Weekend links: Ghosts, Spooks and Spectres edition

spectres.jpg

Cover design by Philip Gough.

Ghosts, Spooks and Spectres (1972 reprint). Editor Charles Molin collected nineteen ghost stories by writers including Oscar Wilde (The Canterville Ghost), Charles Dickens (The Signal-Man), J. Sheridan Le Fanu (Madame Crowl’s Ghost) and HG Wells (The Inexperienced Ghost). This was one of my favourite books when I was ten-years old. There’s nuffin like a Puffin. Puffin Books’ parent company, Penguin, is 75 this year.

• The good people at the Outer Alliance have posted an interview with me here in which I talk about the subversive sexualities of sf in the 1970s and also admit to writing fiction.

• There’s just time to mention It Came From Pebble Mill, an event which includes another screening of David Rudkin’s Penda’s Fen.

• “In our society, there has tended to be a very strong compartmentalization of different experiences, different cultural forms, different genres. We can talk in a very broad sense and say art is separate from science, for example, or body is separate from mind, or we can talk in a specific sense and say one certain form of dance music is separate from one form of, say, heavy metal. I don’t really buy those compartmentalizations. I understand why they exist, how they’ve come into being and why they’re convenient, but it’s not the way I think, it’s not the way I experience the world, it’s not the way I believe things should be.” From an interview by Colin Marshall with David Toop at 3QD. Toop’s latest book is Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener.

The Kingdom of the Pearl by Léonard Rosenthal, illustrated by Edmund Dulac.

Ghost Stations by Dollboy, a CD package. And then there’s the Ghostly Bento.

7 Inch Cinema are Birmingham-based cultural historians.

• Mark Pilkington’s Mirage Men now has its own site.

Borges on Pleasure Island: JLB and his love of RLS.

• RIP Arne Nordheim, Norwegian composer.

• Charlie Visnic’s Modular Ghost Synth.

On the trail of Tutankhamen’s penis.

Photos by Thom Ayres.

Ghosts by Japan | Spooky Rhodes by Laika | Purple Dusk by Spectre.