography to date has comprised a handful of short films plus a single feature, Stopmotion, which is on my future viewing list. All of his work is firmly situated in the horror sphere, a commendable stance when so many animators must be tempted by the financial rewards of advertising work and the pressure to make family-friendly comedies about cute characters with big eyes.

The Separation.

Two of the films linked here are very short so I won’t burden them with description. The Cat with Hands (2001) is one I’m sure I’d seen before, possibly on Channel 4 since the channel is credited at the end. Or maybe I dreamed something similar… With a running time of just over nine minutes The Separation (2003) is the longest and most ambitious of the three, a story of conjoined twins which is like David Cronenberg filming something of his own in the style of Dave Borthwick’s The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb. Morgan’s oeuvre owes much to Borthwick’s animated grotesquerie. They Have Changed Their Faces is more of an experimental piece but very effective all the same; creepy in every sense of the word. If you like these there’s more to be seen at Morgan’s YouTube channel.

They Have Changed Their Faces.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb
• The Magic Art of Jan Švankmajer
• Jiří Barta’s Labyrinth of Darkness
• The Web by Joan Ashworth
• Jiří Barta’s Pied Piper

Lynd Ward’s Haunted Omnibus

“The Haunted Omnibus” is a title that suggests some form of public transport filled with spooks, but all the spectres here are lodged in the pages of a story collection from 1937, edited by Alexander Laing and later reprinted in a truncated edition as Great Ghost Stories of the World. Both books were collections for American readers, with at least half the stories in The Haunted Omnibus originating in Europe. Many of the selections feature no ghosts at all; “weird tales” would be a better descriptor for any collection that includes entries as diverse as Guy de Maupassant’s The Horla, Arthur Machen’s The White People, Algernon Blackwood’s The Wendigo and an extract from Beowulf.

Grendel aside, if you’re familiar with 20th-century weird fiction there are few surprises, the main attraction is Lynd Ward’s copious illustrations which, for the longer stories, run to two illustrations a piece: a title vignette and a full page. With 42 stories in total that’s a lot of artwork; what you see here is a necessary selection. The ISFDB page for the book links to a PDF scan of the entire collection if you’d like to see how well the illustrations suit the stories; alternatively, this old blog post has nearly all of Ward’s interior illustrations. Laing’s collection wasn’t Ward’s first engagement with horror, his superb edition of Frankenstein was published in 1934. This was followed by covers and a frontispiece for two of Alexander Laing’s novels, The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (1934) and The Motives of Nicholas Holtz, Being the Weird Tale of the Ironville Virus (1936), which no doubt led in turn to The Haunted Omnibus. Ward’s Frankenstein illustrations are all wood engravings, a medium at which he excelled, and one which gives his drawings a precise definition that’s lacking in the story collection. I can’t say for sure what medium he used here but they look like lithograph drawings. The textural roughness is useful for conveying a nebulous atmosphere but Ward’s predilection for Expressionist distortion makes some of his depictions difficult to read at first glance. On the plus side it’s good to see how he deals with something like The White People which was being reprinted for the first time outside Machen’s own The House of Souls collection. This makes Ward the first illustrator of the story, as he was with The Wendigo and (I’m guessing) several more of these pieces.

(Note: At the time of writing ISFDB is suffering problems with bots overloading its server resources but the PDF link directs to Alexander Laing’s entry on this page.)

The Half-Pint Flask by DuBose Heyward.

The Treasure of Abbot Thomas by MR James.

Continue reading “Lynd Ward’s Haunted Omnibus”

Weekend links 853

Ghost Rider (detail, 1973) by Bruce Pennington.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Dez Bollardian. My own font of the month is Nosferatu, a design by Sarah Salome Deletain and Jules Durand loosely inspired by the lettering on the German intertitle cards from FW Murnau’s Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens.

• The week in photography: Winners of the Nikon 2026 Microphotography Competition; Winners and finalists of the American Meteorological Society 2026 Photo Contest; The Lion Nebula as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid Infrared Instrument).

• New music: The Larsen Pipes 01 with Reza Mirjalali by The Larsen Pipes; Bound To Substance by Dodenskald & Wilted Perch.

Their career itself can be seen as a kind of collage, in the way it brought elements from different places and periods together into the present. Their music was too eclectic to be comfortably of the moment. Futuristic jams like 1980’s Western Mantra shared a dynamic with the electronic funk then taking shape in New York and London, but was too fragmentary and generally weird for all but the strangest dancefloors. So the Cabs were sometimes too ahead of the curve for their own good, and while they were acknowledged as electronic music pioneers, they never parlayed that stature into consistent success and remained forever outsiders—where they were probably happiest.

Derek Walmsley talks to Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson about the end of the Cabaret Voltaire project

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Panic: Visions Of The Horned God In The English Country Garden by Sara Hannant.

• At the BFI: Ruby McGuigan on where to begin with Billy Wilder.

• At Unquiet Things: The art of Hannah Flowers.

• RIP Tom Skerritt.

• (Ghost) Riders In The Sky (1961) by The Ventures | Ghost Rider (1969) by Musical Doctors | Ghost Rider (1977) by Suicide

Li’l Factory

My thanks to David Polfeldt at Li’l Factory for generously sending me copies of the first four books from his new publishing imprint. Li’l Factory is based in Sweden but publishes in English, and describes its mission thus:

Li’l Factory is focused on publishing odd stories that find no other home. The authors may be young and looking for their first breakthrough, or they may be veterans sitting on material that is rejected by trad publishers. Li’l Factory aims to make a string of beautiful books that reach breakeven and gives the author a boost to continue their work.

All the books published so far are science fiction, the first three of these—Burns by David Polfeldt, Brain Fruit by Stephen Oram, and Mimeograph by Eira A. Ekre—being short stories presented as standalone works. The fourth book—Into the Great by Elliot Blake—is novel length. At the time of writing I’ve only read the first three so it wouldn’t be fair to attempt a review of the quartet, but I can tell you that Burns deals with the solitary existence of a self-aware space probe searching for alien life; Brain Fruit is an account of a three-way act of symbiosis in which a bee, an insect and a fruit have to work together as a single organism in order to advance their evolution; and Mimeograph concerns a near future in which replication machines (“Mimes”) have become so skilfully attuned to the needs of the people they serve that they start to remake the world, with increasingly dramatic consequences. Of the three I preferred Mimeograph, probably because it shades into horror in its second half, as apocalyptic science fiction tends to do.

One thing all the books have in common is the care taken over their presentation, a combination of quality materials, good design and expert typesetting. Publishing books in this manner is always a brave and commendable act; brave because I know from my own experience with small publishers how hard it can be to flourish in a difficult market. But David Polfeldt is off to a good start, and the formatting and design could easily catch the attention of readers who like to collect books when they’re presented like this. His imprint isn’t concerned solely with science fiction either, the submissions page of the Li’l Factory website mentions that fantasy would also be welcome. The submissions window is currently open for anyone with a homeless (and suitable) manuscript. As for what might count as suitable, the taste references are a useful guide.