{books} – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 781

Orphée aux Enfers (1896) by Jean Delville

• “Yes, there was a riot, but it was great”: Cabaret Voltaire on violent gigs, nuclear noise – and returning to mark 50 years.

• At Public Domain Review: Matthew Mullane on George Wightwick’s The Palace of Architecture (1840).

• New music: Dissever by Emptyset; Quiet Pieces by Abul Mogard; Analogues by Lawson & Merrill.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Artist Yukiko Suto finds beauty in Japanese residential neighbourhoods.

• At The Quietus: A Condition of the Space: Mary Anne Hobbs interviewed.

• At Baja el Signo de Libra: The homoerotic photography of Yves Paradis.

• Mix of the week: Bleep Mix #303 by Abul Mogard.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Stan Brakhage Day.

• RIP Edmund White.

• Brakhage (1997) by Stereolab | Brakhage (2002) by Robert Poss | Barbican Brakhage (2009) by John Foxx

Weekend links 780

An early illustration by Burne Hogarth from Federal Illustrator, Winter 1931–1932, credited to the artist’s original name, Bernard Spinoza Ginsburg. (Via)

• RIP Simon House, a musician whose death was announced in the same week as news of a remixed edition of Hall Of The Mountain Grill by Hawkwind, the first of the group’s albums to feature House on violin and keyboards. House’s keyboards made a considerable difference to Hawkwind’s sound, expanding the range of their songwriting; the melodramatic scale of Assault And Battery/The Golden Void wouldn’t have been possible without those massed Mellotrons. Post-Hawkwind it was House’s violin that was sought after during his time as a session musician, on songs like Yassassin by David Bowie, and Talking Drum by Japan. He’s also one of the musicians credited on Thomas Dolby’s biggest hit, She Blinded Me With Science (violin again), although his contribution there is easy to mistake for a synthesizer.

• “We did want the name to be weighty and metal-related because it is a kind of a metal band. So what is heavy and what is metal: that was the answer.” Hildur Gudnadóttir talking about Osmium, an experimental quartet comprising Gudnadóttir with James Ginzburg, Rully Shabara and Sam Slater.

• At Criterion: Stephanie Zacharek on Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, films from a time “when delighting audiences meant more than catering to the predetermined whims of a dogged fandom”.

• The week in maps: At Public Domain Review, Bernard Sleigh’s Anciente Mappe of Fairyland (ca. 1920 edition); at Nautilus, the first maps of the Earth’s magnetic field.

• The eleventh installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi), and in English at Alan Moore World.

• Not on any map: Mark Valentine describes the time he tried to buy a phantom island from the Hudson’s Bay Company.

• At Colossal: “In surreal portraits, Rafael Silveira tends to the garden of consciousness“.

• New music: Osmium by Osmium, and Along The Wind Spear by Survey Channel.

• Anne Billson chooses Anjelica Huston’s ten best roles.

• Owls in Towels

• Five Owls (1970) by Canned Heat | Night Owl (1996) by System 7 | Owls And Flowers (2006) by Belbury Poly

Fantasie di architettura by Aldo Avati

Giving a small collection of architectural designs the label “fantasies” seems an odd thing when so many building designs don’t go further than the planning stage: Frank Lloyd Wright’s mile-high skyscraper is as much a fantasy as the unbuilt towers of London or any of the losing designs from the world’s many architectural competitions. Fantasie di architettura: schizze e prospettive (1920) is a portfolio of 60 plates by Aldo Avati, an architect and stage designer from Bologna whose designs are more fanciful than overtly fantastic. The introductory note refers to “the magician Piranesi” whose architectural caprices, especially his Carceri d’Invenzione, cast long shadows across all the arts. Piranesi’s influence is certainly evident here, in the views through huge ramparts and stone arches, the flights of stairs and dramatic lighting. Some of the views wouldn’t be out of place in this collection of drawings and paintings by an earlier generation of Italian stage designers.

Note: Although the book is titled “Part One” there doesn’t seem to have been a part two.

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The Twilight Magus

Presenting my latest cover for Aconyte’s Arkham Horror line, and the third and final book in a trilogy by Tim Pratt.

Carl Sanford, once the Silver Twilight Lodge’s great leader and now presumed dead, lives in anonymity in Spain, plotting revenge against those who betrayed him. Alone, he calculates his first move to achieve power abroad is by being initiated into the mysterious ancient society called the Red Coterie to secretly take it over. Despite Sanford’s reputation, the Red Coterie demands proof of his occult prowess, sending him on a quest to vanquish The Blood Moon, a reclusive blood magus manipulating humans and monsters alike to achieve their own ends. As Sanford uses every scrap of cunning he possesses to outwit his enemies and prove his worth, old foes from Arkham have discovered his existence and are coming to finish him off once and for all.

The brief for this one was for a design that would continue the form of the previous two volumes while incorporating details of Antoni Gaudí’s architecture, Barcelona being one of the story’s locations. I’ve admired Gaudí’s architecture for a long time but I’ve never had the opportunity to use any of it in an illustration before. Most of the details are tiny ones but the unfinished porch of the Sagrada Família is recognisable, as is the iron dragon from the entrance gate of the Park Güell. The windows behind Sarah van Shaw and Carl Sanford are also Gaudí designs.

Less recognisable, but also a Gaudí creation, is the background pattern which is more visible on the back cover of the book. My previous covers for Aconyte have all used Art Deco mofits to complement stories set in the 1920s, with several of them having elaborate background patterns. The Gaudí design was one I hadn’t seen before, a hexagonal tile in which portions of three organic forms—starfish, ammonite and algae—become whole when the tiles are placed together. It’s a beautifully simple and clever design with the additional bonus for this cover of creating a series of spirals and tendrils which suit the Lovecraftian nature of the story. If you search around you’ll find a number of places selling reproductions as either ceramic tiles or coasters in a variety of materials.

The Twilight Magus will be published in July.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Weird ekphrasis and the Dunwich horrors

The Seal of Yog-Sothoth, or Old Whateley’s conception of the same. A detail from the delightful kitchen autopsy scene which you’ll find below.

My thanks to Tentaclii for bringing the following to my attention in the most recent HPLinks post. The Actual Anatomy of the Terrible: Gou Tanabe, Weird Ekphrasis, and the History of Lovecraft in Comics is a lengthy academic essay by Timothy Murphy which I doubt I would have seen otherwise. Since Lovecraftian comics is the subject, a combination of vanity and curiosity made me click the link to see whether any of my own work rated a mention. I was surprised to find much more than this, with Murphy discussing and contextualising my adaptations of The Haunter of the Dark and The Call of Cthulhu. The bulk of his essay concerns the series of doorstop adaptations that Gou Tanabe has been producing for the past decade (most of which I’ve only seen as extracts), but Murphy’s knowledge of both Lovecraft’s fiction and comics history is very thorough. Particular attention is paid to Alberto Breccia’s pioneering adaptations of the 1970s; Breccia’s version of The Dunwich Horror was the story that impressed me the most when it appeared in the Heavy Metal Lovecraft special in October 1979. Seeing someone approach Lovecraft’s fiction in a sober, realistic manner was a welcome riposte to the jokey EC formula, and very much in my mind when I decided to start adapting Lovecraft myself seven years later.

Previous hauntings: Caermaen Books (1988), Oneiros (1999), Creation Oneiros (2006).

The biggest surprise in Murphy’s essay (and the reason for my writing all of this) was the end of his appraisal when he says “Lovecraft devotees may regret Coulthart’s abandonment of further adaptations…”, referring to my own version of The Dunwich Horror which stalled in late 1989 when I was asked to start working on the Lord Horror comics series from Savoy Books. A few Dunwich pages and panels were included in my Haunter of the Dark book, most of them in collage form, but the bulk of the story has never been made public. In one of those striking coincidences that often occur when you’ve embarked on a new project, I happened to have resumed work on The Dunwich Horror only a week ago, 36 years after leaving page no. 25 in its pencilled form. A few weeks prior to this I’d been scanning all of my Lovecraft comic art for the new edition of the Haunter of the Dark that I’ve been preparing since January. I’ve already mentioned reworking some of the illustrations from the first edition of the book but this process has scaled up considerably in the past two months. I’d been a little mortified to find that the artwork scans I used for the slightly upgraded edition in 2006 were the same ones I made in 1999 using a desktop scanner that wasn’t as good as those I’ve had since. Sorting through all the artwork again reminded me that my adaptation of The Dunwich Horror had been abandoned very near the end, with only the last two parts of the ten-part story left unfinished. This in turn prompted me to seriously consider finishing the story at last, an idea I’d always dismissed as being difficult if not impossible. My work on the Lord Horror comics in the 1990s led to a change in my penmanship and working methods which meant abandoning the very fine (0.2 mm) Rotring Variant pen that I’d used for drawing all the Lovecraft comics. I still have all my old Rotring pens; what I no longer have is the desire to spend months covering sheets of A3-size paper with lines like those made by an etching needle.

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