{ feuilleton }

Weekend links 83

In Memory by Caitlin Hackett who describes her astonishing drawings as “contemporary mythology”.

• David Lynch’s solo album, Crazy Clown Time has just been released so The Guardian last Friday let the artist/director/musician edit their G2 supplement. Xan Brooks tried to get Lynch to open up about his inspirations while elsewhere Lynch had a chat with ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons. Of more interest to me was news that some of the deleted sequences from Blue Velvet have been discovered. I’ve known about these for years from a feature in Video Watchdog magazine but never thought we might get to see them. Related: a mixtape by David Lynch & musical collaborator/engineer ‘Big’ Dean Hurley.

• “Book jackets these days, for reasons I won’t unpack, seem to revel, overtly, in wit, conceptual deviousness, unusual clever or droll juxtapositions – we, as a professional community, seem to have elevated the visual bon mot above all other virtues.” Peter Mendelsund in a great post about certain problems in book design, starting with the very problematic question of what to do with Nabokov’s Lolita. Related: Covering Lolita, a gallery of covers through the ages which run the gamut of bad decisions.

• “For his sins Pinocchio is not only hanged but robbed, kidnapped, stabbed, whipped, starved, jailed, punched in the head, and has his legs burned off.” Nathaniel Rich goes back to Carlo Collodi’s original Pinocchio. Disney it ain’t.

Some of Berthold Wolpe’s Faber cover designs are now available as prints from wire-frame whose Pelham/Ballard prints were mentioned here recently. Related (and worth another visit): Faber 20th century classics at Flickr.

• Technical Vocabularies – Games for May, a small collection of poems by Alan Moore & Steve Moore, is now online with authorial permission. Alan’s Beardsley pastiche on the cover is a bonus.

• Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk says the group’s Virgin albums will be reissued next year by Mute. A new edition of The Crackdown? Yes, please.

• “Homo Riot can only think of six or seven street artists in the world who regularly feature gay themes in their work, and he knows all of them.”

• Rub Out The Words: Letters from William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick on the language virus theory of William Burroughs.

• L’exilé de Capri: the connections between Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen and Roger Peyrefitte explored at Strange Flowers.

• Flying cars and monorails: Soviet Russia in the 1960s also had a Gerry Anderson view of the future.

• Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You.

• Baby’s On Fire (1973) by Brian Eno | Baby’s On Fire (live, 1974) by Eno & The Winkies | Baby’s On Fire (live, 1976) by 801 | Baby’s On Fire (1998) by The Venus In Furs.

Weird Fiction Review

weird, a.

1. Having the power to control the fate or destiny of human beings, etc.; later, claiming the supernatural power of dealing with fate or destiny. Originally in the Weird Sisters = †(a) the Fates; (b) the witches in Macbeth.

2. a. Partaking of or suggestive of the supernatural; of a mysterious or unearthly character; unaccountably or uncomfortably strange; uncanny.

b. of sounds or voices.

3. Of strange or unusual appearance, odd-looking.

4. a. Out of the ordinary course, strange, unusual; hence, odd, fantastic. (Freq. in recent use.)

b. Colloq. phr. weird and wonderful, marvellous in a strange or eccentric way; both remarkable and peculiar or unfathomable; exotic, outlandish. Freq. ironical or derog.

5. Comb., as weird-looking adj.

Oxford English Dictionary

Weird: I’ve relished the word since I was at school for the way it managed to embody or describe so many of the things I was deeply attracted to, especially in the world of fiction. Weird Tales magazine when it was at its height in the 1930s was able to publish stories of fantasy, horror and science fiction, or hybrid stories of fantasy/horror or horror/sf, none of which needed to be alloted specific definitions when “weird” was there to cover everything. China Miéville noted the usefulness of the “weird” designation ten years or so ago, and I’ve been hoping ever since that other people might pick up the broader, more inclusive term instead of dividing the major genres into ever smaller sub-genres. “Weird” could accommodate generic work but also encompass those stories that were simply strange without possessing the usual genre trappings.

So far the term hasn’t found the widespread favour I’d been hoping for but that may change thanks to the Weird Fiction Review, a site launched this week by my friends and occasional collaborators Ann and Jeff VanderMeer whose enormous brick of an anthology, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, is published by Corvus this month. Weird Fiction Review states that:

its primary mission over time will be to serve as an ongoing exploration into all facets of the weird, in all of its many forms—a kind of “non-denominational” approach that appreciates Lovecraft but also writers like Franz Kafka, Angela Carter, and Shirley Jackson—along with the next generation of weird writers and international weird.

Already on the site is an interview with Neil Gaiman who says:

I think of Horror as a section of a bookshop, gothic as a type of book that ended, truly, with Northhanger Abbey, and The Weird as an attempt to unify whatever it was that Robert Aickman did, that Edward Gorey did—using the tools of horror to delight and transform.

I’m re-reading some of Aickman’s stories at the moment. He called them “strange” but I’d call them 100% weird. There’s one in Ann & Jeff’s anthology whose contents are an ideal introduction to this zone of literature.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Vengeance of Nitocris
• Die Andere Seite by Alfred Kubin
• The King in Yellow
• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem

Ver Sacrum, 1900

Continuing an occasional series of posts about Ver Sacrum, the art journal of the Viennese Secession. The collected issues for 1900 undergo a change of design, and not necessarily for the better. Gone are the decorative covers of previous years, replaced by small emblem-like vignettes for each issue. The one above is a design by Gustav Klimt whose work is featured throughout this year. Other familiar names include the Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff, Ludwig von Hofmann and Marcus Behmer. The page design is generally less interesting, unfortunately, although the magazine did retain its square format and there are many impressive examples of Art Nouveau graphics. The complete set of pages for this volume can be viewed or downloaded here.

Continue reading “Ver Sacrum, 1900”

The art of Jindřich Štyrský, 1899–1942

From a late Surrealist to an early one. Jindřich Štyrský is a Czech artist best remembered today for his collages but he was also a painter, a photographer and a publisher of erotic material. He illustrated and published a Czech edition of Lautréamont’s Maldoror, and helped found the Surrealismus review in Prague.

The Bathe (1934).

Regular readers won’t be surprised to hear that I’ve liked Štyrský’s collages for years, many of which subject sentimental Victorian illustration to processes of violent transmutation. Ever since seeing The Bathe I’ve found it impossible to look at one of Renoir’s fleshy nudes without wondering what happened to the exposed viscera. Weimar covered Štyrský’s career in some detail last year so that’s a good place to go for further information. There’s an extract from Štyrský’s dream diary here, and a substantial collection of the collage work and other material at this Flickr set.

Cover for a Czech edition of Fantômas (1929).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Initiations in the Abyss: A Surrealist Apocalypse
• Vultures Await
• Wilfried Sätty: Artist of the occult
• Illustrating Poe #4: Wilfried Sätty
• Metamorphosis Victorianus
• Max (The Birdman) Ernst
• Gandharva by Beaver & Krause
• The art of Stephen Aldrich

Klapheck versus Ballard

left: The Hostage (1966); right: The Female Terrorist (1971). Both by Konrad Klapheck.

No, I’m not suggesting that David Pelham’s paintings for the Ballard covers he designed in the 1970s are inspired by the earlier work of German artist Konrad Klapheck. But it’s tempting to think of Klapheck’s isolated objects as being intended for Ballard collections that never saw the light of day. Klapheck has connections with late Surrealism, and some of his paintings prefigure the styles and concerns of Pop Art, so I’m sure Ballard would have approved.

Three of Pelham’s memorable Ballard paintings were made available as signed and numbered prints earlier this year, together with his design for A Clockwork Orange. For more about the covers see Landscapes From a Dream: How the Art of David Pelham Captured the Essence of JG Ballard’s Early Fiction, an essay at Ballardian. The designer discussed his career at some length in 2007. Then there’s the complete set of covers at the Penguin Science Fiction site, and let’s not forget Konrad Klapheck who’s still painting and who has a website here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive