{books} – Page 243 – { feuilleton }

Homosurrealism

Untitled (2012) by Brian Oldham.

Jack Sanders was in touch recently about his online art showcase Homosurrealism, a gallery of homoerotics, the surreal and the occult. The fourth issue has just gone live, and the contents could just as well be described as Homo-occultism given the predominance of esoterica. Jean Cocteau and Kenneth Anger are in there, also William Burroughs via Gus Van Sant’s film of the Thanksgiving Prayer which receives a lot of exposure at this time of year.

La Petite Mort by John Waiblinger.

Also featured is my Sephiroth of the Great Old Ones from the Haunter of the Dark collection. Credit should be given there to Alan Moore who was responsible for the attribution of the various gods to the different spheres. In the book the chart is followed by my renderings of the sinister pantheon together with Alan’s description of each god and sphere.

The Great Old Ones: Sephiroth (1999) by John Coulthart & Alan Moore.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Salivation Army, a film by Scott Treleaven

Jean de Bosschère’s The City Curious

“…it’s a shame there isn’t more of [Jean de Bosschère’s] idiosyncratic work at the Internet Archive,” I wrote in 2012. The reason that Bosschère’s books aren’t immediately to hand is that the Internet Archive has misspelled his name in many of their tags, not the first time that searches there are thwarted by errors or missing data (illustrators often go uncredited).

The City Curious (1920) is one of several books that Bosschère wrote and illustrated, this edition being translated into English by F. Tennyson Jesse. The whimsical story was presumably intended for children but Bosschère’s imagination is a peculiar one, and his figures are often so eccentric they need to be studied closely to pick out faces and limbs from their details and distortion. Eccentricity isn’t unknown in children’s stories but this one is much closer to Surrealism than the Surrealist’s favourite Lewis Carroll books. Many more of these illustrations may be browsed here or downloaded here.

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Weekend links 236

The Three Witches (2014) by Lorena Carvalho.

• Immersion, a new album by Grey Frequency, “…is a recording of the broken signals, wraiths in the ether from lost futures and utopias which were once promised…”. Box Of Secrets (1999) is an album of electronica by Ian Boddy that’s a free download until the end of December.

• “Hothouse flowers, Egyptian statuary, jewels, Nubian servants, crystal balls, cocaine, opium and champagne were just some of the things she spent her money on…” Lucy Davies explores the riotous world of Marchesa Luisa Casati.

• “London is a network of complete nexuses, coincidences, overlaps, references…” Stephanie Boland talks to Iain Sinclair about his new book 70×70: Unlicensed Preaching: A Life Unpacked in 70 Films.

My Women’s Studies professors would say: “You don’t know how hard we fought for you.” And yet, when they told me my sexuality was not correct, I felt embarrassed. I knew I had longings that didn’t line up with the politics, but I refused to repress them, particularly in my writing. I fought to unravel a political correctness that was censoring desire.

Screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson on sex, cinema and secrets

• Cthulhu, Fiction and Real Magic, a lecture by Ian ‘Cat’ Vincent at Treadwell’s, London, on December 3rd. For those who can’t attend, Erik Davis has just posted his essay about Lovecraft and contemporary occultism.

• “John Gielgud was obsessed with trousers, loved corduroy and leather. And so he wrote a film set in a menswear shop.” Gielgud’s unfilmed screenplay for gay porn director Peter de Rome may now be filmed.

• “The stories are even more fantastic and full of marvels than those in the Arabian Nights.” Robert Irwin on the newly-translated Tales of the Marvellous.

• Mixes of the week: The Advisory Circle present Winter From Out Here; Fall by The Ephemeral Man; Secret Thirteen Mix 136 by Cosmin TRG.

• Danny Cooke‘s drone views of Pripyat, Chernobyl. Related: Into the Zone: Gasworks Park (Seattle, WA) by Christina Scholz.

• Watch Dragnet’s 1967 LSD episode. More psychedelics: “Magic mushrooms change brain connections“.

• Earth Magic: Peter Bebergal on photography of witches at play and at ritual.

• Düsseldorf 1970: The crucible of Krautrock by those who were there.

• It’s Alright Ma, It’s Only Witchcraft (1968) by Fairport Convention | Witch’s Will (1973) by Wilburn Burchette | Witches’ Multiplication Table (1982) by Holger Czukay

Willy Pogány’s Rubáiyát

Willy Pogány’s work is no stranger to these pages, and I did once link to scans of his illustrated Rubáiyát although the site where those images were posted has since migrated. Pogány’s edition, which dates from 1909, presents the quatrains in beautifully lettered and decorated pages separated by watercolour plates. The Persian details may be Pogány’s own approximations but he thanks Arabic scholar Dr Julius Germanus for his assistance with the book. Some of the pages at the Internet Archive are the worse for wear but this is one edition where every page is worth seeing. Browse the rest of the book here or download it here. (There’s also a second Pogány edition from 1930—not 1900 as the site claims—which is worth looking at but seems crude in comparison to the earlier book.)

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Elihu Vedder’s Rubáiyát

A slight return to Omar Khayyam. The Edmund J. Sullivan post prompted comments about other editions so I thought I’d see what else was at the Internet Archive. The problem there is that the Rubáiyát was a very popular book in the latter part of the 19th century which means there are not only multiple editions of the Edward Fitzgerald translation but many translations by other hands, as well as numerous parodies. Anne S mentioned the Edmund Dulac edition which I suppose I ought to at least acknowledge since Dulac’s passion for Persian and Arabian art made him an ideal illustrator. But I do enjoy finding illustrated books that are less familiar, hence Elihu Vedder’s edition of 1894.

Elihu Vedder (1836–1923) was an American Symbolist painter, and also something of a poet himself, producing a few volumes of his own illustrated verse. Many illustrators favour an Orientalist interpretation of the Rubáiyát despite the popularity of the quatrains being more a result of their universality than their exotic qualities. Vedder produced over 50 drawings that concentrate on the mystical aspects of the poem, setting hand-lettered texts against illustrations that are either very similar to his paintings or direct copies of some of his canvases. It’s unfortunate that the reproductions in this edition—a reprinting of Vedder’s 1884 original—aren’t better. The book is still one of the more remarkable editions, however. Browse the rest of it here or download it here.

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