Ernst Haeckel – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Tentacles #5: Art Nouveau

Fob watch (c. 1890) made by Gorham for Tiffany.

Concluding a week of tentacular posts. I was tempted to do something about tentacle porn but that subject has already been covered here, and besides, there’s rather a lot of it around these days. Given the writhing nature of octopus limbs you’d expect there to be far more octopoid Art Nouveau design than there is. The Art Nouveau style was exceptional in allowing the octopus to become a design motif, probably the first time in Western Europe the animal had been given its decorative due since the Ancient Greeks, Minoans and other Mediterranean civilisations used it to pattern dishes and vases. The remoteness of the animal is no doubt one reason it was shunned for so long in northern countries: British sailors used to refer to octopuses as “devil-fishes”, a term that appears in William Hope Hodgson’s fiction. Octopuses in Europe weren’t part of the general culture the way they are in Japan. It took the appearance of Ernst Haeckel’s Kunst-Formen der Natur, published from 1899 to 1904, to bring the aesthetic attractions of the stranger varieties of marine life to a wide audience.

The Prey (1895), bronze by Auguste Ledru.

From Animal Vignettes (c. 1900)

Buckle in silver, gilt, opal, garnet, chalcedony (c. 1900) by Karl Rothmüller.

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Tentacles #3: Dwellers in the Mirage

Illustration by Robert A. Graef (1932).

If the predatory octopuses of the Sargasso Sea are too mundane for you, how about an extra-dimensional Kraken named Khalk’ru which has to be placated with human sacrifice? This creature is the prime menace in A. Merritt’s Dwellers in the Mirage (1932), a novel I’m afraid I haven’t read despite its quite evident tentacular delirium. The story is a Lost Race adventure with the unlikely setting of a warm valley in Alaska where the usual heroic outsider encounters the diabolical Kraken worshippers. Merritt’s work is out of copyright in Australia so the text of the book can be found at the Australian Project Gutenberg. There you’ll discover that chapter four is entitled Tentacle of Khalk’ru.

A handful of covers and illustrations follow.

Virgil Finlay (1941).

Continue reading “Tentacles #3: Dwellers in the Mirage”

Cthulhoid and Artflakes

Cthulhoid (2012).

Hot on the scaly heels of my recent Cthulhu God comes a new collage work I was messing with over Christmas. This was done in part as a reaction to the earlier picture which I’m very happy with but which looks cleaner and flatter than I prefer for Lovecraft-related things. I’d also found some new books of copyright-free cephalopoda that I wanted to try playing with. There are trace elements here of Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur but I’ve plundered Haeckel so much in the past it’s better to search elsewhere for source material.

I’ve been selling reproductions of works such as this at CafePress but now have an additional outlet with a new print venture, Artflakes, who asked me late last year to contribute to their site. Artflakes is a German company operating as CafePress does: artists upload their pictures which can then be sold on a variety of products. The product range is smaller than their rivals but they do canvas prints which CafePress don’t. These are costly items but canvas prints tend to be expensive anyway, even at a high street copy shop. On the plus side, being based in Germany means the shipping costs will be slightly cheaper inside Europe. I’ve not uploaded much at the moment but this new piece is there together with six other works. More will be added in the next couple of months.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Weekend links 70

Faustine (1928) by Harry Clarke.

• This week’s Harry Clarke fix: 50 Watts reposts the Faust illustrations while Golden Age Comic Book Stories has the illustrated Swinburne.

• What Goes Steam in the Night is an evening with contributors to The Steampunk Bible hosted in London by The Last Tuesday Society on September 6th:

Co-author S. J. Chambers invites you to the official U.K. celebration of her book The Steampunk Bible (Abrams Image). Part lecture, part signing, and part entertainment, S. J. will be accompanied by contributors Jema Hewitt (author of Steampunk Emporium ) and Sydney Padua (Lovelace & Babbage) for a discussion of the movement, a special performance by Victorian monster hunter, Major Jack Union, and inevitable hi-jinks and shenanigans to later be announced.

• RIP Conrad Schnitzler, an incredibly prolific electronic musician, and founder member of Tangerine Dream and Kluster/Cluster.

• Golden Pavilion Records reissues fully-licensed late 60’s and 70’s psychedelic, progressive, acid-folk & art-rock music.

• Dressing the Air is “an exclusive consulting and online resource for the creative industries”.

• Luke Haines explains how to cook rabbit stew whilst listening to Hawkwind.

• Wood pyrography by Ernst Haeckel from his home, the Villa Medusa.

Satia Te Sanguine (1928) by Harry Clarke.

The truth is, the best novels will always defy category. Is Great Expectations a mystery or The Brothers Karamazov a whodunnit or The Scarlet Letter science fiction? Does Kafka’s Metamorphosis belong to the genre of fantasy? In reality men don’t turn into giant insects. And it’s funny. Does that mean it’s a comic novel? […] At a time when reading is in trouble, those readers left should define themselves less rigidly.

Howard Jacobson: The best fiction doesn’t need a label.

• Pace the redoubtable Jacobson, Alan Jacobs believes We Can’t Teach Students to Love Reading.

• How Ken Kesey’s LSD-fuelled bus trip created the psychedelic 60s.

• Salvador Dalí creates something for Playboy magazine in 1973.

• JG Ballard: Relics of a red-hot mind.

• Electric Garden (1978) by Conrad Schnitzler | Auf Dem Schwarzen Kanal (1980) by Conrad Schnitzler.

Weekend links 57

A 1973 Ballantine edition of William Burroughs’ novel with a cover illustration from Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) by Salvador Dalí. Via the Burroughs Book Covers archive.

The Sel Publishing House, Turkey, published a new translation of The Soft Machine by William Burroughs in January, an edition which is now under investigation by the Istanbul Prosecutor’s Office following a report by the (deep breath) Prime Ministry’s Council for Protecting Minors from Explicit Publications. The Council lodged a number of complaints, among them assertions of “lacking unity in its subject matter,” “incompliance with narrative unity,” “using slang and colloquial terms” and “the application of a fragmented narrative style.” Details here. Does Turkey still want to join the EU? Because this kind of persistently illiberal bullshit (see the earlier treatment of Orhan Pamuk) isn’t helping their case at all.

• Related to the above: Evan J Peterson reads Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in the toilet of a Seattle gay bar; Ginsberg himself reads Kaddish and other works here.

• More illiberal bullshit: LGBT activists arrested during royal wedding; Queer Resistance released a statement about the arrests. MPs, activists and trade unionists condemn new attacks on the right to protest.

• The Dorian Gray That Wilde Would Want Us To Read. Harvard University Press publishes an uncensored and annotated edition of Wilde’s novel. Kudos for using Caravaggio’s Narcissus on the cover.

One weekend in late 1967, they all decamped to a hotel suite in California’s Ojai Valley for a brainstorming session. Amid clouds of pot smoke, they talked all weekend with the tape recorder running. [Jack] Nicholson then took the tapes and turned the conversations into a screenplay; according to Rafelson, he structured it while on LSD.

Revisiting The Monkees’ psychedelic movie, Head.

Kraftwerk icons for Windows and Mac OS X by Dave Brasgalla.

• Robert Louis Stevenson gets his revenge on sneaky literary agent – 120 years later. And Michael Moorcock imagines tales of unseen Mervyn Peake pictures.

Painting doesn’t look so good on the web. It looks better in life. Sculpture looks better in life. What you end up with is just a reproduction. Whereas with film or with sound or with poetry, you get the deep primary experience not the secondary experience. The web delivers those primary experiences very well.

Ubuweb’s Kenneth Goldsmith interviewed.

• Arkhonia’s Another Dispatch in a World of Multiple Veils is now a free download.

• The story of This Is The Sea: An interview with Mike Scott of The Waterboys.

• Fairlight: The Rolls Royce of synthesizers.

• Haeckel Clock, a free app for the iPad.

• What is totalitarian art?

• Porpoise Song (1968) by The Monkees | Hope For Happiness (1969) by The Soft Machine | I’m A Believer (1974) by Robert Wyatt.