{books} – Page 279 – { feuilleton }

Wildeana 11

The Happy Prince And Other Tales (1888).

Continuing an occasional series. Recent Wildean links.

• Jeanette Winterson makes a persuasive case for the importance of Wilde’s stories for children: “Wilde had a streak of prophecy in him. The children’s stories can be read as notes from the future about Wilde’s fate. It is as though the little child in him was trying to warn him of the dangers his adult self would soon face. ‘Every single work of art is the fulfilment of a prophecy’, he writes in De Profundis.”

• At the Morgan Library & Museum: a collection of Wilde’s manuscripts and letters, including the MS of The Selfish Giant, one of the stories discussed in Winterson’s piece.

• At The Smart Set: “Oscar Wilde abandoned journalism and hated fashion – so why is his essay The Philosophy of Dress so important?” asks Nathaniel Popkin.

The Pictures of Sappho from The Woman’s World.

• Wilde’s The Philosophy of Dress led to his being asked to edit The Lady’s World in 1887, a magazine he promptly renamed The Woman’s World. He was editor for two years. A collected run of the magazine may be browsed here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Oscar Wilde archive

Ye Sundial Booke

I almost posted this in place of The Book of Old Sundials but to have done so would have made the former volume redundant. This is the same idea—pen drawings of British sundials with accompanying pages of sundial mottos—but a much more comprehensive treatment. The antiquated title is an affectation by its author, T. Geoffrey W. Henslow, the book having been published in 1914. What’s most remarkable about this study is the 370 drawings by Dorothy Hartley (1893–1985), a job of illustration that must have involved considerable labour even if she was working from photographs. Looking for details of Ms Hartley’s career it’s possible she researched the sites herself. In addition to being an illustrator and art teacher she was also a noted social historian and rural archivist, and author of a celebrated book of culinary history, Food in England (1954), which is still in print today.

These page selections do little more than scratch the surface of this extraordinary book. Browse the rest of it here or download it here. For more about Dorothy Hartley and her historical research there’s an hour-long BBC documentary, Food in England: The Lost World of Dorothy Hartley.

Continue reading “Ye Sundial Booke”

Weekend links 182

Mirror of Water (1981) by Reika Iwami.

• The week in comics: Paul Gravett interviews Enki Bilal. | Paul Kirchner’s wordless and inventively surreal strip, The Bus, was republished in France last year but it’s been out-of-print for years everywhere else. Read it online here. | Bill Watterson has made the entire run of Calvin and Hobbes available for free.

• “…seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” Leland de la Durantaye reviews Italo Calvino: Letters 1941–1985.

• Artist Charles Ross says “My interest in science is related to how mysterious it is.” Ross Andersen visited Ross’s Star Axis, “a masterpiece forty years in the making”.

There is a satirical intent at work here, as well as mordant humour, a potent mix that reminds one more of the absurdist fictions of the French jazz musician Boris Vian than of anything in the SF canon. Science fiction is not central in Harrison’s work – not even as a target of his sharp wit – and it is a mistake to regard him as being chiefly interested in demolishing a genre that is only one of several he has mastered.

John Gray on M. John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract trilogy. This week Harrison posted a new piece of fiction on his blog.

• Mixes of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 091 by Sugai Ken, and Bride of the Abominable Marshman, an early Halloween mix by Hackneymarshman.

• Clive Hicks-Jenkins on Schandmasken (masks of shame), and the clay visage of Paul Wegener’s Golem.

• A version of Kraftwerk’s Trans Europe Express by Chicago band Disappears.

• Postcards to the Curious: MR James-themed artwork by Alisdair Wood.

• Clive Barker: Why I Once Gave Up Horror Movies Entirely.

• Artist Melinda Gebbie at Phantasmaphile.

• Fragment, a new video from Emptyset.

• 38 photos of airships through the ages.

• This Much I Know: Kenneth Anger.

• Trans Europe Express (2000) by Señor Coconut Y Su Conjunto | Trans Europe Express (2007) by Receptors | Trans Europe Express (2012) by Daniel Mantey

The Book of Old Sundials

The Book of Old Sundials & Their Mottoes (1922) is uncredited although it contains an introductory essay which may be the work of the Viscount Knutsford. The mottos section runs throughout the rest of the book, a collection of philosophical rhymes, moralising admonitions and the inevitable sombre memento mori. The illustrations by one Warrington Hogg are an equal attraction, showing the variety of sundial construction with examples from buildings in England that date back to the Roman occupation. Hogg’s drawings themselves date from the 1890s so its possible this is a reprint of an older volume. See the rest of the book here or download it here.

Continue reading “The Book of Old Sundials”

The Weird

This is a piece of promotional art I’ve done for The Weird: Fugitive Fictions/Hybrid Genres, a two-day event taking place in London next month at the Horse Hospital and the Institute of English Studies, University of London. Organiser Tim Jarvis asked me to contribute an unspecified something; I suggested a poster but that idea proved to be too ambitious, somewhat fortuitously since I had an elaborate design in mind that the current workload would have compromised. This design is the distilled version. The five inset images are a result of having written this post at the beginning of the month. The bespectacled owl is an alchemical illustration from a book I’d found in a charity shop a couple of days earlier.

The event looks like a good one. In addition to the opportunity to see M. John Harrison and others reading on day one, there’s a host of talks on day two that push many of my cult buttons, including discussion of the works of Nigel Kneale and William Hope Hodgson. There’s also Dr Benjamin Noys on “Full Spectrum Offence: The Neo-Weird of Savoy” which I guess may touch on some of the work I’ve done for Savoy Books with David Britton. I’ve got a couple of deadlines looming at the moment so it’s unlikely I’ll be able to attend but I’ll certainly be there in spirit.