Charles Williams – Page 2

Weekend links 299

Starman (2016) by Nyahzul Blanco. From the Saint Bowie exhibition at Stephen Romano Gallery, NY.

• “…[Dashiel] Hammett’s first-hand experience of political sleaze, industrial violence and the everyday routine of an agent allowed for a realism that brought hard-boiled fiction to new heights.” Oliver Harris reviews a new life of Hammett, a history of the American detective, and a study of film noir.

• Mixes of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 177 by Vladislav Dobrovolski, The After-School Club by Melmoth The Wanderer, and Perfect Monolake by Rich Ears.

• Inside High-Rise: product designs by Michael Eaton and Felicity Hickson for Ben Wheatley’s feature film.

Yeats is not the only respected writer to make use of the tarot: Italo Calvino, Salvador Dalí, and even Charles Williams, a novelist and theologian who belonged to the Inklings literary circle, also drew on the cards. Still, the cards remain firmly associated with the occult—and, while [Jessa] Crispin is sympathetic to that tradition, she aims to bring tarot to those who may be skeptical of that way of thinking. Her references are more literary than arcane.

Peter Bebergal talks to Jessa Crispin about making the Tarot literary again

• Legowelt’s best free paranormal synth samples, occult instruments and lo-fi effects.

• At Dangerous Minds: a smorgasbord of sorcerous bad taste via Vintage Occult.

• Free download: Cavern of Anti-Matter live at Acad, Berlin, 2015.

• Conversing with your Subconscious: The Art of Adrian Cherry.

• Diagonal Science is the debut album from Black Helicopters.

• 111 Photographs of 111 Westminster Street in Providence, RI.

• More magick: occult documentaries of the 1970s.

• A Bosch-themed fashion feature by Tim Walker.

• Cycloid Drawing Machine

• Dark Star (1984) by Harold Budd | Dark Start (1994) by ELpH vs Coil | Dark Star Blues (2004) by Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O.

Weekend links 297

Crimson Metallic Emergent Skull Crystal Pendant by Kristen Phillips aka Floridxfauna.

• The Noise-Arch Backup at the Internet Archive is 30GB of mp3s from noise-arch.net, a collection of cassette-based releases and artwork: “material represented includes tape experimentation, industrial, avant-garde, indy, rock, diy, subvertainment and auto-hypnotic materials…” 30GB is an intimidatingly large amount of material so it’s better to browse The Noise-Arch Archive, a selection of 468 releases.

• The week in erotica: Claire Voon on Ancient Erotic Dreams and Explicit Scenes in the New York Public Library Collection; Melanie Porter on Great Grandporn: Hardcore Pornography of the Silent Era; Cathy Camper on The Comics of Dale Lazarov: Illustrated Explorations of Sexual Inventiveness.

• Void Beats/Invocation Trex by Cavern of Anti-Matter (Holger Zapf, Joe Dilworth & Tim Gane) was released this week. The opening number is Tardis Cymbals. Tom Furse condensed the 73-minute album into a 17-minute mini-mix.

Indeed, if you had to “place” Williams—put him alongside writers with whom he had something in common—it would be with the mystical autodidacts, the backstreet Rosicrucians more than with the pipe-smoking, tweedy Inklings. To that extent, the only unsatisfactory thing about Grevel Lindop’s book is its title. True, Williams went to Oxford when war broke out and became friends with the famous circle around C. S. Lewis. But he was not an Inkling in spirit. He was not at home in Oxford, and his arrival, far from consolidating the Inklings, actually broke them up by bewitching Lewis, and making Lewis neglect the central friendship of his life, that with Tolkien. Another scholar of Old English literature, C. L. Wrenn, said that meeting Williams made you realize why inquisitors thought they had the right to burn people. Tolkien agreed: “Williams is eminently combustible.”

Certainly, Williams’s books had an influence on the Inklings. Lindop is right to say that the central plotline of Many Dimensions suggests the story of The Lord of the Rings. In the Williams novel, it is a stone of great power, rather than a ring, but it has the same effect on those who bear it: They become its possession, not its possessor.

AN Wilson reviews Charles Williams: The Third Inkling by Grevel Lindop

• Russ Fischer recommends five films by Andrzej Zulawski (RIP). Possession (1981) is still the easiest to find, and a good place to start. I enthused about On The Silver Globe (1977–87) last year.

• England’s Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground by David Keenan has been published in a revised and expanded edition by Strange Attractor.

• The Preservation Man (1962): Artist and collector Bruce Lacey (RIP) filmed by Ken Russell for the BBC’s Monitor.

• Barry Adamson: “I’ve been called the outsider’s outsider”.

• At Dangerous Minds: Six degrees of Marty Feldman.

• Mix of the week: FACT mix 536 by Not Waving.

• The Alan Clarke page at the BFI shop.

• Umberto Eco (RIP): Porta Ludovica

• Possessions (1980) by The Residents | Possessed (1992) by The Balanescu Quartet | Possessed (2001) by Sussan Deyhim & Shirin Neshat

Orson Welles: The One-Man Band

Vassili Silovic’s 90-minute documentary about the uncompleted films of Orson Welles’ later years was a revelation when it appeared in 1995. Orson Welles: The One-Man Band was shown on UK TV as The Lost Films of Orson Welles but “one-man band” is more appropriate, not only because of the bizarre song-and-dance sequence he filmed in London, but also because it’s an apt description of Welles’ approach to filmmaking. Directors who also write and produce are rare but not too uncommon; directors who write, produce and also act in major roles are in a minority. Welles did all those things and often much more, including editing, set decoration and providing voices for minor characters. The latter habit can be distracting in some of the films, especially Mr Arkadin where it often seems he was doing the voices for everyone who wasn’t already a known actor.

The One-Man Band is a compendium of clips from footage bequeathed to his partner, Oja Kodar, together with interviews, TV appearances, a witty and duplicitous trailer for F for Fake, and other odds and ends. This was the first public airing of scenes from The Deep, an unfinished feature based on a thriller, Dead Calm (1963) by Charles Williams (later filmed by Philip Noyce as Dead Calm in 1989.) There’s also a sequence from The Other Side of the Wind, another feature that was closer to completion, and which may yet receive a proper release. The sequence showing Welles discussing The Trial with an audience is now available in full on YouTube. The London clips were intended for US TV, part of an unfinished special entitled Orson’s Bag. These were filmed in the late 60s, and the song-and-dance sequence is probably the strangest thing he directed. I’m more taken with the Tailors sketch which has Jonathan Lynn and the wonderful Charles Gray as a pair of disrespectful outfitters.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Immortal Story, a film by Orson Welles
• Welles at 100
• The Fountain of Youth
• The Complete Citizen Kane
• Return to Glennascaul, a film by Hilton Edwards
• Screening Kafka
• The Panic Broadcast

Weekend links 148

Quantum Entanglement by Duda Lanna.

• An hour-long electronica mix (with the Düül rocking out at the end) by Chris Carter for Ninja Tune’s Solid Steel Radio Show.

• “…a clothes-optional Rosicrucian jamboree.”: Strange Flowers on the paintings of Elisàr von Kupffer.

• A Paste review of volume 2 of The Graphic Canon has some favourable words for my contribution.

It is an entertaining thought to remember that Orlando, all sex-change, cross-dressing and transgressive desire, appeared in the same year as Radclyffe Hall’s sapphic romance The Well of Loneliness. The two novels are different solar systems. The Well is gloomy, beaten, defensive, where women who love women have only suffering and misunderstanding in their lonely lives. The theme is as depressing as the writing, which is terrible. Orlando is a joyful and passionate declaration of love as life, regardless of gender. The Well was banned and declared obscene. Orlando became a bestseller.

Jeanette Winterson on Virginia Woolf’s androgynous fantasia.

• Jim Jupp discovers the mystical novels of Charles Williams.

• Michael Andre-Driussi on The Politics of Roadside Picnic.

• Les Softs Machines: 25 August 1968, Ce Soir On Danse.

• At 50 Watts: Illustrations and comics by Pierre Ferrero.

• Soviet posters: 1469 examples at Flickr.

• Oliver Sacks on drugs (again).

• At Pinterest: Altered States.

• Farewell, Kevin Ayers.

• Darkest London

• Why Are We Sleeping? (1969) by The Soft Machine | Lady Rachel (1969) by Kevin Ayers | Decadence (1973) by Kevin Ayers

The faces of Parsifal

Parsifal by Jean Delville (1890).

Continuing the occasional series of posts examining the evolution of a particular design or image, this one begins with a mystical charcoal drawing by Belgian Symbolist, Jean Delville (1867–1953), our object of concern being that entranced or dreaming face.

My first encounter with Delville’s image wasn’t via the original but came with this Seventies’ version produced for a Charles Williams paperback cover by illustrator Jim Lamb. (And this copy is the only one I can find, reused on a recent audiobook of Williams’ novel. If anyone has a link to a larger copy of the paperback cover then please post it in the comments.) Yes, this is tenuous but when I eventually got to see Delville’s picture it made me think immediately of Lamb’s illustration. Many Dimensions is one of my favourite books by Williams and unusually for him it deals with Islamic rather than Christian mysticism; in that case if Lamb was borrowing from Parsifal then it’s a case of the right image for the wrong book.

Jim Lamb is another illustrator from this period who now works mainly as a landscape artist.

Continue reading “The faces of Parsifal”