August 2012 – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Ephraim Moses Lilien’s Lieder des Ghetto

There are no golems in Morris Rosenfeld’s Songs of the Ghetto (1899), translated here by Berthold Feiwel for a German readership as Lieder des Ghetto (1902). But the Berlin edition does contain many superb full-page illustrations and embellishments by Ephraim Moses Lilien (1874–1925), a German artist whose work has featured here on a number of occasions. I’d seen a couple of these drawings before but hadn’t quite registered the pronounced Beardsley influence until now. Aubrey had only died four years before this book was published, and while Lilien’s style is strong enough to establish its own identity you can find a Beardsley-like quality not only in the heavy blacks and areas of white, but also in the border designs, the treatment of landscape and foliage, and even the jewellery on the demon figure below, details which resemble the similar jewellery on Beardsley’s title page for the story of Ali Baba. There’s more of Lilien’s work at this Flickr set while the rest of the book may be browsed or downloaded at the Internet Archive.

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More Golems

Golem by Jiri Barta.

There are always more golems. Among recent reading I’ve been catching up with the works of Michael Chabon, and have just finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), a novel concerned with several things that obsessed me when I was 13, namely Harry Houdini, conjuring tricks and the Empire State Building. Chabon even acknowledges JC Cannell’s The Secrets of Houdini, a book I re-read many times trying in vain to learn some of Houdini’s card tricks. What didn’t obsess me at that age happens to be the main subject of the novel: superhero comics. Chabon does a good job of communicating the enthusiasm that powered the early days of the American comics industry, however, and I can appreciate the enthusiasm that history generates for him even if I don’t quite share it. Lurking at the back of his story is the mute and symbolic figure of Rabbi Loew’s Golem of Prague, mention of which prompted me to see whether Czech animator Jiri Barta had managed to complete his film of the Golem story, a project which has been stalled since the 1990s. He hasn’t, unfortunately, but there is a trailer which I hadn’t seen before, a sight that makes the prospect even more tantalising. Someone give this man some money to finish his film.

Emet (2009).

Elsewhere, there’s Emet by Bonsaininja Studio, Milan, a short steampunk take on the Golem creation story. Great use of CGI and digital animation but I’d still prefer to see Barta’s version. Meanwhile, the whole of Paul Wegener’s The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920) is now on YouTube. If you’ve never seen Wegener stomping around medieval Prague with his shopping basket then here’s your chance.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Hodgson versus Houdini
• Das Haus zur letzten Latern
• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem
• Barta’s Golem

Weekend links 122

Transmitter Crowbar Discharge Unit, Bates Linear Accelerator. Photo by Daniel Jackson from his Dark Machines series.

The language we use for writing about art is oddly pornographic: We know it when we see it. No one would deny its distinctiveness. Yet efforts to define it inevitably produce squeamishness, as if describing the object too precisely might reveal one’s particular, perhaps peculiar, investments in it. Let us now break that unspoken rule and describe the linguistic features of IAE in some detail.

IAE has a distinctive lexicon: aporia, radically, space, proposition, biopolitical, tension, transversal, autonomy. An artist’s work inevitably interrogates, questions, encodes, transforms, subverts, imbricates, displaces—though often it doesn’t do these things so much as it serves to, functions to, or seems to (or might seem to) do these things. IAE rebukes English for its lack of nouns: Visual becomes visuality, global becomes globality, potential becomes potentiality, experience becomes…experiencability. […] Whatever the content, the aim is to sound to the art world like someone worth listening to, by adopting an approximation of its elite language.

International Art English by Alix Rule & David Levine

For years I’ve been calling it Artspeak: the frequently disingenuous, misleading or merely confused jargon that passes for descriptive writing in the art world. Alix Rule and David Levine apply the more neutral label of International Art English. In a lengthy essay at Triplecanopy they reveal the origins of IAE’s terminology and show why the stuff has spread like semantic kudzu.

• “What a bizarre focal point Anish Kapoor’s spiral callipers are: a Laocoönian observation platform strangled in red steel at a cost of many millions, while electricity pylons, with their austere elegance, once hymned by the poets of the 1930s, have been removed, at enormous cost, from the same site to be buried in the radioactive tilth of landfill dumps and industrial detritus.” Iain Sinclair reports on the Olympics.

• Alfred Kubin in…Nottingham! The Other Side, an exhibition of “haunting drawings of death, trauma and fantastical creatures inhabiting imaginary worlds”, running to the end of September.

• Francis Ford Coppola and Stewart Copeland discuss the making of Rumble Fish (1982). Over at The Rumpus there’s Coppola talking about his career and his latest film, TWIXT.

• Eraserhead: The Making of a Cult Classic. In the 1980s Kenneth George Godwin interviewed everyone responsible for making David Lynch’s film. Fascinating reading.

• Skin Job, the debut poetry collection by Evan J. Peterson, is twenty-one poems about monsters, horror, and science fiction. Evan made a trailer.

• Wood, brass and “the latest advances in nanotechnology”: Teka, an OLED lamp by Aldo Cibic and Tommaso Corà.

• Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London (1967): Peter Whitehead’s film of the capital at its swinging height.

• “Beam Us Up, Mr. Scott!”: Why Misquotations Catch On by Maria Konnikova.

• Hari Kunzru‘s ten favourite books about underground London.

• The Periodic Table of Heavy Metals.

• Alan Garner: A life in books.

• Fuck yeah, manuscripts!

• (HR) Giger Counter.

• This week was all about Vangelis in the 1970s: Creation du Monde (1973) | Spiral (1977) | Himalaya / Summit (1979).

Wildeana 7

Continuing an occasional series. The drawing above is frequently credited to Aubrey Beardsley in books about Oscar Wilde but receives an “anonymous” attribution in books of Beardsley’s work. The copy here, and the pages below, are from Bibliography of Oscar Wilde (1914) by Stuart Mason.

• Last November it was announced that Wilde’s lipstick-blotched tomb in Père Lachaise cemetery is to be cleaned (again) then shielded from the persistent kissers and graffiti writers by a glass screen. Flickr has a collection of photos showing the earlier condition of the tomb and its embellishments.

• Maria Bustillos in The Vexed Posthumous Life of Oscar Wilde chronicles the story of the blue plaque on Wilde’s former home in Tite Street, London.

• “A hundred and twenty five years ago, Oscar Wilde edited a fashion magazine, his first and only office job. We have yet to learn from the experience.” Wilde in the Office by Kaya Genç.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Oscar Wilde archive

H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction

Illustration by Sven Geier, design by Jo Obarowski and Rebecca Lysen.

HP Lovecraft would have been as surprised as anyone if he could have witnessed the tremendous posthumous triumph he and his work have achieved.

Thus leading Lovecraft biographer and scholar ST Joshi in the introduction to this suitably monstrous book. H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction was published in a new edition last year after first appearing in 2008 as part of Barnes & Noble’s Leatherbound Classics Series. My drawing of Dagon from 1999 adorns the silvered endpapers, and the reason for this belated mention is because I was only sent copies this week after moaning about not having seen a copy in a Tor.com post about the series. In truth the oversight was partly my own fault: one hazard of this line of work is that artwork is requested months (or even years) in advance of publication, so if the work in question is a reprint it’s easy to forget all about it as you get involved with other things.

So anyway, this is a handsome volume of over a thousand pages, not quite leather, it’s more of a leatherette with the design blocked into it. Sven Geier’s cosmic illustration has been given an iridescent finish, and the copies I was sent have metallic silver on the edges as well as a purple ribbon which makes a better match with the colour scheme. The contents comprise all of Lovecraft’s solo fiction (no collaborations, in other words) from the juvenilia through to the non-fiction of his Supernatural Horror in Literature essay. In addition to the introduction there’s a short note from ST Joshi for each story. Needless to say, I’m very pleased to be associated with Lovecraft’s work in this way.

Anyone considered buying a copy should note that the book is currently cheaper at B&N than at Amazon. Also, complaints about typos would appear to apply to the earlier edition although I’ve not had a chance to read any of the stories.

My Dagon picture below appears here larger than it has done before. The drawing was done with a Biro pen, something I’ve always liked using, then tweaked slightly in Photoshop to blur the lines a little and bring out the highlights. I’m not sure now the tweaking was necessary so I may dig out the original at some point to see how it compares.

Dagon (1999) by John Coulthart.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive