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First Papers of Surrealism, 1942
As I was saying a couple of weeks ago, Surrealism will be 100 years old this year, if you mark the movement’s birth from the first manifestoes (there were two different ones) published in October...
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Weekend links 707
Dragon and Tiger—Designs for Lacquer Inro (no date) by Mori Genkosai. • “But where have all those copies of Corridor of Mirrors gone? Sometimes I entertain the thought that an obsessive collector has...
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Harry O. Morris’s Maldoror
Lautréamont’s delirious prose poem/novel/proto-Surrealist dream-text is sufficiently wild and free-ranging to inspire many visual interpretations. One of the peculiarities of the book is that all...
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Weekend links 708
Landscape from a Dream (1936–38) by Paul Nash. • “I was telling a close friend recently, ‘at my funeral, please play this record…’” Yu Su on her love of Laurie Anderson’s second album, Mister...
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Ragnar von Holten’s Maldoror
More Maldoror, and more collage, this time from Swedish artist and art historian Ragnar von Holten (1934–2009). The Historical Dictionary of Surrealism describes von Holten as a Gustave Moreau...
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Nightjars
In the post this week, a handful of original fiction from the generous Mr Royle at Nightjar Press. Thanks, Nicholas!
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Weekend links 709
Guardian Angels (1946) by Dorothea Tanning. • “If photographs can outlive their subjects, and memory works like photography, do images somehow endure in the brain after death? Could these undead...
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Herald of Ruin
New year, new book cover. Herald of Ruin is my latest for Aconyte, a sequel to Tim Pratt’s The Ravening Deep, which featured my last cover in this series of novels spun from the Arkham Horror games:...
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Leonora Carrington’s Surrealist Survival Kit
An assemblage by Steven Cline. Joanna Moorhead writing in Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington (Thames & Hudson, 2023): Penelope [Rosemont] also remembers that Leonora was keen...
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Weekend links 710
Menace (1974) by Ivan Tovar. • “I find myself going back to Early Water more and more in recent years. It should be better known.” B. Sirota reviewing the one-off musical collaboration between Michael...
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Weekend links 711
Les Étrangers (1937) by Wolfgang Paalen. • “I was picturing Monty Python’s spoof Pasolini cricket film The Third Test Match, a man frantically rubbing his groin with a cricket ball.” Paul Gallagher...
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Weekend links 713
Black Cat (1910) by Shunso Hishida. • “A duck goes quack quack in English but coin coin in French. In Spanish a dog goes guau-guau, not woof woof, while in Arabic it goes haw haw, and in Mandarin...
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Moon and Serpent Rising
Top Shelf announced this one on Friday so I can break my silence about the book I’ve been working on since May 2021. The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic by Alan Moore and Steve Moore was first...
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On Babaluma
It’s never the same without the foil sleeve. Since the death of Damo Suzuki I’ve been reading the Rob Young and Irmin Schmidt book about Can, All Gates Open. Can’s history isn’t exactly unfamiliar so...
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The art of Denton Welch, 1915–1948
Symbolist Figure (1946). The visual art, that is, not the novels and short stories. Last month I finally got round to reading Denton Welch’s first two novels, Maiden Voyage (1943) and In Youth is...
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Ewige Blumenkraft
It’s that occult symbol again… And it was suddenly all weird and super-freaky, like Godard shooting a Kafka scene: two dead Russians debating with each other, long after they were dead and buried, out...
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Weekend links 715
Portrait d’Arthur Rimbaud (1933) by Valentine Hugo. • Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: At the Mountains of Madness by HP Lovecraft. •...
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Valentine Hugo’s Contes Bizarres
Looking around at the weekend for drawings by Valentine Hugo (1887–1968), I was reminded of a defunct bookselling blog which hosts scans of the illustrations that Hugo created in 1933 for Contes...
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The Werewolf of Anarchy
Synchronicity is as universal as gravity. When you start looking you find it everywhere. Thus Discordian anarchist Stella Maris, making her first appearance in my re-reading of Illuminatus!...
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Weekend links 716
The Vision of Endymion (1902) by Edward John Poynter. • The Art and History of Lettering Comics by Todd Klein. Eight of the pages in the forthcoming Moon & Serpent book have been lettered by Todd....
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Man with a Newspaper
René Magritte with a newspaper. La Nouvelle Médication Naturelle Traduit de l’Allemand – Vol. 2 (1899) by FE Bilz Man with a Newspaper (1928) by René Magritte Fuzz Against Junk (1959) by Akbar Del...
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Weekend links 717
Bookplate of Charles P. Searle (1904) by Sidney Lawton Smith. • “If Minute 9 is the first time we hear the names Deckard and Blade Runner, it’s also the first time we meet the plainclothes cop who...
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Weekend links 718
Chatting Cats (c.1960) by Tomoo Inagaki. • New/old music: Follow The Light by Broadcast, a song which will appear on Spell Blanket—Collected Demos 2006–2009 in May. The album will be followed by...
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Michael Baurenfeind’s extravagant calligraphy
I like extravagant calligraphy, the more extravagant the better, as with these examples from Schreib-Kunst (1716) by Michael Baurenfeind (1680–1753). The book is a recent scan by the Getty Research...
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Liber Artificiosus Alphabeti Maioris
The previous post reminded me of this, one of my favourite examples of ornamented alphabets from the 18th century. Liber Artificiosus Alphabeti Maioris (“Artistic Book of the Major Alphabet”, 1782)...
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Weekend links 719
The Decoy (1948) by Edith Rimmington. • “Among other things, [Dalí’s] storyboards involved [Ingrid] Bergman turning into a statue that would then break up into ants.” Tim Jonze talks to film scholar...
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Weekend links 720
The Poet and the Siren (1893) by Gustave Moreau. • “Some books become talismans. Because they are strange, wildly different to the common run of literature; because they are scarce, and only a few...
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The Japanese Sandman, a film by Ed Buhr
I upgraded my DVD of David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch to blu-ray recently. The film is one of my favourites in the Cronenberg oeuvre even though its connection to the novel is minimal at best. After...
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Ballard’s sextet
Cover artist unknown. A selection by JG Ballard of six favourite Surrealist paintings, or five Surrealist ones and a Metaphysical picture if you want to be strict about the definitions. These were...
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Weekend links 722
Desert Sunrise (no date) by Kay Robinson. • RIP Richard Horowitz, a composer and musician whose soundtrack work makes the headlines but who I’ve always known best via his appearances on albums by Jon...
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