• 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
