{science} – Page 5 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 801

The Magic Circle (1886) by John William Waterhouse.

• The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic has just been published in France by Editions Delcourt. A preview here shows how carefully they’ve managed to translate and reletter my page designs.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Algernon Blackwood’s stories of John Silence, occult detective.

• Relevant to some of my recent reading: The Necronomicon Wars, an examination of the many attempts to give life to HP Lovecraft’s fictional grimoire.

Altered States is tremendously exciting to watch—and not only during its psychedelic interludes when goat Jesus is being crucified and writhing red figures are toppling, Hieronymus Bosch–like, into hell and abstract splotches give the impression of cells endlessly dividing or murky membranes dissolving and beautiful women stare into Magritte skies and waves of lava crash as though the molten core of humanity itself were erupting. Even in its quieter moments, it is a beautiful film, with Hurt’s every appearance shot by cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth to emphasize his character’s alien otherworldliness.

Jessica Kiang explores the creation of Ken Russell’s flawed but fascinating psychedelic feature, Altered States

• A new catalogue of lots at another After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn. etc.

• Tarot decks through the ages: a video showing some of the cards from Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection.

• More psychedelia: Neuroscientist Grigori Guitchounts asks “What is your brain doing on psychedelics?”

• At the Daily Heller: Ryan Hughes has published a weighty collection of his typeface designs.

• Old music: Caged (25th Anniversary Edition) by Ian Boddy & Chris Carter.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty selects 10 great Technicolor melodramas.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: The Old School Horrors of Terence Fisher.

• Photographs from the 2025 Wildlife Photographer of the Year.

• Ambientblog celebrates 20 years of existence.

• RIP Dave Ball.

• Necronomicon (1970) by Les Baxter | Liriïk Necronomicus Kahnt (1975) by Magma | Necronomicon–The Magus (2004) by John Zorn

Weekend links 800

Plate 43 from Los Caprichos: The sleep of reason produces monsters (El sueño de la razon produce monstruos) (1799) by Francisco Goya.

• At Senses of Cinema: An interview with Jacques Rivette from 2001 in which the director passes judgment on a variety of feature films, old and new. Having read a couple of Cocteau-related books recently, I was pleased to see his comments about the importance of Cocteau’s example for his own film-making. Via MetaFilter.

• “Why is sleep, which literally occurs daily on a planetary scale, so often taken for granted, and not only by most people but even by scientists? Perhaps because its essence, its key property, is to be elusive, out of sight?” A long read by Vladyslav Vyazovskiy on the nature of sleep.

• “Often one cannot be sure if an object in a Welch picture is drawn from life or from other depictions of it, in sculpture, porcelain, woodwork or embroidery.” Alan Hollinghurst on the paintings and drawings of Denton Welch. (Previously.)

• At Colossal: Sinister skies set the scene for derelict buildings in Lee Madgwick’s surreal paintings.

• New music: The Mosaic Of Starlight Slips Back Like The Lid Of An Opening Eye by Paul Schütze.

• At Public Domain Review: Charles le Brun’s Human-Animal Hybrids (1806).

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – October 2025 at Ambientblog.

• At the BFI: Anton Bitel chooses 10 great French horror films.

• Winners of the 2025 Photomicrography Competition.

• RIP Diane Keaton.

• Sleep (1981) by This Heat | Sleep (1995) by Paul Schütze | Sleep (2006) by DJ Olive

Weekend links 799

A Night Alarm: The Advance! (1871) by Charles West Cope.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Meet the artist creating humorous, nihonga-style images of daily life with their rescue cat.

• The thirteenth installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi).

• New music: I Remember I Forget by Yasmine Hamdan; Clearwater by Maps And Diagrams.

His boss was a cards-to-his-chest type named Boynt Crosstown—and here I admit to having dropped that in as the merest excuse to revel right now in more of Pynchon’s christenings: Dr. Swampscott Vobe, Wisebroad’s Shoes, Connie McSpool, Glow Tripworth de Vasta, Cousin Begonia, “child sensation Squeezita Thickly”—for this author’s longstanding genius there on that private swivel chair of the Department of Character Appellations matches long-gone Lord Dunsany’s for imaginary gods and cities.

William T. Vollmann reviews Shadow Ticket, the new novel by Thomas Pynchon

• At Colossal: Twelve trailblazing women artists transform interior spaces in Dream Rooms.

• At Public Domain Review: Ballooning exploits in Travels in the Air (1871 edition).

• At the BFI: Josh Slater-Williams on where to begin with the films of Satoshi Kon.

• Colm Tóibín explains why he set up a press to publish László Krasznahorkai.

• At Print Mag: Ken Carbone on a pool of perfection in Paris.

• Mix of the week: Bleep Mix #310 by Rafael Anton Irisarri.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is OTC Textura.

• Ron Mael’s favourite albums.

• Shadowplay (1979) by Joy Division | Shadow (1982) by Brian Eno | Shadows (1994) by Pram

Weekend links 798

Atlantis (1971) by Bartolomeu Cid dos Santos.

• “Given the workaday settings of many of his movies (a hotel, a summer camp, a science fair), their mortal stakes may come as a surprise, or at least as a paradox—yet paradox is at the heart of his entire body of work.” Richard Brody explores the New Yorker roots of Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch.

• “The power of the Kelmscott Chaucer is in how all the elements harmonise to create something visually spectacular.” Michael John Goodman on William Morris and his reinvention of book design.

• At Smithsonian Mag: “What actually sparks Will-o’-the-Wisps? A new study traces the science behind the mysterious, wandering lights“.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: A chronology of 26 things with Clive Barker’s name on them and what he thinks about that.

• At Wormwoodiana: The novels of Derek Raymond and the type of crime fiction he called “The Black Novel”.

• At Colossal: Untamed flora subsumes abandoned greenhouses in Romain Veillon’s Secret Gardens.

• At The Wire: Read an extract from James Tenney: Writings and Interviews on Experimental Music.

• The Strange World of…Mulatu Astatke.

• RIP Patricia Routledge.

• The Garden (1981) by John Foxx | The Secret Garden: Main Title (1993) by Zbigniew Preisner | Secret Garden (2011) by Sussan Deyhim

Weekend links 794

Green Castle (1975) by Roger Dean.

• Roger Dean’s first book, Views, was published 50 years ago this month. The book sold 60,000 copies in its initial run, and was reprinted twice the following year. This extraordinary success gave Dean and his associates at the newly-formed Dragon’s Dream the resources to publish a line of art books by other imaginative artists such as Chris Foss, Ian Miller and Syd Mead. Without Views there wouldn’t have been a Dragon’s Dream, and without Dragon’s Dream there wouldn’t have been Paper Tiger, a publishing house launched by Roger Dean, Martyn Dean and Hubert Schaafsma in 1976. All this activity made a huge impression on me at the time, with books that provided a showcase for artists whose work would otherwise only be seen on the covers of paperbacks or vinyl records.

• At Alan Moore World: 3 novels and The Great When, an extract from a new video interview in which Alan talks about three of the books that have influenced his novels.

• At the BFI: “Dead of Night: 80 years on, Ealing’s anthology horror is still a waking nightmare,” says Edward Parnell.

…Drexler’s vision of nanotechnology was a chimera. It was like the philosophers’ stone of the alchemists: magic dressed in the science of its time, by means of which almost anything becomes possible. I call these oneiric technologies: they do not and quite probably cannot exist, but they fulfil a deep-rooted dream, or a nightmare, or both.

These are not simply technologies of the future that we don’t yet have the means to realise, like the super-advanced technologies that Arthur C Clarke said we would be unable to distinguish from magic. Rather, oneiric technology takes a wish (or a terror) and clothes it in what looks like scientific raiment so that the uninitiated onlooker, and perhaps the dreamer, can no longer tell it apart from what is genuinely on the verge of the possible. Perpetual motion is one of the oldest oneiric technologies, although only since the 19th century have we known why it won’t work (this knowledge doesn’t discourage modern attempts, for example by allegedly exploiting the ‘quantum vacuum’); anti-gravity shielding is probably another.

Philip Ball on unrealistic prognostications in science, from nanotechnology to artificial intelligence

• New music: Rún by Rún; Other Sides Of Nowhere by Underwater Sleep Orchestra; I Believe In You by Ladytron.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Curtis Harrington‘s Day.

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

• A View From Her Room (1982) by Weekend | A Private View (1982) by Bill Nelson | Aerial View (2014) by Jon Hassell