Weekend links 652

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Landscape with Antiquities (1955) By Ithell Colquhoun.

• “The ontological horror at the core of these stories is that the stone–which represents the natural world and the uses we carve out for it–is unknowable. It’s been here, affecting the land, whether erected as a monument or laid as bricks, for longer than we can fathom, and its inaccessible past has some frightening bearing on the present.” Sean McGeady on 50 years of stone-tape theory, from Nigel Kneale to Ben Wheatley. Also a reminder that Christmas ghosts on TV could be more than another adaptation of MR James.

• “Midnight is the time when one can recall, with ribald delight, the names of all the Great Works which every gentleman ought to have read but which some of us have not. For there is almost as much clotted nonsense written about literature as there is about theology.” At Wormwoodiana: That Black-Edged Light: A Note on HM Tomlinson.

• “Anxious but stubborn herself, she was a lucid observer of social awkwardness, her subject matter in her books being primarily worry: at disasters real and imagined (comet-fall, floods, unplanned chaos), but also at small-scale domestic panics (such as how to mollify unwanted guests).” Mark Sinker reviewing Tove Jansson, a new biography by Paul Gravett.

Dennis Cooper’s favourite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2022. Thanks again for the link here!

• “A is for Alphabet and Architecture.” Public Domain Review now has an index. Rather slight but still useful.

Ju-on: The Curse and four other Y2K J-Horror movies you may have missed: a list by James Balmont.

• At Smithsonian Magazine: Listen to the sound of a dust devil swirling around on Mars.

• Unquiet Things offers the latest accumulation of Intermittent Eyeball Fodder.

Stone God (1957) by Martin Denny | Sanctuary Stone (1973) by Midwinter | Children Of Stone (2006) by Espers

L’outrageant Lord Horror

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Cover art by Enki Bilal.

Arriving in the post this week was the catalogue for the Shoah et bande dessinée exhibition which is currently running in Paris at Mémorial de la Shoah. I’ve mentioned previously that the exhibition includes some of my pages from my first collaboration with David Britton/Savoy, the death-camp issue of the first Lord Horror series, Hard Core Horror, but until the catalogue arrived I wasn’t sure how that work would be presented. Consequently, I’m surprised to find the comic and Britton’s wider Lord Horror project given a section of its own in the catalogue, with a lengthy appraisal by British comics historian Paul Gravett. The text is French throughout so I can’t follow Gravett’s piece very well but it looks to be an expansion of earlier pieces he’s written about the Savoy comics and their troubled history.

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The book itself is a solid production that I’m pleased to find following the hardback “album” format used by Continental comics. Denoël Graphic, a publisher of bandes dessinées, is the publisher. Among the other artists represented are Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman (of course), plus many French artists whose work I hadn’t seen before. The exhibition runs throughout the year to 30th October, 2017.

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Previously on { feuilleton }
Exhibitionism

Weekend links 182

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Mirror of Water (1981) by Reika Iwami.

• The week in comics: Paul Gravett interviews Enki Bilal. | Paul Kirchner’s wordless and inventively surreal strip, The Bus, was republished in France last year but it’s been out-of-print for years everywhere else. Read it online here. | Bill Watterson has made the entire run of Calvin and Hobbes available for free.

• “…seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” Leland de la Durantaye reviews Italo Calvino: Letters 1941–1985.

• Artist Charles Ross says “My interest in science is related to how mysterious it is.” Ross Andersen visited Ross’s Star Axis, “a masterpiece forty years in the making”.

There is a satirical intent at work here, as well as mordant humour, a potent mix that reminds one more of the absurdist fictions of the French jazz musician Boris Vian than of anything in the SF canon. Science fiction is not central in Harrison’s work – not even as a target of his sharp wit – and it is a mistake to regard him as being chiefly interested in demolishing a genre that is only one of several he has mastered.

John Gray on M. John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract trilogy. This week Harrison posted a new piece of fiction on his blog.

• Mixes of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 091 by Sugai Ken, and Bride of the Abominable Marshman, an early Halloween mix by Hackneymarshman.

• Clive Hicks-Jenkins on Schandmasken (masks of shame), and the clay visage of Paul Wegener’s Golem.

• A version of Kraftwerk’s Trans Europe Express by Chicago band Disappears.

Postcards to the Curious: MR James-themed artwork by Alisdair Wood.

Clive Barker: Why I Once Gave Up Horror Movies Entirely.

• Artist Melinda Gebbie at Phantasmaphile.

Fragment, a new video from Emptyset.

38 photos of airships through the ages.

• This Much I Know: Kenneth Anger.

• Trans Europe Express (2000) by Señor Coconut Y Su Conjunto | Trans Europe Express (2007) by Receptors | Trans Europe Express (2012) by Daniel Mantey