{ feuilleton }

Weekend links 688

Ascending to the Cathedral, Barcelona (1938/1960) by Kati Horna.

• The rise and fall of Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong’s infamous urban monolith. Related: a four-and-a-half-hour walkthrough of Stray, a game in which you help a cat escape from a deteriorated robot-filled housing complex.

• Quote of the week: “The true master requires the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.” Thus Vladimir Nabokov at Lawrence Weschler’s Wondercabinet.

• New music: Orion Nebula by Christian Wittman, and Chthonic by Lawrence English & Lea Bertucci.

Chapter by chapter, Flaubert lampoons his poor pair, who fail at discipline after attempted discipline: landscape architecture, anatomy, history, literature, phrenology, religion, even love, and on and on. In each pursuit, they never lose the optimism or the hubris of thinking they can put their knowledge to work in the world. When they become interested in pedagogy, they adopt a pair of abandoned children who are at turns mystified by and contemptuous of their efforts to improve their well-being. The fruit trees fail, the novel is abandoned, a cat is boiled alive, the children cause scandals.

David Schurman Wallace explores the hazards of distraction with a detour through Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet

• At AnOther: Peter De Potter’s new book explores the erotic performance of social media.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Hobart LaRoche presents…15 experimental video games.

• Take a look at a book chronicling the albums of Island Records.

• At Colossal: Gabriel Schama’s laser-cut plywood reliefs.

• Orion (1986) by Metallica | Shades Of Orion (1993) by Shades Of Orion | Orion (2001) by Jah Wobble and Bill Laswell

Online galleries have made profiles like this short Mexican film rather redundant, but it’s good to know that someone went to the trouble of presenting Varo’s paintings in this way at a time (1967) when you’d be lucky to see more than one of them in a book on Surrealist art. Jomí García Ascot’s camera roams among the details of Varo’s dreamworlds while Spanish voices read from a variety of Romantic and other texts. I hadn’t noticed before the amount of cats in Varo’s paintings. Look for the felines here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Pynchon and Varo
• Remedios Varo’s recipe for erotic dreams

More Harry Clarke online

A while back I put together a list of links to freely-available online copies of Harry Clarke’s illustrated books. The list didn’t have any notable omissions but was unsatisfying if you’re like I am and prefer to see scans of an entire book rather than collections of pictures or home-made creations. This illustration of Ligeia is from a 1936 US edition of Clarke’s illustrated Poe which is archived in the digital collection at Poland’s Biblioteka Narodowa. This is the edition for which Clarke created eight new full-page pieces in colour, all of which are happily intact in the Polish copy which may be downloaded as a PDF. A good test of the scanning (and print) quality of this book is the illustration for The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, a drawing where Clarke tested the limits of ink reproduction with his closely-hatched lines and speckle effects. I was hoping the Polish library might have more books like this but so far nothing has appeared.

Following this discovery I tried another Clarke search at the Internet Archive where I found this recent upload of a Dutch edition of his illustrated Perrault. The same source has had an English edition of this title for some time but the copy is missing one of the colour plates, plate theft being a perennial problem for library books. Or even non-library books… I own a rather battered first-edition of Clarke’s illustrated Swinburne from which two of the full-page pictures have been carefully removed by a previous owner with a razor blade. And speaking of Swinburne, Clarke’s edition of the Selected Poems is the one I keep hoping to find as an online edition, together with his Faust, even though I own a reprint of the latter book. I suspect the contentious “obscene” drawings in these two volumes have kept copies away from library collections. You can at least find the illustrations for the books easily enough. Still unavailable unless you’re a collector of rare magazines is The Golden Hind, the short-lived arts magazine edited by Clifford Bax and Austin Osman Spare which contained unique contributions from Harry Clarke and many similar artists of the 1920s. That’s one I’ll continue to search for.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Harry Clarke online
• Harry Clarke record covers
• Thomas Bodkin on Harry Clarke
• Harry Clarke: His Graphic Art
• Harry Clarke and others in The Studio
• Harry Clarke’s Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
• Harry Clarke in colour
• The Tinderbox
• Harry Clarke and the Elixir of Life
• Cardwell Higgins versus Harry Clarke
• Modern book illustrators, 1914
• Illustrating Poe #3: Harry Clarke
• Strangest Genius: The Stained Glass of Harry Clarke
• Harry Clarke’s stained glass
• Harry Clarke’s The Year’s at the Spring
• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

Weekend links 687

The Peacock Garden (1898) by Walter Crane.

• “The trio [Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington & Kati Horna] became known as the ‘three witches’ for their exploration of the supernatural and metaphysical—which ranged…’from tarot readings to shamanic psychedelics to attempts to stop or slow time.'” Teresa Nowakowski on Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, an exhibition of Varo’s paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago which includes the one that Thomas Pynchon singled out for description in The Crying of Lot 49.

• Philip K. Dick giving a lecture on “orthogonal time” to a small audience at the Festival International de la Science-Fiction, Metz, in 1977. Dick’s talks and interviews aren’t exactly scarce, but this one was of interest for me since I recently designed an edition of John Crowley’s Great Work of Time, a novella which involves a similar concept. If you were at the Metz Festival in 1977 you could also see a live performance by Cluster. Lucky you.

• “Our minds remain open when the LSD wears off.” Steve Paulson on psychedelic drugs and their usefulness as therapeutic tools.

• At Cartoon Brew: Stephen Irwin’s animated films “combine the influences of David Lynch, Struwwelpeter, and the Brothers Grimm.”

• Steven Heller looked at NB3, the third book about Neville Brody’s graphic design. Elsewhere, Heller’s font of the month is Scusi.

• The glowing, prismatic nervous system of a sea star wins the Scientific Image of the Year.

• At Unquiet Things: Forgotten worlds and wonderlands from The Art of Fantasy.

• “Don’t waste my time with blood-free monster movies,” says Anne Billson.

• At Aquarium Drunkard: King Tubby And Soul Syndicate — Freedom Sounds In Dub.

• Mix of the week is DreamScenes – August 2023 at Ambientblog.

• Time Machine (1970) by Stray | Time Captives (1973) by Kingdom Come | The Existence Of Time (2012) by Monolake

On the silver disc

In today’s post…finally. I ordered this at the end of February but production problems delayed the May release so it’s taken this long to make its way into the world. It’s worth the wait, of course, these films have been difficult to see for years, although the recent resurrection of On the Silver Globe has given the film a revitalised existence in bootleg circles. Zulawski’s unfinished science-fiction epic is the main attraction here—most of the substantial extras are devoted to it—but I’m looking forward to seeing The Devil again after only having watched it as a low-grade digital copy.

An uncompromising visionary and a true maverick of European cinema, the Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present three films by Andrzej Zulawski, all making their UK debuts on Blu-ray from definitive restorations.

Rich with multilayered symbolism and apocalyptic imagery, The Third Part of the Night is Zulawski’s highly influential debut feature film. After his whole family is slaughtered during the Nazi-occupation of Poland, Michal (Leszek Teleszynski) decides to join the resistance but descends into madness after encountering a doppelgänger of his murdered wife.

The Devil is a violent tale of Satanic seduction during the Prussian invasion of Poland in the 17th century, which proved so controversial upon release that it was banned for 16 years.

And finally, On the Silver Globe, Zulawski’s masterpiece about a team of astronauts who land on a desolate planet and start a new society. When filming was 80% complete, the Polish government ordered the production to be shut down and all the negatives be destroyed. Miraculously, the original film reels were preserved and ten years later the film was presented at the Cannes Film Festival to great acclaim.

If any of this sounds interesting then I also recommend Zulawski’s fourth feature, Possession. The less said about that one, the better. It’s a wild ride.