{books} – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 692

Illustration by Alfred Pearse for The Horror of Studley Grange by Clifford Halifax & LT Meade. Via.

• The Haunting at 60: Guy Lodge asks “Is it still one of the scariest films ever made?” I say yes but then it’s always been a favourite. Also, Robert Wise is something of a cult figure in this house, not for his big-budget directing jobs on The Sound of Music and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but for his RKO horror entries (The Curse of the Cat People and The Body Snatcher), his film noir (Born To Kill, The Set-Up, Odds Against Tomorrow), and two smaller science-fiction films from different decades, The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Andromeda Strain. All this and he also edited Citizen Kane.

• “This show makes an irrefutable case for her technical mastery while also affirming her as a first-rate fabulist whose disparate influences—chivalric romance, medieval architecture, tarot, psychology, astronomy, and much more—cohere into a visionary whole.” Jeremy Lybarger reviewing Science Fictions, the retrospective devoted to the art of Remedios Varo.

• New music: Improvisation On Four Sequences by Suzanne Ciani; Incorporeal by Hidden Horse; Atlas by Laurel Halo; Infinito (Version) by Moritz von Oswald.

While Ballard’s more outwardly conventional books may give us solider, more stable realities, what these realities often present…is a child (or childlike figure) frolicking against a backdrop provided by the destruction of an older order of reality that the world previously took for granted. It’s a cipher for his oeuvre as a whole: endlessly playing among the ruins, reassembling the broken or “found” pieces (styles, genres, codes, histories) with a passion rendered all the more intense and focused by the knowledge that it’s all—culture, the social order, the beliefs that underpin civilization—constructed, and can just as easily be unconstructed, reverse engineered back down to the barbaric shards from which it was cobbled together in the first place. To put it in Dorothean: In every context and at every level, Ballard’s gaze is fixed, fixated, on the man behind the curtain, not the wizard.

Tom McCarthy: JG Ballard’s Brilliant, Not “Good” Writing

• At Public Domain Review: Behold the Nebulous Smear: ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi’s Illustrated Book of Fixed Stars (ca. 1430).

• At Unquiet Things: Shake, Shiver, and Shriek: The Haunted Gothic Nightmares of George Ziel.

• Winners of Nature TTL Photographer of the Year 2023.

• The Strange World of…Gavin Bryars

• Watch The Stars (1968) by Pentangle | Stars (1983) by Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois & Roger Eno | Kelly Watch The Stars (1997) by Air

A territory always rather nocturnal and almost subaqueous

I’m still reading through Umberto Eco’s essays in between various novels, the current Eco volume being Chronicles of a Liquid Society, a book which includes an appraisal of the works of Jules Verne. Enthusiastic remarks about engraved illustrations are uncommon things so I wanted to draw attention to the following:

Verne’s engravings are far more mysterious and intriguing, and they make you want to examine them through a magnifying glass. Captain Nemo, who sees the giant octopus from the large porthole of the Nautilus; Robur’s airship bristling with high-tech masts; the balloon that crashes down on the Mysterious Island (“Are we rising again?” “No. On the contrary.” “Are we descending?” “Worse than that, captain! We are falling!”); the enormous projectile that points toward the Moon; the caves at the centre of the Earth—all are images that emerge from a dark background, outlines with thin black strokes alternating with whitish gashes, a universe without areas of uniform colour, a vision scratched and scored, reflections that dazzle for lack of any strokes, a world seen by an animal with a retina all its own, as seen perhaps by oxen or dogs or lizards, a world glimpsed at night through the thin slats of a venetian blind, a territory always rather nocturnal and almost subaqueous, even in full daylight, made with the dots and abrasions that generate light only where the engraver’s tool has dug or left the surface in relief.

The illustrators of Captain Nemo’s adventures were Alphonse de Neuville and Édouard Riou, their drawings being engraved by Henri Hildibrand. See the rest of them here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Eco calls on Cthulhu

The Journal of Decorative Art

My workload has increased of late to a degree where I’ve not been looking at many websites that aren’t intended to fulfil some research quest or other. To this end, the Getty Research Institute has become a regular port of call, especially when the GRI section of the Internet Archive is updated regularly with many fine books that you won’t easily find elsewhere. For my purposes, the GRI is especially good with books about architecture, design and ornamentation, like this three-volume collection of The Journal of Decorative Art, “An Illustrated Technical Journal for the House Painter, Decorator, and all Art Workmen” published from 1881 to 1883. The illustrated examples are typical late Victoriana of a type I don’t always have much use for but for anyone who does the illustrations are very good, especially the spreads which were obviously intended to be copied by decorators. Some of these include lettering samples for sign-writers that range from simple post-Pugin Gothic to the excessively detailed styles that were de rigueur in the 1880s.

Continue reading “The Journal of Decorative Art”

Weekend links 691

Arcus (2019) by Markus Matthias Krüger.

• “Listeners can only make an educated guess as to what the experience of working with Slapp Happy might have done for Faust.” Fergal Kinney on the 50th anniversary of Sort Of by Slapp Happy, an eccentric intersection of Anglo-American rock and German experimentalism.

• Now that the summer is over people are making mixes again. Take your pick this week between a mix for The Wire by Shane Woolman at Stihia festival, The Observatory by Jay Keegan, or DreamScenes September 2023 at Ambientblog.

• Quantum poetics: “How Borges and Heisenberg converged on the notion that language both enables and interferes with our grasp of reality.” William Egginton explains, with a little help from Funes the Memorious.

“I feel as if I am entering Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel, a universe of books and records, or maybe a labyrinth of paper and vinyl,” a flabbergasted Szwed relates. “The temptation is to read and listen to every one of them in hopes of at least finding the meaning behind Harry Smith the reader and listener.” He adds, with pointedly Borgesian anxiety, that “maybe my book is in there, already written.”

Ed Halter reviewing Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith by John Szwed

• At The Daily Heller: Photographs of lost buildings and American ruins.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: The unknowable presents…Secretly encoded.

• At The Paris Review: Six photos from WG Sebald’s albums.

• Winners of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2023.

• The Art of Cover Art: A Substack by Rachel Cabitt.

• New music: Le jour et la nuit du réel by Colleen.

• Familiar Reality (1971) by Dr John | Reality Dub (Virtual Reality Mix) (1993) by Material | Reality Net (1994) by Richard H. Kirk

Rudiments of Curvilinear Design

George Phillips’ Rudiments of Curvilinear Design (1839) belongs among a subset of books about historic design in which the desire to provide a faithful record of various styles competes with the imagination of the artist creating the illustrations. The artist in this case is Phillips himself who runs through the catalogue of decoration and ornament in a series of beautiful full-page plates, the engravings being credited to publisher Shaw and Sons. Each plate is a tableau of different architectural features—windows, wall decoration, columns, and so on—which Phillips embellishes in a manner that avoids outright fantasy while also deviating from the more accurate renderings you’ll find in similar volumes. The notes at the beginning of the book describe the author’s aesthetic philosophy, a process which involves “engrafting upon that which may be considered as already excellent, some feature enhancing its value, and extending its usefulness to larger or more opulent classes of the community.”

Acanthus leaves abound here, inevitably when so many of the plates feature designs based on Classical styles. The acanthus is a common feature in design books from the 19th century, with some books even showing the correct (ie: Grecian) way to draw or sculpt the leaves if you’re having to create Corinthian columns. Mr Phillips seems to have taken such lessons to heart. For more acanthus, and many fine engravings which aim for greater historical accuracy, see Ornamenti di Tutti Gli Stili (1882) by Camillo Boito.

Continue reading “Rudiments of Curvilinear Design”