Alan Bennett – Page 4 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 91

Untitled (1978) by GR Santosh at 50 Watts.

• Evertype Publishing produces a range of Lewis Carroll special editions including Ailice’s Àventurs in Wunnerland (a translation in Scots), Alicia in Terra Mirabili (a Latin version), and an edition printed in the Nyctographic Square Alphabet devised by Carroll.

• This week’s bookshop animations: Type Books, Toronto presents The Joy of Books while at Shakespeare and Company, Paris, Spike Jonze and Simon Cahn explore the erotic life of book covers in Mourir Auprès de Toi.

• Invisible Girls and Phantom Ladies, a 1982 article on sexism in (US superhero) comics by Alan Moore. Thirty years on, things haven’t improved much at all.

I reread it now, 35 years later, and I am struck by its capacity to change like a magic mirror. Where I had originally seen it as a book about writing, about becoming a writer, I now see it as a book about reading, about taking one’s place in the chain. Where I once assumed it was a book about eternal youth, I now see it as a book about growing up, about learning to live.

Tilda Swinton on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando

• Dark Water, Lovecraftian carpet designs (yes, carpets) by Kirill Rozhkov. Danish carpet manufacturer Ege has a catalogue showing the finished products.

• Neil Gaiman ventures into the treacherous labyrinth of M. John Harrison’s Viriconium.

• Nicholas Lezard reviews The White People and Other Weird Stories by Arthur Machen.

The Dream (1910) by Henri Rousseau at the Google Art Project.

• Reassessing the Saul Bass and Alfred Hitchcock Collaboration by Pat Kirkham.

• Getting There Too Quickly: Peter Bebergal on Aldous Huxley and Mescaline.

• Hidden in the Open: A Photographic Essay of Afro-American Male Couples.

• Filles En Aiguilles, a new musical work by Schütze+Hopkins.

• RubiCANE’s Erotic Illustrations.

• Laurie Anderson has a Godplex.

• Alan Bennett on Smut.

• The Jungle Line (1975) by Joni Mitchell | The Jungle Line (1981) by Low Noise (Kevin Armstrong, Thomas Dolby, JJ Johnson & Matthew Seligman) | The Jungle Line (2007) by Herbie Hancock with Leonard Cohen.

Edward Gorey book covers

Scribner’s edition (USA, 1978).

I’m still working through the Robert Aickman stories so curiosity had me looking up the covers of his first editions. Edward Gorey was a fitting choice as artist for Aickman’s fifth story collection, Cold Hand in Mine, and it’s interesting seeing his work labelled on both these books as “strange stories”; paperbacks tended to brand his fiction as horror which isn’t always accurate. We’re back with that term “weird” again: reading Aickman today is like finding the quotidian Britishness of Alan Bennett darkening into the inexplicable nightmares of David Lynch. Gorey’s gloomy renderings suit these atmospheres a lot better than later attempts to package Aickman’s books so it’s a shame he wasn’t allowed to illustrate more of them. Cold Hand in Mine has recently been republished by Faber, together with two more collections of Aickman’s stories.

Scribner’s edition (USA, 1979).

Edward Gorey illustrated and designed many book covers, not all of them horror or ghost stories. This Flickr set has some of the more notable examples which includes Cold Hand in Mine. Also a flaming spider… There are more covers at Gorey Books where I was surprised to find he’d produced a cover for A Room in Chelsea Square, an early novel of gay life in London by Michael Nelson that was originally published anonymously to spare the author the attentions of intolerant authorities. Gorey’s drawing is like something Philippe Jullian might have done had he been a more careful draughtsman.

• See also: Edward Gorey’s Elephant House for more covers and Gorey ephemera.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Weird Fiction Review

Malicious Damage

I was going to title this post “Fucked by Monty” but thought that might give the wrong impression. The phrase was one of several titles added to the cover of The Collected Plays of Emelyn Williams by Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell when they were happily defacing the books of Islington Library, London, in the early 1960s. Despite the outrage of the librarians at the vandalism most of the defaced books were put aside and are now prized items in Islington’s collection. This week the library announced an exhibition of the books, Malicious Damage: The crimes of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell. The Guardian has a gallery of the covers here (and there’s more at Joe Orton central), rare examples of what might be called “guerilla collage”.

In addition to tarting up boring cover designs, Orton and Halliwell also typed their own descriptions of some the books’ contents. Gollancz volumes were apparently good for this since the publisher left the inside of their famous yellow dust jackets blank. John Lahr in Prick Up Your Ears gives an example from a Dorothy L Sayers novel which is also read out in the 1987 film adaptation:

When little Betty Macdree says that she has been interfered with, her mother at first laughs. It is only something the kiddy has picked up off television. But when sorting through the laundry, Mrs. Macdree discovers that a new pair of knickers are missing she thinks again. On being questioned, Betty bursts into tears. Mrs. Macdree takes her to the police station and to everyone’s surprise the little girl identifies P.C. Brenda Coolidge as her attacker. Brenda, a new recruit, denies the charge. A search is made of the Women’s Police Barracks. What is found there is a seven inch phallus and a pair of knickers of the kind used by Betty. All looks black for kindly P.C. Coolidge…. What can she do? This is one of the most enthralling stories ever written by Miss Sayers.

It is the only one in which the murder weapon is concealed, not for reasons of fear but for reasons of decency!

READ THIS BEHIND CLOSED DOORS. And have a good shit while you are reading!

Alan Bennett wrote the screenplay of Prick Up Your Ears and that line about “It is only something the kiddy has picked up off television” could well have been one of his own. Orton said that when the pair ended up in court the greatest outrage was shown not towards their obscene amendments but to simple bits of Surrealism such as the adding of a monkey’s face to the cover of Collins Guide to Roses. Schoolboy humour is understandable but don’t dare do something that makes no apparent sense.

Malicious Damage is a free exhibition and runs until January, 2012.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Joe Orton Online
• Joe Orton

Screening Kafka

Kafka (1991).

This week I completed the interior design for a new anthology from Tachyon, Kafkaesque, edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly. It’s a collection of short stories either inspired by Franz Kafka, or with a Kafka-like atmosphere, and features a high calibre of contributions from writers including JG Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges, Carol Emshwiller, Jeffrey Ford, Jonathan Lethem and Philip Roth, and also the comic strip adaptation of The Hunger Artist by Robert Crumb. When I knew this was incoming I rewatched a few favourite Kafka-inspired film and TV works, and belatedly realised I have something of a predilection for these things. What follows is a list of some favourites from the Kafkaesque dramas I’ve seen to date. IMDB lists 72 titles crediting Kafka as the original writer so there’s still a lot more to see.

The Trial (1962), dir: Orson Welles.

Orson Welles in one of his Peter Bogdanovich interviews describes how producer Alexander Salkind gave him a list of literary classics to which he owned the rights and asked him to pick one. Given a choice of Kafka titles Welles says he would have chosen The Castle but The Trial was the only one on the list so it’s this which became the first major adaptation of a Kafka novel. Welles always took some liberties with adaptations—even Shakespeare wasn’t sacred—and he does so here. I’m not really concerned whether this is completely faithful to the book, however, it’s a first-class work of cinema which shows Welles’ genius for improvisation in the use of the semi-derelict Gare d’Orsay in Paris as the main setting. (Welles had commissioned set designs but the money to pay for those disappeared at the last minute.) As well as scenes in Paris the film mixes other scenes shot in Rome and Zagreb with Anthony Perkins’ Josef K frequently jumping across Europe in a single cut. The resulting blend of 19th-century architecture, industrial ruin and Modernist offices which Welles called “Jules Verne modernism” continues to be a big inspiration for me when thinking about invented cities. Kafka has been fortunate in having many great actors drawn to his work; here with Perkins there’s Welles himself as the booming and hilarious Advocate, together with Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider and Akim Tamiroff.

Continue reading “Screening Kafka”

Weekend links 68

Every man and every woman is a star by Sveta Dorosheva.

• Matt Taylor (illustration) with Gregg Kulick and Paul Buckley (design) provide new Penguin covers for John Le Carré. I love the look which seems inspired by Daniel Kleinman’s title sequence for Casino Royale even if it doesn’t quite suit the shabby world of George Smiley and the Circus.

[Deborah Kass] told me that when she was going to art school in the ’70s, she tripped on LSD almost every week and she said she felt it was her “moral duty as an artist to take the trip.” […] I think psychedelic experience makes you think that there are multiple realities, that there isn’t just this one normal real world to which we’re supposed to conform, but that the reality changes depending on the state of consciousness that we’re in when we’re experiencing it. So, any different kind of art kind of posits a different reality. (more)

New York Times art critic Ken Johnson discussing his new book Are You Experienced?: How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art.

• “That got me thinking that evolution really isn’t survival of the fittest, when it comes to these things, it is more like survival of the interesting, survival of the beautiful, survival of the weird, cool stuff that managed to evolve.” Laurie Anderson and David Rothenberg discuss music and animals.

• Laura Cumming on the late Lucian Freud. And Stephen Heller on Alex Steinweiss, the originator in 1939 of the artistic record sleeve who also died last week.

• Alan Moore says “Think Locally: Fuck ‘Globally'”. He and Queen Calluz explain how Dodgem Logic magazine puts their ideas into practice.

• Adam Curtis gets interviewed while Alan Bennett returns to Armley Public Library in Leeds.

• Peacock’s Garden, a celebration of pavonine splendour.

• A visit to Seher Shah’s studio in Brooklyn, New York.

• Maximum androgyny at Epicenity, a Tumblr.

• Does your god have a penis?

• Chrysalide (1978) is an album of “cosmic” guitar instrumentals by Michel Moulinié which sounds at times like a French equivalent of Manuel Göttsching. It’s never been released on CD but a copy can be found here.