Cover art by Toshiyuki Fukuda for the Japanese edition of the new novel by Kazuo Ishiguro.
• “The story here is how between 1978 and 1982, this impulse shed its novelty genesis and its spoils were divvied up between gay producers making high-energy soundtracks for carnal abandon, and quiet Hawkwind fans smoking spliffs in Midlands bedrooms.…this excellent compilation offers fresh understandings of a period in sonic history where the future was up for grabs.” Fergal Kinney reviews Do You Have the Force? Jon Savage’s Alternate History of Electronic Music, 1978–82.
• DJ Food continues his history of mini CDs with Oranges And Lemons, the 1989 album by XTC which was released in the usual formats together with a limited edition of three small discs in a flip-top box. The cover art by Dave Dragon is a good example of the resurrected groovy look.
• “If Austin Osman Spare, William Burroughs, Mary Butts and Kathy Acker got together for a séance, the transcript could well look like this.”
• How Leonora Carrington used Tarot to reach self-enlightenment: Gabriel Weisz Carrington on his mother’s quest for mythic revelations.
• Mixes of the week: Sounds Unsaid at Dublab with Tarotplane, and To Die & Live In San Veneficio by SeraphicManta.
• At Dennis Cooper’s: 5strings presents…Solve et Coagula: An introduction to Israel Regardie.
• The Joy of Silhouettes: Vyki Hendy chooses favourite shadow-throwing cover designs.
• Emily Mortimer on how Lolita escaped obscenity laws and cancel culture.
• Freddie deBoer has moved his writing to Substack.
• New music: Wirkung by Arovane.
• Children Of The Sun (1969) by The Misunderstood | Children Of The Sun (1971) by Hawkwind | Children Of The Sun (2010) by The Time And Space Machine
Maybe something gets lost traveling from the US to the UK.
“Lolita” didn’t face “cancel culture” problems. It faced the same censorship issues at the time that were faced by “Ulysses” and “Tropic of Cancer”.
Cancel culture is a fabrication of the US right wing to create issues out of simple shunning and repulsion over beyond the pale opinions. Someone says something highly objectionable, people reject it. Normal. But the term also rests on the perversion of language US conservatives use, like pro-life (they in fact have a pro-birth position but afterwards, it’s all disregard for the lives of people outside of the Republicans’ (and too many Democrats) special interests; fiscal responsibility, which responsibility does not rest on economic conditions but who’s in power — if it’s Republicans, it’s all about bankrupting the government by transferring $$$ to said special interests; and the free market which actually is subject to, I dunno, conservative approval and promoting so called corporate welfare, as a result not free.
And back to cancelling, my favorite at the moment: The fandango over the summer when US Sen. Tom Cotton ran a piece calling for the US Army to be called into DC to put down peaceful BLM demos and who was then quiet about the insufficient security at the Capitol on 6 January.
So, you know, I take issue with the inappropriate use of the bullshit term, cancel culture.
Love you, your work and this blog all the same. <3
You’re getting a little sidetracked by the NYT’s glib use of a term for clickbait reasons. I was going to put it into inverted commas but was hoping people would read past the headline. Emily Mortimer’s piece is good on her father, as well as wondering why Nabokov managed to evade court cases in the US, unlike Naked Lunch. She confuses things a little since the Lady Chatterley trial was famously a British one, and Lolita was banned for a couple of years in Britain (and France, which always seems surprising). I think with the latter it helped that Nabokov had been writing the Pnin stories in the New Yorker for several years. He didn’t appear out of the blue like Burroughs did, and he didn’t have Burroughs’ associations with the (at the time) disreputable Beats.