Arthur Machen – { feuilleton }

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

Weekend links 716

The Vision of Endymion (1902) by Edward John Poynter.

• The Art and History of Lettering Comics by Todd Klein. Eight of the pages in the forthcoming Moon & Serpent book have been lettered by Todd.

• At Igloomag: Chang Terhune looks for music to help you sleep. No mention of an obvious (and superior) candidate, Sleep by Max Richter.

• New music: Ghosted II by Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin; and The Ship by David Shea.

But unlike macroscopic drugs like cannabis, LSD is so small and so powerful that its consumption almost always requires an inert housing—the water, tablets, sugar cubes, bits of string, or pieces of paper that transport the drug from manufacturer to tripper. In the law, this vehicle is described as the “carrier medium,” an object impregnated with drugs, one that can be sold, seized, presented as evidence, and dissolved into the hearts, minds, and guts of consumers.

When you print images onto a paper carrier medium, you are adding another layer of mediation to an already loopy transmission. Hence, a meta medium, a liminal genre of print culture that dissolves the boundaries between a postage stamp, a ticket, a bubble gum card, and the communion host. This makes blotter a central if barely recognized artifact of psychedelic print culture, alongside rock posters and underground newspapers and comix, but with the extra ouroboric weirdness that it is designed to be ingested, to disappear. Blotter is the most ephemeral of all psychedelic ephemera. It is produced to be eaten, to blur the divide between object and subject, dissolving material signs and molecules into a phenomenological upsurge of sensory, poetic, and cognitive immediacy.

Erik Davis, in an extract from Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium

• At Wormwoodiana: John Howard on The London Adventure, or, The Art of Wandering by Arthur Machen.

• At Unquiet Things: Hidden Marvels on Your Bookshelf: The Artistic Legacy of Laurence Schwinger.

• “Some intelligent civilizations will be trapped on their worlds”. Evan Gough explains.

• At Vinyl Factory: The Latin-American women of 20th-century electronic music.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Steve Erickson presents A Black Psychedelia Primer Day.

• At Public Domain Review: Animated Putty by Walter R. Booth.

• Vinita Joshi’s favourite music.

• Sleepy Theory (1982) by Weekend | Sleep 3 (1995) by Paul Schütze | Sleep Games (2012) by Pye Corner Audio

Weekend links 693

Imaginary (no date) by Sidney Sime.

• Victor Rees was in touch this week to alert me to a one-off screening of The Gourmet (previously), a cult TV drama from 1986 written by Kazuo Ishiguro and directed by Michael Whyte. The screening, which will take place at Swedenborg House, London, on 16th October, is one of a series of retrospective events based around an exhibition from 1974, Albion Island Vortex, by Brian Catling and Iain Sinclair. The film, which is connected to Sinclair’s oeuvre by its use of one of the Hawksmoor churches, will be followed by a Q&A session with Sinclair and Michael Whyte. The screening is free but places are limited so prior booking is required.

• “Alongside his thieves and vagabonds, Hotten includes religious slang, public schoolboy slang, pirate slang, equine stable slang, phrases coined by Dr. Johnson, the slang of softened oaths, workmen’s slang, stagehand slang, shopkeeper’s slang, and dozens of other argots.” Hunter Dukes on A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words (1860) by John Camden Hotten.

• The Night Land, William Hope Hodgson’s “Dying Earth” doorstop, is republished in an abridged version as part of MIT Press’s Radium Age series, “proto–science fiction stories from the underappreciated era between 1900 and 1935”. All the reprints come with new introductions, the one for Hodgson being by Erik Davis.

• “My partner wanted me to stop buying lava lamps. It was an expensive hobby, and we were running out of room in our apartment.” Nora Claire Miller on the lure of the lava lamp. I only own a single one but I appreciate the obsessive attraction.

• Rambalac takes his roaming camera for a walk through teamLab Planets, Tokyo, a labyrinthine exhibition featuring plenty of water (and wet feet), and a moss garden filled with large silver eggs.

• At Strange Flowers: An examination of the connections between the self-mythologising Marie Corelli and her fictional counterparts in the Mapp and Lucia novels of EF Benson.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Cabarets of Death, a book about the otherworldly cabarets of Montmartre by Mel Gordon, edited by Joanna Ebenstein.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The Secret Glory by Arthur Machen.

• 10 essential Japanese reggae releases selected by Kay Suzuki.

• Mix of the week: A Fact Mix by Venus Ex Machina.

• Modern Art in Mid-Century Comics.

• RIP Michael Gambon.

• Planet Caravan (1970) by Black Sabbath | Planet Queen (1971) by T. Rex | Oszillator Planet Concert (1971) by Tangerine Dream

Weekend links 689

Salammbô (1899) by Adolphe Cossard.

• At Unquiet Things: “A mystery that no longer exists: Wrinkle in Time cover artist revealed”. S. Elizabeth explains. I did a little research of my own into this enigma without success. Good to know that it’s been resolved.

• James Balmont’s latest guide to Japanese cinema is an examination of the transcendental oeuvre of Yasujiro Ozu.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Trains intersect with everyday life in nostalgic illustrations by Shinjiro Ogawa.

• DJ Food discovered a set of Zodiac posters by Bruce Krefting from 1969.

• At Wormwoodiana: John Howard on looking for misplaced Machens.

• At Vinyl Factory: Discovering Mort Garson with Hilary Wood.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: More Ozu in Yasujiro Ozu Day.

• New music: Multizonal Mindscramble by Polypores.

• Mix of the week is a mix for The Wire by Aho Ssan.

• Ioneye in conversation with Bill Laswell.

• Train Song (1969) by Pentangle | Love On A Real Train (1984) by Tangerine Dream | Tokyosaka Train (2002) by Funki Porcini

Weekend links 677

Design by Neville Brody, 1980.

• My work soundtrack for the past couple of weeks has been non-stop Cabaret Voltaire so this is pertinent. Neville Brody designed many of the group’s record sleeves in the 1980s as well as this poster and another one that I’ve only seen as a small picture in the first Brody book. He was also responsible for the CV logo which I never managed to find in badge form.

• “Anger’s preferred mode of artistry in his last decades was self-mythologising, and while he would return to filmmaking late in life, it was less as hierophant than totem—the worn keepsake of a once powerful magick.” Ryan Meehan remembers Kenneth Anger.

• New music: Waves by Ben Chasny and Rick Tomlinson, Topos by UCC Harlo, and Zango by WITCH.

Kafka’s perpetual redescription of his plight suggests that throughout his writing life he was less interested in finding a solution or even arriving at a single, definitive formulation of the problem than he was in exploring the implications and complications of his situation from new, unexpected angles and crafting an ever-expanding lexicon of figures for its inescapability.

Ross Benjamin, the translator of Franz Kafka’s diaries, on the neurotic concerns that Kafka turned into art

• “Why are men seemingly always naked in ancient Greek art?” Sarah Murray investigates.

• Artists for Bibi: an auction in aid of Arthur Machen’s great-great-granddaughter.

• At Public Domain Review: Unidentified Floating Object: Edo Images of Utsuro-bune.

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

• Old music: Moon Journey by Mort Garson.

• RIP Tony McPhee.

• Kafka (1964) by The Rowdies | Kafka (1982) by Masami Tsuchiya | Kafka (Main Title) (1992) by Cliff Martinez