{science} – Page 5 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 750

Cover art by Edward Gorey, 1964.

• Plenty of Halloween fallout as usual this week, but then Halloween here is a state of mind rather than a single day’s celebration. Leading off with an article by Smoky Man for Italian readers (and for auto-translators) at (Quasi), the first in what will be a series of reviews of each section of the Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic. I’ve been helping with this, answering questions about the book’s production. I may post my answers here at a later date but for the moment I’m happy to keep them exclusive. In other Moon and Serpent news, the Bumper Book was reviewed by Sam Thielman in the New York Times last weekend, and also subjected to a deeper exploration by Joe McCullough for The Comics Journal.

• Michael Atkinson explores the psychosocial dread at the heart of Japanese horror. One of the films I watched for Halloween was Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s brilliantly unnerving Pulse, a film which turns up again in Anne Billson’s evolution of horror in ten revolutionary films.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Short Fiction by Frank Belknap Long, a collection of science fiction and horror stories which opens with Long’s contribution to the Cthulhu Mythos, The Hounds of Tindalos.

Paracelsus’ quasi-scientific, quasi-magical worldview would profoundly influence scientists for centuries to follow. As historian Violet Moller puts it in her new book Inside the Stargazer’s Palace, “To our rational, orderly, 21st-century minds the 16th-century map of knowledge appears messy, a paradoxical and confusing place where magic was studied alongside geometry, people searched obsessively for the philosopher’s stone and astrology was fundamental to many areas of life.” But in this mixed-up cauldron of magic and nature, real science was forged.

Dale Markowitz on how the occult gave birth to science

• New music: Of Nature & Electricity by Teleplasmiste, and Tristitiam Et Metus Tradam Portare Ventis by Philippe Blache (Day Before Us).

• Adam Scovell dares to look inside Dario Argento’s dungeon-like museum of horror memorabilia, Profondo Rosso.

• At Little White Lies: Tyler Thier on Stan Brakhage’s autopsy film, The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Keisuke Oka’s Arimaston Building in Tokyo, made entirely by hand.

• At Bandcamp: George Grella on the pioneers of musique concrète.

• At Unquiet Things: Marci Washington’s midnight revelations.

• Typo 8: The International Journal of Prototypes.

• RIP Teri Garr.

• Pulse (1972) by Agitation Free | Pulse State (1991) by The Future Sound Of London | Pulse Detected (2021) by The Grid/Fripp

Weekend links 749

Fantastic Sea Carriage (1556) by Johannes van Doetecum the Elder & Lucas van Doetecum, after Cornelis Floris the Younger.

• “Preiss and McElheny have acknowledged the influence of Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘The Library of Babel’ (1941), which offers a brilliant, brain-scratching disquisition on bibliotecas as conduits both of infinity and meaninglessness. I also found myself thinking of Arthur Fournier, in D. W. Young’s documentary The Booksellers (2019), who spoke of ‘the psychic dreaming that paper allows.'” Sukhdev Sandhu on The Secret World, a film by Jeff Preiss and Josiah McElheny about the books collected by Christine Burgin.

• Most people know Burt Shonberg’s paintings—if they know them at all—from their appearance in Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films. But Shonberg had a career outside the cinema, something explored in Momentary Blasts of Unexpected Light: The Visionary Art of Burt Shonberg, an exhibition currently running at the The Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles.

• Warriors (1996), an ad for Murphy’s Irish Stout directed by the Quay Brothers. Samurai warriors in an Irish pub scored to the theme from Yojimbo.

The Grand Jeu group have been neglected, at least in English-speaking history, from the general consciousness of “Surrealism” but they remain among its most interesting dissidents. The teenage Simplistes, led by [René] Daumal and [Roger] Gilbert-Lecompte, collectively experimented with consciousness and investigated wildly syncretic modes of destroying and recombining selves: diverse hermetic and occult systems, extrasensory perception, trances and somnambulism, mediumistic practice and collective dreaming.

[…]

The Grand Jeu was a project of paradox: artistic and ascetic, indulgent and severe, political, and mystical, ecstatic and negating, egoistic and selfless, graceful and violent. It sought to continually weave between collectivity and individuality, of art and life, multiplicity and unity, fed by a brew of political radicalism, inspired by Rimbaud’s germinal poetics of revolt and illumination, a utilitarian embrace of occult traditions and ideas, drug experimentation, Hindu sacred texts (Daumal would become an expert in Sanskrit) and some of Bergson’s philosophy. They were, in their own words, “serious players.” It was a mad mix, and in retrospect, clearly doomed to a short life—so, it turned out, were most its members.

Gus Mitchell on the “experimental metaphysics” of the Grand Jeu

• At Smithsonian magazine: Lanta Davis and Vince Reighard on the sculpted monsters and grotteschi that fill the Sacro Bosco at Bomarzo, Italy.

• At Bandcamp: George Grella compiles a list of “spooky sounds and spooky music, things to haunt nights and dreams”.

• At Colossal: Kelli Anderson’s amazing pop-up book, Alphabet in Motion: How Letters Get Their Shape.

• “The play that changed my life: Jim Broadbent on Ken Campbell’s electrifying epic Illuminatus!”

• DJ Food browses some of the many album covers designed by the versatile Robert Lockhart.

• Winners of the 2024 Nikon Photomicrography Competition.

• Mix of the week: XLR8R Podcast 873 by Andy Graham.

• The Strange World of…Lou Reed.

• The Internet Archive is back!

• Warriors (1990) by Jon Hassell | Red Warrior (1990) by Ronald Shannon Jackson | Bhimpalasi Warriors (2001) by Transglobal Underground

Weekend links 748

• In Tate Britain yesterday afternoon I finally got a proper look at Frederic Leighton’s An Athlete Wrestling with a Python (1877). It’s been part of the Tate collection for years but I never used to see it there, my only sighting being a view through a glass door into a locked gallery where the exhibits were being rearranged. I put the statue into my adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu in 1988 (see this post). Virgil Finlay also borrowed the pose for a Tarzan illustration in 1941.

• At Smithsonian magazine: See the first section of the largest-ever cosmic map, revealed in stunning detail by the Euclid space telescope.

• At The Daily Heller: Your Next Stop, The Twilight Zone. An interview with Arlen Schumer about the TV series.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on Punch and the Surrealists.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – October 2024 at Ambientblog.

• New music: A House Where I Dream by Mattias De Craene.

• RIP Lillian Schwartz, pioneering computer animator.

• At Bandcamp: The Acid Mothers Temple Dossier.

• Where to start with Alan Garner.

• Jim Reid’s favourite music.

• The Twilight Zone (1963) by The Ventures | The Twilight Zone (1979) by The Manhattan Transfer | Twilight Zone (1998) by Helios Creed

Weekend links 744

Postage stamp design by Dario Canovas celebrating Argentina as guest of honour at the 2010 Frankfurt Book Fair.

• Sideways Through Time, Joe Banks’ book of Hawkwind interviews, was initially available as an exclusive supplement with the special edition of Days of the Underground, Joe’s essential history of Hawkwind’s first decade. From the end of October both books will be available as separate editions from Strange Attractor, with the interview collection being republished in a revised and expanded edition.

• “Two heads are better than one”: Another extract from Two-Headed Doctor: Listening For Ghosts In Dr John’s Gris-Gris by David Toop.

• “Rammellzee was an electric presence”: Thurston Moore on NYC’s graffiti-writing hip-hop pioneer.

• New music: Long Tail Of The Quiet Gong by Robert Rich, and Neostalgia by Heiko Maile, Julian Demarre.

• At Colossal: Postage stamp designs by Tùng Nâm showing portraits of endangered animals.

• At Public Domain Review: Edwin D. Babbitt’s Principles of Light and Color (1878).

• At Print magazine: An interview with design anthropologist Keith Murphy.

• At Unquiet Things: Tristan Elwell’s visual spellcraft.

• Mix of the week: Bleep mix 287 by Sarah Davachi.

• Mariam Rezaei’s favourite music.

• Over Under Sideways Down (1966) by The Yardbirds | Stepping Sideways (2003) by John Foxx & Harold Budd | Trip Sideways (2010) by The Time And Space Machine

Weekend links 743

Icebergs and the aurora borealis in the Arctic. From the Illustrated London News, 13 October 1849.

• The week in award-winning photographs: Winners and finalists from the Ocean Photographer of the Year Awards; and winners and finalists from the Astronomy Photographer of the Year.

• A new layer of mystery is added to The Voynich Manuscript with the discovery of additional writings revealed by multispectral imaging. Lisa Fagin Davis explains.

• At Swan River Press: Helen Grant talks to John Kenny about her new collection of stories, Atmospheric Disturbances, a book whose cover design I discussed here.

Some in Hollywood were taken aback by Huston’s screenwriting choice to bring Melville to the big screen. After all, to adapt a profoundly complex literary novel, he had given the nod to a man known for writing science fiction. Perhaps no one was more surprised by Huston’s choice than Bradbury himself. Huston had read the most recent book Bradbury had sent him, The Golden Apples of the Sun, and the lead story was all it took.

“The Fog Horn” is a tale about two lighthouse keepers who, late one November night, are paid a visit by a beast that has surfaced from the depths after hearing the lonely call of the lighthouse’s foghorn. Bradbury’s love of dinosaurs had led him to write the story, and it was this love that led Huston to believe he was the right man to adapt Moby-Dick. In reading “The Fog Horn,” Huston stated in his 1980 autobiography An Open Book, he “saw something of Melville’s elusive quality.”

Sam Weller on how Ray Bradbury came to write the screenplay for John Huston’s adaptation of Moby-Dick

• At Public Domain Review: Kirsten Tambling on the life and art of Gottfried Mind (1768–1814), a Swiss artist known as “The Raphael of Cats”.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Tentacle-inspired leather accessories handcrafted by Cokeco.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – September 2024 at AmbientBlog.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Rig Solid.

• Solid State Survivor (1979) by Yellow Magic Orchestra | All That Was Solid (1996) by Paul Schütze | From A Solid To A Liquid (2006) by Biosphere