Marian Bantjes designs the cover of the latest Creative Review and there’s a feature about her work inside.
• “…the question: ‘was Shakespeare gay?’ strikes me as so daft as to be barely worth answering. Of course he was. Arguably he was bisexual, of sorts, but his heart was never on his straight side.” Don Paterson throws the cat among the pigeons in an examination of the Shakespeare’s sonnets. Related (sort of): Shakespeare and Company: The bookshop that thinks it’s a hotel. Also related: Jeanette Winterson revisits Shakespeare and Company.
• 100 orbs of light float in the Schuylkill River. Also in Philadelphia: Animators Amok in a Curiosity Cabinet: the Brothers Quay are making a film in the Mütter Museum. Can’t wait to see it.
• More Alan Moore: Fossil Angels, a lengthy essay about magic and the occult, was written in 2002 but hasn’t been given a public airing until now.
• Alberto Manguel is always worth reading:
As Borges was well aware even then, the history of literature is the history of this paradox. On the one hand, the deeply rooted intuition writers have that the world exists, in Mallarmé’s much-abused phrase, to result in a beautiful book (or, as Borges would have it, even a mediocre book), and, on the other hand, to know that the muse governing the enterprise is, as Mallarmé called her, the Muse of Impotence (or, to use a freer translation, the Muse of Impossibility). Mallarmé added later that all who have ever written anything, even those we call geniuses, have attempted this ultimate Book, the Book with a capital B. And all have failed.
• Here Comes Everybody: Wake In Progress is a self-described “foolhardy attempt to illustrate Finnegans Wake”. Easier to illustrate than make a film of the book, I’d have thought, and Mary Ellen Bute already attempted the latter.
Psychic Explosion: Adolf Hoffmeister’s illustrations for a 1967 edition of Lautréamont’s Poesies at A Journey Round My Skull.
• Craig Colorusso’s Sun Boxes can be seen at Turner Falls, Massachusetts, during November.
• Clive Hicks-Jenkins has a book and retrospective exhibition of his art due next year.
• A sneak peek into The Steampunk Bible to which I’m a contributor. And also here.
• “Human or other; depends who comes”: the Ballardian films of Paul Williams.
• Transmission (1979) by Joy Division; Transmission (1995) by Low; Monkey (2010) by Robert Plant.
Gotta love cover versions by and of Low. Seem to remember there was a cracking cover of the Floyd’s “Fearless” on the Lifetime of Temporary Relief box.
How does it feel to have Alan refer to you as “the luminous John Coulthart” in his essay?
After listening to Unearthing I think it’s best to listen to all of his prose works read aloud instead of just reading them silently. He should do a reading of Voice of the Fire (especially the last chapter).
James Joyce makes more sense when you hear it read aloud, especially Finnegan’s Wake.
That’s very good of Alan, of course, although I forget when I made that remark about the Golden Dawn. I saw him read part of the first chapter of Voice of the Fire in London circa 1992. This was when he was still writing the book, I think. Since some of the voices are female a spoken-word version might work better with a different actor for each piece.