A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Painting
The Devil’s Wife and her Eldest (1924) by Harry Clarke.
Happy new year. 02024? Read this.
L’Inhumaine poster (1924) by Georges Djo-Bourgeois.
Counter-Composition V (1924) by Theo van Doesburg.
The Thief of Bagdad poster (1924) by Anton Grot.
Linea Capricciosa (1924) by Wassily Kandinsky.
Sea Change (c.1966) by George Wallace Jardine.
A paucity of links this week thanks to the Xmas blight which reduced my RSS feed to a wasteland of no activity at all or too many of those lazy listicles devoted to “our top ten things of the year”. There was, however, this from Simon Reynolds:
I miss the inter-blog chatter of the 2000s, but in truth, connectivity was only ever part of the appeal. I’d do this even if no one read it. Blogging, for me, is the perfect format. No restrictions when it comes to length or brevity: a post can be a considered and meticulously composed 3,000-word essay, or a spurted splat of speculation or whimsy. No rules about structure or consistency of tone. A blogpost can be half-baked and barely proved: I feel zero responsibility to “do my research” before pontificating. Purely for my own pleasure, I do often go deep. But it’s nearer the truth to say that some posts are outcomes of rambles across the archives of the internet, byproducts of the odd information trawled up and the lateral connections created.
Setting aside the inter-blog conversation, which I was never very interested in, Reynolds articulates precisely why I still enjoy posting things here. I also agree with his comments about the psychological constraints that doing the same for Substack or similar would impose: a paying readership creates responsibilities that would make the whole thing feel like another form of work rather than play. To Reynolds’ comments I’d add that I also enjoy having a tiny area of the internet over which I exercise complete control. If I fall out with my webhost, as I did in the summer, I can move the entire site to a new location.
Reynolds expanded on his article at his regular forum, blissblog, where he examines the current state of the thing that people used to call the blogosphere. My thanks to Simon for including this place in his list of diehard operatives. I can’t say I’ve noticed the younger generations picking up the habit (then again, I haven’t really been looking…) but the small percentage of any generation who want to do more than simply follow the herd will always find outlets for their interests. And the tools for doing this have never gone away. This particular medium may not suit most people, but for those who can accommodate themselves to the format it’s a better way to spend your time than marinating your soul in the corrosive sump of social media.
• Elsewhere: Among other things, 2024 will be the year that the earliest manifestation of Walt Disney’s ubiquitous rodent enters the public domain in the USA. Jennifer Jenkins lists some of the more prominent books, films, songs, etc that will be following suit.
• At Open Culture: The Beautiful Anarchy of the Earliest Animated Cartoons.
• At Dennis Cooper’s: Another day for Shirley Clarke.
• Suspended Animation (1980) by Bernard Szajner | Animation (1983) by Cabaret Voltaire | Reanimation (1996) by Bill Laswell feat. DJ Rob Swift
Le Grand Transparent (1947) by Jacques Hérold.
The Great Transparent Ones
Man is perhaps not the centre, the cynosure of the universe. One can go so far as to believe that there exist above him, on the animal scale, beings whose behaviour is as strange to him as his may be to the mayfly or the whale. Nothing necessarily stands in the way of these creatures’ being able to completely escape man’s sensory system of references through a camouflage of whatever sort one cares to imagine, though the possibility of such a camouflage is posited only by the theory of forms and the study of mimetic animals. There is no doubt that there is ample room for speculation here, even though this idea tends to place man in the same modest conditions of interpretation of his own universe as the child who is pleased to form his conception of an ant from its underside just after he has kicked over an anthill. In considering disturbances such as cyclones, in face of which man is powerless to be anything but a victim or a witness, or those such as war, notoriously inadequate versions of which are set forth, it would not be impossible, in the course of a vast work over which the most daring sort of induction should never cease to preside, to approximate the structure and the constitution of such hypothetical beings (which mysteriously reveal themselves to us when we are afraid and when we are conscious of the workings of chance) to the point where they become credible.
I think it necessary to point out that I am not departing appreciably from Novalis’ testimony: “In reality we live in an animal whose parasites we are. The constitution of this animal determines ours and vice versa,” and that I am only agreeing with a thought of William James’s: “Who knows whether, in nature, we do not occupy just as small a place alongside beings whose existence we do not suspect as our cats and dogs that live with us in our homes?” Even learned men do not all contradict this view of things: “Perhaps there circle round about us beings built on the same plan as we are, but different, men for example whose albumins are straight,” said Émile Duclaux, a former director of the Pasteur Institute (1840–1904).
A new myth? Must these things be convinced that they result from a mirage or must they be given a chance to show themselves?
André Breton, Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto, or Not, 1942
Le Grand Transparent (1947) by Jacques Hérold.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Execution of the Testament of the Marquis de Sade by Jean Benoît
• Chance encounters on the dissecting table
• The Marvellous
• Surrealist cartomancy
The Seven Lamps (c.1956) by Marion Elizabeth Adnams.
• At Spoon & Tamago: All 54 playing cards reinterpreted through still-life photography by Yuni Yoshida.
• At Colossal: Photographer Mikko Lagerstedt illuminates the magical solitude of the Nordic winter.
• At 3:AM Magazine: Alexander B. Joy explores the 9th minute of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris.
• At Dennis Cooper’s: The Seven Godlike Books of James McCourt.
• Mix of the week: Winter Solstice 5 at Ambientblog.
• Entries for the RSPCA Young Photographer 2023.
• Artmaker Blog curated by Bruce Sterling.
• New music: Earth Drone by The Owl.
• Ace Of Spades (1965) by Link Wray | Jack Of Diamonds (1966) by The Daily Flash | Pack Of Cards (1970) by Nat Cole
The Yolk (1953) by Gertrude Hermes.
• “By 1910, a quarter of the 129 million litres of alcohol consumed annually by Frenchmen was absinthe. Of course, the wine industry was threatened by this growing desire for ‘industrial spirits.’ The Pernod Company was the primary producer, but there were dozens of distilleries offering variations of the ambrosial concoction. The Green Fairy had become the Green Curse.” Barnaby Conrad III on the intersections of absinthe and art.
• At Wormwoodiana: “The Zombie of Great Peru is a transgressive novel written in 1697 by Pierre–Corneille Blessebois…a memoir of occultism, seduction, slapstick, and humiliation, set in the racial and sexual hothouse of colonial Guadeloupe. It contains the first appearance of the word ‘zombie’ in literature.” Doug Skinner, the translator of a new edition, talks to Bill Ectric about the book.
• “I have been lucky to have the time to understand, or misunderstand, the concept of sound. It’s all about the sound. I don’t play styles, I don’t play genres, I don’t play jazz. I play my repertoire, my language, my own poetry.” Bill Laswell talking to Paul Acquaro and David Cristol about his career as player and producer.
• New music: Rhan-Tegoth by Cryo Chamber Collaboration. A couple of months ago I was wondering whether Cryo Chamber would be continuing their series of Lovecraftian albums, and, if so, which entity they might choose for the theme of the next one. Now we know.
• “Zines, at their most glorious, are indifferent to dignity, reckless in the statements they reel off, determined to make a virtue of their limited resources.” Sukhdev Sandhu on the history of the fanzine.
• At Unquiet Things: Hazy Shade of Winter: The Artwork of Julius Sergius von Klever.
• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – December 2023 at Ambientblog.
• At the Daily Heller: Daniel Pelavin’s Pipe Dreams.
• Old music: Buchla Christmas by Warner Jepson.
• At Dennis Cooper’s: Isaac Julien Day.
• Pipeline (1962) by The Chantays | Pipeline (2005) by Monolake | Banzai Pipeline (2020) by The Surfrajettes