{books} – Page 62 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 664

Caduceus: Tarot Card Study – Love by Holly Warburton.

• The week in stage magic: Ken Carbone, writing about playing cards and graphic design, points the way to an hour of Ricky Jay demonstrating his miraculous abilities with a pack of cards. Elsewhere, Erik Ofgang asks “Who was Mr. Electrico, the sideshow magician who inspired Ray Bradbury—then vanished?”

• The 1980 Floor Show – Uncut / Unedited: 8 Hours of David Bowie in Ziggy Stardust guise performing for American TV cameras at The Marquee, London, in October 1973. That’s more Bowie than most people would want—there’s a lot of repetition—but it’s good to know things like this can still surface.

• “A supernova has gone out,” says David Grundy about the late Wayne Shorter. Also this: “Sci-fi fan Shorter suggested the title to [Weather Report’s] second album I Sing The Body Electric, taken from Walt Whitman via Ray Bradbury.”

• “We need to get away from thinking of ourselves as machines… That metaphor is getting in the way of understanding living, wild cognition.” A long read by Amanda Gefter about the secret life of plants, and “4E” cognitive science.

• “…why take a soft approach to safety when you can scare the sensible into the next generation with some of the most effective horror shorts of all time?” Ryan Finnegan on the notorious PIFs (public information films) of the 1970s.

• “I am increasingly of the Lynchian mindset of ‘never explain’…” Lynda E. Rucker talking to Steven Duffy about her latest story collection, Now It’s Dark.

• James Balmont presents a brief introduction to the mind-altering cinema of Sogo Ishii.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Hidari: An epic wooden puppet samurai stop-motion film.

• Old music: Musique De Notre Temps (1976) by Éliane Radigue.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Juma.

• Body Electric (1982) by The Sisters Of Mercy | Super-Electric (1991) by Stereolab | Electric Garden (Deep Jazz In The Garden Mix) (2013) by Juan Atkins & Moritz von Oswald

Weekend links 663

Weird Tales celebrates its centenary this month (although the first issue was on the shelves in February, 1923). Thirty years later, one of the last issues from the initial run had Slime by Joseph Payne Brennan as the story featured on its cover. The magazine maintained a viscous consistency if nothing else. Tentacular art by RR Epperly.

• A big surprise in yesterday’s Bandcamp Friday was the announcement of Singularity, a new album by synth ensemble Node. Or new-ish since the previously unreleased recording is almost 30 years old:

Singularity is the legendary “lost” Node album. Recorded at the same time as their original sessions in 1994 this has DiN stalwart Dave Bessell join Buller & Flood alongside original member Gary Stout who was later replaced by Mel Wesson for the two DiN releases. Presented here for the first time, mastered to modern standards but otherwise untouched and in its original form and recorded to two track with no overdubs.

Node have never been very prolific—two decades separate their first album from their second—so this was very welcome. The new release includes a bonus addition of the 16-minute version of Terminus, one of their best pieces which has only been available previously on a scarce CD-single.

• Steven Watson at Print Mag on skeuomorphic magazine design that turns print into play. Now I want to design a book that fits inside a cassette box.

• RIP jazz giant Wayne Shorter, and David Lindley, co-founder of one of my favourite psychedelic groups, the incredible Kaleidoscope.

• S. Elizabeth at Unquiet Things on The Sensitive Plant, a poem by Percy Shelley illustrated by Charles Robinson.

• Christopher Parker at Smithsonian Magazine asks “Did Salvador Dalí paint this enigmatic artwork?” Yes, he did.

• Tangerine Dream in 1973 playing Atem live (with pre-recorded drums) on Spotlight, an Austrian TV show.

• New music: Mohanam by Shakti, and Area Code 601 by William Tyler & The Impossible Truth.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Bento boxes inspired by notable Japanese architecture.

• At Tentaclii: Ian Miller cover art for metal albums.

• Northern lights seen across the UK.

• New Blue Ooze (1970) by Kaleidoscope | Ooze Out And Away, Onehow (1986) by Harold Budd/Simon Raymonde/Robin Guthrie/Elizabeth Fraser | Ooze (1986) by 23 Skidoo

Now it’s here

Arriving in the post this week, the Lynda E. Rucker story collection with my art on the dustjacket and the printed boards. This is a typically high-quality production from Swan River Press which comes with the usual complement of postcards and bookmark. I’ve already written something about the art but now the book is in print you can see the texture of the stock that covers the boards. I like the way this works with the texture of the drawing.

The book is available now. All copies are signed by the author, by Rob Shearman (who wrote the introduction), and by myself.

Slothrop’s half-century

There is nothing in contemporary literature to compare with it, certainly not in English. All the lesser pretenders—John Barth, Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, even Don DeLillo—seem small and trivial in the glow of its mad quasar-pulses of brilliance. The risks taken here, in 1973, are so astonishing in retrospect largely because of everybody else’s incapacity to match them.

The burning question will always be: for whom was Pynchon writing? There was no ready readership for a book composed of such disparate, off-putting materials and crazy shifts of tone.

Yet Gravity’s Rainbow created one from scratch, the way Einstein created a new image of the universe and the universe rearranged itself accordingly.

Julian Murphet on Thomas Pynchon’s magnum opus which was published 50 years ago today. Happy birthday, Rocket book. I finally tackled the thing a couple of years ago, and wrote about the experience here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Late Show: Thomas Pynchon
• Esoterica 49
• Pynchonian cinema
• Going beyond the zero
• Pynchon and Varo
• Thomas Pynchon – A Journey into the Mind of [P.]

Parapsychology by Moebius

I always enjoy seeing illustrations by Moebius but they haven’t always been easy to find, even today when his international popularity has grown but his comics still overshadow his work in other areas. La Parapsychologie et Vous, a book by Paule Salomon and Charlie Cooper, was published in 1980 and illustrated throughout by Moebius. According to a note by Jean-Marc Lofficier, Moebius had been introduced to Salomon by Jean-Paul Appel-Guéry, a French New-Age figure who I think may be the “guru” whose influence over Moebius in the 1980s is referred to rather scathingly by Jodorowsky in the Moebius Redux documentary.

Whatever the circumstances that led to the commission, I love these illustrations which manage to honour the theme of the book while being typical products of their creator’s imagination. It’s also good to see further examples of Moebius adding screentone (aka Letratone or Zip-A-Tone) to his drawings. Moebius and Jodorowsky’s The Eyes of the Cat (1978) was created using the same technique, but elsewhere his black-and-white art is usually shaded by hand, if it’s shaded at all.

All these illustrations are taken from Chaos (1991), a collection of Moebius illustrations and other one-off pieces which may be seen in full here. I’ve not seen a copy of La Parapsychologie et Vous so I can’t say whether this is a complete set of drawings; there’s at least one other picture, showing someone floating in a chair, that seems to be from the same series. In addition to book reprints, the drawings were also reprinted a few years ago as a portfolio set for collectors.

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