Arni

Sometime last year I happened upon a site showcasing the work of several Russian photographers with a strong emphasis, subject-wise, on black-and-white nudes. I found the galleries of one of these photographers, identified only as A. Arni, particularly striking…

I’d since misplaced the bookmark, but, after a half-hour or so’s search this morning, was pleased to find the site still there. Arni’s photographic narrations combine the erotic and the ironic in a stylised, theatrical setting.

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Isola

Whilst there is nothing remarkably original about the work of contemporary Italian painter Pierluigi Isola (1958-), I very much enjoy his coolly and quietly enigmatic still-life pieces.

His landscapes and street scenes (not pictured here), which almost always have his native city of Rome as their subject, likewise seem depopulated, and quietly spellbound.

I first saw Isola’s work at the big Quadriennale show in Rome in 1996, which served as my crash-course introduction to contemporary Italian art in general.

I lifted the above images from these sites. Clicking on them will open slightly larger pop-up versions of the same.

Svampar

Here are some of the more decorative of the watercolours made as part of a 19th-century endeavour, initiated and supervised by mycologist Elias Fries (1794-1878), to catalogue and classify the fungi of Sweden. Many of the paintings he commissioned were eventually published as plates in Sveriges ätliga och giftiga svampar (Edible and poisonous fungi of Sweden, 1860-1868) and Icones selectae hymenomycetum (1867-1884). The originals now belong to the Swedish Museum of Natural History, from whose website I lifted these images.

Agaricus azymus Fr. painted by H. von Post and P. Åkerlund.

Agaricus colossus Fr. painted by P. Åkerlund.

Agaricus muscarius painted by E. Pettersson.

Clavaria condensata Fr. painted by E. Pettersson.

Lycoperdon bovista (L.) Fr. painted by P. Åkerlund.

Russula emetica Fr. painted by P. Åkerlund.

Stereum hirsutum painted by P. Åkerlund.

Trametes connata painted by P. Åkerlund.

The Dark One’s Dances

‘The twenty-fourth of August 2003 is the twentieth anniversary of Pentti Saarikoski’s departure from this planet’, writes Anselm Hollo, in the introduction to his new book of translations of Saarikoski’s poetry. This book, Trilogy, collects Saarikoski’s final three verse collections: The Dance Floor on the Mountain (1977), Invitation to the Dance (1980) and The Dark One’s Dances (1983).

No postman knocks at the houses of the dead
I sink a hole deep in the soil
put my invitation at the bottom
and top it with juniper twigs
I soak them with aqua vitae
and when the whole thing’s flaming
there’s such a smoke and stink
the dead rise, they have to

they rise behind me on the mountainside
they see my shadow
and they ask me what it is

the world and the world’s phenomena
are soon forgotten

Hollo goes on to note that, besides publishing twenty-two volumes of poetry, Saarikoski also turned out six volumes of prose, three radio-plays, and many book-length translations, including, significantly, Homer’s Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses: Hellenic classicism and modernism being two of the primary colours of Saarikoski’s work.

The Girl
dandy as a dandelion
took me by the hand and said
I’m the light that leads you into darkness
No crop to brag about when I dig the potatoes
summer was dry I was lazy
dandy as a dandelion
Our bodies overlap as we sleep
legs bent
these beds weren’t made for people as tall
as those of our time
I natter with the magpies about how all
the world’s people
are my children and you’re the light
dandy as a dandelion who leads
me into darkness
I’ve eaten of the knowledge of good and evil
the heavens are clouded
the philosophies and policies crack like dry twigs

I’d been hoping for years that a book like this might be published, ever since I acquired a copy of Herbert Lomas’ anthology Contemporary Finnish Poetry, published by Bloodaxe Books back in ’91. Saarikoski was one of several outstanding poets whose work I discovered in this eye-opening volume, and it was specifically the selection translated from the ‘trilogy’ of his late works that left me hungry for more. It was a poetry that struck me as casual yet profound, conversational yet fervently inspired.

I was poking about in the junipers and the drystone wall
for a schnapps bottle I’d hidden somewhere
The Girl appeared, licked her ice-cream
turned up her nose and said
you’re daft
you’re forever seeking the way
down the mountain and out of the wood
and our of your darkness
you call
for your dead friends
that you long for
as a bald man longs for his hair don’t you understand this
The Girl licked her ice-cream superciliously
you don’t understand
in the darkness
even the reddest of reds
the red of a red frostbitten lingonberry looks black
that’s what’s happened to your friends
I’m the light
that will lead you into darkness

I wept and wailed as soon as I opened my eyes
to have been born into this
who has looked closely
has stopped to look at the interior surface
of a freshly-cut piece of meat
understands
what I’m talking about
That a gust of wind flattens the leaves of grass
is, for me
an event, a thought
that penetrates and governs everything

The translations I’ve excerpted here are variously Lomas’s (the first), Hollo’s (the last couple) or confusions of the two. I’ve not attempted to reproduce the irregular line-placement of all but the first of these extracts…

The Dark One dances
there is no other world
than the one he inscribed on a cow’s skull
spiderwebs hang from his fingers he dances
dances through the sentence he wrote
You know nothing of this world if you haven’t looked
into a lizard’s eyes, he dances
ants climb his legs, piss
into his short hairs, crawl
into his urethra, devour
his strength, the serpent
intrudes its tongue deep into his ear and whispers
Not me
I know but won’t tell

Bestiary

The University of Aberdeen’s Bestiary is a particularly fine mediaeval manuscript which, moreover, has been given an exemplary on-line presentation. Here are a few snippets:

The horseman has stolen a cub and has been pursued by the tiger. The thief can stop the tiger by a trick: he throws down a glass sphere and the tiger, seeing its own reflection, stops to nurse the sphere like a cub. She ends by losing both her revenge and her child.

A many coloured animal [the panther], handsome and gentle, whose only enemy is the dragon. When he roars, he exhales a sweet odour which draws all animals to him except the dragon. The dragon retreats to his hole and lies stiff with fear, as if dead.

The monoceros has the head of a stag, the tail of a boar, elephant's feet and a horse's body. A horn four feet long projects from his head.

The phoenix turns to face the sun, beats its wings to fan the flames and is consumed.

The dragon strangles an elephant. The text says the dragon has a crest, small mouth and does not kill with its teeth but with its tail. The illustrator has added massive teeth and wings.

This basilisk has a raptor's beak, a coxcomb, wings, a tail and claws. He is being attacked by a weasel.

All of the above images and texts are © The University of Aberdeen, 2002.

Sour Herring

At the ICA Cityhallen supermarket yesterday evening to buy bread, frozen pizza, cream, and bananas, I noticed a display of bulging red-and-yellow cans in one of the freezers: a quick inspection sufficed to confirm that, yes, it’s surströmming season again. Strömming means herring and sur means sour, but what we have here is no ‘added lemon-juice’ kind of sourness…

Herring fished in the near-fresh waters of the northern Baltic in spring is processed and canned, but with insufficient salt to arrest all biological activity. In the can, a process of fermentation (some might say putrefaction) takes place, which renders the contents foul-smelling but still edibly non-toxic. Apparently, the hungrily ingenious northern Swedes of yore hit upon this process as a means of economising on the use of salt. From an outsider’s account of this delicacy:

On a sunny balcony in soaring temperatures of 15°C, my hosts laid out a big table for the surströmming banquet. Kalle, the head of the household, bravely takes the tins to the bottom of the garden and covers them in a tea towel. Looking away, trying to protect his nose with his shoulder, he carefully opens them. He tries hard not to inhale as the pressurized stink emanates. Once he’s poured out a suspect, murky brown liquid, he brings the can to the table. The smell is so overpowering, I wonder if somebody nearby has a very bad stomach problem and should make a quick exit to the crapper, or leave altogether. After awhile, though, nobody has moved. The smell can only come from one place. I begin to have second thoughts. Should I really introduce this ‘food’ to my mouth just to avoid causing offense to my hosts? - Andreas Grundtvig.

I have never tried it, and am not at all tempted: interested readers are directed to this English-language surströmming page.

Bookshops

My wife and I returned to the provinces on Monday, having enjoyed a capital weekend’s shopping in Stockholm. For me, one of the foremost luxuries of our three days away was simply being able to browse the shelves of some particularly well-stocked bookshops: notably Hedengrens on Stureplan, Akademibokhandeln on Master Samuelsgatan, and Rönnells, a large antiquarian bookseller on Birger Jarlsgatan. Even though part of the ground floor of the building which houses the Hotel Mañana, and with it our apartment, is occupied by a bookshop of sorts, its stock of English-language material is necessarily limited to the kind of books one might find in a third-rate airport, and thus is not conducive to lazy browsing.

Oftentimes, just picking up a book will remind me of the time and the place where I bought it, and the other books I bought, or was thinking of buying, at the same time. Ordering books on-line, whilst eminently convenient, does not carry with it, for me, this charge of associative recall, and consequently seems, overall, a slightly less satisfying experience. Besides that, I value the element of serendipity that still plays a larger part in my experience of physical bookshops than of virtual ones.

Until my twentieth year, I seldom bought books at all, considering them items one borrowed rather than owned. During the first of my London summers, I began to haunt the Pan Bookshop on the Fulham Road, and the branches of Waterstone’s on the Old Brompton Road and Kensington High St, and took my first baby steps in accumulating a library of my own. Very few of the Penguins and Picadors I purchased back then are still with me, but I still cherish the copy of Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table I bought at that time, and my battered, second-hand copy of Heaney and Hughes’ anthology The Rattle Bag which I was delighted to find in an Oxfam shop, on sale for only a pound.

Over the years I’ve had cause to be grateful to many fine book-selling establishments, but will mention two more in particular, which opened my eyes or expanded my mind in specific but different ways: ‘Oriel’, a bookstore/gallery in Cardiff, sadly now defunct, that, by some fortunate, government-funded oversight was able to stock virtually every book of poetry then in print, and which was where I discovered Akhmatova, Lorca, Mandelstam and Montale, amongst others; and the Anglo-American Bookstore on via della Vite in Rome, where I found a two-volume reprint of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and from where I bought Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory and Couliano’s Eros, Magic and the Renaissance, to name just a few among many.

Map of the World

Found amongst this list of miscellaneous images. My thanks for the link to Kara, of trashfish.net.

Shades & Mirrors

Whilst looking, with little success, for some images from Saloman de Caus’ 1612 book La Perspective avec la Raison des Ombres et Miroirs, I happened upon the following:

News of a project to create a digital reconstruction of de Caus’ Hortus Palatinus in Heidelberg; an article entitled Anamorphic Perspective & Illusory Architecture; an on-line exhibition ‘Splash and Spectacle’ on the history of the fountain; a history of automata, at the intriguing Miralab site, which, one must hope, reads better in the original French; a nicely-presented selection of illuminated manuscripts; and, lastly, and very indirectly, a flying pig.

Volvelles

In 1540, the German astronomer and mathematician Petrus Apianus (1495-1552), published his magnum opus: the Astronomicon Caesareum. This lavish exposition of Ptolemaic astronomy was notable for its inclusion of thirty-five intricate ‘volvelles’, movable illustrations made from as many as six layered paper discs.

Amongst his several accomplishments, Apianus (also known as Peter Apian, or by his given surname of Bennewitz, or Bienewitz) was the first to use darkened glass for observation and to recognise that the tails of comets always point away from the Sun. He became Professor of Mathematics at Ingolstadt and ‘Imperial Mathematician’ to the German Emperor Charles V.

The first batch of images above were lifted from a page at the ETH (the Swiss Institute of Technology), in Zurich. The second batch are latterday facsimiles, taken from this page.

Quimby the Mouse

I was delighted that my copy of Chris Ware’s book Quimby the Mouse arrived yesterday. I ordered it a couple of months ago, after having read the appeal for help from his publishers, the estimable Fantagraphics Books, who at that time were suffering an acute cashflow crisis, thankfully since resolved.

I had bought a few titles from the brothers Hernandez’ marvellous Love and Rockets series, also published by Fantagraphics, years before, and so had good cause to think well of them. Browsing their current catalogue, it was Ware’s books, produced as a series collectively entitled ‘The ACME Novelty Library’, that intrigued me the most…

Seeing as how the combination of word and image is a preoccupation of mine, and consequently a mainstay of this journal, it occurs to me that I should make more effort to spend time in the world of comic-books. Regrettably, I have paid very little attention to this field over the past decade or so. Before that though, at around the time when graphic novels were being touted as the Next Big Thing, I dipped my toe in the water and, besides a few Love and Rockets collections, I also read Alan Moore’s Watchmen and V for Vendetta, Sienkiewicz and Miller’s Elektra: Assassin, and Moebius and Jodorowsky’s The Incal.

In his introduction to Quimby, Ware repeatedly disclaims its contents as near-juvenilia (they were written in his early 20s), and, as he sees it, of relatively little merit. While it’s true that many of the pieces therein are on a rather maudlin, single note, the meticulous love with which this volume was made shines out brightly, and its design is a constant delight to behold.

My source for the four panels from Quimby, above, was this page. Clicking on them will open slightly larger versions of the same. For more information about Ware’s art, this list of links might be a good place to start.

The Temptations of St Anthony

I was thinking the other day that wouldn’t it be good if there were an on-line art-history resource with a thematic or motivic index, such that one could find all of the famous paintings depicting the myth of Danaæ, say, or those including scenes from Boccaccio’s Decameron. I was pleased to find that there is indeed such an index: which lists not only scenes inspired by classical mythology, but also those taking their cue from Biblical tradition, or depicting incidents from the lives of the saints.

In fact it was something like this lattermost list that I was looking for, as I was hoping to track down some pictorial versions of The Temptation of St. Anthony. Having said all that, a title search at the ever-reliable Artcyclopedia ultimately proved more useful in this instance, when it came to hunting down the images I had in mind, but I shall be bookmarking Olga’s indexes all the same.

And when the enemy could not endure it. but was even fearful that in a short time Anthony would fill the desert with the discipline, coming one night with a multitude of demons, he so cut him with stripes that he lay on the ground speechless from the excessive pain. For he affirmed that the torture had been so excessive that no blows inflicted by man could ever have caused him such torment - St Athanasius.

But changes of form for evil are easy for the devil, so in the night they made such a din that the whole of that place seemed to be shaken by an earthquake, and the demons as if breaking the four walls of the dwelling seemed to enter through them, coming in the likeness of beasts and creeping things. And the place was on a sudden filled with the forms of lions, bears, leopards, bulls, serpents, asps, scorpions, and wolves, and each of them was moving according to his nature. The lion was roaring, wishing to attack, the bull seeming to toss with its horns, the serpent writhing but unable to approach, and the wolf as it rushed on was restrained; altogether the noises of the apparitions, with their angry ragings, were dreadful - ibid.

In the 15th and 16th-century depictions of the tale, ferocity and weirdness predominate, and these pictures could more accurately be described as illustrating the torments of the saint, focussing as they do on the physical pain and fear which the demons inflicted on him.

The importance of the temptation as a pictorial theme seems to have declined during the 17th Century, and is very seldom seen during the 18th. Indeed the subject did not come back into vogue until the latter half of the 19th Century, with the publication of Flaubert’s re-imagining of the tale providing an important imaginative impetus. In the intervening centuries, it is plain that the demons had lost much of their power to scare and intimidate, gaining instead in subtlety, perhaps, as the focus of the majority of these latterday images is squarely on material and, especially, sexual temptation…

First of all he tried to lead him away from the discipline, whispering to him the remembrance of his wealth, care for his sister, claims of kindred, love of money, love of glory, the various pleasures of the table and the other relaxations of life, and at last the difficulty of virtue and the labour of it; he suggested also the infirmity of the body and the length of the time.

And the devil, unhappy wight, one night even took upon him the shape of a woman and imitated all her acts simply to beguile Antony. But he, his mind filled with Christ and the nobility inspired by Him, and considering the spirituality of the soul, quenched the coal of the other's deceit. Again the enemy suggested the ease of pleasure. But he like a man filled with rage and grief turned his thoughts to the threatened fire and the gnawing worm, and setting these in array against his adversary, passed through the temptation unscathed. All this was a source of shame to his foe.

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

Earth, Moon & Sun

The following images are of hand-coloured engravings taken from Athanasius Kircher’s 1664 opus Mundus Subterraneus (previously mentioned here).

Opus Naturae Opus Intelligentiae - Geocosmi Structura - Sectional view of the ‘subterranean’ earth, showing internal magma and volcanic action at the surface. Decorated in the spandrels with cherub winds and clouds.

Genuina Corporis Lunaris Facies - the surface of the moon as observed in the times of Galileo with improved observations through the use of the telescope. Decorated in the spandrels with suns showing moon phases, and eclipse diagram.

Schema Corporis Solaris - an early view of the sun, mistakenly showing sun-spots as erupting volcanoes. Decorated in the spandrels with a phoenix rising from the ashes, a cherub with cornucopia, a sunflower in baroque pot, and an eagle carrying its young.

I lifted these images and captions from a page at the George Glazer gallery’s site. The same information is also presented in Eugenii Katz’s Kircher page.

Fomenko

Taking some time to explore the Mathematik und Kunst (Mathematics and Art) section of Prof. Dr. Udo Hebisch’s Mathematischen Café site (my source for the Lorenz Stoer images posted here last week), I discovered the graphic work of contemporary mathematical artist Anatoly Timofeevich Fomenko (1945-), from which I’ve picked out the following small selection:

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The genre of mathematical art seems, regrettably, to be a marginal one, with Escher’s visualisations of tesselation and symmetry still perhaps its most recognizable modern expression.

I do not really think of myself as an artist. I am a mathematician. To me, my drawings are photographs of some strange and interesting mathematical world - A.T. Fomenko.

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Anatoly Fomenko is a Soviet topologist with a special gift for expressing abstract mathematical concepts through art. Some of his work resembles that of M.C. Escher in its meticulous rendering of shapes and patterns, while other pieces are more visceral expressions of mathematical ideas. Stimulating to the imagination and to the eye, his rich and evocative work is interpreted and appreciated in various ways - mathematically, aesthetically, and emotionally - AMS blurb about the artist.

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Lastly, here is a striking variation on the theme of Albrecht Dürer’s celebrated engraving Melancholia I: Fomenko’s ‘Anti-Dürer’. Clicking on these images will open much larger versions of the same.

Professor Starson’s Refusal

I met Professor Starson in the summer of 1990, in London, where he was attending the second Physical Interpretations of Relativity Theory conference at Imperial College. I was working through the summer at the College’s Summer Accommodation Centre, whose job it was to let out rooms in the student residences to delegates, tour-groups and stray vacationers. Besides his slightly implausible name, the man’s appearance and demeanour also raised an eyebrow or two: he was immaculately-dressed, and perfectly-groomed, always clad in a sharply-creased suit, it seemed, with not a hair out of place. He carried a shiny black-leather briefcase, and there was an evangelist’s gleam in his eye. I’d met enough physicists to know that this was no typical example. I don’t recall how I ended up with a copy of the paper he meant to present to the conference, but this was a curiosity that I kept with me for years thereafter: a seemingly crankish patchwork of outlandish theorising that, if I remember correctly, touched on other dimensions, ball-lightning, anti-gravity and time-travel. I wish now that I never threw the thing away.

I met many other colourful individuals that summer, but the Professor stood out in my memory as maybe the second-weirdest of them all. A couple of months ago I googled a few of these names, of which Starson’s was the only one to bring up a sigificant number of results, all of which pertained to a then on-going legal battle he was at the centre of. Checking again a few days ago, I saw that Starson had won his case, an appeal to the Canadian Supreme Court…

In June 2003, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld a patient’s right to refuse medical treatment. The case involved 47-year-old Scott Starson, who has bipolar affective disorder … a combination of schizophrenia and manic depression. The condition causes behavioural outbursts and has had him in and out of psychiatric wards since 1985.

Starson is ‘an exceptionally intelligent man,’ according to the courts. Without formal training, he has pursued work in physics, specifically in the areas of anti-gravity, the theory of relativity and the measurement of time. In 1991, he co-authored an article with a Stanford University physics professor, who describes Starson’s thinking in the field of physics as ‘10 years ahead of its time.’ - Owen Wood, CBC News.

To glance at the headlines about this case one might assume it a victory for individual rights against the legal-medical establishment. Starson’s mother, however, has deplored the court’s decision, and her view is supported by the Schizophrenic Society of Canada. Their opinion is that forced medication offers Starson’s only hope that his condition might be stabilised. Indeed, most of the available sources seem to agree that his mental state is worsening.

Starson has gone more than five years without medication and remains involuntarily confined in a mental hospital. As predicted, his condition seems to have deteriorated. In a bizarre interview with a reporter following the Supreme Court ruling, he talked about his plan to marry Joan Rivers, whom he has never met, and confided: ‘Pope John Paul II works for me now.’ - Rory Leishman, London Free Press.

Starson, if there remains any doubt, is not really a professor at all, and his given name was in fact Schutzman, which he had legally changed in 1993, for the simple but mad reason that he believes himself to be a son of the stars. Despite all this, it seems that his ideas genuinely did impress some of his fellow-delegates at the PIRT II conference, and the paper he co-wrote with Stanford physicist H. Pierre Noyes is real enough, if perhaps out at the more speculative end of the research spectrum.

This case bothers me, as there seems no good resolution to it. In Starson’s mother’s place, I would want what she wants, for the courts to recognise that her son does not know what’s best for him, that the medication is the best chance of her getting him back. But in Starson’s place, I would probably want what he wants: to be free to decline a sanity, that, he feels certain, would be worse than his madness.

‘I'm leading the edge. I'm trying to define physics that will eventually enable us to build a starship. Okay? That's what antigravity is all about,’ […] ‘I have the perfect scientific mind. Only you people say I have an illness.’ - Professor Starson, as quoted by Margaret Wente.