Clark Ashton Smith – Page 6

The House of Orchids by George Sterling

Do all roads lead to the Internet Archive? Not really but I keep ending up there when I happen to discover an interesting old book and wonder whether they have a PDF of the volume in question. The volume for consideration today, The House of Orchids, is a 1911 collection of verse by George Sterling (1869–1926), an American but another of those writers whose poetry looked to Decadent London and Paris for its flavour, hence the Wildean title, and, it should be said, the cover design. I haven’t been able to find an artist credit for this; if anyone knows who was responsible, please leave a comment.

Many of the books at Archive.org are unremarkable library editions but this is a rare exception, being a gift to the University of California of writer Ambrose Bierce, Sterling’s idol and the person to whom he writes the above thanks and a dedication. Bierce praised Sterling’s work but must have passed the book on fairly soon after receiving it since he famously disappeared in Mexico two years later. Or maybe his library was passed to the university after his disappearance? Whatever the answer, this edition contains another curious feature in the form of a pasted-in newspaper clipping from 1926 concerning the death in mysterious circumstances of Sterling himself at San Francisco’s Bohemian Club. The general supposition is that he killed himself with a vial of cyanide he was in the habit of carrying around. One of Sterling’s young poetic protégés at the time The House of Orchids appeared was Clark Ashton Smith whose first volume of verse, The Star-Treader, and Other Poems, was published a year later. That book and another of Smith’s titles is also available at Archive.org, as I noted in June. Also there, and of particular {feuilleton} interest, is Sterling’s The Evanescent City, a paean to San Francisco’s 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. (This site has scans of the text and photos.)

George-Sterling.org is a site devoted to the writer which includes many of his poems and other texts. Looking at his lengthy piece from 1907, A Wine of Wizardry, you can see what it was about his work that so appealed to Clark Ashton Smith and others.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Odes and Sonnets by Clark Ashton Smith
• Clark Ashton Smith book covers
• The Evanescent City

Weekend links 27

Annie Duels The Sun (2010) by Angie Wang.

I’m interviewed again, this time by James at Cardboard Cutout Sundown. Covering familiar subjects for {feuilleton} readers: art history, design, Lovecraft, the genre/mainstream seesaw, etc. Related: Jeff VanderMeer previewed my design for the forthcoming Steampunk Reloaded.

• Battle over legacy of father of Art Nouveau. Prague authorities are demanding the paintings which comprise Alphonse Mucha’s Slav Epic be moved to the capital.

• The films that time forgot. David Thomson on ten neglected works including a cult favourite of mine, Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End (1970).

• The Viatorium Press: “Fine letterpress printing, digital typography, and hand painted illumination.” Among their recent productions is a poem by Clark Ashton Smith.

À la conquête du pôle (1912); Georges Méliès vs. Jules Verne.

• Taxandria, a feature-length collaboration between Raoul Servais, François Schuiten and, er, Alain Robbe-Grillet, is on YouTube. My earlier post about the film is here.

• Salvagepunk, or (maybe) Post-post-modernism: “How a music micro-trend heralds an emerging, internet-enabled, aesthetic movement.” See also the latest issue of The Wire.

• Drainspotting with Remo Camerota: documenting Japan’s creative manhole covers.

• Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of squid: a book devoted to Kraken Black Spiced Rum.

• After Stanley Kubrick. Christiane Kubrick on life without Stanley K.

• Pills and penises and kissing boys: Tara Sinn’s Kaleidoscopes.

• Found Objects: a hauntological dumping ground.

• Sandow Birk’s American Qur’an.

• RIP Frank Kermode.

• Feuerland (1968) by Theo Schumann Combo; Feuerland (1977) by Michael Rother; Feuerland (2007) by Justus Köhnke.

Odes and Sonnets by Clark Ashton Smith

Clark Ashton Smith’s weird fiction is reprinted more often and more widely than his poetry so it’s convenient for those curious about his verse that the Internet Archive has two volumes of early work. Odes and Sonnets is from 1918 and features embellishments by illustrator Florence Lundborg whose grape-devouring peacocks nod towards the fin de siècle spirit Smith was trying to capture in his poems. The Star-Treader, and Other Poems is Smith’s first book from 1912, published when he was just 19, and is heavily indebted to the Decadents. That Decadent influence carried over into the stories he wrote for Weird Tales and augments their unique flavour and over-heated atmosphere, an atmosphere which raised his work above the often mediocre level of his contemporaries. On page 58 of The Star-Treader can be found The Eldritch Dark, the poem from which the leading Smith website takes its name.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Clark Ashton Smith book covers

Frank Frazetta, 1928–2010

Conan the Adventurer aka The Barbarian (1965).

How to appraise Frank Frazetta? In November last year I wrote about this Conan portrait for an SF Signal Mind Meld feature on favourite book covers:

The covers that launched a thousand imitators. Lancer’s series of Conan books in the 1960s were the first appearance of Howard’s barbarian in paperback and came sporting cover art by Frank Frazetta. A great example of artist and subject being perfectly matched, these are the standard by which all subsequent barbarian art must be judged. Frazetta’s painting of a brooding warrior lord (which he reworked slightly for its poster edition) is for me the definitive portrait of Howard’s hero, battle scarred and proudly malevolent, with a chauvinistic blur of trophy female clinging at his feet. Other artists can do the muscles and monsters but none capture the physical presence and brute animality of Howard’s characters the way Frazetta does.

I found Frazetta’s work through the great series of fantasy art books which Pan/Ballantine published in the 1970s. I hadn’t read any Robert E Howard at the time, I only knew the diluted version of the Conan character in the Marvel comics series but Frazetta’s work was so powerful it was a spur to search out Howard, especially when I read that the writer had been a pen-pal of HP Lovecraft. I was never as interested in Frazetta’s other staple inspiration, Edgar Rice Burroughs, probably because Tarzan was too familiar from films and TV.

The Fantastic Art of Frank Frazetta (1975).

Both Howard and Frazetta defined a milieu which combined an intensity of vision with a projection of their own personalities into the worlds they created. (Many of Frazetta’s protagonists resemble their creator.) Both suffered from having that intensity of vision watered-down by ham-fisted imitators or the vulgarisations of films and comics. At their best, Howard’s Conan stories are a blend of heavyweight adventure story with supernatural horror; many of them were first published in Weird Tales magazine alongside other masters of the weird like Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. What impressed me about Frazetta’s paintings was the way he managed to capture a sense of eldritch weirdness as well as the more obvious barbaric adventure in a manner which eluded so many of the sword and sorcery illustrators who followed. What’s even more remarkable when you read interviews is that he seemed to do all this instinctively. He’d learned from looking at earlier artists such as J Allen St John, Howard Pyle, Frank Schoonover and Roy Krenkel, and found the means to apply their painting style to his own internal aesthetics and sense of drama.

Swords of Mars (1974).

Aesthetics is one of the things I always come back to with Frazetta. I used to pore over these paintings wondering how it was that all the details of weapons and decor seemed absolutely right. Nothing was ever over-worked or too elaborate. Where did this invention come from? The other obvious feature is a raw sexiness which pervades everything. I’ve had people tell me that Frazetta must have been bisexual because of the equal care he lavished on his male and female figures. I’ve always disagreed with this. The point about Frazetta’s world is that everything is sexy: the people, the decor, the architecture, the animals, even the monsters; naturally the men are going to be as sexy as the women. In addition, he wasn’t afraid of giving his men real balls (so to speak) unlike the endless parade of costumed eunuchs filling the comic books. These figures may be dealing death but they’re filled with vigour and life when they’re doing it.

Bran Mak Morn (1969).

I said everything is sexy; I’ll make an exception for the extraordinary painting of Bran Mak Morn and his tribal horde, a picture of feral nightmarishness that goes beyond mere illustration and makes you feel the artist has shown you an atavistic glimpse of ages past. Robert E Howard would have been thrilled to see his characters brought to life with this kind of visceral intensity. For years Howard’s fiction was dismissed as pulp, now he’s a Penguin Modern Classic. And it’s as a modern classic that I’ll continue to think of Frank Frazetta.

• Unofficial gallery site

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Frazetta: Painting with Fire
• The monstrous tome
• Men with snakes
• My pastiches
• Fantastic art from Pan Books

Outer Alliance Pride Day

Today is Outer Alliance Pride Day so let’s begin with a statement:

As a member of the Outer Alliance, I advocate for queer speculative fiction and those who create, publish and support it, whatever their sexual orientation and gender identity. I make sure this is reflected in my actions and my work.

Various members of the Outer Alliance are either posting fiction, or reviewing something or otherwise attempting to fill that declaration of intent. For my part I decided today to do a sketch based on my favourite chapter of The Ticket that Exploded by William Burroughs, the sequence entitled the black fruit which Burroughs wrote with Michael Portman. Ticket was the first Burroughs book I read at the age of 16 or so, having discovered a copy in a local library, and it really felt like something exploding in the head. For a start, the text is some of his least accommodating for an average reader, although I was already familiar enough with literary experiment to cope with that. Far more electrifying was seeing familiar scenarios from science fiction and fantasy infused with a raw and relentless gay sexuality of endless erections and spurting cocks. The black fruit begins with a science fiction scene of lost astronauts encountering alien fishboys intent on having sex; it then progresses through a series of descriptions which read like a pornographic rewriting of similar scenes from HP Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith. In the opening pages of Ticket, Burroughs describes his book as “science fiction” but this was like no sf I’d read; I started to wish there was more like it. There are flashes of similar stuff in The Soft Machine (including an idea borrowed from Henry Kuttner) and elsewhere, and Cities of the Red Night is pretty much a full-on fantasy in its second half, but I’d still like to read more about the fishboys…

Fishboy and Astronaut (detail).

So here’s an explicitly erotic sketch based on the black fruit (click the picture for the full thing). This should have been a lot better but I’m out of practice drawing at the moment and I didn’t give myself enough time. The scene doesn’t really match the book either, and the astronaut figure is pretty crappy. Feeble excuses aside, Burroughs’ rotting swamp gardens with their marble statues of copulating boys deserve better. And where his fiction leads, I’m still hoping that more writers will follow, not by copying his obsessions but by being as fearless and honest in mining their own.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• William S Burroughs: A Man Within
• The art of NoBeast