{books} – Page 225 – { feuilleton }

Bookmark: Italo Calvino

I’ve been re-reading Invisible Cities this week so the discovery of an interview in English with its author was most welcome. Bookmark was a BBC series about writers that ran throughout the 1980s; each programme usually lasted for 50 minutes but this episode from 1985 only devotes 25 minutes to Calvino’s life and work. Considering Calvino’s stature, and the scarcity of English interviews, this seems like a missed opportunity but Calvino says at one point that he dislikes talking even in his own language. The presenter/interviewer (whose name has eluded me) gives a précis of the most celebrated works, and also talks to Calvino’s very adept translator, William Weaver. If you’re familiar with If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller there’s a fascinating moment when Calvino goes through the hand-written manuscript showing the tiny diagrams he used to keep track of the narrative threads. Watch it here.

Update: The presenter/interviewer was Ian Hamilton.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Bookmark: Mervyn Peake
• Crossed destinies revisted
• Crossed destinies: when the Quays met Calvino
• Tressants: the Calvino Hotel

Weekend links 264

Stonehenge Suite, No.10 (1977) by Malcolm Dakin.

• “Part of me always wanted to write a teatime drama. That’s something that I wanted to get out of my system,” says director Peter Strickland. The results may be heard here. In the same interview there’s news that Strickland will be adapting Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape for radio later this year.

• “He was, as one obituary stated in terms unusually blunt for the time, ‘not as other men’.” Strange Flowers on the eccentric and profligate Henry Cyril Paget (1875–1905) aka The Dancing Marquess.

• “Please tell Mr Jagger I am not Maurits to him.” MC Escher rebuking The Rolling Stones. The artist is the subject of a major exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland from June 27th.

Often mentioned in the same breath as works of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Ó Cadhain’s novel is, in some ways, even more radically experimental. For starters, all the characters are dead and speaking from inside their coffins, which are interred in a graveyard in Connemara, on Ireland’s west coast. The novel has no physical action or plot, but rather some 300 pages of cascading dialogue without narration, description, stage direction, or any indication of who’s speaking when.

Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin on the newly-translated Cré na Cille (The Dirty Dust) by Máirtín Ó Cadhain

• Paul Woods examines “10 Edgy Properties No Film Producer Dared To Touch
(Yet)”. No. 2 is David Britton’s Lord Horror.

• Mallory Ortberg ranks paintings of Saint Sebastian “in ascending order of sexiness and descending order of actual martyring”.

• The Sign of Satan (1964): Christopher Lee in a story by Robert Bloch for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

• Sympathy For The Devil – The True Story of The Process Church of the Final Judgment.

• At Dangerous Minds: Paul Gallagher on the seedy malevolence of Get Carter (1971).

• Mix of the week: Sonic Attack Special – Earth by Bob’s Podcasts.

• Sanctuary Stone (1973) by Midwinter | The Litanies Of Satan (1982) by Diamanda Galás | Sola Stone (2006) by Boris

Copying Clarke

“On to the brocken the witches are flocking.” From Faust (1925) by Harry Clarke.

Spotted earlier this week, a rather blatant swipe from Harry Clarke’s Faust by an unknown cover artist for the Avon Fantasy Reader. Such borrowings weren’t uncommon in the pulp magazines—the pressure of deadlines no doubt encouraged them—and I’ve logged a couple of other examples in the past, here and here. Clarke’s scene shows a crowd of his mutated witches flaunting themselves in a manner that was too strong for a fantasy magazine. The Avon cover is probably illustrating The Day of the Dragon (1934), a novelette by Guy Endore. Everything in this edition was a reprint, and among the contents there’s also The Yellow Sign by Robert Chambers.

Avon Fantasy Reader, No. 2, 1947.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Harry Clarke’s Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
• Harry Clarke in colour
• The Tinderbox
• Harry Clarke and the Elixir of Life
• Cardwell Higgins versus Harry Clarke
• Modern book illustrators, 1914
• Illustrating Poe #3: Harry Clarke
• Strangest Genius: The Stained Glass of Harry Clarke
• Harry Clarke’s stained glass
• Harry Clarke’s The Year’s at the Spring
• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

The Duc de Joyeux

I was writing about the Vorticists last week so for the traditional Bloomsday post here’s a portrait of Joyce by Wyndham Lewis. The Vorticists were supporters of Joyce (he’s praised in the first issue of Blast), and Lewis produced several portrait sketches. This one—The Duc de Joyeux Sings—is the only example I’ve seen in something approaching the Vorticist style. It’s also a little cartoony but then there’s something of the caricature in many of Lewis’s more serious portraits. As usual, the month of June brings the Joyce-related news stories:

• Signed first edition of Ulysses set to make over €100,000

• How Would Ulysses Be Received Today?

• Finnegans Wake is a bestseller in China

• Ulysses and Us by Declan Kiberd

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dubliners
• Covering Joyce
• James Joyce in Reverbstorm
• Joyce in Time
• Happy Bloomsday
• Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
• Books for Bloomsday

Weekend links 263

Dancing Horse (1972) by Tadashi Nakayama.

• The Wounded Galaxies Festival of Experimental Media takes place in Bloomington, Indiana, on October 7–11, 2015. The event is an offshoot of the earlier Burroughs Century, and the phrase “wounded galaxies” is one of Burroughs’ own. It’s also the partial title of Wounded Galaxies Tap At The Window, the most recent album by Cyclobe who will be performing at the festival. Cyclobe’s Stephen Thrower will be in London later this month for the launch of his new book, Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco, and a screening of Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos (1971).

• Gallery sites showcasing erotic art are often coy about the details of the work they’re exhibiting. That’s not the case with Artists Space, NYC, whose Tom of Finland: The Pleasure of Play is running from June 14–August 23, 2015.

• “I just loved the songs, and I didn’t mind the age in their voices, and I didn’t mind the fact that they were unaccompanied, it didn’t matter.” Shirley Collins talking to Ben Graham about her love of English folk music.

The more important question is what do we do with psychedelia now? I think the drugs themselves and the experiences they produce in individuals and for society are too important and vital to be pigeon-holed and taken hold of by a bloodthirsty media that always aims to reduce all experience to a few simple straplines for improved consumerism.

Dr Ben Sessa talking to Barnaby Smith about psychedelic drugs. Breaking Convention 2015, the Third International Conference on Psychedelic Consciousness, takes place at the University of Greenwich next month.

• “…if someone opens a door or if sunlight falls on them they shoot off the grid and suddenly you have a roomful of what sounds like sick bagpipes.” Will Gregory on the physicality of Moog synthesizers.

• Mixes of the week: The Necromancer-Queens of Neverland, an exotic collection by SeraphicManta, Secret Thirteen Mix 156 by Asusu, and an Ornette Coleman playlist.

• “In 2015, the thought of anything as incendiary as Scum or Made in Britain turning up on TV just seems bizarre.” Danny Leigh on the great Alan Clarke.

• More psychedelia: ‘Art That Transcends‘, my article for Communication Arts, has been posted on the magazine’s website.

• Phantasmaphile recommends Thus Were Their Faces, a collection of short stories by Silvina Ocampo.

• Earth filmed playing live in Brooklyn, NY, September 24, 2014. The full set, and a great performance.

• At Dangerous Minds: “How Far Will You Go?” Meet Smokey, the outrageously gay 70s cult rockers.

• Peter Strickland on six films that fed into The Duke of Burgundy.

• Things I Found In Records

• Christopher Lee sings!

• Polly On The Shore (1970) by Shirley & Dolly Collins | The Quiet Joys Of Brotherhood (1972) by Sandy Denny | The Banks of Red Roses (1988) by June Tabor