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The recurrent pose 7

The Flandrin pose returns in a photograph for the Adonis series by Brent Dundore. Flandrin was striving for a Classical simplicity in his original painting and the quasi-Classical seat in this picture seems to be doing the same. This might easily become a line drawing like those produced by John Flaxman, a contemporary of Flandrin’s whose work was inspired by Classical sources.

“Athena in the form of Penelope’s sister tells the queen of the return of her son Telemachus” from illustrations for The Odyssey by John Flaxman (1810).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive

The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger

The title comes from a newspaper headline, one of many that the tabloid press bestowed on occultist Aleister Crowley whilst titillating their readers with lurid descriptions of orgies and Black Masses throughout the 1920s. Before the Second World War it was still possible to label a self-aggrandising magus “The Wickedest Man in the World”. If only they knew what was coming…

The picture above is a still from Kenneth Anger’s 2002 film of Crowley’s paintings which you can see in two parts at YouTube. The paintings were filmed in exhibition at the October Gallery in 1998 and Anger turns the original tabloid headline around by making the “hang” refer to hanging a painting. Crowley’s crude artwork often turns up in books but there are several pictures in the film I hadn’t come across before. Crowley’s depiction of the Himalayas, where he spent some time mountaineering, look very similar to those of Nicholas Roerich, the painter whose work HP Lovecraft references in At the Mountains of Madness. It would have been nice to have some more information about the pictures but that’s not Anger’s style.

• The Man We Want to Hang pt 1 | pt 2

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Relighting the Magick Lantern
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995
• Austin Osman Spare

Coulthart Calendar 2008

Mid-September is when new calendars are unveiled so here’s my addition to the calendrical onslaught. This year’s edition is an improved version (with tinted page art and a unique cover design) of the Lovecraft-themed calendar I produced last year, and of the three 2007 designs was easily the most popular. The pictures are those from The Great Old Ones sequence in The Haunter of the Dark. You can see larger versions of the page art here and the CafePress shop is here.

Outer Dark

A very young-looking Cormac McCarthy (he was 35) in a New York Times book ad from 1968. There are more ads from the paper’s recent past here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Cormac McCarthy book covers

Strange cargo: things found in books

The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects by Alexandra David-Neel & Lama Yongden, City Lights Books (1972).

One of the additional pleasures of buying old books besides finding something out-of-print (or, it has to be said, something cheap) occurs when those books still possess traces of their previous owners. A recent posting on The Other Andrew’s page concerned book inscriptions, something any book collector will be used to seeing. Less common are the objects which slip from the pages when you’ve returned home. There are several categories of these.

1: Bookmarks

I have a substantial collection of bookmarks proper, from embossed strips of leather to the more mundane pieces of card of the type that bookshops frequently give away. But I also make a habit of using odd inserts to mark a place as did the previous owners of these volumes. The City Lights book (above) came with a very fragile leaf inside it which may well be as old as the book. Another City Lights book I own, the Artaud Anthology from 1965, included a newspaper article about Artaud. Newspaper clipping inserts are discussed below.

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