{ feuilleton }

{ feuilleton } is taking a short break. As usual, you’re encouraged to browse the archives.

Extended downtime over the past few days was caused by a major server calamity at the webhost end so my apologies to regular visitors. I keep backups of everything for precisely this reason—servers of all kinds can be subject to failure—but one of the problems with an increasingly sprawling site such as this (8,000+ files, [...]

The Flapper by Frank X Leyendecker, Life magazine (1922).
When I posted this splendid cover last July I said that I ought to make a post of Butterfly Women, so here is one. Don’t expect this to be at all comprehensive, women with butterfly wings are as legion as mermaids, these are merely a couple of [...]

William Burroughs’ Control Virus is alive and well and ready to flourish in New Zealand on February 28 where new copyright laws will force ISPs to take down material as a result of accusation only, no proof required. 16,000 people have signed a petition against this at the Creative Freedom Foundation site.
Update: Internet copyright law [...]

The name’s d’Eon. Chevalier d’Eon | “He was an 18th-century spy who loved to cross-dress and swordfight.”

Nothing doing here for the past twenty-four hours due to things collapsing at the webhost end. Everything seems stable now (fingers crossed). In future when this happens check my Twitter feed for reports.

So then… The above is the better of my two entries for a Valentine’s day competition on the Extensis blog which required you [...]

Tweet addicts may like to know that I’m now on Twitter.

Three Spheres II (1946) by MC Escher.
Celebrating the third { feuilleton } anniversary and post number 1,438. It’s become customary now to list the most popular posts of the past year so here we go again:
• The Underwater Sculpture Gallery. This has been surprisingly popular for several months now, despite pictures of the artworks in [...]

Yes, it’s that word again… As is customary here, this year’s calendars have been reduced in price to $17.99, a dollar above the CafePress base cost. The Heaven and Hell calendar has sold surprisingly well so I’ll be keeping the shop active for the next couple of months. My thanks to everyone who bought one [...]

Life magazine for August 5th, 1909, with an illustration by Coles Phillips.
02009? Read this.
Happy new year!

No sun–no moon!
No morn–no noon!
No dawn–no dusk–no proper time of day–
No sky–no earthly view–
No distance looking blue–
No road–no street–no “t’other side this way”–
No end to any Row–
No indications where the Crescents go–
No top to any steeple–
No recognitions of familiar people–
No courtesies for showing ’em–
No knowing ’em!
No travelling at all–no locomotion–
No inkling of the way–no notion–
“No [...]

— You’re a nice third degree witness, faith! But this is no laughing matter. Do you think we are tonedeafs in our noses to boot? Can you not distinguish the sense, prain, from the sound, bray? You have homosexual catheis of empathy between narcissism of the expert and steatopygic invertedness. Get yourself psychoanolised!
— O, begor, [...]

Four Hawkwind badges and a Nik Turner badge based on designs by Barney Bubbles. From the Coulthart archives.
Readers who’ve been waiting for Reasons To Be Cheerful, Paul Gorman’s landmark study of the life and work of artist and designer Barney Bubbles, may like to know that Paul was in touch today with the suggestion [...]

Apologies (again!) for last night’s outage. This time my webhost neglected to tell me the database was being moved which means WordPress ground to a halt. I haven’t checked but I think a couple of recent comments may have been lost in the confusion. Very aggravating in a “What am I paying more money for?” [...]

My apologies to any visitors arriving here during the past week to find the site down. What should have been a straightforward upgrading of the hosting service became overly-extended due to compounded misunderstanding and poor communication. It didn’t help that I was also extremely busy catching up with work after the long bank holiday weekend.
By [...]

Wordle is a Java-based web toy which generates random arrangements of words from any text input. This is the result after pasting in the opening of the “Sirens” chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses and playing around with the colour and font settings. Fun, but as far as web-based toys go I prefer the abstractions of Bomomo.
While [...]

Thanks to Ms Bluewyvern at Blue Tea for honouring { feuilleton } with the Arte y pico award, the details of which are as follows:
1. You have to pick 5 blogs that you consider deserve this award for their creativity, design, interesting material, and also contributes to the blogging community, no matter what language.
2. [...]

Or the thousandth post, so here’s a capital M from the Gothic alphabet of Marie de Bourgogne, circa 1480. Taken from Fantastic Alphabets (L’Aventurine, Paris, 1995).

Earthquake hits much of England
| Biggest for 25 years.

Fortune cover by Antonio Petrucelli, January 1938.
Happy new year everyone. 02008? Read this.
My Best Things of 2007 list is over at Arthur.