Philip Ball – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 794

Green Castle (1975) by Roger Dean.

• Roger Dean’s first book, Views, was published 50 years ago this month. The book sold 60,000 copies in its initial run, and was reprinted twice the following year. This extraordinary success gave Dean and his associates at the newly-formed Dragon’s Dream the resources to publish a line of art books by other imaginative artists such as Chris Foss, Ian Miller and Syd Mead. Without Views there wouldn’t have been a Dragon’s Dream, and without Dragon’s Dream there wouldn’t have been Paper Tiger, a publishing house launched by Roger Dean, Martyn Dean and Hubert Schaafsma in 1976. All this activity made a huge impression on me at the time, with books that provided a showcase for artists whose work would otherwise only be seen on the covers of paperbacks or vinyl records.

• At Alan Moore World: 3 novels and The Great When, an extract from a new video interview in which Alan talks about three of the books that have influenced his novels.

• At the BFI: “Dead of Night: 80 years on, Ealing’s anthology horror is still a waking nightmare,” says Edward Parnell.

…Drexler’s vision of nanotechnology was a chimera. It was like the philosophers’ stone of the alchemists: magic dressed in the science of its time, by means of which almost anything becomes possible. I call these oneiric technologies: they do not and quite probably cannot exist, but they fulfil a deep-rooted dream, or a nightmare, or both.

These are not simply technologies of the future that we don’t yet have the means to realise, like the super-advanced technologies that Arthur C Clarke said we would be unable to distinguish from magic. Rather, oneiric technology takes a wish (or a terror) and clothes it in what looks like scientific raiment so that the uninitiated onlooker, and perhaps the dreamer, can no longer tell it apart from what is genuinely on the verge of the possible. Perpetual motion is one of the oldest oneiric technologies, although only since the 19th century have we known why it won’t work (this knowledge doesn’t discourage modern attempts, for example by allegedly exploiting the ‘quantum vacuum’); anti-gravity shielding is probably another.

Philip Ball on unrealistic prognostications in science, from nanotechnology to artificial intelligence

• New music: Rún by Rún; Other Sides Of Nowhere by Underwater Sleep Orchestra; I Believe In You by Ladytron.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Curtis Harrington‘s Day.

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

• A View From Her Room (1982) by Weekend | A Private View (1982) by Bill Nelson | Aerial View (2014) by Jon Hassell

Weekend links 539

Fire, Red and Gold (1990) by Eyvind Earle.

• Roger Penrose won a Nobel Prize recently for his work in physics. I read one of his books a few years ago, and was intimidated by the “simple” equations, but I always like to hear his ideas. This 2017 article by Philip Ball is an illuminating overview of Penrose’s life and work.

• At Dangerous Minds: Joe Banks on the incidents that led to Lemmy’s dismissal from Hawkwind in 1975, an extract from Hawkwind: Days of the Underground. The book is available from Strange Attractor in Europe and via MIT Press in the USA.

• “Not married but willing to be!”: men in love (with each other) from the 1850s on. It’s always advisable to take photos like these with a pinch of salt but several of the examples are unavoidably what they appear to be.

Most of all, this resolutely collaborative production stood against the vanity and careerism of individual authorship; Breton called it the first attempt to “adapt a moral attitude, and the only one possible, to a writing process.” The text itself is peppered with readymade phrases, advertising slogans, twisted proverbs, and pastiches of such admired predecessors as Rimbaud, Apollinaire, and Lautréamont, whose pluralistic credo, “Poetry must be made by all. Not by one,” anticipates the sampling aesthetic by a century. But the intensity was draining, and as the book moves toward its final pages and the writing becomes increasingly frenetic, you can almost feel the burnout taking hold. After eight days, fearing for his and Soupault’s sanity, Breton terminated the experiment.

Mark Polizzotti reviews a new translation by Charlotte Mandell of The Magnetic Fields by André Breton and Philippe Soupault

• The hide that binds: Mike Jay reviews Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin by Megan Rosenbloom.

• “A photographer ventures deeper into Chernobyl than any before him.” Pictures from Chernobyl: A Stalker’s Guide by Darmon Richter.

• John Van Stan’s reading of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley uses my illustrations (with my permission) for each of its chapters.

• Susan Jamison, one of the artists in The Art of the Occult by S. Elizabeth, talks to the latter about her work.

• William Hope Hodgson: The Secret Index. A collection of Hodgson-related posts at Greydogtales.

• Gee Vaucher talks to Savage Pencil about her cover art for anarchist punk band, Crass.

• Weird, wacky and utterly wonderful: the world’s greatest unsung museums.

• Tom Cardamone chooses the best books about Oscar Wilde.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Jean-Pierre Melville Day.

• You by The Bug ft. Dis Fig.

• Magnetic Dwarf Reptile (1978) by Chrome | Magnetic Fields, Part 1 (1981) by Jean-Michel Jarre | Magnetic North (1998) by Skyray

Weekend links 179

Summer Swell (2007) by Fred Tomaselli. The artist is interviewed at AnOther.

• Mixes of the week for the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness: Forever Autumn Mixtape by The Outer Church, and celebrating what would have been Trish Keenan’s 45th birthday: Trish’s Toys & Techniques Birthday Tape (with cover art by Julian House).

• Jirí Kolár: His Life, Work and Cultural Significance to the Czech Republic. Leah Cowan looks into the life and work of this influential Czech artist. Related: Jirí Kolár: poet and collage artist, and collages, rollages and prollages by Jirí Kolár.

• “Name any well-known poet from any age, any country. He or she wrote at least one poem about death, most likely several poems.” Russ Kick introduces his new book, Death Poems.

[M]any pictures in the splendid exhibition at the British Museum show men having sex with men. One of the earliest erotic handscrolls, from the 15th century, shows a Buddhist priest casting longing glances at his young acolyte. Indeed, among some samurai, male love was considered superior to the heterosexual kind. Women were necessary to produce children, but male love was purer, more refined.

The question is why were Japanese – compared not just with Europeans, but other Asians, too – so much more open to depicting sex? One reason might be found in the nature of Japanese religion. The oldest native ritual tradition, Shinto, was, like most ancient cults, a form of nature worship, to do with fertility, mother goddesses, and so forth. This sometimes took the form of worshipping genitals, male as well as female.

Ian Buruma on The joy of art: why Japan embraced sex with a passion. Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art is a forthcoming exhibition at the British Museum.

• Harold Offeh on how the cosmic life and music of Sun Ra inspired the artwork decorating the Bethnal Green, Notting Hill Gate and Ladbroke Grove Tube stations in London.

• Fearful symmetry: Roger Penrose’s tiling by Philip Ball. Related: Penrose Tiles Visualizer, and lots more Penrose tiling links at The Geometry Junkyard.

• Masculine / Masculine. The Nude Man in Art from 1800 to the Present Day, a new exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay.

• Into the Croation Zone: more derives from Christina Scholz here, here, and here.

• Stephen Eskilson on Heteronormative Design Discourse.

• Applied Ballardianism

• The Zero of the Signified (1980) by Robert Fripp | The League of Gentlemen (Fripp/Lee/Andrews/Toobad, 1981): Minor Man (with Danielle Dax) | Heptaparaparshinokh