• At Bandcamp: Marc Masters on The Curious Case of the Channeled New Age Tape; and Erick Bradshaw’s guide to Nurse With Wound.
• At Public Domain Review: Designing the Sublime – Boullée and Ledoux’s Architectural Revolution by Hugh Aldersey-Williams.
• The fifth installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi).
It does not follow that the scientific spirit of empirical inquiry runs against dreaming, and [André] Breton was wrong to think [Roger] Caillois’s investigative methods opposed wonder. Material mysticism led Caillois back to magical thinking, which he expanded further than the Surrealist interest in chance and coincidence as he probed for insights into the order of things. Caillois was equally, perhaps even more, fascinated with magic than the Surrealists, but he wanted to probe what might exist as phenomenally marvelous, beyond the subjective self—he was a scholar of the sacred, and from the episode of the jumping beans onwards, he looked for its character and its workings in actual phenomena. In this sense he was more of a believer—though not in a personal god or a religion. Where Breton exalted the perceiver, Caillois wanted to go beyond these anthropocentric limits.
Marina Warner on the imaginary logic of Roger Caillois
• Mixes of the week: DreamScenes – January 2025 at Ambientblog, and Unrush 093 at A Strangely Isolated Place.
• At Criterion.com: Reincarnations of a Rebel Muse – David Hudson on Delphine Seyrig.
• Old music renewed: Angherr Shisspa (Revisited) by Koenjihyakkei.
• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Laura Dern’s Day.
• Jussi Lehtisalo’s favourite music.
• Lynch music: The Beast (1956) by Milt Buckner | Honky Tonk (Part 1) (1958) by Bill Doggett | Something Wicked This Way Comes (1996) by Barry Adamson
I cannot hear the name Boullee without thinking about Brian Dennehy going spectacularly insane in Rome to the music of Wim Mertens
Terrific article about Roger Caillois. My French is serviceable at best so I’m happy to see his work has been well translated.
If anyone is interested in pursuing the Chinese lore and aesthetic of stones I will recommend the work of Sinologist Edward H Schafer. His translation and commentary Tu Wan’s Stone Catalogue of Cloudy Forest is a classic text. Schafer was a rare scholar whose academic books are themselves beautiful works of literature.
That Caillois article was an old piece but Marina Warner is always worth reading and Caillois is a fascinating character. I included his Little Guide to the 15th Arrondissement for the Use of Phantoms in an essay I wrote about architectural photography and the urban weird. The translator of the Little Guide describes it here:
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/08/11/the-phantoms-of-the-fifteenth-arrondissement/