A walk on the wild side in 70s New York | Edmund White and City Boy.
Category: {books}
Books
New projects and new interview
The final post of an exceptionally productive year arrives with 2010 already shaping up to be just as busy and stimulating work-wise. In 2009 I designed at least 12 books (or was it 13? I’ve lost count…), 8 or 9 book covers, several CDs and many one-off commissions, as well as producing that calendar. If the precise details are vague it’s because the year has passed in something of a blur.
A number of the books I’ve been working on have yet to be published, among them The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer which will be appearing soon from Tachyon. This is a small hardback whose humorous nature should be self-explanatory but if you need further details, Jeff can tell you more. And one of the major tasks of next year will be work for another VanderProject, The Thackery T Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, a sequel to the acclaimed Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases. The new anthology will be a HarperCollins title due for publication in 2011; once again, Jeff has further details.
Finally, the good people at Innsmouth Free Press talked to me recently and their interview is now posted. Given the nature of the site, the discussion mostly concerns matters Lovecraftian but I also talk a little about how I ended up doing all this stuff in the first place. And if you read to the end you’ll discover which Lovecraft character I’d prefer to be. I decided to stick with the human cast; choosing from among the Great Old Ones seems far too presumptuous, even for an inflated ego like mine.
Me, Paul Bowles and that forgotten night in Tangier
More Steampunk and the Crawling Chaos
Yes, it’s these again, and no, I’m not posting them because it Christmas (although you probably don’t believe that). This is the first opportunity I’ve had to add the designs to CafePress after letting them sit for a while seeing as they’re all still available on Modofly’s book range. I’ve had queries recently for the Steampunk designs as poster prints so these are now available in the usual CafePress sizes of large, small and mini. There’s also a range of CafePress t-shirts, and if you’d like one of those they have a bewilderingly extensive choice. The four pieces are:
• Steampunk | CafePress shop
• Steampunk Redux | CafePress shop
• Steampunk: Life in Our New Century! | CafePress shop
• Nyarlathotep: the Crawling Chaos | CafePress shop
While we’re on the subject of Coulthart merchandise, I haven’t mentioned that I’ve discontinued selling signed prints for the time being so CafePress is now the sole place to get a print of anything. I’ve been so busy recently that keeping up with print orders was becoming a serious problem, in addition to never having been very lucrative in the first place. CafePress has excellent printing and can produce things at a large size a lot more cheaply than I’d be able to manage. This doesn’t rule out signed prints altogether but in future they’ll probably be strictly limited editions, signed and numbered. Any developments along those lines will be announced here.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• New Modofly books
• Nyarlathotep: the Crawling Chaos
• Steampunk Redux
• Steampunk framed
• Steampunk Horror Shortcuts
Alice in Acidland
No idea how this piece of exploitation from 1968 evaded my attention for so long but going by the IMDB reviews it’s probably safe to say that any obscurity is well-deserved:
this movie is very accurate, as every girl i have met that smokes weed instantly becomes a bisexual nymphomaniac. scientific studies have actual proved this many times over. the accuracy is phenomenal and i think i speak for every man out there when i say i leave my boxers on while having sex. the parties look like any other raging party in the 60’s where people sit together in a well lit room smoking weed and immediate have sex with everyone as soon as they walk in.
The director and writer were evidently embarrassed enough to use pseudonyms (Gertrude Steen…yeah, right) so the poster and title card (below) are probably as good as it gets unless tepid soft porn is something that really turns you on (baby).
Another fabulous Chateau Thombeau tip.
Alice has been in the news again this week with a new trailer turning up for Tim Burton’s forthcoming film and also this lengthy article in New Scientist which looks at the Alice books through an interpretative lens of algebra and geometry. While it’s nice to play with a fresh interpretation of the stories, essays like this are invariably subject to considerable strain as they attempt to wring hidden meanings from every quirk of the text.
The trouble with the Alice books is that their origin is almost as famous as the stories themselves, and it’s well-known that Dodgson wrote down Alice’s Adventures Under Ground as a present for Alice Liddell with no intention of seeing it published. Aside from the addition of extra scenes, the published book doesn’t radically differ from the handwritten original so you have to stretch your credulity to accept that Dodgson managed to improvise an entertaining story for a child whilst simultaneously authoring a critique of developments in contemporary mathematics. As usual in cases such as these it helps to refer to an earlier logician, William of Ockham, whose famous declaration that “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily” is given on this mathematician’s page as “when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better.”
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Return to Wonderland
• Dalí in Wonderland
• Virtual Alice
• Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar
• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Humpty Dumpty variations
• Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller
• The Illustrators of Alice