{ feuilleton }

A Cabinet of Curiosities

When I still had a television I used to enjoy Lucinda Lambton’s films for the BBC, and this one—a short history of the British Wunderkammer—was a particular favourite. Lambton’s films cover similar ground to those of Jonathan Meades but with a lighter touch, and free of Meades’ often relentless pontification. This episode of 40 Minutes, first broadcast in 1987, includes some unusual architecture—a Lambton speciality—but concentrates for the most part on seeking out a few surviving examples of the ad hoc museums hidden away in country houses. Among the more notable features there’s Walter Potter’s taxidermy diorama, The Death and Burial of Cock Robin, and the full 40-minute programme showed the incredible Bowes Swan automaton in action. The copy of the film at YouTube is missing the last 10 minutes so the swan is absent although it’s easily seen elsewhere.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities
• The specimens of Alex CF
• Walmor Corrêa’s Memento Mori
• The art of Ron Pippin
• Custom creatures
• Jan Švankmajer: The Complete Short Films
• Cryptozoology
• The Bowes Swan
• The Museum of Fantastic Specimens

Weekend links 271

Environment Transformer/Flyhead Helmet by Haus-Rucker-Co (1968). From Hippie Modernism at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

• From 2006: Weird Tales: The Strange Life of HP Lovecraft. Geoff Ward examines Lovecraft’s life and work for BBC Radio 3 with contributions from Neil Gaiman, ST Joshi, Kelly Link, China Miéville and Peter Straub. Meanwhile, Ned Beauman wonders whether Ford Madox Ford is “as scary as Lovecraft”.

• Alexei German’s years-in-the-making feature film, Hard to be a God (previously), receives a UK release this week. Paul Duane reports on an overwhelming viewing experience, while Nigel Andrews says it “may be the greatest film since the millennium began”.

• Mixes of the week: Adventures In Sound And Music, 30 July 2015, hosted by Joseph Stannard, and RCMIX9 by worriedaboutsatan.

As Nabokov insisted, “Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.” The genre thrives because its deceptions are liberating. For Wood, the thrill of reading fiction is intimately connected with the awareness that fiction constitutes “an utterly free space, where anything might be thought, anything uttered.” The excitement comes when, as readers, we’re allowed to participate in this freedom and experience the fiction imaginatively, without being required to believe that it is true.

Joanna Scott on The Virtues of Difficult Fiction

• “Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?” asks Meghan Tifft.

• The original, real-life dystopian cityscape of Kowloon Walled City, and the artwork it inspired.

• The Long, Lonely Walk: Nick Ripatrazone on hallways in horror films.

• New cover designs for the Essentials range from Penguin Books.

• Lemi Ghariokwu: “How I designed Fela Kuti’s album covers”.

• “Do CDs sound better than vinyl?” asks Chris Kornelis.

• Magic Fly (1977) by Space | Human Fly (1978) by The Cramps | I Am The Fly (1978) by Wire

Writhings

Adam Proctor’s After Effects experiment lasts all of 30 seconds but he titles it Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn which makes it relevant to the week’s theme. Watch it here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Howard’s creatures

One of the tasks this week has been sketching out a member of the Great Race of Yith, the consciousness-hopping alien scholars whose exploits are detailed in HP Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out of Time. Their appearance isn’t at all mysterious: Lovecraft describes them in some detail (and sketched them in his notes above) and they were illustrated by Howard V. Brown for their first publication in Astounding Stories in June 1936. But I’ve only ever drawn any of Lovecraft’s creatures when there’s been a good reason (or a commission) so this was the first time I’d had to think seriously about how I wanted to depict a Yithian.

The results will be posted here in due course but in the meantime here’s a couple more of Lovecraft’s own sketches of his creations. The Cthulhu sketch is one of two showing the statue from the story. The most interesting detail for me is the multiple eyes which aren’t described in the text.

The Great Race of Yith have always struck me as somewhat improbable even if you take into account alien evolutionary paths. Similar creatures populate the early science fiction magazines (Frank R. Paul painted many of them), and this is one place where I feel slightly let down by Lovecraft’s imagination. In the recent batch of drawings I’ve also been depicting one of the Mi-go and some of the Elder Things from At the Mountains of Madness. The latter are at the opposite end of the scale to the Great Race, sufficiently alien without seeming absurd.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Psychetecture

And speaking of architecture… I wouldn’t usually punish the spine of a scarce paperback by subjecting it to trial by flatbed scanner but not all of these drawings have found their way to the web. The artist is Gavin Stamp, here masquerading as “GM Sinclair” for illustrations used in the appendices of the aforementioned Necronomicon (1978), edited by George Hay. The book was published in hardback by occult specialists Neville Spearman, with a paperback following two years later from Corgi Books.

For a purportedly real Necronomicon this one always struck me as more plausible than the US equivalent by Simon; Hay and his collaborators, Robert Turner and David Langford, go to some lengths to describe the sourcing of rare manuscripts from the British Museum, and the process of cryptographic decoding that follows. But the part of the book that made the greatest impression was the essay contributions by Christopher Frayling and Angela Carter, and Gavin Stamp’s accompanying illustrations. In 1980 unless you knew an older book collector (which I didn’t) serious writing about Lovecraft’s work was hard to find. Hay’s book and Stamp’s illustrations were one of several discoveries that pushed me towards illustrating Lovecraft myself.

The pictures above are taken from the paperback while the ones below are lifted from David Langford’s site. I borrowed the pentagonal labyrinth from the title page for the cover of the NecronomiCon convention booklet: two Necronomicons joined, and a nod to a group of writers who helped me along the way.

Continue reading “Psychetecture”