{science} – Page 9 – { feuilleton }

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

Weekend links 742

Thunderstorm (1959) by Blair Rowlands Hughes-Stanton.

• “To create a novel or a painting, an artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence,” says SF writer Ted Chiang. A New Yorker essay which has received a fair amount of attention over the past week, with good reason. As someone who found his name on the list of artists whose work was allegedly being fed into Midjourney, I suppose I have a vested interest in the arguments. (Good luck to any machine trying to imitate my “style”. I don’t have one.) Too much of the discussion, however, has been very poor which is why this is the first time I’ve linked to such a piece here.

• “After going their own way for much of the 20th century, mathematicians are increasingly turning to the laws and patterns of the natural world for inspiration. Fields stuck for decades are being unstuck. And even philosophers have started to delve into the mystery of why physics is proving ‘unreasonably effective’ in mathematics, as one has boldly declared.” Ananyo Bhattacharya on why physics is good at creating new mathematics. Having recently finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s final novel, Stella Maris, this was all very timely.

• “…our films obey musical laws. Of course, you can never tell people how they should watch a film. But the musical element provides a narrative of its own.” Thus the Quay Brothers, in the news again with their forthcoming feature film, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. The quote is from a recent interview with Xan Brooks. Meanwhile, Alex Dudok de Wit posted another interview from 2019, originally published in French, now made available in English for the first time.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine announces a new book of his essays, The Thunderstorm Collectors.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: 28 books that either faked ingesting LSD or did.

• At Public Domain Review: Antiquities of Mexico (1831–48).

• At Print mag: Kelly Thorn’s Tarot of Oxalia.

• USC Optical Sound Effects Library

• Strange Thunder (1987) by Harold Budd | Sweet Thunder (1991) by Yello | Studies For Thunder (2004) by Robert Henke

Weekend links 736

South Polar Map of Jupiter by the Cassini spacecraft, 2000.

• “A ghostly train journey on a forgotten branch line transports a son, Jozef, visiting his dying Father in a remote Galician Sanatorium. Upon arrival Jozef finds the Sanatorium entirely moribund and run by a dubious Doctor Gotard who tells him that his father’s death, the death that has struck him in his country has not yet occurred, and that here they are always late by a certain interval of time of which the length cannot be defined. Jozef will come to realise that the Sanatorium is a floating world halfway between sleep and wakefulness and that time and events cannot be measured in any tangible form.” The Quay Brothers have finished their third feature film, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, a combination of live action and animation which is being premiered next month at the Venice film festival. No sign of a trailer as yet but the curious can prime themselves by watching (or rewatching) the Quays’ Street of Crocodiles—their first adaptation of Bruno Schulz—or Hourglass Sanatorium, the first screen adaptation of Schulz’s stories by Wojciech Has.

• “No one is sure when the tremendous whirl—the largest and longest-lived storm in our current solar system, with a diameter wider than planet Earth and wind speeds of more than 260 miles per hour—began. Or why it’s red. Or even who first observed it…” Katherine Harmon Courage on Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.

• New music: Bórdice by Nestor, and Nightfall by Trentemøller, the latter with a video swiping shots from Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon. Nice song but musicians really need to stop plundering independent film-makers when they want some visual embellishment.

• At The Daily Heller: Steven Heller talks to Drew Friedman about Friedman’s new book of caricatures, Schtick Figures.

• Mixes of the week: A mix for The Wire by Miaux, and Isolatedmix 127 by David Douglas & Applescal.

• DJ Food’s latest psychedelic trawl is a collection of book covers, puzzles, etc, designed by Peter Max.

• At Unquiet Things: Vic Prezio’s Gothic book covers.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Morgan Fisher Day.

• Jupiter (1990) by NASA Voyager Space Sounds | Jupiter! (Feed Your Head Mix) (1994) by System 7 | Jupiter Collision (2002) by Redshift

Weekend links 731

The Electrical Experimenter, Vol. 5, no. 1. April, 1918. Electrical cover art by Vincent Lynch.

• Coming soon from Rocket 88 Books: Electricity and Ghosts, a collection of art and graphic design by John Foxx/Dennis Leigh. The book itself has been designed with a regular Foxx collaborator, Jonathan Barnbrook. Last year I put together a post collecting Dennis Leigh’s book covers.

• At Strange Flowers: Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt, their Expressionist dance costumes, and their short, tempestuous lives. There’s more about the couple’s costumes and dances here.

• New music: Road to Mandalay by Laurie Anderson; Panorama (French Soundtracks & Rarities) by Various Artists; The Passage Of Time by Cosmos In Collision.

• At Public Domain Review: Raffaele Mainella’s illustrations for Nos Invisibles (1907), a Spiritualist text by Clotilde Briatte (writing as Charles d’Orinio).

• Dennis Cooper’s favourite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2024 so far. Thanks again for the link here!

• John Cale’s favourite music. Also The Records That Made Me by Carsten Nicolai/Alva Noto.

• The mysterious mirrored monolith returns.

• RIP Donald Sutherland.

• BBC Sound Effects.

• Electricity (1967) by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band | Electricity (1980) by Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark | Electricity (1995) by Pet Shop Boys

Weekend links 729

Phosphorus and Hesperus (1881) by Evelyn De Morgan.

• Mix of the week, or possibly the entire year: The Deep Ark, 167 tracks (over 8 hours of music), most of which are from the electronic deluge of the early 1990s. The download link may not work for all browsers—it didn’t for one of mine—but it is active. Via Simon Reynolds who has more about the Deep Ark project.

• At Nautilus: Betsy Mason on the use of stage magic to investigate animal behaviour. “By performing tricks for birds, monkeys, and other creatures, researchers hope to learn how they perceive and think about their world.”

• At The Daily Heller: Mad and the Usual Gang of Idiots. Meanwhile, Mr Heller’s font of the month may prove useful for this election season, a Jonathan Barnbrook design named Moron.

Looking back, you can see a pattern in those eras in which interest in telepathy boomed. Coined by Myers and his fellow psychical researchers in the 1880s, telepathy gained traction because it was formulated inside a moment of scientific and technological revolution, where uncanny transmissions proliferated across the visible and invisible spectrum, seeming to collapse the natural and the supernatural together. In the 1970s, telepathy returned, if under different names, as part of another moment of crisis. The Cold War arms race was an essential part of this, feeding a strange supplemental world of fantasy technologies, from mind control to brainwashing, and playing on an all-too-widespread psychological paranoia around being seen, infiltrated and manipulated by invisible agents.

Roger Luckhurst looks back at a century of psychic research

• New music: Portable Reality Generator by Field Lines Cartographer, and Sublime Eternal Love by Chrystabell and David Lynch.

• Coffee and Chocolates for Two Guitars: Robert Fripp interviewing John McLaughlin in July, 1982.

• Paintings by Ithell Colquhoun currently showing at the Ben Hunter gallery, London.

• At Public Domain Review: Eye Miniatures (ca. 1790–1810).

• ESP (1965) by Miles Davis | ESP (1990) by Deee-lite | ESP (2002) by Comets On Fire