{books} – { 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

Weekend links 843

Total solar eclipse over Zaragoza, Spain, 12th August, 2026. Photograph by Ruiyu Zhang.

• Kenneth Anger (again), in a transcript for another KPFA radio interview, in which we Anger have mentioning HP Lovecraft. Not a major revelation in itself but it’s not something I’ve seen before. On a related note, Anger wrote to August Derleth in 1947 asking permission to adapt The Dreams in the Witch House for one of his films. Another tantalising might-have-been from the Anger filmography, along with his unfinished film of Maldoror. (Thanks to Hagen for the info.)

• A recording of Jon Hassell’s final concert (London, 2015) will be released later this year as Music Is Invisible, which will become the third part of the Pentimento series. This may not be the last Hassell album, however. Other live recordings exist, and you could make a substantial compilation from all the one-off pieces Hassell recorded over the years.

• No City Fun: Manchester in 1979 (again) in a short film by Charles Salem with the music of Joy Division on the soundtrack.

• New music: Melting Days by Lusine; Yours Sincerely by Haruomi Hosono; Seedhead by Avi Engel.

• At Unquiet Things: Rebecca Chaperon‘s dreaming thresholds and painted portals.

• Mix of the week: Bleep Mix #322 by Tyondai Braxton.

• Finalists for the Ocean Photographer of the Year.

• Old music: Arles 75 Sechs by Can.

• RIP John Crowley.

• Eclipse (1968) by The Moving Sidewalks | Total Eclipse (1974) by Billy Cobham | Eclipse (1998) by Talvin Singh

The Greenwood Faun

Arthur Machen isn’t usually considered to be a Decadent author even though it was in the Mauve Decade of the 1890s that he first established himself as a writer. Machen knew Oscar Wilde well enough to recount an anecdote in later life, and two of Machen’s earliest books were published with covers designed by Aubrey Beardsley. But Machen outlived Wilde and Beardsley and all the other writers and artists who expired prematurely around the turn of the century, while Machen’s 20th-century stories are now so enmeshed with the evolution of weird fiction that the world of the weird has claimed him as one of its own.

The Greenwood Faun is a novel by Nina Antonia which plays with both these phases of Arthur Machen’s career. This is a ghost story to some degree, in which the shade of Decadent poet Lionel Johnson wanders the streets of London in various stages of corporeality, as well as a tale of the dysfunctional Hartington Leacock-Jones family whose entanglements with a mysterious book—The Greenwood Faun by Lucian Taylor—comprise the main substance of the novel. Machen aficionados will recognise Lucian Taylor as being the central character of Machen’s semi-autobiographical The Hill of Dreams, a detail which makes Antonia’s story a novel about a novel from a novel.

It’s never entirely clear how the world of The Greenwood Faun manages to have Arthur Machen in it as the author of a novel called The Hill of Dreams while also containing the central character from that novel whose death has occurred before the story begins. The important element is Lucian Taylor’s unpublished book, discovered in manuscript form then printed in a limited edition (books like these are always limited editions) with faun-embossed boards and pages that exude a sylvan fragrance. Jorge Luis Borges would have enjoyed the intertextuality—he enjoyed inventing books, and also enjoyed Arthur Machen’s writing—which is paralleled to a small degree by Alan Moore’s The Great When in which we find another book from a Machen story—A London Walk by the Reverend Thomas Hampole—manifesting in the real world. (This isn’t to suggest any influence; Antonia’s book was first published in 2017.) The Greenwood Faun extends a fateful influence over the Hartington Leacock-Jones family, either chiming sympathetically with those receptive to its magical charm or repulsing those whose characters are blind to its visionary qualities. Roger, the oldest of the trio of siblings, is a worldly materialist who remains immune to the spell of the book, whereas Conrad, his dreamy younger brother, is a poète maudit in embryo, equally responsive to the lure of the novel and to the romantic seductions of the ghostly Lionel Johnson. The thorn in this world is Giles Gorse, a literary critic soon to be married to Violet, the brothers’ sister. Gorse has his own designs on The Greenwood Faun, seeing the novel as something he can republish as his own, if only the book would behave more like a book and less like an object endowed with magical life.

Nina Antonia’s novel is a treat for Decadent enthusiasts, littered with references and borrowings from the Mauve Decade, and to writers like Saki and Ronald Firbank who carried its spirit into the 20th century. Saki is a good match for Machen even though one of Saki’s most memorable characters, the waspish Clovis Sangrail, would be appalled to find himself repurposed here as one of the lower orders. The mysticism that surfaces now and then in Saki’s stories reaches a Machenesque peak in The Music on the Hill, another of those Edwardian tales in which Pan is encountered in the English countryside. The story is quoted in epigraph at the opening of The Greenwood Faun, and it’s to this vision of a pagan deity that the novel pays homage, not the annihilating terror of Machen’s Great God Pan.

The Greenwood Faun is published by Snuggly Books which also has a paperback edition of N by Arthur Machen, the story that concerns that other fateful volume, The London Walk.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A Czech Machen
• Ibrahim Ineke’s The White People
• The White People
• The Bowmen by Arthur Machen
• Rex Ingram’s The Magician
• The Great God Pan