Memories of Dreams

I seldom remember my dreams, and sometimes wish I could more often arrive on the shore of wakefulness clutching on to some or other piece of oneiric flotsam. I envied a one-time colleague of mine, Mr. G______, who, a couple of times a week, would casually relate some details of the latest epically convoluted and weird nocturnal drama of which he had been witness and participant. In a similar vein, I was intrigued when I read an account, last year, of an author who had trained himself, through auto-suggestion, to recall details from his own dreams almost every night: alas, I hadn’t the self-discipline to submit myself to such a regime.

On the rare occasion that I can recollect a dream, then, I will tend to ponder its imagery at length, and wonder protractedly about its significance, if any. The most recent such was last week, when I dreamt that my wife and I arrived at passport-control in a Mexican airport, and, whilst she was waved through without comment, the officials took a look at my passport and stopped me, saying that they didn’t believe that the name thereupon could be mine, that it was somehow ‘too silly’, as though my name was the equivalent to them of something like Donald Duck or Wile E. Coyote…

Beyond this, there are a tiny handful of dreams that I have had which have impressed themselves upon me very deeply, but the memories of which, I suspect, I have unconsciously embellished and embroidered over the years, such that now I can no longer be sure what belonged to the original dream, and what was a narrative flourish, or additional afterthought…

One such was what I have since come to think of as the Harlequin Dream, in which I found myself in a cavernous ballroom, filled with aquamarine light. A dinner-dance was being held there, and had entered its final phase. The tables were abandoned, and the dancefloor crowded with elegantly-dressed couples swaying woozily to some slow big band number that seemed as if played underwater. Ahead was a raised stage where the band could be seen, and where, to one side, a penguin-suited emcee crooned along voicelessly into a microphone: no sound came out of his mouth.

I was distracted by a flicker in my peripheral vision, which resolved itself into the dancing figure of a clown, a harlequin, who had appeared stage-right. He wore a motley diamond-pattern costume and a visor mask part-covering his black-painted face, his mouth made up into a false crimson grin. His dance was continuous and fluid, restless and weird. The harlequin wheeled and gyrated his way ever closer to the emcee, who, still lost in silent song, did not notice as the other stole closer behind him, dancing all the while.

Then, with deliberate gestures, the harlequin drew the fingers of his left hand down the side of his face, smudging his fingertips with greasy facepaint, which he went on to smear into the emcee’s forehead and cheek, seeming to burn him there, as though with vitriol. The unfortunate man’s face twisted into a scream, as silent as his song had been, and the whole scene faded to black… and in the blackness there was a voice that could only have been the harlequin’s, and it said I can open the doors in your dreams.

I woke in a hotel room, sunlight streaming in through the windows. There was a rich smell of new pine. I felt uneasy, disoriented. Then came a scrabbling at the door, which lay just out of my line of sight. Someone was fumbling with the handle! My heart flopped around like a dying fish. The door was creaking, someone was coming in!

The anticlimactic end of it was that it turned out just to be the maid, bringing clean towels, at which point I woke up for real. Never before or since though, have I been less sure of the trueness and solidity of the world around me, than on the morning after that false awakening.

In another dream I was still living, after the fact, at the house where I grew up. There was a knock at the door, and, on opening it, I was met by an elderly couple, unknown to me, of dreary and down-at-heel aspect, wearing grey padded overcoats, and carrying two plastic grocery bags apiece. They said nothing, but it was apparent that they wanted to come in. Even though I felt uneasy, I pitied them - it was raining - and motioned them to enter.

I walked into the kitchen to get a glass of water, uncertain what to do about these unwelcome visitors. I could hear footsteps, as if they were walking around the rest of the house, which upset me, although even then I was reluctant to confront them. I could not think why, but I was afraid of them.

Time passed, and there was silence. I walked upstairs to my room and was shocked to see that several of my belongings had been replaced. My books had been exchanged for others, likewise my CDs, and my cheap stereo. The odd thing was that the replacements were all things I wanted and coveted, things that were all somehow better than my own meagre possessions. Even so, I was bothered by these items’ intrusion into my room, I felt it as an alien presence, a violation.

Walking back downstairs I once again saw the little old man. He still carried the two bags, one in each hand. I was angry with him for what he had done, and he must have sensed this, and seemed afraid of me, yet at the same time resignedly defiant, as if the consequences for him of not carrying out his exchange would be much worse than anything I could ever say or do. I sensed he was merely an agent, a hireling, though for whom I could not guess. So I let him go, but immediately regretted having done so, as if I had been set a test, and had failed it.

The memory of this latter dream returns to trouble me from time to time. I feel as though my dreamself let me down by not fighting for the return of what was genuinely and authentically his, even if the fight may have been a futile one. And I wonder whether my waking, walking self would, in truth, show any more backbone if an analogous situation were to occur in the real world.

‘A Delight for the Eye and the Mind’

While compiling a previous entry, I chanced upon one of several digital collections hosted by the Academy of Natural Sciences’ Ewell Sale Stewart Library, namely A Delight for the Eye and the Mind, ‘books on molluscs and their shells’.

The image above is of a ‘Pink, or Queen Conch’ Strombus gigas taken from From Jean Charles Chenu’s, Illustrations Conchyliologiques, published in Paris between 1842 and 1853. Among the other digital collections are: The Remarkable Nature of Edward Lear; Nature's Great Masterpiece: The Elephant; Foul and Loathsome Creatures (‘Illustrated Herpetological Books’); and Drawn from the Deep (‘The Fish in Science, Art and the Imagination’). I have excerpted a single, sample image from each of these collections, below:

Leadbetter’s Cockatoo, one of 42 plates in Edward Lear’s 1832 work Illustrations of the family of Psittacidæ, or Parrots.

Known the world over as the author of ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ and other ‘nonsense poems’ for children, Edward Lear (1812-1888) was also an extraordinarily accomplished natural history painter, ranked by many contemporaries—and subsequent art historians—as an artist on a par with John James Audubon - Robert McCracken Peck.

Engraving by Mathæus Merian from the Historiae naturalis de quadrupedibus (Amsterdam, 1657) of Joannes Jonstonus (1603-1675).

Although Jonstonus’ ‘Natural History’ was a popular book, going through many editions in Holland and Germany in the 17th century, it was filled with fanciful plagiarizations of the works of Gesner and Aldrovandi. It did, however, contain superb copperplate engravings by Mathæus Merian - C. Danial Elliott.

Plates 6-7 from Léon-Louis Vaillant and Guillaume Grandidier’s 1910 publication Histoire Physique, Naturelle et Politique de Madagascar, vol. 17: Histoire Naturelles des Reptiles. Première Partie: Crocodiles et Tortues, illustrating Testudo radiata aka Geochelone (or Astrochelys) radiata (Shaw, 1802).

Illustration from Louis Renard’s 1754 opus, Poissons, Ecrevisses et Crabes, de Diverses Couleurs et Figures Extraordinaires, Que l’on Trouve Autour des Isles Moluques et sur les Côtes des Terres Australes.

A translation of the title of this work, ‘Fishes, crayfishes, and crabs, of diverse coloration and extraordinary form, which are to be found about the Islands of the Moluccas and on the coasts of the Southern Lands,’ gives a glimpse of its remarkable contents. There are 100 plates with brilliantly colored engravings representing 416 fishes, 40 crustaceans, two grasshoppers, one dugong, and a mermaid … It is one of the rarest and most famous natural history books known, and one of the very few pre-Linnaean works on fishes to be published in color.

More Free Books

I was pleased with the response to my previous book giveaway, and value the shelf-space that it has freed up. I’m encouraged then, to go through the exercise again with a second batch of volumes. I had vaguely planned to make some kind of sneak preview offer to those who just missed out on the last giveaway, but, alas, laziness has prevailed, and… well, it’s just the same deal this time as before.

To claim one of the books listed below, leave a comment including an e-mail address that states which book you want. Then send me an e-mail which includes a mailing address. I’ll pay the postage, and will dispatch the item within a week. As before, I’ll be restricting the offer to one book per mailing address.

1. The Birds, by Tarjei Vesaas, published by Peter Owen, translated from the Norwegian by Torbjørn Støverud and Michael Barnes. ‘A tale of delicate beauty and deceptive simplicity by one of the greatest Scandinavian writers of the twentieth century’, says the publisher. I’d previously read (and loved) The Ice-Palace, by the same author, but I found this book, although obviously well-written, much harder to get into. Paperback; ISBN: 0720611431; 234pp.

2. Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar. My copy is of the US edition, published by Pantheon. Gregory Rabassa did the translating from the Spanish. Had I encountered this boldly experimental novel ten years earlier, I may well have persevered with it to the end, but, as it turned out, I began to lose all interest in its bohemian characters’ misadventures and opinions about half way through. Then again, I was reading it sequentially: perhaps that’s where I went wrong… ISBN: 0394752848; 576pp; paperback.

3. For Years Now, by W.G. Sebald. This is a slim volume of poetry written in English by the renowned German-born author. The book is illustrated by the artist Tess Jaray. It’s published by Short Books. The poems are mostly very short, like little chopped-up aphorisms, making for a light snack of a book, where one might have hoped for a more satisfying meal, so to speak. Paperback; 75pp; ISBN: 1904095097.

4. Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes, specifically the 1999 Oxford World’s Classics edition, in the translation by Charles Jarvis, with an introduction by Milan Kundera. Some favourite authors of mine love this book, so I was disappointed to find that Cervantes was not for me: give me Pierre Menard’s partial re-creation of the Quixote any day! Hardback; ISBN: 0192100327; 1128pp.

5. Dr. Simon Forman, A Most Notorious Physician, by Judith Cook, published by Chatto & Windus. This is a moderately interesting biography of a successful medic (or, to give an alternative view ‘nothing but a quack and a charlatan, an astrologer who purported to practise medicine, a fellow of bad repute’) who lived in Elizabethan London and who was notable for having kept a diary for many years, albeit of an altogether sketchier and slighter kind that Pepys’s say, or Evelyn’s. He wrote, for example, of visiting the theatre to see the original production of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale. ISBN: 0701168994; Hardback; 240pp.

6. Dossier, a Collection of Short Stories, by Stepan Chapman, published by the Creative Arts Book Co. This collection of exceedingly weird tales, set in all manner of far-flung locales, advertises an author with a singularly powerful imagination. The publisher writes ‘the author flips recklessly from culture to culture in his attempt to compile a dossier on the human animal’: an ambitious undertaking which is only sporadically successful. Also, I sensed (or, perhaps, I imagined) in several of the tales a disconcertingly cold undercurrent of isolation and alienation. Paperback; 176pp; ISBN: 0887392806.

7. Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose(8): a Memoir of Love, Exile and Crosswords, by Sandy Balfour, published by Atlantic Books. This is a charming autobiographical account by a South-African-born, but London-resident documentary film-maker, in which he relates anecdotes from his many travails and travels, structured around his growing fascination with the phenomenon of the English cryptic crossword. Hardback; ISBN: 1843540363; 288pp.

8. The Unsettled Dust, by Robert Aickman, published by Mandarin (now out-of-print). This is a good selection of Aickman’s marvellous ‘strange stories’, featuring what is perhaps my favourite of his tales, Ravissante. Also included is The Cicerones, recently realised as a short film by the League of Gentlemen's Jeremy Dyson. I’m only parting with this book at all as I’ve since invested in the 2-volume Collected Strange Stories set published a few years ago. Paperback; 302pp; ISBN: 0749301732.

9. Embers by Sándor Márai, Published by Viking, and translated from a German edition by Carol Brown Janeway. This is a 1942 novel that has only recently been rescued from obscurity. The book has been widely praised, and even likened to Thomas Mann and García Marquez: on reading it though, I couldn’t see why it had recieved such acclaim, at the same time wondering if its being a translation-of-a-translation may have dulled its edge somewhat. Hardback; ISBN: 0670910996; 224pp

10. Mindware: an Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science, by Andy Clark, published by the Oxford University Press. This is a succinct introduction to a fascinating subject, which I bought after reading an earlier book of Clark’s, only to be somewhat disappointed to find the latter book seemed in large measure a restatement of the former. 226 pages; ISBN: 0195138562; paperback.

The Cat’s-Paw

The painter Richard Dadd (1817-1886) is chiefly remembered for the two extraordinarily-detailed masterpieces he painted during his incarceration in Bethlem Hospital: Contradiction. Oberon and Titania (1854-8), and The Fairy-Feller’s Master Stroke (ca. 1855-64). Besides these justly-celebrated works, he also produced dozens of watercolours, and a smaller number of singularly-fascinating oil-paintings, during his long confinement in ‘Bedlam’, and, later, in Broadmoor.

Beginning in 1853, Dadd painted a series of about thirty watercolours under the collective title Sketches to Illustrate the Passions, each one focussing on a single virtue, vice, or state-of-mind. Subjects for the sketches included love, hatred, jealousy, treachery, idleness, brutality, raving madness, and melancholy (pictured above). The quality of these compositions varies widely: some seem weirdly stilted, others are straightforwardly naturalistic.

Of the oil-paintings from this period, Mercy, David Spareth Saul’s Life (1854) offers ample evidence that Dadd’s compositional and colouristic skills were unaffected by his madness. And, if anything, his Potrait of a Man, from the previous year, is even more striking, with its unexpected juxtaposition of a sober-looking, black-suited gent (thought, perhaps, to be one of Bethlem’s doctors or stewards), and a beautifully-fanciful background, drawn from memory, imagination and sketchbook fragments.

Among the independent watercolours Dadd executed during his Bethlem years, his Sketch of an idea for Crazy Jane (below) is one of the best known, and is perhaps the most poignantly lyrical, despite the bathetic edge introduced by the fact that the model for Jane is evidently a man in drag. Dadd’s watercolours could also conjure up much darker moods, as in, for example the baffling and deeply unnerving The Child’s Problem - a fancy sketch (1857).

The year 1860 saw Dadd complete two more minor masterpieces in oils: Negation (for which, alas, I could not find a good-quality colour image), and Mother and Child, below. The latter work is a pure and delicate piece, with numerous striking details: the mother’s jewellery, the alignment of the sun behing her head (almost making a madonna of her), and the peculiar puffed-up bird to her left…

One painting which carries echoes of Dadd’s most famous canvases is his 1862 work Bacchanalian Scene. This could almost be a detail from The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, but is apparently complete. According to the commentary in Patricia Allderidge’s monograph on Dadd, there is a Latin verse inscribed on the reverse of the panel, which, translated, runs thus:

Each man then has his own unlucky fate both here and beyond - like must be added to like, and ones due paid to the appointed spirit.

Allderidge’s commentary continues:

The first part at least is in keeping with Dadd’s fatalist philosophy as he had already explained it … saying that he could not separate himself from what appeared to be his fate, and also ‘Now the author of this act [the murder of his father] is unknown to me, although, as being the cat’s-paw, I am held responsible.’

Clicking on each of the images above will open larger, pop-up versions of the same.

The Town Where I Live

Here are some stock photographs of the town where I live (i.e. I did not take these myself). First, we have the two principal churches in the town’s main square:

The square is packed today with hundreds of market-stalls, as the day before Midsummer’s Eve always brings lövmarknaden, ‘the leaf-market’. A few days ago our skies were as blue as those pictured here, but today they are drably overcast. The main shopping thoroughfare (below), is also lined with stalls…

And the market spills over too into the Admiralty Park, whose centrepiece is the yellow-painted clock-tower, above, around which Dog and I walk three times a day. The Naval base, part of which adjoins the southern end of this park, is still enclosed, in places, by some of its original 17th-Century fortifications.

The town is built over an archipelago of interbridged isles and holms, and has a half-dozen harbours, one of which is home to this charming fountain. The Marine Museum, below, overlooks another harbour.

And this last picture is of the offices where I work, and where I am right now.

A Week of Kindness

The following half-dozen images are taken from Max Ernst’s fascinating 1934 ‘collage-novel’ Une Semaine de Bonté, ou, Les Sept Éléments Cardinaux, (A Week of Kindness, or, the Seven Deadly Elements):

Une Semaine de Bonté marks the culmination of a series of published collage works that began with some collaborations between Ernst and the poet Paul Éluard, shortly after the former’s arrival in Paris in 1922, with La Femme 100 Têtes being published in 1929, and Rêve d’une Petite Fille qui Voulut Entrer au Carmel following in 1930.

The book comprises 182 collages, all of which rely solely on cut-and-pasted images taken from illustrations in old pulp novels and catalogues. The work is divided into seven parts, one for each day of the week, and each illustrating one of seven ‘deadly elements’. The present images are all taken from the ‘Tuesday’ section, entitled La Cour du Dragon (The Dragon’s Heart) for which the corresponding element is fire.

On Tuesday, large or small dragons (sometimes bats or serpents) are almost universally present… Stern, proper-looking women sprout giant sets of wings, serpents appear in the drawing-room and bed-chamber… - from the (unsigned) publisher’s notes in the Dover edition.

There is an interesting animation based on the book to be found here. To find out more about Ernst’s work in other media, one could do worse than click here or here.

Unable to find these particular images anywhere on-line, I resorted to scanning them from the book. Clicking on each image will open a larger, pop-up version of the same.

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Vinyl Fantasy

Saturday morning I took a stroll around town which took me to a store called Movement, a cool place stocking good-as-new designer furniture and other knick-knacks from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. I’d bought a couple of Jazz LPs there some time ago. This time around, though, the man had a whole new stock of vinyl, not just Jazz, and all in fine condition: I ended up buying eight albums: Sinatra at the Sands, a 2-LP set from ’66 featuring the Count Basie Orchestra; Flowers, a mid-’60s compilation-album by the Rolling Stones; The Songs of Leonard Cohen and also Cohen’s Death of a Ladies Man; Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues (the Bringing it All Back Home LP retitled for the European market) and Blonde on Blonde; Snap! by The Jam; and the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks….

It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve gotten into buying vinyl. It happened that during one incursion into a junkshop I started rifling through some boxes of records that they had, most of which were of mid-late ’80s vintage: Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Eurythmics, Paul Young, Milli Vanilli, and the like. I was having great fun, and, when my wife came over, she suggested we look & see if they had any old record-players there too. Luckily, they did, and not just a record-player but an entire ’70s hi-fi system with a Ferguson amp/receiver, an Akai cassette deck, two speakers, a microphone and headphones, all for just 300 SEK.

So we bought the thing, and with it a big pile of records including Peter Gabriel’s So, Sweet Dreams by the Eurhythmics, and What Up Dog? by Was (Not Was); 12" single versions of Relax and Two Tribes by Frankie Goes to Hollywood; a nine-LP Reader's Digest box-set of ‘Your Favourite Classical Melodies’, a quadrophonic recording of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade; and an original ’50s pressing of the South Pacific soundtrack. Since then I’ve bought dozens more discs, mostly classical, and acquired a new Kenwood turntable that I could plumb into our main hi-fi set-up.

The odd thing is that I’ve no particular sentimental attachment to black vinyl as such, and never owned any records when it was still the #1 format, going instead straight from cassettes to CDs. Even so, I do enjoy fond memories of LPs and 45 singles…

When I was about seven or eight years old our mother gave her old mono record-player to my sister and me, along with a stack of ’60s singles, which ranged from an orange-labelled copy of the Byrds’ version of Mr. Tamborine Man, to Wink Martindale’s Deck of Cards, songs which are worlds apart, but which, at the time, I believe I loved equally well. Also, from about that time I can recall that we would pick out the LPs from my dad’s collection that we liked best, and he’d let us play them on his ITT record deck. I particularly liked a ‘Best-of’ collection by Fats Domino, and Desperado by The Eagles. My dad would also listen to the Stones, CCR, Cream, Roxy Music, Fleetwood Mac… that kind of thing. I always preferred his taste in music to my mother’s, which took in Lionel Richie, Dr. Hook, and the like.

My sister’s earliest vinyl enthusiasm was for ABBA, and, much as I would pretend to dislike their music, I was secretly in love with the way Agnetha and Anni-Frid could harmonise; I enjoyed the corny songs like Fernando and Chiqitita best of all. She was given the two Greatest-Hits sets, and later also Voulez-Vous on LP. Of the singles she bought I can remember the Boomtown Rats’ I Don't Like Mondays, Hazel O’Connor’s Eighth Day, Don’t Stand So Close to Me by The Police, and, incongruously, Woman in Love by Barbara Streisand… LP-wise she also bought Blondie’s Parallel Lines, which became a great favourite of mine.

I, meanwhile, much as I loved listening to the radio, never bought one single or LP, preferring instead to nerdishly spend my money on computer games & accessories, and it wasn’t until I was given a Walkman, aged seventeen or so, that I started buying music on cassette for myself. My first purchases were So by Peter Gabriel, already mentioned above, and Love by The Cult: at the time I thought their song She Sells Sanctuary really rocked. Oh my.

En Garde!

There follow some images from Francesco Alfieri's 1653 treatise L'Arte Di Ben Manegiarre La Spada (‘The Art of Good Swordsmanship’, I suppose), selected randomly from a set of over forty such, presented by the Association for Renaissance Martial Arts (ARMA for short) on their ‘Online Historical Fencing Manuals & Texts’ page.

I had been looking for some engravings from Girard Thibault d’Anvers’ very splendid book Academie de’ l’Espée (1628): apparently the most lavishly-illustrated of all Renaissance fencing texts, but couldn’t dredge up the images I wanted (although I did eventually find them here).

In the course of my search, I found such distractions as: an historical gallery of women in fencing; lists of the top 10 swashbucking films; and discussion of the mysteries of the Spanish style of rapier fencing: la verdadera destreza.

As usual, clicking on the images will open larger pop-up versions of the same.

Vallotton’s Woodcuts

Here is a selection of woodcuts by the Swiss-born artist Félix Vallotton (1865-1925), which I’ve gathered from diverse corners of the internet.

Vallotton’s bold designs, influenced by Japanese wood-block prints, helped establish the young artist’s reputation in 1890s Paris. These were just one aspect of his prolific output: he completed roughly 1,700 paintings in all, and still found time to write three novels…

I discovered them by way of a slim hardcover volume entitled Vallotton: Graphics that I borrowed one day in ’94 or ’95 from Bristol Public Library. Even though I only kept the book for a few weeks, some of the images reproduced therein left sharply-outlined impressions in my memory.

Clicking on most of these images will open slightly larger, pop-up versions of the same. One more link, about the art of the woodcut in general: here.

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The Fantastic in Art and Literature

My thanks to Iconomy for pointing me towards this fine site hosted by the Cornell University Library, which compiles and indexes nearly three-hundred images on the theme of the fantastic in art and literature.

I had encountered several of the images before: Gesner’s merman seemed familiar; and I’d certainly seen Piranesi’s Carceri d'Invenzione; the woodcuts illustrating Sebastian Brandt’s Narrenschiff (‘Ship of Fools’); and an engraving of Félicien Rops’, in various places elsewhere.

I was drawn, again, to the dragons on show, such as the one above, from an opus of Aldrovandi’s, and also those drawn from I work I’d never heard of: Johannes Ionstonus’ 1755 Historiæ Natura.

Demonic entities of various kinds are also well-represented at the site, with this wee devil catching my eye in particular: just what is he planning to do with that spoon?

Also new to my eyes was this striking Tower of Babel, dating from 1732, but which could almost have come from the 1930’s, and which makes a welcome addition in my mental gallery to the more famous representations of the same theme.

Crampton

I first came across the work of Thomas Ligotti in Cardiff Central Library in 1993, when I picked up his debut short-story collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer. The jacket copy placed him as a successor of Poe’s and Lovecraft’s: mixed signals to my mind, as I love EAP but care little for HPL. I was curious, nevertheless; all the more so as this came at a time when I cultivated a keen appetite for literary morbidity and grotesquerie.

Integrated natures consider themselves their own masters, if the question even arises in their ‘minds’. To actually feel that one is a puppet requires the pull of conflicting forces. Then you know about the wires that hold you together, and afterward you can never free yourself from the ‘sense of strings.’

I was soon sucked into the book. I found that I had such an affinity with Ligotti’s pessimistic worldview, that my own perception of things was altered and expanded as a consequence of reading his work. I feel I owe him a great deal. In the years that followed, I found his second book, Grimscribe in the ‘Forbidden Planet’ bookshop in London, and picked his third, Noctuary, from a dodgy mail-order catalogue. In an interview a few years ago, Ligotti explained his motivation thus:

Since I was a child I‘ve had a morbid and melodramatic imagination. I went to see every horror movie at the local theaters and stayed up late to watch midnight horror movies on TV. As a teenager I had a tendency to depression. To me, the world was just something to escape from. I started escaping with alcohol and then, as the sixties wore on, with every kind of drug I could get. In August of 1970 I suffered the first attack of what would become a lifelong anxiety-panic disorder. Not too long after that I discovered the works of H. P. Lovecraft. I found that the meaningless and menacing universe described in Lovecraft’s stories corresponded very closely to the place I was living at that time, and ever since for that matter. I was grateful that someone else had perceived the world in a way similar to my own view. A few years later, when I took an interest in writing fiction, there was never a question that I would write anything else other than horror stories.

His is a rich and evocative style, eminently quotable, which is lent strength and consistency by a sophisticated, albeit quasi-nihilistic philosophical skeleton that underlies the skin of his prose. Sometimes he over-reaches, or falls flat, but given the exotic weirdness of the effects he conjures with, this can easily be forgiven him. Ligotti, it seems, strives in his tales not so much to horrify, nor to frighten, or revolt; but rather to demand recognition of the ruinous and malign locales he delineates, and concordance with the fatalistic outlooks his creations espouse or epitomise.

Anyone with a thorough understanding of existence is either silent or raving mad.

He has also collaborated with the band Current 93 on a number of pieces combining his words with their music, and, in recent years, has branched out into scriptwriting. His latest book, Crampton, co-written with Brandon Trenz, began life as a screenplay for an X-Files episode that was never made. I received my copy last week, and read it that same evening. On closing the book, a characteristically intense and disconcerting piece, I experienced what is by now a familiar sensation of having stumbled out from a very dark place, as though my eyes were blinking, unaccustomed to the light.

And in darkness we open our eyes, briefly, and in darkness we close them.

The Ligotti quotations above were taken from this page.

Kitsch-Musik

I’ve just been listening to Kitsch-Musik, a cycle of five solo-piano pieces by Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov. These are poignant neo-romantic vignettes in the manner of Chopin or Schumann, but played almost as softly as humanly possible, so that their sound reaches the listener as though from ‘somewhere long ago, and far away’.

…but it is not an imitation or stylisation: it is a question of the listener remembering the archetypes - a deep involvement in the past as a source of the inner life of the human soul. As the composer says, the title ‘Kitsch’ (in the sense of ‘feeble’, ‘failed’, ‘rejected’) has an elegaic rather than an ironic meaning. ‘Play very quietly and extremely quietly, as if from far away, with a tender, intimate sound, as if the music were touching the memory of the listener, …as though the memory itself were singing the music’ - Alexei Lubimov.

This kind of distantly ghostlike quality is a feature of other of Silvestrov’s works too, such as his Silent Songs, and the piano-piece Der Böte (‘The Messenger’), which likewise floats along in an ectoplasm of desolate nostalgia and unembarrassed sentimentality.

Probably Silvestrov’s best-known work is his fifth symphony (1980-82), a grand ruin of music in a single, slow-moving, forty-five-minute arch, somewhat reminiscent of Mahler, or so I gather - I have yet to get into Mahler’s work myself - and redolent for the most part of mournful elegy, with the occasional flash of menace and malice eventually giving way, in a prolonged coda, to an air of resignation and lassitude. It is the most ambitious example of Silvestrov’s ‘postludes’: a series of compositions of his which strive to exist as echoes and encores of the entire classical tradition, like something that might issue weakly from failing loudspeakers across some post-human wasteland:

Silvestrov no longer feels the need to commence a composition at the beginning, since the contemporary listener has become a memory bank of the music he has already heard. What matters is the accompaniment of the oeuvre in its final estuary. What has already been expressed, tersely and concisely, in the coda of traditional forms, comes to cover the entire composition… Silvestrov’s symphonies are to be perceived as the musical and eschatological coda of great implicit symphonies that silently exist within the listener’s consciousness, but which have not yet been completed… - Frans C. Lemaire.

My response to Silvestrov’s music is highly dependent on my mood: what is achingly lovely and profoundly moving when approached in a patient and reflective frame of mind can otherwise exasperate with its longwindedness, and depress with its narrow emotional range.

The most important lesson of the avant-garde was to be free of all preconceived ideas, particularly those of the avant-garde - Valentin Silvestrov.

The Paper Zoo

There is a nice miscellany of zoological illustration on show at an on-line exhibition entitled Lo zoo di carta (the paper zoo), hosted by the Biblioteca Panizzi, of Reggio Emilia, Italy, from which I have picked out the following images:

This shaggy camel is one of the hundreds of engravings in Swiss humanist and scientist Conrad Gesner’s five-volume Historia Animalium (1516-1565).

This engraving of a mermaid is taken from a volume entitled Istorica descrizione de tre regni Congo, Matamba et Angola, a publication of one Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi (d. 1692), a Capuchin friar and missionary.

These are some of the many oddities pictured in a treatise simply entitled De Monstris, by Fortunato (or Fortunio) Liceti (1577-1657), an Aristotelian scholar who also published works on hieroglyphics, spontaneous generation and astronomical controversies.

This distinguished-looking armadillo is taken from the great Histoire Naturelle Générale et Particuliére of George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707-1788), a 44 volume production published between 1749 and 1804.

And, lastly, here is a delicately-tinted etching of a porcupine, taken from a four-volume album of quadruped animals, ‘drawn from nature’ published in Venice in the 1770s.

Clicking on any of the images above will open a larger version of the same in a pop-up window.

Four Dragons

Here are some illustrations of dragons taken from Athanasius Kircher’s book Mundus Subterraneus (1664/5).

In 1664 Kircher published his masterpiece, an immense and amazing work entitled ‘Mundus subterraneus’ (The Underground World) and covering all aspects of anything that dwelled or occurred within the earth’s interior - from lizards in caves, to fossils in rocks, to mountain springs, earthquakes, and volcanoes. Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus marks the first serious effort to describe the physical makeup of the earth, proposing theories (sometimes fantastic) in the areas of physics, geography, geology, and chemistry… - Eugenii Katz.

I found these splendid creatures amongst the many interesting images behind this page of links, compiled by French writer Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès. I had been looking for something else entirely.

M. Blas de Roblès has published volumes of poetry and short stories, two intriguing-sounding novels: L’impudeur des choses and Le rituel des dunes, which, sadly, have not made it into English translation, and an illustrated treatise based on an archaeological expedition to Libya: Libye grecque, romaine et byzantine.

Clicking on the images will open slightly larger versions of the same.