{painting} – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 757

The Breath of Creation (c. 1926–34) by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn.

• At Wormwoodiana: “…Gresham was well-read enough to know that while magic can be more than a MacGuffin in a fantasy story, neither fantasy nor thriller fiction lets magic unsettle readers much. […] Even when it is good, the supernatural is never safe in a Williams story. Not conventional fantasy by half.” G. Connor Salter on William Lindsay Gresham’s enthusiasm for Charles Williams’ novels.

• At Harper’s Magazine: Christopher Tayler reviews Lawrence Venuti’s translations of Dino Buzzati’s Il deserto dei Tartari (now titled The Stronghold) which was published last year, and The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories which will be out in January.

• Dennis Cooper’s favourite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2024. Thanks again for the link here!

• The Approach to J.L. Borges: A Borgesian pastiche in homage to the creator of Ficciones by Ed Simon.

• “HP Lovecraft meets Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser”: an essay from 1992 by Fritz Leiber.

• Can performing live on The Old Grey Whistle Test in January, 1974.

• DJ Food says “Let’s have some psychedelia”.

• RIP Zakir Hussain.

• Creation Dub 1 (1977) by Lee Perry & The Upsetters | Threat To Creation (1981) by Creation Rebel/New Age Steppers | Theme from ‘Creation’ (1992) by Brian Eno

Weekend links 756

A Diver (no date) by Walter Crane.

• At Worldbuilding Agency: The first part of a long interview with Bruce Sterling concerning “the pursuit of deliberate oxymorons as a creative strategy, worldbuilding in the context of history and futurity, Berlusconi on the moon and more”. With questions from Paul Graham Raven, and my cover art for Bruce’s Robot Artists and Black Swans.

• “With its focus on the 1970s career of Leonard Rossiter and its mordant metaphysics of the moist, Sophie-Sleigh Johnson’s Code: Damp might just be the most original book yet to emerge from Repeater publishing,” says Tim Burrows.

• “A definitive guide to the work of William S Burroughs’ on screen.” It’s a guide but it’s hardly definitive when there’s no mention of the four films Burroughs made with Anthony Balch.

• A catalogue of lots at the forthcoming After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, etc, also historic porn and a few garments worn by Divine.

• New music: Jay recommends the high-grade motorik en espanol dance-rock of Sgt Papers; Topology Of A Quantum City by Paul Schütze; Overtones by Everyday Dust.

• This week’s obligatory Bumper Book of Magic entry: Ben Wickey at Alan Moore World talks about his work on the book’s Great Enchanters comic strips.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Malcolm Le Grice’s Day. Le Grice’s death was announced earlier this month.

• At The Wire: The magazine’s contributors’ charts showing their favourite music of the past year.

• A new website for the Sanborn Fire Maps and their decorated title pages.

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

• At Public Domain Review: Albert Kahn’s autochromes.

• Burroughs Called The Law (1960s) by William S. Burroughs | Language Is A Virus From Outer Space (Live) (1984) by Laurie Anderson | Burroughs Don’t Play Guitar (1996) by Islamic Diggers

The art of Jean Ransy, 1910–1991

La ville de bas en haut (1961).

Back in January I had a vague intention to write about new areas of Surrealist interest in the months leading up to Surrealism’s 100th anniversary, an impulse that didn’t really sustain itself. That’s okay, almost everything I add to these pages is the result of a whim of some sort, and whims are often short-lived and erratic. All the same, Jean Ransy may fit the Surrealist bill even if he doesn’t seem to have had any lasting connections with those groups who regarded themselves as the official guardians of the Surrealist flame. Ransy was Belgian artist which makes him Surrealist by default if you subscribe to Jonathan Meades’ proposition that Belgium is a Surrealist nation at heart. (Magritte wasn’t a Surrealist, says Meades, he was a social realist.)

Composition surréaliste au coquillage (1962).

Ransy’s paintings appear at first glance like a Belgian equivalent of Rex Whistler in their pictorial realism and refusal to jump on the Modernist bandwagon. Whistler and Ransy were contemporaries (Whistler was born in 1905) but Whistler’s paintings were much more restrained even when outright fantasy entered his baroque pastiches. The “metaphysical” vistas of Giorgio de Chirico are mentioned as an influence on Ransy’s work so he was at least looking at living artists, something you never sense with Whistler. There’s a de Chirico quality in the tilted perspectives and accumulations of disparate objects, also a hint of Max Ernst in one or two paintings. Most of the pictures here have been hoovered from various auction websites but the artist’s official website has the best copies plus biographical information. (Ransy tip via Anne Billson. Thanks!)

Le chant du printemps (1968).

Diane (1969).

La nuit silencieuse (1970).

Continue reading “The art of Jean Ransy, 1910–1991”

Weekend links 755

A painting by Ed Emshwiller for the cover of Fantastic Stories of Imagination, July 1962, illustrating The Singing Statues by JG Ballard .

• This week in the Bumper Book of Magic: my comments about the creation of the book’s cover and magical alphabet have been posted at Alan Moore World. At (Quasi), Smoky Man (in Italian) looks at other parts of the book, and includes my answers to his questions about the creation of The Soul, a character originally planned for a comic strip that Alan Moore and I were working on. I’ve been trying recently to find the first sketches I made of The Soul back in 2000 or 2001, without success. If I do find any of them I’ll post them here.

• New music: Juk-Shabb by Cryo Chamber Collaboration is this year’s installment in the Lovecraft-themed album series (previously) from Cryo Chamber. Also this week: Xerrox Vol. 5 by Alva Noto; Nocturne (Soundtrack for an Invisible Film) by Avi C. Engel; and Cat Location Conundrum by Moon Wiring Club.

• Code: Damp: An Esoteric Guide to British Sitcoms by Sophie Sleigh-Johnson, being “an alternative occult and esoteric history of England told through one of its most popular cultural forms: the comedy sitcom”.

…the joy of art isn’t only the pleasure of an end result but also the experience of going through the process of having made it. When you go out for a walk it isn’t just (or even primarily) for the pleasure of reaching a destination, but for the process of doing the walking. For me, using AI all too often feels like I’m engaging in a socially useless process, in which I learn almost nothing and then pass on my non-learning to others. It’s like getting the postcard instead of the holiday.

Brian Eno at Boston Review

• “The typographic choices that Godard made were thematic and not only chosen for their stylistic properties.” Arijana Zeric looks inside the design world of Jean-Luc Godard.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: The Stammering Librarian: Essays by Timothy D’Arch Smith, edited by Edwin Pouncey & Sandy Robertson.

• At Public Domain Review: Fantastic Planet: The Microscopy Album of Marinus Pieter Filbri (1887–88).

• At the BFI: Michael Brooke offers suggestions for where to begin with Guy Maddin.

• At The Quietus: The Strange World of…Dennis Bovell.

• Mix of the week: A mix for The Wire by KMRU.

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

• Fantastic Cat (1996) by Takako Minekawa | Fantastic Analysis (2001) by Mouse On Mars | Fantastic Mass (2016) by Time Attendant

Weekend links 754

The Remains of Minotaur in a Harlequin Costume (1936) by Pablo Picasso. Via.

• At Rarefilmm: Long Live the New Flesh: The Films of David Cronenberg, a TV documentary from 1987 which includes contributions from Martin Scorsese and Stephen King. I wrote about this one years ago but at the time the only available copy was chopped into 10-minute segments.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Delinquent Elementals: A Pagan News Anthology, edited by Phil Hine & Rodney Orpheus.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine explores the possible influence of the Sherlock Holmes stories on Arthur Machen’s early fiction.

Perhaps there was a Super-Sargasso Sea in the upper atmosphere into which were carried objects from earth—frogs, fish, leaves—and from which they later rained. Perhaps the universe was a living thing, rains of blood its bleeding. Perhaps in 1903 the earth, in its orbit about the sun, passed through the remains of a world destroyed in an interplanetary dispute, the particles falling as rains of dust and redness. Perhaps humanity was controlled. “I think we’re property”, Fort wrote. Or, perhaps not; so skeptical he could not accept even his own authority, he had given up theorizing. “We have expressions: we don’t call them explanations: we’ve discarded explanations with beliefs.”

Joshua Blu Buhs on how Charles Fort came to write The Book of the Damned

• More Alan Moore: “Magic is not this big, spooky, dark thing that’s full of nightmares,” he tells Séamas O’Reilly at the Irish Times.

• High-resolution images of 14,000 woodblock illustrations and letterforms free to use at the Plantin-Moretus Museum, Antwerp.

• New music: Music For Bus Stations by Rod Modell; and Between Soil And Sky by Tarotplane.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Denton Welch In Youth is Pleasure (1945).

• At the Quietus: The Strange World of…Irena and Vojtech Havlovi.

• Apollo Explorer

• Pagan Love Song (1959) by Martin Denny | Pagan Lovesong (Vibeakimbo) (1982) by Virgin Prunes | Pagan Sun Temple (2022) by Hawksmoor