John – { feuilleton }

Mug-wump Specific

Mugwump (mŭg´ wŭmp). An Algonquin word meaning a chief; in Eliot’s Indian Bible the word “centurion” in the Acts is rendered mugwump. It is now applied in the United States to independent members of the Republican party, those who refuse to follow the dictum of a caucus, and all political Pharisees whose party vote cannot be relied on. —Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1954

Such is the usual explanation given for the origin of the word “mugwump”, a term better known today, of course, for its use in Naked Lunch, and that mainly via David Cronenberg’s feature film. Why William Burroughs came to name his sinister creatures mugwumps is something I’ve never seen an explanation for although one may well exist somewhere.

A few years ago I wrote a short post showing how the first description of the mugwumps in Naked Lunch was a kind of science-fictional rewrite of a similar passage from Junkie, a description a predatory character that a drug-user might encounter in the narcotic underworld of the 1940s. As an addendum to the post I added a crude image of a label for a 19th-century patent medicine, “Mug-wump Specific”, which had turned up at Wikipedia without any attendant information. At first sight the label seemed too good to be true in its Burroughsian combination of the mugwump name, sexual disease and—since it claims to be a cure—Dr Benway-style crank medicine. These associations were further compounded by the Freudian illustration of a woman offering a bowl to a very large snake. (The latter detail shouldn’t necessarily be taken as a reference to snake oil, however. The snake twined around a staff is a common medical symbol, derived from Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine.) Why a medicine manufacturer in Indiana should choose mugwump as the name for its alleged cure is yet another mystery, and one unlikely to be resolved. I’d guess it’s a result of the impulse that still prevails today when new products have to be named in a distinctive manner that’s both memorable and copyrightable.

This mass of conundrums was percolating through my mind last week as a result of which I embarked on a fairly determined search to find the image above, a first-generation printing of the medicine label affixed to a US trademark application. Ever since the cruder image had turned up at Wikipedia I’d been wondering why there wasn’t a better copy to be found anywhere. Surely something with so many cultural connections should be flying around the Tumblr labyrinth by now? I’d previously tried all the obvious sources like the image section of the Wellcome collection, where you’ll find a variety of medicine labels, as well as the product catalogues at the Internet Archive. Since Google has taken to ruining its search engine it’s become increasingly difficult to find uncommon images but I was lucky on this occasion when I found one of the trademark applications for sale at eBay. Knowing that the Library of Congress has an online archive of such things I zipped over there and immediately found the sample above. I’ve since seen the same image plastered with proprietorial watermarks at Etsy where someone is selling reproductions. This happens a lot in print-on-demand circles and at image-resellers like Alamy where ownership is claimed over material which is demonstrably in the public domain. Well, if you’re desperate to own a “Mug-wump Specific” T-shirt or poster you can save yourself some money by downloading a high-resolution tiff of the label here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The William Burroughs archive

The Art of the Unknown by S. Elizabeth

I was amused when I opened this new arrival to see a reproduction of the picture which is currently being used as this month’s blog header. The coincidence confirms that this is my kind of book, being a collection of paintings, drawings and engravings of the mysterious and recondite throughout the ages. The Art of the Unknown continues the format that S. Elizabeth began in 2020 with The Art of the Occult, then continued with The Art of Darkness and The Art of Fantasy. If you’ve followed any of the links I post here to Unquiet Things then you may already be familiar with Sarah’s writings and excellent pictorial tastes. I can’t be wholly objective when talking about any of these books, I’ve known their author at a distance for many years, and one of my own illustrations appears in The Art of the Occult. Caveats aside, this is still my kind of book.

The Art of the Unknown opens with a paean to mystery, a quality which may be a more accurate descriptor of the book’s predominant theme even though “Art of the Unknown” makes a better title. The mysteries of alchemical symbolism, the enigmas of pictorial allegory, the poetic movement which called itself Symbolism, Surrealisms past and present: all these modes of artistic expression are explored and juxtaposed with works by contemporary artists who either continue to evolve the old mystery traditions or play new games with their themes and imagery.

Mystery has been a recurrent attribute of painted art even when it isn’t necessarily the subject of the picture—think of the endless theorising about the Mona Lisa—while some degree of mystery is present any time a painting isn’t immediately explicable. But mystery, like fantasy, is one of those qualities which forms a parallel tradition within the body of art history, connecting a wide variety of otherwise unconnected works going back to the earliest examples of picture-making. The Art of the Unknown isn’t structured as a history of this tradition, however, the book is more a sampling of different eras and an examination of modes and sub-classes: cosmic mysteries, other dimensions, the spectral and the occult, dreams and visions.

Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514) is one of several early examples of pictorial enigma that appear in the book but the bulk of the pages are devoted to the mystery-enriched terrain of the 19th and 20th centuries. Rather than run everything in chronological order Sarah pairs complementary pictures to create rhymes of theme or pictorial content across the centuries. This is something you don’t see very often in art books even though the close juxtaposition of works from different eras has become increasingly common in exhibitions. Common but not always successful when deployed in a gallery where the space of the rooms can make it easy for you to direct your attention at a single picture while ignoring all the rest. Juxtaposition works better in a book spread, bringing two or more pictures to the reader’s attention simultaneously. The Art of the Unknown does this very effectively, much better than some of the attempts I saw in Tate Britain during one of my recent visits to London. To the Tate’s credit, the gallery shop did have a copy of The Art of Fantasy on one of their book tables.

The unknown is a big subject for any book but, as with the previous titles in this series, The Art of the Unknown is a gateway work, and a signpost to areas worthy of deeper exploration. These books remind me of another gateway book I’ve mentioned many times in previous posts, The Fantasy Book by Franz Rottensteiner, which was published by Thames & Hudson in 1978. Rottensteiner’s study was concerned more with literature than with art but the pictures it contained were so wide-ranging and well-chosen I spent many years looking for further examples by the artists. Arthur Machen is one of the British authors whose stories Rottensteiner examines, and I think it was Rottensteiner as much as Lovecraft who helped push me towards Machen’s fiction. The unknown is a recurrent feature in Machen’s fiction, and he liked to say that whatever advances science may make in the future there will always be some aspect of the Universe left unexplained. The four words carved on his gravestone summarise this philosophy: “Omnia exeunt in mysterium“—”Everything ends in mystery”.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Art of the Occult
• Splendor Solis revisited
• Melencolia details

Weekend links 844

Crivelli’s Room I (1967) by Gillian Ayers.

• “This is the first film ever made about HP Lovecraft—and almost no one has seen it. Shot in 1989–90, it features unique interviews with Lovecraft’s friends and colleagues. It has sat unfinished for more than thirty-five years. We need your help to complete it and release it for the first time.” Lovecraft: When the Stars are Right, a documentary directed by Seán Martin, is asking for funding assistance to help digitise the extant footage. Watch the crowdfunding trailer.

• New music: Oblique by Ghost Dubs; Serpentine by Christer Bothén / Oren Ambarchi / Johan Berthling / Andreas Werliin; The Cardboard Falcon by Mico Nonet.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The Lost Stradivarius, by John Meade Falkner.

• At Nautilus: Kristen French talks to Devon Stoliker about the latest researches into psilocybin experiences using an fMRI scanner.

• At Colossal: “On vintage boards, Lou Benesch conjures the fantastic world of The Magician”.

• Amazonie (2020): music by Jonathan Fitoussi; animation by Jules Guérin.

• The Strange World of…Adam Curtis.

• RIP Frank Beard.

• Rolling Stone

• The Pink Room (1988) by Seigen Ono | The Darkened Room (1995) by David Toop | The Room Of Accidental Geometry (2000) by Harold Budd

Milik, a film by Mati Klarwein

Giving this 30-minute curio a “film by…” designation is a bit of a stretch but it was co-written by artist Mati Klarwein and also directed by him. Milik was filmed among the towns and desert landscapes of Niger in 1972, and is a rambling thing that’s not easy to comprehend if you’re trying to do so while the all-French voiceover is being haltingly auto-translated. The film was a creation of members of the Deyá art community in Mallorca where Mati Klarwein spent his later years. The scenario is very typical of its time: a youth from Europe travels outside the continent to gain self-knowledge among people with darker skins and “exotic” lifestyles. The endeavour in this case involves a search for a lost cow marked with an aleph—the Hebrew letter which happens to mean “Ox”—with the cow being only the first of a herd of cosmic cattle marked with the remainder of the Hebrew alphabet. Or so we’re told; we only get to see a single animal. The repeated references to marabout angels reinforce the metaphysical nature of the youth’s quest, as do the various rituals that take place while we watch Didier Léon stumbling around the desert from one mysterious encounter to another. Given that the script is credited to three Europeans, with few of the Africans allowed to speak for themselves, it’s unclear whether the descriptions of the rituals that we observe are inventions of the scriptwriters or the genuine article.

The best that can be said about this is that there’s some good music scattered underneath and around the narration, while the film as a whole is vaguely Klarweinesque if you’re familiar with the artist’s paintings and his books. Many of the burnoose-clad Africans are reminiscent of those who populate Klarwein’s earlier pictures, while the calf that appears with an aleph painted on its hide isn’t something you’re liable to find in the farmlands of Niger. The relentless narration is something I also take as a Klarwein hallmark even though other hands were at work. Verbiage is very much a feature of Klarwein’s art books and the one-off album he recorded in 1997 with Per Tjernberg, lengthy “cosmic” spiels littered with bad puns. Milik reminded me in places of Sergei Parajanov’s films, but Parajanov showed how well you could present a narrative like this without an explanatory voiceover.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Visa de censure numéro X
• Mati Klarwein, peintre Américain, a film by Fabienne Strouvé

Symphonie Fantastique

1955. Cover art by Jane Sinnickson Flora.

The programme for the symphony (1845 version) by Hector Berlioz:

Part One: Daydreams, Passions
The author imagines that a young musician, afflicted by the sickness of spirit which a famous writer has called the vagueness of passions (le vague des passions), sees for the first time a woman who unites all the charms of the ideal person his imagination was dreaming of, and falls desperately in love with her. By a strange anomaly, the beloved image never presents itself to the artist’s mind without being associated with a musical idea, in which he recognises a certain quality of passion, but endowed with the nobility and shyness which he credits to the object of his love.

This melodic image and its model keep haunting him ceaselessly like a double idée fixe. This explains the constant recurrence in all the movements of the symphony of the melody which launches the first allegro. The transitions from this state of dreamy melancholy, interrupted by occasional upsurges of aimless joy, to delirious passion, with its outbursts of fury and jealousy, its returns of tenderness, its tears, its religious consolations—all this forms the subject of the first movement.

Part Two: A Ball
The artist finds himself in the most diverse situations in life, in the tumult of a festive party, in the peaceful contemplation of the beautiful sights of nature, yet everywhere, whether in town or in the countryside, the beloved image keeps haunting him and throws his spirit into confusion.

Part Three: Scene in the Countryside
One evening in the countryside he hears two shepherds in the distance dialoguing with their “ranz des vaches” this pastoral duet, the setting, the gentle rustling of the trees in the wind, some causes for hope that he has recently conceived, all conspire to restore to his heart an unaccustomed feeling of calm and to give to his thoughts a happier colouring. He broods on his loneliness, and hopes that soon he will no longer be on his own… But what if she betrayed him!… This mingled hope and fear, these ideas of happiness, disturbed by dark premonitions, form the subject of the adagio. At the end one of the shepherds resumes his “ranz des vaches” the other one no longer answers. Distant sound of thunder… solitude… silence…

Part Four: March to the Scaffold
Convinced that his love is spurned, the artist poisons himself with opium. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned, led to the scaffold and is witnessing his own execution. The procession advances to the sound of a march that is sometimes sombre and wild, and sometimes brilliant and solemn, in which a dull sound of heavy footsteps follows without transition the loudest outbursts. At the end of the march, the first four bars of the idée fixe reappear like a final thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow.

Part Five: Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath
He sees himself at a witches’ sabbath, in the midst of a hideous gathering of shades, sorcerers and monsters of every kind who have come together for his funeral. Strange sounds, groans, outbursts of laughter; distant shouts which seem to be answered by more shouts. The beloved melody appears once more, but has now lost its noble and shy character; it is now no more than a vulgar dance tune, trivial and grotesque: it is she who is coming to the sabbath… Roar of delight at her arrival… She joins the diabolical orgy… The funeral knell tolls, burlesque parody of the Dies irae, the dance of the witches. The dance of the witches combined with the Dies irae.

1958. Cover art by Richard M. Powers.

The programme for the symphony (1855 version) by Hector Berlioz:

A young musician of morbid sensitivity and ardent imagination poisons himself with opium in a moment of despair caused by frustrated love. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions, in which his experiences, feelings and memories are translated in his feverish brain into musical thoughts and images. His beloved becomes for him a melody and like an idée fixe which he meets and hears everywhere.

Part One: Daydreams, Passions
He remembers first the uneasiness of spirit, the indefinable passion, the melancholy, the aimless joys he felt even before seeing his beloved; then the explosive love she suddenly inspired in him, his delirious anguish, his fits of jealous fury, his returns of tenderness, his religious consolations.

Part Two: A Ball
He meets again his beloved in a ball during a glittering fête.

Part Three: Scene in the Countryside
One summer evening in the countryside he hears two shepherds dialoguing with their “ranz des vaches” this pastoral duet, the setting, the gentle rustling of the trees in the light wind, some causes for hope that he has recently conceived, all conspire to restore to his heart an unaccustomed feeling of calm and to give to his thoughts a happier colouring; but she reappears, he feels a pang of anguish, and painful thoughts disturb him: what if she betrayed him… One of the shepherds resumes his simple melody, the other one no longer answers. The sun sets… distant sound of thunder… solitude… silence…

Part Four: March to the Scaffold
He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned to death and led to execution. The procession advances to the sound of a march that is sometimes sombre and wild, and sometimes brilliant and solemn, in which a dull sound of heavy footsteps follows without transition the loudest outbursts. At the end, the idée fixe reappears for a moment like a final thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow.

Part Five: Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath
He sees himself at a witches’ sabbath, in the midst of a hideous gathering of shades, sorcerers and monsters of every kind who have come together for his funeral. Strange sounds, groans, outbursts of laughter; distant shouts which seem to be answered by more shouts. The beloved melody appears once more, but has now lost its noble and shy character; it is now no more than a vulgar dance-tune, trivial and grotesque: it is she who is coming to the sabbath… Roars of delight at her arrival… She joins the diabolical orgy… The funeral knell tolls, burlesque parody of the Dies Irae. The dance of the witches. The dance of the witches combined with the Dies Irae.

1958. No cover artist credited.

1959. Cover art by Hieronymus Bosch.

1960. No cover designer credited.

1964. Cover art by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

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