Ben Wickey – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 773

The Tower of Babel from Turris Babel (1679) by Athanasius Kircher, showing how wide the Tower would have to be at its base to reach the Moon.

• The week’s literary resurrection: Penguin announced Shadow Ticket, a new novel by Thomas Pynchon. “Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering…”

• The week’s musical resurrection: Stereolab announced Instant Holograms On Metal Film, their first new album since Not Music in 2010. Aerial Troubles is the new single with a video which has prompted complaints in the comments about the use of AI treatments for the visuals.

• At Public Domain Review: Modern Babylon: Ziggurat Skyscrapers and Hugh Ferriss’ Retrofuturism, a long read by Eva Miller. Previously: The Metropolis of Tomorrow by Hugh Ferriss.

• This week in the Bumper Book of Magic: Ben Wickey is selling some of the original art from his Lives of the Great Enchanters pages.

• At Wormwoodiana: The Golden Age of Second-Hand Bookshops is now. Mark Valentine explains.

• “Alvin Lucier is still making music four years after his death – thanks to an artificial brain.”

• At Colossal: Hundreds of fantastic creatures inhabit a sprawling universe by Vorja Sánchez.

• Coming soon from Radiance Films: A blu-ray disc of Essential Polish Animation.

• Pattern design and illustration by Gail Myerscough.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Homage Script.

• New music: Sabi by Odalie.

• RIP Max Romeo.

• Babylon (1968) by Dr John | War In A Babylon It Sipple Out Deh (1976) by Max Romeo | Babylonian Tower (1982) by Minimal Compact

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

Moon and Serpent Rising

Top Shelf announced this one on Friday so I can break my silence about the book I’ve been working on since May 2021. The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic by Alan Moore and Steve Moore was first announced in February 2007. I’d created the cover design which was used for promotional purposes after which the project went into hibernation for several years. In 2014 Alan and Steve were back at work again, and were co-writing the final essay when Steve died suddenly in March of that year, whereupon the book retreated to limbo once more. Since 2007 my cover has been floating around the internet like the lid for an empty toybox, but the book really is finished at last, and will be published by Knockabout (UK) and Top Shelf (US) in October.

In addition to the cover design I was also slated to be working on two of the book’s internal features: The Soul, a six-part illustrated serial set in the 1920s which evolved out of the occult-detective strip that Alan and I were planning circa 1999; also a series of twenty full-page illustrations for a feature titled Magical Landscapes. When Tony at Knockabout informed me at the beginning of 2021 that the book was being revived I made the audacious suggestion to him and to Alan that I could, if need be, design the whole thing as well as illustrate my own sections. Alan readily agreed, saying he trusted me implicitly, which was good to hear; his sole brief was that the book should be “beautiful and psychedelic”. One reason for his trust is that we’d already made excursions into the Moon & Serpent zone together. I designed three of the Moon & Serpent CDs in the 2000s, and made the video that accompanied the William Blake-themed reading/performance by Alan and co. at the Purcell Room, London, in 2001. Consequently, I’ve often felt like a floating member of the Moon & Serpent cabal.

A couple of things are worth noting now that the book is about to enter the world. The first is that the contents are a little different to the press release from 2007 which announced a book of 320 pages, with 78 of those pages being brand new Tarot card designs. The authors subsequently realised that creating an entirely new Tarot deck is a huge task in itself, especially if, as was the intention, you wanted it to be as wide-ranging and authoritative as the Crowley/Harris Thoth deck. There is a chapter about the Tarot in the finished book but readers will now have to choose decks of their own. I can imagine disappointment being expressed about this, and about some of the other changes but the book as it now stands is actually bigger than the original proposal, with an additional 32 extra pages. The expansion is partly a result of my page design which put fancy borders on all of the text pages. I ended up doing a lot more work for the book than I expected, adding new pages here and there, creating a lot of extra graphics and illustrations, and breaking up the long final essay into sections which are illustrated throughout with small pictures.

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