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Weekend links 811

A still from The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), a feature-length animated film by Lotte Reiniger.

• Hélice 39 is a speculative-fiction journal (in Spanish) whose current issue includes an article by Marcelo Sanchez: “What did Borges think of Lovecraft?”

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.

• Old music: Hydrophony For Dagon by Max Eastley & Michael Prime; The Adventures Of Prince Achmed by Morricone Youth.

• Public Domain Review lists some of the writers whose works will enter the public domain this year.

• “Modern Japanese Printmakers celebrates vibrant mid-20th-century innovation“.

• At Nautilus: “Here’s what’s happening in the brain when you’re improvising.”

• At the BFI: Pamela Hutchinson selects 10 great films of 1926.

• New music: The Future Is Now by Pietro Zollo.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Phil Solomon Day.

• 2026 is the Year of the Fire Horse.

• Runaway Horses (“poetry written with a splash of blood”) (1985) by Philip Glass | Unicorns Were Horses (1996) by New Kingdom | Red Horse (2002) by Jack Rose

02026

The Basket of Bread (1926) by Salvador Dalí.

Happy new year. 02026? An affectation via the Long Now.

The Cello Player (1926) by Edwin Dickinson.

Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926) by Otto Dix.

The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child before Three Witnesses: André Breton, Paul Eluard and the Artist (1926) by Max Ernst.

The Musician’s Table (1926) by Juan Gris.

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The art of Benvenuto Disertori (1887–1969)

L’arco di Tito (1918).

Benvenuto Disertori was an Italian artist with a parallel career as a musicologist. I forget how his prints came to my attention but they’re just the kind of thing I like to see: meticulous monochrome views with an emphasis on architecture and eroded mineral surfaces. Some printmakers tend to concentrate on a single medium—wood engraving, for example—but Disertori embraced a wide range of etching and engraving techniques. Once again, the influence of Piranesi is discernible in some of these views (another point in their favour), especially those that depict Roman ruins or older Italian buildings like the medieval towers in San Gimignano.

Il Pensatore (1909).

L’edera (1911–13).

Gubbio. La Campanella di S. Giovanni Battista (1912-13).

La Nicchia (1913).

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Weekend links 810

Image of a Spherical Black Hole with Thin Accretion Disk (1979) by Jean-Pierre Luminet. Via.

• “I would be willing to bet that every student of fantastic fiction has at some point in his or her career read a book with the name EF Bleiler printed on its cover.” Brian J. Showers of Swan River Press talked to EF Bleiler in 2005.

• “James Webb Space Telescope confirms 1st ‘runaway’ supermassive black hole rocketing through ‘Cosmic Owl’ galaxies at 2.2 million mph.”

• “You have to be ready to see it”: Abel Ferrara and Catherine Breillat on why Pasolini’s Salò is a gift that keeps giving.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Kosten Koper presents…Bill Nelson: Acquitted By Mirrors (1982–1987).

• At Skurrilsteer: Ongoing research into the life, work and legacy of Edward James.

• At The Daily Heller: All that jazzy record cover design.

• Cygnus X-1 (1977) by Rush | Blackhole Dropout (1979) by Tod Dockstader | The Competition Of Supermassive Black Holes And Galactic Spheroids In The Destruction of Globular Clusters (1999) by Jah Wobble

Harry Clarke’s Elixirs of Life

A magazine ad.

Of all the books illustrated by Harry Clarke the most scarce are a pair of slim volumes published 100 years ago by the Jameson distillery to promote their brand of Irish whiskey. The books were never widely distributed, being given away to distillery visitors. Copies of the illustrations were still hard to find in 2011 when I wrote a brief post about them. Collections of Clarke’s work seldom pay the books much attention beyond reproducing one or two drawings but by trawling the auction houses it’s now possible to accumulate most of the illustrations. With the ongoing interest in Clarke’s work I keep expecting Jameson to publish facsimile reprints but so far this doesn’t seem to have happened. The information below is taken from Harry Clarke: His Graphic Art (1983) by Nicola Gordon Bowe. A couple more illustrations from The History of a Great House may be found in Hiroshi Unno’s exceptional study, Harry Clarke – An Imaginative Genius in Illustrations and Stained-glass Arts.

The History of a Great House — Origin of John Jameson Whiskey, containing some Interesting Observations thereon together with the Causes of Its Present Scarcity. Printed by Maunsel and Roberts Ltd, Dublin 1924 for the distillers; 24 pp, 8 x 4.75 inches, 21 black line drawings blocked in with viridian, one repeated as an endpiece, custard paper cover (8 x 5 inches), printed with additional black and viridian drawing.

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