{photography} – Page 58 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 231

Design by Julian House.

Always good to hear of a new release on the Ghost Box label, and a new album by The Advisory Circle (due on 5th December) is especially welcome. From Out Here is described thus: “Exploring darker territory than 2012’s more pastoral As The Crow Flies, The Advisory Circle hint at a Wyndham-esque science fiction story, where bucolic English scenery is being manipulated and maybe even artificially generated by bizarre multi-dimensional computer technology.” The Belbury Parish Magazine has extracts.

• Jon Hassell’s Fourth World Music Vol. I: Possible Musics receives a long-overdue reissue next month. Possible Musics was a collaboration with Brian Eno, and Eno has some of his own albums reissued again in expanded editions. Most notable is the first official release of My Squelchy Life, an album that was withdrawn in 1991 to be replaced by Nerve Net.

• Some Halloween theatre on Friday (the 31st) at the Museum of Bath at Work with a dramatisation of Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman. There’s a repeat performance the following week (8th November) with added spectral atmospherics from the Electric Pentangle. Free admission.

The value of these books wasn’t anything wholesome they contained, or any moral instruction they offered. Rather, it was the process of finding them, the thrill of reading them, the way the books themselves, like the men they depicted, detached you from the familiar moral landscape. They gave a name to the palpable, physical loneliness of sexual solitude, but they also greatly increased your intellectual and emotional solitude. Until very recently, the canon of literature for a gay kid was discovered entirely alone, by threads of connection that linked authors from intertwined demimondes. It was smuggling, but also scavenging. There was no internet, no “customers who bought this item also bought,” no helpful librarians steeped in the discourse of tolerance and diversity, and certainly no one in the adult world who could be trusted to give advice and advance the project of limning this still mostly forbidden body of work.

Smuggler: A Memoir of Gay Male Literature by Philip Kennicott

• Getting in before the Mixcloud Halloween rush, mix of the week is Samhain Seance 3: Better Dead Than Never by The Ephemeral Man. My Halloween mix for this year is almost finished; watch the skies.

• For those who can’t wait until December for From Out Here, there’s a new Howlround album, Torridon Gate, out this week from A Year In The Country.

• Last week, Yello’s Boris Blank was choosing favourite electronic albums, this week he runs through a list of thirteen favourite albums.

• Altered Balance: A Tribute to Coil by Jeremy Reed & Karolina Urbaniak. Richard Fontenoy reviewed the book for The Quietus.

• Cut-Ups: William S. Burroughs 1914–2014, an exhibition of Burroughs’ typescripts at Boo-Hooray, NYC, from 7th November.

• Brando, a film by Gisèle Vienne for the song by Scott Walker & Sunn O))).

• NASA has a Soundcloud page

• The art of leaves

• Cobra Moon (1979) by Jon Hassell | Moon On Ice (1987) by Yello feat. Billy MacKenzie | Moon’s Milk Or Under An Unquiet Skull Pt. I (1998) by Coil

The recurrent pose 55

And still they come… These latest examples of the Flandrin pose are in the Flandrinesque category since they don’t quite match the figure in Flandrin’s painting. The one above is Spanish model Emilio Flores, photographed by Matteo Felici, one of a series featured at Homotography. The one below is another of those mystery pictures whose origin is difficult to determine. The source site is here but, as with many Tumblr sites, it’s so slow to load its hoard of endlessly scrolling high-res photos that I’m afraid I didn’t search very far. Lastly, there’s this photo by Santy Mito, a recommendation from a Twitter user.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive

Weekend links 227

A Follower by Jason Grim.

• Haunted Futures, a multi-genre anthology from Ghostwoods Books, will feature stories by Warren Ellis, John Reppion, Liesel Schwarz, Chuck Wendig, Richard Kadrey, Stephen Blackmoore and others. It will also feature some of my illustrations but only if this this Kickstarter fund is successful.

• “…at issue here is restriction versus potential: protect a specific set of choices versus open the field to the exploration of everything.” Sam Potts offers a refutation of Robert Bringhurst’s design textbook The Elements of Typographic Style.

• “I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath.” Morgan Meis quoting David Lynch in a review of David Lynch: The Unified Field, a new exhibition of Lynch’s paintings.

But among these novels only Moravagine, first discovered for English-speaking readers by Henry Miller and a direct ancestor of Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, has survived as an underground classic. A monstrous admixture of Lautréamont’s Maldoror, Feuillade’s Fantômas, Nietzsche’s Superman, Jack the Ripper and (according to the Cendrars scholar Jay Bochner) the deranged Jung and Freud disciple Otto Gross, Moravagine remains Cendrars’s most nihilistic and darkly comic other.

Richard Sieburth on Blaise Cendrars and his “Dada update of Dostoevsky”, coincidentally the subject of a post here earlier in the week.

• “…the duchess became enthralled with the idea of creating a garden of plants that could kill instead of heal.” Natasha Geiling on Jane Percy’s Poison Garden.

• Mix of the week: Kosmik Elektronik [part 3] by The Kosmische Club. More Kosmische musik: Agitation Free on French television in 1973.

• At Dangerous Minds: Secret Weapons (1972), 22 minutes of made-for-TV dystopian science fiction directed by David Cronenberg.

• Project Praeterlimina, “a journal of daemonology, magic, and the human condition”.

• The NOS Project: download Shed’s score for Murnau’s Nosferatu.

• At Lambda Literary: Toy, a poem by Evan J. Peterson.

• Drew Daniel doesn’t want to play the listicle game.

• Surrealism and Magic

• Stuff in old books

• Haunted Island (1973) by Agitation Free | Haunted Heights (1977) by Peter Baumann | Haunted Dancehall (1994) by The Sabres of Paradise

Moravagine book covers

First publication, Grasset, 1926.

I should have liked to open all cages, all zoos, all prisons, all lunatic asylums, see the great wild ones liberated and study the development of an unheard-of kind of human life…

Recent reading was Moravagine (1926) by Blaise Cendrars, a novel that resists easy summary. It’s a Modernist work to some extent although the prose (a good translation from the French by Alan Brown) is never unorthodox in style; it’s also scabrous, amoral, misogynist and deeply misanthropic. The narrative is a picaresque affair narrated by a young doctor who frees the mysterious Moravagine from an asylum where he’s been imprisoned for many years. “Moravagine” is an adopted name whose origin and meaning is never addressed, although a French reader would find a rather unavoidable pun on “death by vagina”. Moravagine himself is an otherwise unnamed member of the Hungarian royal family, a dwarfish intellectual psychopath with a bad leg who goes on the run with the doctor, first to pre-revolutionary Russia, then to the United States and South America.

Reviewers have compared the book to Beckett, Céline and Burroughs although it’s much lighter reading than the first two, and the prose is more coherent than Burroughs in cut-up mode. Since we’ve been hearing a lot about the First World War this year it’s tempting to read the book as a kind of Dadaist reaction to Cendrars’ own experiences in the war, even though the entirety of the conflict is dispensed with in two pages. Cendrars appears as a character in the later chapters; he lost an arm in the war so he has his narrator lose a leg while Moravagine loses his reason altogether. At the end of the book he’s found imprisoned in another asylum where he believes he’s an inhabitant of the planet Mars, and where he spends his last months writing a huge, apocalyptic account of how the world will be in the year 2013.

All this, of course, presents a challenge for a cover designer. I have two Penguin editions, both with very different covers, neither of them unsuitable. Curiosity impelled me to see how the book has been treated since 1926. There aren’t many editions but their difference shows the difficulty of trying to encapsulate the contents of this strange novel in a graphic form. The selection here has avoided text-only treatments in favours of those using some form of illustration.

Le Livre de Poche, 1957.

In an early chapter Moravagine describes fleeing the imperial household by strapping himself to a horse. Without knowing this narrative detail the painting here seems bizarrely arbitrary.

Editora Ulisseia, Portugal, 1966.

The horses again, with Moravagine strapped underneath one of them. I’d guess the illustrators of these two books didn’t read very far.

First UK edition, Peter Owen, 1968.

Peter Owen commissioned the first English translation which is still in use today.

Continue reading “Moravagine book covers”

Weekend links 224

Zona: concept art by Alex Andreyev for a planned TV series based on Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky.

• The Black Sessions are a long-running series of concerts by international artists recorded for radio station France Inter. UK group Broadcast were recorded by the station in May, 2000. While copies of the shows can be often be hard to find, files of the Broadcast concert may be downloaded here. A fantastic performance, especially the white-hot psychedelic freakout at the end.

• Further investigations from the radio age: Invention for Radio No. 1: The Dreams (43 mins, 1964): “an attempt to re-create in five movements some sensations of dreaming—running away, falling, landscape, underwater and colour”. Voices recorded by Barry Bermange with Radiophonic manipulation by Delia Derbyshire.

• “…in his first description of Cthulhu he gives you a list of four things that Cthulhu isn’t quite like.” Nick Talbot talks to Alan Moore about HP Lovecraft. Related: one of my depictions of Azathoth appears in this list of “gods who have forsaken you”.

• Tracking the locations of JG Ballard’s Super-Cannes: an investigation by Rick Poynor. Related: houseboats, architecture and eco-disaster; Justin Sullivan photographs California’s extreme drought.

• “As her writing career existed outside the realm of respectable ‘high-lit’ fiction, she cast herself as an outsider icon.” Chris Kraus on I’m Very Into You, a collection of Kathy Acker’s emails.

• Cover design inspiring fiction: Susan Coll on how a photo of a Bauhaus chair on the cover of her new novel, The Stager, made her alter her text at the last minute.

• “People were either taken by it or felt it was the Antichrist.” MetaFilter on Clair Noto’s unmade science-fiction film, The Tourist.

• The Norwood Variations is a new album by Drew Mulholland (Mount Vernon Arts Lab et al).

• Thought Maybe has a collection of the television essays made by Adam Curtis.

• From 1974: How To Make Magic, a children’s handbook of the occult.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 126 by Mira Calix.

• One Minute Blasts Rising To Three And Then Diminishing (2000) by Mount Vernon Arts Lab | Dashwood’s Reverie (2001) by Mount Vernon Arts Lab | Warner’s Reverie (2002) by Mount Vernon Astral Temple