Weird Tales – Page 10 – { feuilleton }

Word games

Wordle is a Java-based web toy which generates random arrangements of words from any text input. This is the result after pasting in the opening of the “Sirens” chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses and playing around with the colour and font settings. Fun, but as far as web-based toys go I prefer the abstractions of Bomomo.

While we’re on the subject of word-scrambling, Weird Tales magazine has announced a writing contest: write a story— 500 words or less—based on a spam headline you’ve received. The spam waiting to be purged in my trash folder doesn’t offer much in the way of inspiration: “Paris Hilton charges for pussy”, “Tyra to go undercover ass a man iin a rapper’s posse”. More interesting is the recent comment spam I received (none of which you ever see here, thanks to Akismet), a funny conflation of Bible quotes, porn links and stray words from a novel. Once the links are removed, all the text runs together and the result looks like this:

45:4 And Joseph said unto his brethren, Come near to me, I pray you. be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying,
12:18 cam chat donne live mature web Selah. a stranger, he shall both wash his clothes, and bathe himself in mature mistresses london
5:19 Howbeit Jesus suffered him not, but saith unto him, Go home to
17:20 And when Absalom’s servants came to the woman to the house, they fucking hairy mature plump a look at you, dear, and see that we start right. Then we’ll send They don’t mean any harm, I’m sure, but if they knew how we premature ejaculation tip their own doings, nor from their stubborn way.
3:19 Husbands, love your wives, and be not bitter against them. hand job mature impotent man answered him, Sir, I have no man, when the water is
4:13 Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived adult gallery mature woman
5:7 And these things give in charge, that they may be blameless.
9:13 So Mephibosheth dwelt in Jerusalem: for he did eat continually at mature photo galleries thing be? And he said, Behold, thou shalt see it with thine eyes, but
5:21 Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen. armpit hairy mature
5:29 And Levi made him a great feast in his own house: and there was a unto the LORD God of their fathers. mature women younger girls 8 them, and plucked off their hair, and made them swear by God, saying, times that I have formed it? now have I brought it to pass, that thou canada escort independent mature his error as fast as possible.
5:12 And we beseech you, brethren, to know them which labour among busty mature movie sample the men of Israel, Because the king is near of kin to us: wherefore
12:4 Ye shall not do so unto the LORD your God. anal black mature sex presence of mind. swarest by thine own self, and saidst unto them, I will multiply your mature gay sex video “Did the spider accept the old fellow’s invitation?” asked Laurie, according to godliness;
6:4 He is proud, knowing nothing, but doting walk for premature baby open fields, or a dead body, or a bone of a man, or a grave, shall be
4:11 These things command and teach. mature suck black cock O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war. of the question.” mature lezbos and unto the supplication of thy people Israel, to hearken unto them
33:1 Manasseh was twelve years old when he began to reign, and he mature fellatio there. “It is always so quiet and pleasant here, it does me offer the burnt offering and the meat offering upon the altar: and the mature licking him with the curious girdle of the ephod, and bound it unto him
30:30 And to them which were in Hormah, and to them which were in mature female spanking and twenty:

John Phillip Law, 1937–2008

Pygar the angel, Barbarella (1968).

John Phillip Law, who died on Tuesday, was featured here last year in a look at Mario Bava’s crazy live action fumetti, Danger Diabolik (below). Law made that film the same year as he played a blind angel in an equally crazy slab of Sixties’ decadence, Barbarella. In a more serious role, he played opposite the very formidable Rod Steiger in The Sergeant which was released the same year; together with Victim, this was one of the first films I remember watching that dealt with same-sex attraction (albeit in the usual angst-ridden mode), with Law’s character being the understandable object of Steiger’s doomed affection.

After those heights, things tended to be more down than up but I do have an affection for Ray Harryhausen’s The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974). Law’s Sinbad was pretty good even if he spends much of the time fighting monsters while Tom Baker was great as the villainous Koura. And I always appreciated that screenwriter Brian Clemens made Lemuria the destination of the voyage, a lost continent mentioned by Madame Blavatsky and many of the Weird Tales writers, including HP Lovecraft in The Haunter of the Dark.

Danger Diabolik (1968).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• CQ
• Danger Diabolik

At the Mountains of Madness

Going through stacks of old artwork today turned up a photocopy of a drawing I did in 1990, my sole attempt to illustrate HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. By the time I did this I was pretty exhausted by Lovecraft’s world and was already at work on the first phase of the Lord Horror comics for Savoy which explains why this is a bit half-hearted, the architecture owing more to Piranesi than anything particularly alien. I forget why I did this now, I think it was at someone’s request, and I’ve also no idea where the original drawing is. The sprawling organic cityscape/landscape I created last year for the Maison d’Ailleurs exhibition is probably closer to the kind of thing this story requires.

At the Mountains of Madness was rejected by Lovecraft’s usual publisher, Weird Tales, for not being enough of a horror story. This is true, the novella is more of a fictional travelogue, especially in its later half where a million-year-old alien city is discovered in the heart of Antarctica. Science fiction magazine Astounding took it instead where it made the cover of the February 1936 issue, the climactic shoggoth attack being painted by Howard V Brown. Poor old Lovecraft had nearly all his most famous stories published in Weird Tales, and helped give the magazine its lasting reputation, yet he was never given a cover feature during his lifetime. Astounding gave him the honour again in June of the same year for another novella, The Shadow Out of Time, also illustrated by Howard Brown.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lovecraftian horror at Maison d’Ailleurs

Men with snakes

Laocoön and His Sons attributed to Agesander, Athenodoros
and Polydorus of Rhodes (c. 160–20 BCE).

No jokes about snakes in a frame, please. Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin de Siècle Culture (1986) is a wide-ranging study of the “iconography of misogyny” in 19th century painting. Dijkstra examines the numerous ways that women were depicted in late Victorian and Symbolist art, with one chapter, “Connoisseurs and Bestiality and Serpentine Delights”, being devoted to representations of women with animals, especially snakes. The story of Eve and the Serpent prompts many of these latter images, of course, while scenes with other creatures seem intended to demonstrate the Victorian attitude that woman was closer to the brute beasts than man and could often be found conspiring with them to bring down her masculine masters. Continue reading “Men with snakes”

Philip Core and George Quaintance

A solidly gay day for secondhand books with the discovery of two relatively scarce items by gay artists. Philip Core is probably more well-known as a writer than a painter, author of The Original Eye: Arbiters of Twentieth Century Taste and the masterful Camp: The Lie that Tells the Truth (both 1984 and both out of print, unfortunately). His paintings predominantly feature unclothed men but present these in a far more painterly style than one usually sees from gay artists, the approach too often being a kind of kitsch photo-realism that tends towards soft (or hard) porn. A shame that this volume is rather battered as it seems to be a rare book. Core died of AIDS in 1989 but his paintings are still being bought and sold, gay art being one genre that never lacks for an audience.

The Bermuda Triangle by Philip Core (1982).

Continue reading “Philip Core and George Quaintance”