{books} – Page 327 – { feuilleton }

La Vie Électrique by Albert Robida

Albert Robida (1848–1926), a French illustrator and writer, might be less well-known today had he not authored several books which attempt to predict what life might be like in the 20th century. He was sufficiently well-regarded in his lifetime to be given the task of imagining “Old Paris” for one of the attractions at that cult event of mine, the Exposition Universelle of 1900. These days his work mostly appears in histories of science fiction as a result of books such as Le Vingtième Siècle: La Vie Électrique, a comic novel published in 1890 that looks at French life in the distant year of 1955. The attitude may be humorous, with a drawing style that resembles the contraptions of William Heath Robinson rendered by Gustave Doré, but some of Robida’s predictions are as prescient as those of HG Wells. The inhabitants of France in the 1950s may still dress like those in the 1890s but they communicate via “Téléphonoscope” while the military wage biological and chemical warfare. The usual fleets of fanciful airships fill the skies; the idea that everyone in the future would be the owner of a flying-machine goes back a long way. Robida also shows submarines, transit tubes connecting cities, and pollution caused by the new technologies.

La Vie Électrique is copiously illustrated so the selection here is a necessarily small sample. Anyone wishing to see the whole book can browse it or download it at the Internet Archive.

Continue reading “La Vie Électrique by Albert Robida”

Weekend links 118

The Garden of Urban Delights (2010) by Marcin Owczarek.

His protagonists are misfits: alienated, implicitly gay, longing for love, frequently hard to be around, always fixated on small pleasures that compensate for an essential feeling of not belonging. […] His patroness Edith Sitwell termed him “that rare being, a born writer.” William Burroughs dedicated The Place of Dead Roads to him, declaring Welch “certainly the writer who most directly influenced my work.” John Waters has called In Youth is Pleasure “so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, [it] is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger.”

Sadie Stein on Denton Welch, a writer I’m embarrassed about still not having read. Edith Sitwell and William Burroughs had a famously disputatious correspondence in the pages of the TLS over The Naked Lunch. An appreciation of Welch’s work was one of the few things they had in common.

• Don’t mention guitars: Robert Hampson on acousmatic music, the curse of Loop and the rebirth of Main.

• No Straight Lines: A Collection Of Queer Comics part one, part two, part three. A history by Justin Hall.

• Pieces Of Gold by The Aikiu: shots from gay porn videos repurposed via some smart editing.

• RIP İlhan Mimaroğlu, electroacoustic composer. Ubuweb has a selection of his recordings.

“A good ground rule for writing in any genre is: start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself,” he says. “Ask what it’s afraid of, what it’s trying to hide – then write that.” For Harrison, the most satisfying writers are “at odds with their cultural context. They’re trying to fit in and failing, or they’re trying to remove themselves and failing. The attempt to resolve the conflict is an angle – a frame or a context – in itself.”

The Guardian’s A Life in Writing profiles M. John Harrison. His new novel, Empty Space, was published on Thursday. There’s also this recent video interview with Arc magazine.

• Stephen Usery interviews editor Russ Kick about The Graphic Canon: Volume One.

• At home with Prince Zaleski, the “most decadent and imperial detective in fiction”.

• A Visit with Magritte: photographs by Duane Michals.

• Loitering airships could dispense drones on demand.

• Creating a Forever Object: Ian Schon’s Pen Project.

• A Tumblr for the late, lamented Arthur Magazine.

• “Few cities can boast a railway line for the dead.”

• The Lost Tapes by Can: An Oral History.

• Space Reflex (1963) by Dick Hyman & Mary Mayo | Space Is Deep (1972) by Hawkwind | Space Is The Place (1973) by Sun Ra | Space Moment (1995) by Stereolab | Space Pong (2006) by T++

The Royal Natural History by Richard Lydekker

The second surprise of the weekend came, as in the best Lovecraftian tradition, with the chance discovery of a small sheet of paper, a reminder from the librarian when I was at sixth form college to return three overdue books. This was an odd survival from my schooldays since I kept hardly anything from that period. One of the books was this volume, The Royal Natural History (1894), vol. 1, sec. 2, written by Richard Lydekker with engraved illustrations by a variety of artists. I said goodbye to higher education when I quit sixth form after a year; the interval there was miserable but the place did have a very good library in which I spent a lot of time reading instead of attending classes. Many of the books there were better than those in the town library—my first sight of James Joyce’s Ulysses was on those shelves—and included a small number of older titles which were in surprisingly good condition for school books.

What’s nice about tracing this book is finding the title of one of those volumes whose engravings I found so fascinating and whose identity I’ve wondered about for years. The pictures are all excellent renderings, far better than the illustrations in a set of similar books I own which are forty years older and where the animals tend to be goggle-eyed comical things. Although this was the one I borrowed I suspect the library may have had more in Lydekker’s series since I recall one depicting fish and other marine creatures. The copies here are from the Internet Archive, of course, where they have a complete set that I’ve yet to look through. (There are twelve books in the set.) I wondered at first why I’d borrowed a book about the larger mammals until I saw the picture of a lynx below which I remember using as reference for a drawing. The Lydekker and the purchase a year later of Wilfried Sätty’s illustrated Edgar Allan Poe is where my engraving obsession really took off.

Continue reading “The Royal Natural History by Richard Lydekker”

Weekend links 117

Illustration and design by Karlheinz Dobsky.

Above and below: samples from Die Lux-Lesebogen-Sammlung, an exhibition of booklets for young people published by Sebastian Lux from 1946–1964. All were designed and illustrated by Karlheinz Dobsky.

• At The American Scholar: “Vladimir Nabokov’s understanding of human nature anticipated the advances in psychology since his day,” says Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd, and An Unquenchable Gaiety of Mind: “On visits to Cambridge University late in life, Jorge Luis Borges offered revealing last thoughts about his reading and writing,” says George Watson.

• The British Library releases The Spoken Word: “A rare collection of recordings featuring the American writer William S Burroughs and the British-born artist Brion Gysin.” Related: Interzone – A William Burroughs Mix by Timewriter.

• Charting the Outlaws: Christopher Bram (again) talking to Frank Pizzoli about his recent study Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America.

• The BBC asks “Where are you on the global fat scale?” I’ve always been thin but was still surprised to find my BMI at the very bottom of the scale.

The “otherness” of Ballard, his mesmeric glazedness, is always attributed to the two years he spent in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai (1943–45). That experience, I think, should be seen in combination, or in synergy, with the two years he spent dissecting cadavers as a medical student in Cambridge (1949–51). Again the dichotomy: as a man he was ebulliently social (and humorous), but as an artist he is fiercely solitary (and humourless). The outcome, in any event, is a genius for the perverse and the obsessional, realised in a prose style of hypnotically varied vowel sounds (its diction enriched by a wide range of technical vocabularies). In the end, the tensile strength of The Drowned World derives not from its action but from its poetry.

Martin Amis on The Drowned World by JG Ballard.

• The Chickens and the Bulls: “The rise and incredible fall of a vicious extortion ring that preyed on prominent gay men in the 1960s.”

• It’s that Zone again: Jacob Mikanowski on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Geoff Dyer’s Zona.

• Scans of the rare film programme for London screenings of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Illustration and design by Karlheinz Dobsky.

• “The web is a Library of Babel that could go the way of the Library of Alexandria.”

• Fila Arcana: alchemy- and occult-themed embroidery by Mina Sewell Mancuso.

• A Very Edgy Alice In A Very Weird Wonderland: illustrations by Pat Andrea.

• Malka Spigel reveals a new track from her third solo album.

• John Martin and the Theatre of Subversion.

• Olafur Eliasson: Little Sun at Tate Modern.

• Meanwhile, back in 1972: Mahavishnu Orchestra live at the BBC (30 mins), and the complete performance of the MC5 on Beat Club (29 mins).

Reverbstorm update

The photo shows a detail of the design embossed on the front board proof of the forthcoming Reverbstorm book, publication of which has been put forward while the printers address some production problems. Without getting overly technical there’s been trouble with the ink causing a number of pages to print far too dark for reasons that still aren’t clear. As a result of this I’ve still no idea when the book will be ready for sale. Be assured that any frustration would-be readers are feeling goes double for the writer and artist. More news will appear here in due course.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• James Joyce in Reverbstorm
• A Reverbstorm jukebox
• Reverbstorm: Bauhaus Horror
• Reverbstorm: an introduction and preview