{fantasy} – Page 56 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 180

One of Jonathan Andrew‘s photos of coastal bunkers and concrete defences from the Second World War. In 2006 JG Ballard looked at the way these structures embody the functional nature of Modernist architecture.

• “Utamaro, whose prints of famous courtesans were regarded as the very models of sober beauty by 19th-century Western collectors, in fact produced more Shunga books and albums than non-erotic works.” Adrian Hamilton on the Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art exhibition.

• “…in Samoa, as in many traditional cultures around the world, androphilic males occupy a special transgendered category.” Alice Dreger on gay male couples and evolution.

• Robert Fuest’s film of Michael Moorcock’s first Jerry Cornelius novel, The Final Programme (1973), is out on (Region 2) DVD this month.

Masked by reticence and cloaked in tweeds, [Herbert] Read was the unexpectedly ardent and frighteningly prolific champion of nearly everything that was radical in the first half of the twentieth century: Imagism, Surrealism, abstraction, the Bauhaus, Marxism, anarchism, Freud and Jung, progressive education, Gandhian nonviolent resistance. Though now somewhat dimly remembered, he was, for decades, the Victoria Station of the arts, England’s primary explainer of the modern.

Eliot Weinberger introduces Herbert Read’s strange fantasy novel, The Green Child (1935).

• KW Jeter’s steampunk novel Fiendish Schemes is published (with my cover art) by Tor on the 15th. There’s an extract here.

• Mix of the week: An early Halloween mix (and interview) from Joseph Stannard of The Outer Church.

• At Dangerous Minds: Codex Seraphinianus: A New Edition of the Strangest Book in the World.

• A trailer for the forthcoming Blu-ray release of Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.

• Kenneth Halliwell: lover, killer… artist? Philip Hoare on the collages of Joe Orton’s partner.

• Clive Hicks-Jenkins looks back at Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête here, here and here.

• Anastasia Ivanova‘s photo portraits of lesbian couples in Russia.

• Christopher Fox on electronic music’s sound of futures past.

• At Strange Flowers: Melchior Lechter’s book designs.

• Vaughan Oliver‘s favourite 4AD album covers.

• Swinging Sixties Japanese film posters.

• John Foxx’s favourite albums

• Beauty And The Beast (1977) by David Bowie | Slow Motion (1978) by Ultravox | I Am The Green Child (2000) by Coil

Words and pictures

This one has been a long while gestating. Evan J. Peterson asked me late last year to contribute a cover to a new edition of Seattle’s Gay City anthology which he was editing with Vincent Kovar. In May this year the anthology successfully covered some of its production costs with a Kickstarter fund, and the anthology will have its official launch next month (although the book is on sale now). Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam combines a loose take on steampunk themes with spectral or horror material, and adds a queer twist. The contents are as follows:

Cover art by John Coulthart
Illustrations by M S Corley and Levi Hastings
Graphic story: Paper Lantern by Jon Macy

Poetry:
from Preternatural Conversations and Oblivious Imperialism is the Worst Kind by CAConrad
Dear Dr. Frankenstein by Jericho Brown
Anaphora as Coping Mechanism and American Dreams by Ocean Vuong
Orpheus on the 74 and The Resurrection Spell by Oscar McNary
Zombie Autopsy by Janie Miller
Moon Goddess by Imani Sims

Hybrid/Flash Fiction/Prose Poetry:
Psychopomp by Lydia Swartz
Thangs by Imani Sims
The Door, Casualties of War, and The Worst is that You Can’t Even Ask Him to Use Protection by Jeremy Halinen

Short Stories:
Demon Lover by Dorothy Allison
Monster Movie by Rebecca Brown
B.E.M.s by Gregory L. Norris
Feeding Desire by Steve Berman
Medium Méchanique by Catherine Lundoff
Study in Blue, Green, and Gold by John Coulthart
A Captive Audience by Ryan Keawekane
Splinter by Ryan Crawford
The Difference Men by Kat Smalley
Alexander’s Wrath by J L Smither
Quota by Amy Shepherd
Heart of the Labyrinth by Tony Rella

This isn’t the first occasion when I’ve produced the cover for an anthology and also contributed some fiction inside—The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases included a short fiction piece—but the Gay City anthology marks the first appearance in print of anything from my ongoing Axiom project. This is a long-term endeavour which I began in March 2001 but haven’t referred to much in public, mainly because the bulk of the project to date has been written fiction. There are few words more dismaying to hear than the dread phrase “I’m writing a novel”, especially today when the activity of fiction writing seems to have undergone an exponential increase. I tend to believe that unless you’re an established author there’s little to be gained by discussing your own literary labours in public until you have some results to offer. Well, now I have.

I know some people have been curious about the Axiom project so—keeping things brief—I can say it’s two novels, one finished, the second one nearly finished. Axiom was written from 2001 to 2007, and concerns a year in the life of an invented city. It’s fantasy of a sort but closer to the world of Reverbstorm than anything you’ll find on the swords-and-dragons shelves. The idea began in the late 1990s when I was working on Reverbstorm with David Britton and realised I could easily shift the city in that book a few degrees sideways to provide a setting for my own obsessions. I’d been writing a lot of fiction in the 1980s—short stories and two unfinished novels—and wanted to return to this seriously having tired of collaborations and illustrating the work of other people. Axiom marked out some territory I wanted to explore; the new novel, Vitriol, uses the territory to stage a “psychedelic apocalypse”. The project as a whole is loose enough to evolve into other media, and eventually there should be some Axiom-related art. I’ve been working on Vitriol since August 2006 (there was some overlap while finishing the first book); my contribution to the Gay City anthology, Study in Blue, Green, and Gold, is an extract from the work-in-progress which happened to function quite well as a self-contained piece. Despite the anthology theme it’s not quite a steampunk affair but there are some steam locomotives present so it has the required flavour.

Whilst working on the new book I’ve had an agent (Leslie Gardner at Artellus) trying to sell Axiom. This would have been in print by now if the London publisher who agreed to take it 18 months ago hadn’t gone bust after they’d sent us a contract. I’ve been considering putting out a limited hardback edition of the novel, although I’m busy enough as it is, and don’t relish having to self-distribute even a small number of books. For now it’s an option that remains open.

Gay City’s own site points to Amazon for sales of Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam so on this occasion I’ll do that too. If you’re in the Seattle area there’s a launch party on September 27th. Details here.

Update: I’ve belatedly noticed that Evan is interviewed about the anthology here.

The art of Roland Cat

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Axium, 1969).

The work of French artist Roland Cat is less Surreal—although some of it could be classed as such—than Fantastic in a manner similar to that of contemporaries such as Michel Henricot, Jean-Pierre Ugarte, Jean-Marie Poumeyrol, Gérard Trignac and others. Art of this nature receives support and encouragement from the French to a degree which often seems inversely proportional to the ignorance it receives from the Anglophone art world. For years the only example of Cat’s work I’d seen was the picture that Dave Britton used on the cover of the Savoy edition of New Worlds magazine in 1979. The examples here are the result of a web trawl, hence the missing titles and dates.

The Coleridge illustration above was for a volume that was part of a series produced by a French publisher in 1969, each edition of which was illustrated by a different artist. This forum post has more details. For more about Roland Cat see this short appraisal at Visionary Review.

Sleep (1980).

Dagon (Belfond, 1987).

Continue reading “The art of Roland Cat”

Liška’s Golem

The Last Golem from The Nights of Prague (1969).

Since watching The Cremator I’ve been listening to Zdeněk Liška’s music from the early Švankmajer films, and following leads to the composer’s other work. One film with a Liška score that I’d not previously come across is Prazské noci (The Nights of Prague, 1968), one of those anthology films there seemed to be so many of in the late 60s and early 70s. Of the four stories on the theme of Prague at night, Liška provides the music for The Last Golem, a tale of Rabbi Loew and the legendary Golem written and directed by Jiří Brdečka. YouTube seems to have little more than this short clip but it does at least give a flavour of the piece. As usual Liška’s music is unmistakable, and as good as anything else he was doing in the 1960s. Seeing this makes me wish that Jan Švankmajer had tried his hand at a Golem film when Liška was still alive.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Cremator by Juraj Herz
• Golem, 2012
• More Golems
• Das Haus zur letzten Latern
• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem
• Barta’s Golem

The Cremator by Juraj Herz

The Cremator, a film directed by Juraj Herz, missed out on the attention given to other Czech films in the late 1960s, something the Brothers Quay note in their enthusiastic introduction to the Second Run DVD. Unlike other films made during the Czech New Wave, Herz’s film premiered in 1969 then was promptly banned, and didn’t receive a wider distribution until 1989.

It’s easy to see why the Communist authorities would have a problem with a film about a Prague crematorium director in the 1930s, a man who not only delights in his ability to efficiently turn human beings into ash in 75 minutes, but also has no problem siding with the invading Nazi regime when it becomes apparent that this will further his obsession with incineration. Rudolf Hrušínský dominates the proceedings as cremator Kopfrkingl, a stout and ebullient presence who Herz directs without resorting to any clichés of macabre or morbid characterisation. We’re with Kopfrkingl in every scene, and for the most part he remains cheerful and reasonable, whether showing new workers around the crematorium, dealing with his family (or the prostitutes he visits), or happily shopping all the Jews he knows to his collaborationist associates. A Holocaust subtext becomes overt when Kopfrkingl is asked to lend his incineration skills to a “secret project” the new authorities have in mind, an offer which sends the cremator into a fantasising rant (filmed against Hieronymus Bosch’s painting of Hell) in which he realises he might be allowed to turn many thousands of bodies into ash.

Described like this the film is a blackly comic satire at the expense of all those Czechs who collaborated with the Nazis during the war. What attracts the praise of viewers such as the Brothers Quay, and puts the film in the essential category, is the additional details of Herz’s direction. Anyone familiar with the early films of Jan Švankmajer will feel quite at home with the sequences of rapid editing, with the scenes introduced by unexpected close-ups, and with the grotesquery of a visit to a chamber of horrors which includes a special area showing bottled foetuses and the consequences of disease. The Švankmajer atmosphere is reinforced by a marvellous score from Zdeněk Liška whose music can be heard in many of Švankmajer’s early films. One of these, The Flat (1968), features Juraj Herz in an acting role, while The Ossuary (1970) would be ideal for a screening with The Cremator even if Kopfrkingl would disapprove of all those unburnt bones. Liška’s score is as idiosyncratic as in the Švankmajer films, and helps augment a sense of disquiet that shades to outright horror.

There’s more: the skilful way that Herz and screenwriter Ladislav Fuks (whose novel provides the basis of the story) link otherwise disconnected scenes; Kopfrkingl’s obsession with Tibet which gradually descends into mania; and the mysterious and silent dark-haired woman whose presence in so many scenes is never explained. Given all this, and the successful way that Herz blends his outré material, I’m surprised this film isn’t better known. Herz’s later Morgiana (1972) has more of an audience, and is also worth seeking out. It’s also very different to The Cremator, to such a degree that it might be the work of a different director altogether. Both films can be found on Region 2 DVD at Second Run.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Sedlec Ossuary panoramas
• The Hourglass Sanatorium by Wojciech Has
• Jan Svankmajer: The Complete Short Films