MR James – Page 4 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 392

Art by Twins of Evil for the forthcoming blu-ray from Arrow Academy.

• Images (1972), the film that Robert Altman made between McCabe and Mrs Miller and The Long Goodbye, is the closest the director came to outright horror. A disturbing portrait of mental breakdown, with Susannah York in the lead role, and photography by Vilmos Zsigmond, the film has for years been so difficult to see as to be almost invisible. Arrow Academy will remedy this situation in March next year with a new blu-ray restoration. Related: Geoff Andrew on where to begin with Robert Altman.

• “[Johnson] is a paltry, utterly conventional, upwardly mobile, morally squalid parvenu who yearns to be taken for what he isn’t.” Jonathan Meades‘ vitriol is in a class of its own, here being deployed in a review of Nincompoopolis: The Follies of Boris Johnson by Douglas Murphy.

• “These films, all preserved in the BFI National Archive, are known as Orphan Works. When the rights-holder for a film cannot be found, that film is classified as an Orphan Work.” 170 orphaned films have been added to the BFI’s YouTube channel.

Don’t romanticize science fiction. One of the questions I have been asked so many times I’ve forgotten what my stock answer to it is, ‘Since science fiction is a marginal form of writing, do you think it makes it easier to deal with marginal people?’ Which—no! Why should it be any easier? Dealing with the marginal is always a matter of dealing with the marginal. If anything, science fiction as a marginal genre is more rigid, far more rigid than literature. There are more examples of gay writing in literature than there are in science fiction.

Samuel Delany in a lengthy two-part interview with Adam Fitzgerald

• One of the books I was illustrating this year was The Demons of King Solomon, a horror anthology edited by Aaron French. The collection is out now; I’ll post the illustrations here in the next month or so.

• Mixes of the week: Routledge Dexter Satellite Systems by Moon Wiring Club, No Way Through The Woods: A Conjurer’s Hexmas by SeraphicManta, and FACT mix 632 by Priests.

• Also at the BFI: Adam Scovell on a film adaptation of MR James that predates Jonathan Miller’s Whistle and I’ll Come To You (1968) by 12 years.

• At Weird Fiction Review: Jon Padgett on absurd degenerations and totalitarian decrepitude in The Town Manager by Thomas Ligotti.

• At Larkfall: Electricity & Imagination: Karl von Eckartshausen and Romantic Synaesthesia.

• It’s the end of December so the London Review of Books has Alan Bennett’s diary for the past year.

• Aquarium Drunkard‘s review of the year’s best music.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Lotte Reiniger Day.

• Robin Rimbaud is In Wild Air.

• Dream Sequence (Images II) (1976) by George Crumb | Images (1977) by Sun Ra | Mirror Images (1978) by Van Der Graaf

Weekend links 382

Raven (2015), a metal sculpture by Taiichiro Yoshida.

• “Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light [at the Smithsonian American Art Museum] restores Thomas Wilfred (1889–1968) to his rightful place in the history of modern art.”

• At Brown Noise Unit: a fascinating, lengthy interview by Philip Kaberry with Stephen O’Malley of Sunn O))) et al, with particular focus on O’Malley’s work with Japanese musicians.

• Erik Davis talks to scholar, writer, and mythographer William Rowlandson about Jorge Luis Borges, magical trees, Yankee mysticism, and the power of the weird and murky.

• The first issue of the world’s first magazine of fantastic art and literature, Der Orchideengarten (previously), has been reprinted in full with additional English translation.

• At Muddy Colors: the month in covers for September/October which includes my cover for Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng (and which is on sale now).

• At 3:AM Magazine: Adam Scovell talks to horror author Ramsey Campbell about the ghost stories of MR James.

• Paralysis: Live at Silent Night #8, a new release on (limited) cassette and digital by The House In The Woods.

• At Dangerous Minds: Jozef van Wissem buries the dead in his new video, Virium Illarum.

• PKD Files — A podcast about the life and work of Philip K. Dick.

• Russell Cuzner on The Strange World of Nurse With Wound.

• Clark Collis on the rise and fall of Fangoria.

• The North Star Grassman And The Ravens (1971) by Sandy Denny | Flight Of The Raven (1979) by Emerald Web | Kill The Great Raven (1979) by Snakefinger

Weekend links 336

Visit in Night (1951) by Toshiko Okanoue.

• Rhythms of the World: Bombay and All That Jazz; a 60-minute BBC documentary featuring Trilok Gurtu, L. Shankar, Don Cherry, Alice Coltrane, Zakir Hussain and others. The quality of the full-length copy is a little rough so it’s worth noting the six-part version here.

• Adam Scovell talks to Leah Moore and John Reppion about adapting the ghost stories of MR James for the comics medium. Related: The Corner of Some Foreign Field, a short piece of folk horror written by Martin Hayes with art by Alfie Gallagher.

• Callum James on the overtly gay nature of Films and Filming magazine (1959–1990). Having seen a few copies over the years I’d always suspected this but didn’t realise it was so persistent. Related: The Boy and the Wolf by Callum James.

• At Dangerous Minds: Lucifer Rising live in concert: Bobby Beausoleil and the Freedom Orchestra perform their Kenneth Anger soundtrack, 1978.

• Simon Says: A rare cassette tape of instructions by Peter Levenda for using the Simon Necronomicon (1977) as a grimoire.

• Mixes of the week: Fact Mix 577 by Outer Space, and Incantations and Manifestations by Melmoth_The_Wanderer.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: _Black_Acrylic presents … Art Sex Music: A Cosey Fanni Tutti Day.

• Up from the Abyss: Brenda SG Walter on Rammstein, Lovecraft and Sea Zombies.

• Cinematic Alchemy: Christopher Gibbs on designing sets for Performance (1970).

• Magic carpets: the art of Faig Ahmed‘s melted and pixellated rugs.

• Drips, pop and Dollars: the music that made Ennio Morricone.

• At Bibliothèque Gay: Cocteau et quelques autres.

• “Sleepers Awake!” says Moon Wiring Club.

• Can your city change your mind?

• The Paul Laffoley Archive

• The Ambivalent Abyss (2001) by Lustmord | Byss And Abyss (2004) by Espers | Dark Bullet From The Abyss (2010) by Pleq

Weekend links 333

Time Out (London), no. 2403. No illustrator or designer credited.

• October isn’t all about the dark, there’s also psychedelia: Ned Raggett reviews a new collection of British psych, Let’s Go Down And Blow Our Minds: The British Psychedelic Sounds of 1967, while Floodgate Companion, a forthcoming collection of art by Robert Beatty, is previewed here.

• Mixes of the week (aside from my own, of course): Samhain Seance 5: Invasion of the Robot Witch by The Ephemeral Man, Thee Finders Kreepers Halloween Spezial, and Secret Thirteen Mix 199 by Blue Hour.

• “No diggin’ ‘ere!” Adam Scovell revisits the ghostly locations of the BBC’s A Warning to the Curious, and presents a short film based on the same.

• Stanley Kubrick’s film of The Shining has lost its shine through endless quotation and over-familiarity, says Anne Billson. Hard to disagree.

• Between Ballard’s Ears: in which two short stories by JG Ballard—Track 12 and Venus Smiles—are dramatised in binaural sound.

• John Carpenter talks to Adam Woodward about remakes, his love of early synthesisers and why nostalgia works in mysterious ways.

• Next month at the British Library: Brion Gysin: A Centennial Invocation with Alan Moore, Iain Sinclair, Barry Miles and others.

• Peter Bebergal on the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross, “a shadowy medieval brotherhood that probably didn’t exist”.

• Until The Hunter, a new album by Hope Sandoval and The Warm Inventions, is streaming here.

• San Fran-disco: Geeta Dayal on how Patrick Cowley and Sylvester changed dance music forever.

• A small portion of Bill Laswell‘s vast back catalogue is now on Bandcamp.

• At MetaFilter: The strange history of books bound in human skin.

• Italian composer Fabio Frizzi remembers 50 years of cult horror.

• Matthew Cheney on the strange horrors of Robert Aickman.

• Jóhann Jóhannsson’s favourite records

• Dark Start (1995) by ELpH vs Coil | Darkstalker (2000) by Bohren & Der Club Of Gore | Dark (2012) by Moritz Von Oswald Trio

Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies

The particularly British sub-genre of folk horror receives a substantial examination in Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies, a 500-page collection of essays, interviews and artwork edited by Andy Paciorek.

Featuring essays and interviews by many great cinematic, musical, artistic and literary talents, Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies is the most comprehensive and engaging exploration to date of the sub-genre of Folk Horror and associated fields in cinema, television, music, art, culture and folklore.

Includes contributions by Kim Newman, Robin Hardy, Thomas Ligotti, Philip Pullman, Gary Lachman and many many more.

100% of all profits from sales of the book will be charitably donated to environmental, wildlife and community projects undertaken by The Wildlife Trusts.

Nuada rising, 1973 & 1976.

Among the contents there’s my 4000-word essay Sacred Demons: The Dramatic Art of David Rudkin, parts of which will be familiar to readers of my previous posts about Rudkin’s work. I’m not sure Rudkin would appreciate being subjected to such a narrow focus when his plays and TV films are much more personal and cerebral than most generic entertainments. But there is an intersection in a number of them with folk horror at its widest reach, and Rudkin did happen to adapt The Ash-Tree (1975) by MR James for the BBC’s series of ghost stories at Christmas. My piece covers this along with other TV films such as Penda’s Fen (1974) and Artemis 81 (1981), and many of the stage plays including Afore Night Come (1962), The Sons of Light (1965/76) and The Saxon Shore (1983). The stage plays I only know from their scripts which makes them difficult to appraise; maybe the renewed interest in Rudkin’s work will spur some revivals.

Sight and Sound, August 2010. Illustration by Becca Thorne.

Paciorek’s book isn’t solely concerned with British subjects, other essays include studies of Weird Americana, the music of The Cremator and Morgiana, and Czech folk horror. The Lulu page apparently didn’t allow the listing of a full table of contents so I’m posting the details below.

Continue reading “Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies”