Weekend links 107

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Le Faune (1923) by Carlos Schwabe.

• “When I recently attended a conference in China, many of the presenters left their papers on the cloud—Google Docs, to be specific. You know how this story ends: they got to China and there was no Google. Shit out of luck. Their cloud-based Gmail was also unavailable, as were the cloud lockers on which they had stored their rich media presentations.” Ubuweb’s Kenneth Goldsmith on why he doesn’t trust the Cloud.

• “I’m a poet and Britain is not a land for poets anymore.” A marvellous interview with the great Lindsay Kemp at Dangerous Minds. Subjects include all that you’d hope for: Genet, Salomé, David Bowie, Ken Russell, Derek Jarman, The Wicker Man and “papier maché giant cocks”.

• “As early as the 1950s, Maurice Richardson wrote a Freudian analysis which concluded that Dracula was ‘a kind of incestuous-necrophilious, oral-anal-sadistic all-in wrestling match’.” Christopher Frayling on the Bram Stoker centenary.

Björk gets enthused by (among other things) Leonora Carrington, The Hourglass Sanatorium and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s YouTube lectures.

• Before Fritz Lang’s Metropolis there was Algol – Tragödie der Macht (1920). Strange Flowers investigates.

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David Marsh recreates famous album covers using Adobe Illustrator’s Pantone swatches.

• New titles forthcoming from Strange Attractor Press. Related: an interview with SAP allies Cyclobe.

• 960 individual slabs of vinyl make an animated waveform for Benga’s I Will Never Change.

• An exhibition of works by Stanislav Szukalksi at Varnish Fine Art, San Francisco,

Keith Haring‘s erotic mural for the NYC LGBT Community Center is restored.

The Situationist Times (1962–1967) is resurrected at Boo-Hooray.

• Doors Closing Slowly: Derek Raymond‘s Factory Novels.

Will Wilkinson insists that fiction isn’t good for you.

• More bookplates at BibliOdyssey and 50 Watts.

The Top 25 Psychedelic Videos of All Time.

Flannery O’Connor: cartoonist.

• RIP Adam Yauch.

• Their finest moment: Sabotage (1994) by Beastie Boys.

Henry Keen’s illustrated Webster

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More gorgeous work from elusive British illustrator Henry Keen (1871–1935). These are some of the ink drawings Keen provided for a 1930 edition of John Webster’s Jacobean tragedies The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil. In addition to eleven full-page illustrations there are decorative embellishments, and as usual it’s a shame there isn’t anywhere with a complete set of the artwork. I’m tempted to track down some of Keen’s books myself, this one seems especially good. That crowned skull is not only worthy of Carlos Schwabe, it makes me wonder why Webster wasn’t given more attention from earlier artists. Probably because the plays were too strong for 19th century tastes, violent revenge drama wasn’t what anyone wanted on stage at the time. Swinburne admired Webster’s work but then Swinburne wasn’t exactly a typical Victorian.

Thanks to ~Wunderkammer~ for the tip!

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The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Henry Keen’s Dorian Gray

Carlos Schwabe’s Fleurs du Mal

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La Déstruction.

More Symbolist femmes fatale, this time courtesy of Carlos Schwabe (1866–1926) and his illustrations for Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal from 1900. I’d had the site these pictures are from bookmarked for some time but hadn’t noticed that the version of Schwabe’s Spleen et Ideal illustration (below) was different to the one more commonly seen in books of Symbolist art. In fact the more common picture is about the only one of these illustrations that turns up at all in books. (It also appeared on a UK edition of Baudelaire’s poems, as I recall.) Schwabe is more usually represented by his mystically-inspired paintings and drawings, especially those he produced for the Salon de la Rose+Croix; on the strength of some of his Baudelairean pieces I’d say he’s a worthy companion to Félicien Rops.

Continue reading “Carlos Schwabe’s Fleurs du Mal”