peacocks – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

The Weird Questionnaire

A peacock. Photograph by Vidhya Narayanan.

Posted at the Weird Fiction Review in the past week, The Weird (or Étrange) Questionnaire is Éric Poindron’s Weird (or Étrange) riposte to the Proust Questionnaire. I’d read the post, and seen Jeff VanderMeer’s answers to the questions, but wasn’t planning on answering it myself until Neddal Ayad wrote asking whether I’d be willing to do so for a future WFR assembly of responses. So here we are. The rules are as follows:

…there are sixty questions (twice as many as most versions of the Proust Questionnaire). Spend no more than a minute on each, and an hour in total. However, don’t keep checking your watch: “let writing define time.”

In the end I took longer than an hour but the time limit is a good idea, otherwise I’d have spent far too long pondering, revising, qualifying remarks, unqualifying the qualifications, and so on. Deadlines have their uses.

The Weird Questionnaire

1: Write the first sentence of a novel, short story, or book of the weird yet to be written.

The first night of winter moonlight revealed a pattern of tiny runic figures etched inside the window glass.

2: Without looking at your watch: what time is it?

01:15

3: Look at your watch. What time is it?

01:20

4: How do you explain this—or these—discrepancy(ies) in time?

It’s always later than you think.

5: Do you believe in meteorological predictions?

“Believe” seems the wrong word in this context since the question concerns a conjecture based on scientific study. Short-range forecasts are fine, long-range ones seldom seem to be.

6: Do you believe in astrological predictions?

If this refers to newspaper columns, they’re always so vague they may as well be computer-generated. Maybe they are.

7: Do you gaze at the sky and stars by night?

Yes, when I’m out of the city.

8: What do you think of the sky and stars by night?

My bad eyesight (the stars are always a blur), the length of time the light has taken to reach us, how the familiarity of the few stars we do manage to see shields us from the true immensity of the stellar gulfs.

9: What were you looking at before starting this questionnaire?

A guest post by Clive Hicks-Jenkins on Kathe Koja’s blog.

10: What do cathedrals, churches, mosques, shrines, synagogues, and other religious monuments inspire in you?

Further appreciation of the values of art, architecture and related crafts. In the case of cathedrals: astonishment at the feats of labour required to build them in a pre-industrial age; their presence as sites of accumulated history.

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Ken Russell, 1927–2011

May–September 1970, Ladbroke Grove: Ken asked me what would most upset an English audience. Louis XIII dining al fresco, carelessly shooting peacocks on the lawn between courses. “Impossible,” said Ken. “How would you do that?”

“Make some dummies, stand them on the lawn and detonate them.”

“No, you’d have to shoot real peacocks. It wouldn’t work otherwise.”

Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge (1984)

It hardly seems worth adding to the Russell eulogies when The Guardian over the past few hours has been so profligate with their stories you might think they’d offed the director in order to boost their readership. For my part I’ll keep it brief and say I used to be guilty of taking Ken Russell for granted, he seemed so ubiquitous when his feature films were turning up all the time on British television. He was fortunate to make the most of that brief moment when American studios were nurturing a handful of world-class talents in the UK. A shame it didn’t last. Derek Jarman, after working on The Devils and Savage Messiah, designed a production of Stravinsky’s The Rake Progress that Russell directed in 1982. Discussing that period in Dancing Ledge he says: “Ken is deeply disillusioned with the cinema, the end of a love affair. Whenever the subject comes up there is sadness, tales of betrayal and hopes dashed.” About British cinema in general, Jarman had this to say:

The English film world is mesmerized by Oscars, and almost any project has to pass the Hollywood test. All indigenous work has to be historic and “quaint” – Brideshead or Chariots of Fire, a dull and overrated TV film, fit the bill. All the rest take their chances.

The BFI is finally releasing The Devils on DVD in March 2012. Unlike The King’s Speech it never won any Oscars. No need to guess which one I’d rather watch.

• Guardian obituary | Ken Russell: a career in clips
• The Independent: Farewell to the wild man of cinema
• Telegraph obituary
• Fuck Yeah Ken Russell

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Salome’s Last Dance

The art of Jacopo Ligozzi, 1547–1627

Cartouche with Macabre Symbols and a Hairy Skull (no date).

Some macabre things for a macabre month. Jacopo Ligozzi was a Mannerist artist, and the date of his birth here is the most commonly cited one, some sources give later years. The excesses of Mannerism—distorted figures, sensational subject matter, grotesquery in general—used to be regarded with suspicion if not downright hostility by the guardians of good taste who write art history books. Peter & Linda Murray’s frequently snotty Dictionary of Art and Artists (1959) describes the style as being “best adapted to neurotic artists”, then goes on to list a few allegedly neurotic types, none of whom are Ligozzi. Judging by these examples, the artist had a thing for memento mori since many of the examples of his work online are grotesque cartouches or scenes of a rampaging Death. The last picture here showing a curious peacock boat is credited to Remigio Cantagallina and was discovered at the rather wonderful Frequent Peacock (now relocated here), another site which saves me the trouble of searching out further peacock pictures.

Thanks to Wunderkammer for the Ligozzi tip!

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Will Bradley posters

More from American illustrator and designer Will Bradley (1868–1962) from the height of his Beardsley period circa 1894–95. These are from a collection by Edward Penfield entitled Posters in Miniature (1897) in which Bradley’s work receives more attention than some of his better-known contemporaries. Half of these designs are familiar, the rest I hadn’t seen before, including the peacock piece below. Even though Bradley was trying out various Beardsley moves at this stage, his work was always a lot more versatile than the lesser imitators. More of Bradley’s designs, and work by other artists, can be found in the scanned edition of Penfield’s book at the Internet Archive.

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Whistler’s Peacock Room revisited

The Peacock Room (1876–1877).

More Japonism courtesy of the Google Art Project where it’s possible to pan around this view of Whistler’s Peacock Room at the Freer Gallery of Art. There’s only one view, unfortunately, it would have been good to see the reverse angle or, better still, a full panorama.

The Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1864).

Google has a number of the Freer’s collection of Whistler drawings and paintings, including The Princess from the Land of Porcelain, the painting which the Peacock Room was designed to show to best effect along with patron Frederick Leyland’s blue-and-white china. Once again the Google views allow us to scrutinise the details of a painting in a way which would otherwise be impossible. It’s fascinating for me to see how loose Whistler’s technique was even at this early date, the brushstrokes of the face seem to have been scumbled over raw canvas.

Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen (1864).

Also at the Freer is another piece of exotica from the same period with a suitably Japanese frame. Whistler’s Japonism, and the Peacock Room in particular, leads directly to Aubrey Beardsley’s art thirty years later.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Peacock Clock
• Whistler’s Peacock Room