Bumper Book of Magic – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 763

I Live in Shock (1955) by Mimi Parent.

• At Public Domain Review: “Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare (1922) is at turns obtuse, grotesque, and moralizing—and sought to provoke the obscenity trial of the century. Only it didn’t, quietly vanishing instead. Colin Dickey rereads this failed satire, finding a transcendent rhythm pulsing beneath the novel’s indulgent prose.”

• “There are no surprises when a pallet of CDs arrives at my office, but when a pressing plant alerts me to a shipment of records headed my way I start to worry.” John Brien, head of Important Records, on the problems involved in the manufacture of vinyl albums.

• The sixth installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi).

They were building a vast alternative religion with a lack of dictates but no shortage of rituals and icons. They’d pass through the end of the world to get there first; the next album was based on a vision of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse slaughtering their animals and constructing a earth-gouging machine from their jawbones, demonstrating they weren’t quite intending to settle down yet. It would take them far from mainstream culture, and indeed mainstream gay culture given their repeated disdain for sanitised queerness, and into enigmatic territory. Having scared away most fans of synth pop and industrial with provocation, and the weak and tyrannical with ambiguity, they were unencumbered and “allowed to mature in the dark”, sustained by a cult following (you rarely encounter a tepid fan of Coil, most are acolytes).

Darran Anderson looking back at Coil’s debut album, Scatology

• At Smithsonian Magazine: See 15 winning images from the Close-Up Photographer of the Year Competition.

• At The Daily Heller: How did pink become a colour? Meanwhile, Steven Heller’s font of the month is Vibro.

• New music: Even The Horizon Knows Its Bounds by Lawrence English.

• SciURLs: A science news aggregator.

• Shackleton’s favourite albums.

• RIP Marianne Faithfull.

• The Pink Panther Theme (1963) by Henry Mancini | The Pink Room (1988) by Seigen Ono | Pink (2005) by Boris

Novelty and curio catalogues

One of the more esoteric corners of the Internet Archive is the section devoted to the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals: “The IAPSOP is a US-based private organization focused on the digital preservation of Spiritualist and occult periodicals published between the Congress of Vienna and the start of the Second World War.” The collection currently comprises over 30,000 items. I didn’t go looking for this while I was reading Nightmare Alley but the IAPSOP archive happens to contain the kinds of publications whose paranormal and religious jargon Stanton Carlisle uses to relieve chumps of their cash. A sub-section of the collection contains novelty and curio catalogues, publications from mail-order companies selling all manner of incense, lucky charms, cheap jewellery and minor items of occult significance. I wish I’d found these catalogues when I was working on the Bumper Book of Magic. The drawings are crude but with things like this it’s the general appearance that you’re after, the finesse you can supply yourself.

Continue reading “Novelty and curio catalogues”

Weekend links 761

• At Bandcamp: Marc Masters on The Curious Case of the Channeled New Age Tape; and Erick Bradshaw’s guide to Nurse With Wound.

• At Public Domain Review: Designing the Sublime – Boullée and Ledoux’s Architectural Revolution by Hugh Aldersey-Williams.

• The fifth installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi).

It does not follow that the scientific spirit of empirical inquiry runs against dreaming, and [André] Breton was wrong to think [Roger] Caillois’s investigative methods opposed wonder. Material mysticism led Caillois back to magical thinking, which he expanded further than the Surrealist interest in chance and coincidence as he probed for insights into the order of things. Caillois was equally, perhaps even more, fascinated with magic than the Surrealists, but he wanted to probe what might exist as phenomenally marvelous, beyond the subjective self—he was a scholar of the sacred, and from the episode of the jumping beans onwards, he looked for its character and its workings in actual phenomena. In this sense he was more of a believer—though not in a personal god or a religion. Where Breton exalted the perceiver, Caillois wanted to go beyond these anthropocentric limits.

Marina Warner on the imaginary logic of Roger Caillois

• Mixes of the week: DreamScenes – January 2025 at Ambientblog, and Unrush 093 at A Strangely Isolated Place.

• At Criterion.com: Reincarnations of a Rebel Muse – David Hudson on Delphine Seyrig.

• Old music renewed: Angherr Shisspa (Revisited) by Koenjihyakkei.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Laura Dern’s Day.

• Jussi Lehtisalo’s favourite music.

• Lynch music: The Beast (1956) by Milt Buckner | Honky Tonk (Part 1) (1958) by Bill Doggett | Something Wicked This Way Comes (1996) by Barry Adamson

Weekend links 756

A Diver (no date) by Walter Crane.

• At Worldbuilding Agency: The first part of a long interview with Bruce Sterling concerning “the pursuit of deliberate oxymorons as a creative strategy, worldbuilding in the context of history and futurity, Berlusconi on the moon and more”. With questions from Paul Graham Raven, and my cover art for Bruce’s Robot Artists and Black Swans.

• “With its focus on the 1970s career of Leonard Rossiter and its mordant metaphysics of the moist, Sophie-Sleigh Johnson’s Code: Damp might just be the most original book yet to emerge from Repeater publishing,” says Tim Burrows.

• “A definitive guide to the work of William S Burroughs’ on screen.” It’s a guide but it’s hardly definitive when there’s no mention of the four films Burroughs made with Anthony Balch.

• A catalogue of lots at the forthcoming After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, etc, also historic porn and a few garments worn by Divine.

• New music: Jay recommends the high-grade motorik en espanol dance-rock of Sgt Papers; Topology Of A Quantum City by Paul Schütze; Overtones by Everyday Dust.

• This week’s obligatory Bumper Book of Magic entry: Ben Wickey at Alan Moore World talks about his work on the book’s Great Enchanters comic strips.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Malcolm Le Grice’s Day. Le Grice’s death was announced earlier this month.

• At The Wire: The magazine’s contributors’ charts showing their favourite music of the past year.

• A new website for the Sanborn Fire Maps and their decorated title pages.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – December 2024 at Ambientblog.

• At Public Domain Review: Albert Kahn’s autochromes.

• Burroughs Called The Law (1960s) by William S. Burroughs | Language Is A Virus From Outer Space (Live) (1984) by Laurie Anderson | Burroughs Don’t Play Guitar (1996) by Islamic Diggers

Weekend links 755

A painting by Ed Emshwiller for the cover of Fantastic Stories of Imagination, July 1962, illustrating The Singing Statues by JG Ballard .

• This week in the Bumper Book of Magic: my comments about the creation of the book’s cover and magical alphabet have been posted at Alan Moore World. At (Quasi), Smoky Man (in Italian) looks at other parts of the book, and includes my answers to his questions about the creation of The Soul, a character originally planned for a comic strip that Alan Moore and I were working on. I’ve been trying recently to find the first sketches I made of The Soul back in 2000 or 2001, without success. If I do find any of them I’ll post them here.

• New music: Juk-Shabb by Cryo Chamber Collaboration is this year’s installment in the Lovecraft-themed album series (previously) from Cryo Chamber. Also this week: Xerrox Vol. 5 by Alva Noto; Nocturne (Soundtrack for an Invisible Film) by Avi C. Engel; and Cat Location Conundrum by Moon Wiring Club.

• Code: Damp: An Esoteric Guide to British Sitcoms by Sophie Sleigh-Johnson, being “an alternative occult and esoteric history of England told through one of its most popular cultural forms: the comedy sitcom”.

…the joy of art isn’t only the pleasure of an end result but also the experience of going through the process of having made it. When you go out for a walk it isn’t just (or even primarily) for the pleasure of reaching a destination, but for the process of doing the walking. For me, using AI all too often feels like I’m engaging in a socially useless process, in which I learn almost nothing and then pass on my non-learning to others. It’s like getting the postcard instead of the holiday.

Brian Eno at Boston Review

• “The typographic choices that Godard made were thematic and not only chosen for their stylistic properties.” Arijana Zeric looks inside the design world of Jean-Luc Godard.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: The Stammering Librarian: Essays by Timothy D’Arch Smith, edited by Edwin Pouncey & Sandy Robertson.

• At Public Domain Review: Fantastic Planet: The Microscopy Album of Marinus Pieter Filbri (1887–88).

• At the BFI: Michael Brooke offers suggestions for where to begin with Guy Maddin.

• At The Quietus: The Strange World of…Dennis Bovell.

• Mix of the week: A mix for The Wire by KMRU.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Gigafly.

• Fantastic Cat (1996) by Takako Minekawa | Fantastic Analysis (2001) by Mouse On Mars | Fantastic Mass (2016) by Time Attendant