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Weekend links 847

La voix des airs (1931) by René Magritte.

• “Gangsters is to the 1970s what The Prisoner was to the 1960s—a playful, knowing and mildly crazed production but today it bears an important warning from the past to us.” John Quin on the extraordinary vitality of Philip Martin’s Play For Today and the BBC drama serial spun-off from it.

• New music: Juxtapositions by Boddy | Scanner; Embodied Shadow Of Thy Secret Mind by Philippe Blache; Light on Water by Modern Apartments.

• At Public Domain Review: Metamorphosis: Transformations in the Early Modern Flap Book (early 19th century).

Maeterlinck would write of [The Great God Pan], “it is, I believe, the attempt had been made to combine the traditional, or diabolical Fantasy with the new scientific kind, and that such a mixture has produced the most disturbing work I have ever come across”. Maeterlinck’s description of Machen serves as a tidy introduction to the crux of Ray’s writings too. A writer equally perplexed, intrigued, and possessed by the “the terrifying, hypergeometric, fourth dimension”. Ray’s works span the thin fabric of reality, piercing through into other eternal worlds and abducted by its eternal horror. Ray’s worlds are numerous realities battling one another, overlapping, mimicking, and distorting; it is an evocation of time and space as a battle-field of alternativities, governed by strange supernatural forces, notably angels or the occult.

The London of the Imagination, an examination of the fictional metropolis as it manifests in the stories of Belgian writer, Jean Ray

• Mixes of the week: A Slomo mix for The Invisible College, and DreamScenes – September 2026 at Ambientblog.

• At Colossal: “Spanning 200+ works, a new book celebrates the world of fungi“.

• The Electric Music Machine: Five Days at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (1988).

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Ege Basalt.

• Matt Cargill’s favourite albums.

• RIP Jeremy Thomas.

• Metamorphosis (1970) by Ananda Shankar | Metamorphosis (1995) by Pet Shop Boys | Metamorphosis (2012) by Demdike Stare

Italo Calvino: L’écrivain perché

The first minute of this Franco-German documentary doesn’t present a title in English but the French title, L’écrivain perché, refers to Le Baron perché, one of Italo Calvino’s earliest novels which English readers know as Baron in the Trees. The novel isn’t the first of Calvino’s flights of fancy—The Cloven Viscount preceded it—but in borrowing its title the documentary suggests that the tree-dwelling Baron’s new way of living and viewing the world was personally significant for its author, something supported by the opening interview clip.

A promising start, then, so it’s a shame that the documentary as a whole isn’t very satisfying. As with last week’s science-fiction documentary, the best parts are the extracts from interviews with Calvino himself, and I’d have preferred to see more of these than hear from random individuals (the inevitable academics, an American writer, a musician) whose comments aren’t without value but who use up time that might have been better spent describing for those unfamiliar with Calvino’s work the origin and structure of his fictions. I can tell you, for example, that the stories in Cosmicomics (1965) are the closest that Calvino came to outright science fiction; that The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1969) is a novel based around a series of Tarot readings, with the layout of those readings appearing beside the text in the book; that Invisible Cities (1972) is a book-length conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in which the Venetian explorer presents capsule descriptions of the places he’s encountered on his travels; that If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979) is a masterpiece of self-reflexive writing… And so on. The documentary, unfortunately, tells you none of these things, and hardly mentions these books at all, leaving the unfamiliar viewer with no clue as to why Calvino became one of Italy’s most popular writers during his lifetime, and why he continues to be popular today. One of the worst examples of this is when his French translator talks about Calvino’s relocation to Paris in 1967, an event which brought him into the orbit of the Oulipo writers. There’s a brief explanation of the Oulipo group using formal constraints to reinvent their fiction but no mention of what this meant to Calvino or whether the formal restraints in the novels and stories he produced after 1967 were influenced by Oulipo or not.

I wouldn’t usually spend so much time writing about something which was dissatisfying but, as with the SF documentary, this felt like a missed opportunity. Arte is a public service channel that produces many similar arts documentaries. The Calvino one is well-made, subtitled in English throughout, and contains a large quantity of photographs and scarce film footage which must have taken time to assemble. Despite his continued popularity Italo Calvino has been very poorly served by Anglophone documentaries. The BBC interviewed him in 1985, the last year of his life, but the introduction to the man and his work was crammed into half an episode of Bookmark when he should have been profiled at greater length in an episode of Arena as Jorge Luis Borges was in 1982. Calvino said in the BBC film that he disliked being interviewed—he says something similar in one of the clips here—but he still spent enough time sitting in front of cameras to help support a better documentary.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• More Invisible Cities (and an invisible author)
• Invisible Cities: Miscellanea
• Seeing Calvino: Invisible Cities
• Gérard Trignac’s Invisible Cities
• Colleen Corradi Brannigan’s Invisible Cities
• Le Città In/visibili
• Mikhail Viesel’s Invisible Cities
• Bookmark: Italo Calvino
• Crossed destinies revisted
• Crossed destinies: when the Quays met Calvino
• Tressants: the Calvino Hotel

Henri Rivière’s lithographs

Aspects de la nature: La Baie (1897).

Henri Rivière (1864–1951) was a French painter and printmaker whose Thirty-six Views of the Eiffel Tower (1902) is one of my favourite picture series, a Parisian response to Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. Rivière’s series is beautifully done, printed in autumnal hues, bound in boards that combine Art Nouveau design with the traditional styling of Japanese books, and with each print signed with a small red monogram. The same monogram—or a variation of it—turns up on many of his other prints, serving to remind the viewer of the artist’s debt to Japanese printmakers. Rivière’s lithographs apply the traditional Japanese arrangement of minimal outline and flat colour to French subjects, with an equivalent care taken over the choice of view and the structure of the composition. In their realistic detail and use of atmospheric effects this is a side of Rivière’s work that looks forward to the ligne claire style of European comic art.

(Note: several of these samples have artificially applied borders which I’ve left as they are.)

Aspects de la nature: La Falaise (1898).

Aspects de la nature: Le Crépuscule (1898).

Paysages parisiens: Du haut des tours de Notre-Dame (1900).

Paysages parisiens: L’île des Cygnes (1900).

Continue reading “Henri Rivière’s lithographs”

Weekend links 846

Design by Randoll Coate for the Labirinto Borges, a hedge maze at the Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice, which was renovated earlier this year.

• “Code was probably our most overtly political record, which is interesting, touring and playing it in these very different but scary political times.” Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire talking about the experience of touring America again.

• At The Daily Heller: A look at the work of designer/illustrator George Hardie whose five-decade career is to be celebrated in a retrospective exhibition in London. There’s more George Hardie here.

• “Almost as soon as weird began circulating outside of Macbeth, its meaning broadened too, from ‘eerie’ and ‘uncanny’ to ‘odd’ or ‘unusual’.” Colin Gorrie on the weird history of the word “weird”.

• At The Quietus: Toby Manning on 40 years of Gone To Earth by David Sylvian. A minor nitpick: the album’s art and design was by Russell Mills, not Vaughan Oliver.

• New music: Burning Song by Kali Malone; Obsessive Surrealism by Parallel Worlds.

• At Door Of Perception: The radical architectural designs of Eugene Tssui.

• DJ Food’s latest accumulation of psychedelic graphics from the desktop.

• Old music: When The Music’s Over (Live, 1970) by The Doors.

• Arthur Brown‘s favourite songs.

• Weird Dream (1976) by Harmonia | It’s So Weird (1983) by Bush Tetras | Ballad Of The Weird Sisters (2013) by Blood Ceremony

Paul Woodroffe’s Tempest

Paul Vincent Woodroffe (1875–1954) was a British illustrator and stained-glass artist, a kind of British equivalent of Harry Clarke in that he seems to have spent more time creating stained glass than he did illustrating books. Woodroffe was also an exact contemporary of Aubrey Beardsley, and both artists provided illustrations in 1897 for The Parade, a heavily-illustrated gift book of stories for children. I’ve known about Woodroffe’s illustrated Tempest for some time but I’ve had to wait to find a decent collection of all the colour plates. Woodroffe was an excellent watercolourist whose nebulous effects are so delicate they might easily be spoiled by poor reproduction. I’m at a loss to say exactly how some of these effects were achieved. He evidently used washes to fill in the sky, a technique where the paint can’t be manipulated before it dries, yet he still has the translucent figures of Ariel and Prospero hovering over some of the scenes. What he seems to have done is painted the transparent figures in very diluted white tones over the backgrounds, a difficult process when you don’t want any pencil outlines showing underneath.

Where the subtance of the text is concerned, Woodroffe adds more to some of the familiar scenes than you find with other artists. For the scene where Ariel is transformed into a harpy Edmund Dulac shows the spirit as an eagle-sized bird; Woodroffe’s Ariel is a larger creature with a fearsome pair of claws. For Ariel’s Song he shows a cowled and enthroned skeletal figure sitting at the bottom of the sea, like Death waiting to make an appearance in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Woodroffe’s human figures are less interesting although still well-drawn, a parade of statuesque types with similar faces and a distinctly Pre-Raphaelite appearance. His book also features three double-page scenes, something you don’t find so often in these coloured editions.

Continue reading “Paul Woodroffe’s Tempest”