Category: [Books, magazines, etc]

Beginning with bones

Sighted on Facebook. This is an illustration by Carl Lagerquist and it comes from a 1922 edition of Frankenstein by Cornhill Publishing… and it struck me because the book is famously silent on exactly how Frankenstein creates his monster, only that he did so and was aghast at what he’d done; all the pyrotechnics and shit you see in film versions simply aren’t there in the original text. And for some reason the idea that Frankenstein might have really have started from scratch had never occurred to me until now. Cos look at it, that’s basically what he’s doing here, beginning by evidently making the skeleton himself, which would require adding the flesh, organs, etc separately. Something about that seems more appalling than just, you know, taking a pair of “readymade” fully finished legs and attaching them to a similarly fully finished torso…

And this, apparently, is the end result. From the same edition, Lagerquist’s rendering of the final product; I sighted this on Reddit and can do no better than quote the OP there:

I really like this take on the Creature (my only nitpick is the short hair). His eyes seem to be popping from their sockets (quite different from the Universal version’s droopy and sunken eyes). His inner workings are visible in uneven measure. His limbs have the correct structure, but not quite the right proportions. There’s even a big hernia below his abs!
He looks accurately messed up.

I’ll take OP’s word for that, cos I’m not an anatomical expert and wouldn’t know how “accurate” the mess is, but… yeah, damned if it’s not a mess. And what they say about having the structure but not the proportions is spot on; we’re not looking at dubious technique, Lagerquist evidently meant him to look misproportionate, it’s not really like the infamous Rob Liefeld…

The Comfort Zone

Michael K. Vaughan is one of my favourite Youtubers, and his latest video is a particularly interesting one; he tells about a viewer who expressed disappointment that, for a while now, the sort of books he’s been reading and reviewing on his channel isn’t as broad as it used to be, and he should read more widely and out of his comfort zone, and dared him to read something by Jane Austen (there being a Booktube reading event devoted to her in June)…

“That’s more like it, Roger!”

Now, I’m sure the horror he expresses at that idea in his video was mostly performative and for comedic value, cos he has a couple of videos on the subject of favourite books (one of which I actually rewatched the other night), and he’s upfront about his broad tastes being pretty populist, but his top 100 also encompasses classical authors like Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus (whose Histories is his top book), Arrian, Xenophon, Polybius and Livy, and “serious” authors like Dickens, Steinbeck, Walter Scott, Wilkie Collins, Hemingway, Stevenson, Charlotte Bronte, John O’Hara, Conrad, Dostoyevsky, Wilde, Dumas, Tolstoy, Fitzgerald, Haggard, Wells and Hugo, and even his “genre” preferences would mostly be considered classics of their kind and even literature in general too (Asimov, Bradbury, Lovecraft, E.R. Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Chandler, Hammett, Ross MacDonald, Matheson, LeGuin, Machen, S. King, Verne, Simak, Tolkien). So his tastes are much broader than his viewer possibly thinks. But he’s also made videos about all of these in the past, so it’s probably not like he feels the need to redo them.

And the whole thing made me wonder: what if someone did that with me? I mean, if someone came across this blog and looked at the page for the films I’ve reviewed and decided the stuff I’ve reviewed on here so far (which is mostly of a horror nature) so far constituted my “comfort zone”, and then told me I needed to watch something “good” instead… well, would I respond with similar grace to Michael? Cos I suspect probably not; I would note that yeah, horror is a lot of what I’ve been watching in the last few months, but I have seen plenty of the standard classics. I’m not stupid enough to make a top ten list or anything of the sort, but if they demanded I name some non-horror titles I have considered “great” over the years, I’d include a lot of the following:

    • Citizen Kane and quite a few other Welles films
    • Singin’ in the Rain
    • The Rules of the Game
    • Sunrise
    • The Great Dictator
    • Bad Day at Black Rock
    • The Searchers
    • A Matter of Life and Death and, again, most other Archers titles from the ’40s
    • Lucifer Rising
    • 2001: A Space Odyssey
    • Duck Soup
    • Sherlock Jr.
    • A Hard Day’s Night
    • North by Northwest
    • Blazing Saddles
    • Wild Strawberries
    • Forty Guns
    • Yojimbo and, again, several other Kurosawas
    • Sansho the Bailiff
    • Tokyo Story and, again, quite a few other Ozu films
    • Fitzcarraldo and, yet again, other Herzog films
    • Battleship Potemkin
    • King Lear (1971)
    • The Cranes Are Flying, Letter Never Sent and I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov triple bill)
    • Metropolis and, once more, several other Langs
    • Heat
    • Ben Hur (1959, though the 1925 one is also good)
    • And any number of Warner Brothers cartoons, especially from the 40s and 50s (and by Bob Clampett particularly)

Alternately, I could just point them at my Letterboxd, save myself time, and tell them to choke on my general experience of “good” cinema. It’s not like I feel the need to justify myself anyway, of course, but if someone were to approach me like Mr. Vaughan’s viewer and tell me to widen my horizons, I think they’d soon live to regret doing so…

I should hope so

Nothing if not an extraordinary title. However, trying to find out exactly what the fuck this thing is/was has been another matter… the Internet has been unusually unhelpful, and has primarily pointed me towards second-hand bookshops offering it for sale through Abebooks. Still, with a bit more research, I’m going to assume “this book of Earth” was in fact a booklet (only 32pp. long, apparently) of poetry, cos that’s what Dave Cunliffe did… the latter was part of the ’60s British poetry revival, and this obituary of him is where I get most of what I now about him from; that obit includes a photo from which the cover picture has evidently been cropped, and it depicts Cunliffe and Tina Morris, his wife and partner in crime… I don’t recognise many of the other names invoked in the articles I’ve seen about cos frankly I know bugger all about this particular scene (though obviously I recognised Nelson Mandela, who apparently contributed to one of Tina’s works), but I did know the name Jeff Nuttall; he was another publisher of small press books and journals at that time, including My Own Mag, which I knew of cos William S. Burroughs wrote for it, and Nuttall wrote a book called Bomb Culture in 1968 about the rise of the underground movement of the era. And I’ve actually got that, or rather a bodgy ebook of same, cos I read about it in Mark Fisher’s K-Punk… though being me, of course, I still haven’t read the damn thing three years later. Perhaps I should actually do that and learn something…

Bill gets the bus

Well HERE’s something remarkable, on multiple levels, William Hartnell on record in 1931 (hence why I’m filing it under music even though there is none, cos “film & TV” feels wrong)… a “one-act thriller” first broadcast on the BBC in 1927, then re-recorded four years later. I never knew until literally just a few minutes ago that this was even a thing; I knew he was in films from the early ’30s on, but I’ve never seen any reference to this until now. So that’s remarkable enough, and probably so is the fact that it survives, but, well, so is the fact that it was even made in the first place. Cos… why was it made? Was there a market for this sort of record? Cos I can’t imagine there being much of one somehow, and yet it was clearly a commercial recording, not just something pulled from the BBC archive or some such. I wonder who was buying this sort of thing.

As for the author, well, “Martin Hussingtree” actually turns out to be a place rather than a person… but the person using the name turns out to have been interesting, assuming there wasn’t another “Martin Hussingtree” out there. He appears to have been Oliver Baldwin, son of British PM Stanley Baldwin, and one of his other literary works was a book called Konyetz, which is described thus:

Konyetz is a dystopian science fiction novel written by UK politician and author Oliver Ridsdale Baldwin, who used the pseudonym Martin Hussingtree. Baldwin, the son of British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, adopted his pseudonym from a small village in Worcestershire near the Baldwin family ironworks factory in Wilden. The novel was published in 1924 and reflects Baldwin’s profound experiences during World War One, which transformed him into an avowed socialist.
The title, Konyetz, is Russian for “end” or “termination.” The novel depicts a series of social upheavals leading to the invasion of Britain by a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy. This invasion triggers a worldwide future war that culminates in the apocalypse and the end of civilization. The story combines elements of apocalypse, plague, and political turmoil, capturing Baldwin’s disillusionment with contemporary English politics and the global situation.
Baldwin’s novel is summarized by some as a strange yet striking forecast of the end of Western civilization, where a Labour-governed Britain faces bombing and gassing by the invading forces. The novel’s grim depiction of societal collapse and global conflict was undoubtedly influenced by Baldwin’s wartime experiences and his political views, which led him to become a Labour Member of Parliament in 1929.

I don’t know about you, but a dystopian novel about a “Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy” destroying civilisation doesn’t suggest to me at least that the author of said book might be an “avowed socialist”… and yet Baldwin Jr was, very much, an avowed socialist. Mind you, per his Wiki entry, he also had an unfortunate run-in with Bolsheviks in Armenia during his post WW1, pre-parliamentary career (after which he was jailed in Turkey for spying for the Bolsheviks), so perhaps he was fine with socialism, just not a fan of the Soviets (and/or Jews)? I don’t know.

Books do furnish a blacklist

A slightly curious story:

Librarians in the schools of 66,000 children of American service members are being directed to pull books “potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics” at Department of Defense-run schools, according to a memo viewed by Task & Purpose.
But they’re doing so without a list of specific titles or even clear guidance on what books to target.
Among the books selected for review were 2003’s “Kite Runner,” a story about a boy growing up in Afghanistan amid the rise of the Taliban by Khaled Hosseini, and 2016’s “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” by Vice President JD Vance about his upbringing in Ohio as part of a white working-class community. […]
A Feb. 6 memo to DoDEA administrators, librarians, and teachers directed a review of library books to ensure they’re in line with two of President Donald Trump’s executive orders disavowing the use of gender identities instead of sex and “ending radical indoctrination” which the memo describes as treating people as part of groups defined by race, sex, national origin and blaming or stereotyping people for actions committed in the past by their own groups.
DoDEA librarians have been instructed to remove physical and online copies of books on gender and inequity topics and catalog them in a spreadsheet, the librarian said. The memo states that the books will be relocated to the school’s professional collection — which is off-limits to students. Task & Purpose asked DoDEA officials what would happen to those books but they did not elaborate.
“Teaching students about the lives and experiences of people from different backgrounds than their own is part of the high-quality education DoDEA offers. However, there are some resources that appear to be in violation of the spirit of recent directives,” said Will Griffin, a spokesperson for DoDEA, in a statement.

The censorship is not even remotely surprising, obviously, this is entirely in keeping with Trump’s Reich. The article notes the following books are a partial selection of the ones removed so far:

“The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini
“Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” by Vice President JD Vance
“Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley
“An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
“Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves” by Glory Edim
“War: How Conflict Shaped Us” by Margaret MacMillan

Not particularly surprised by most of these particular titles (Brave New World having always raised a stink with the right wing)… but, obviously, one of these things is not like the other:

I found this a little… bizarre and unlikely when I first saw this posted on Bluesky earlier, but, bafflingly, it was evidently true. I’m still wondering what the hell’s happened here. I see the order cited above attacks “blaming or stereotyping people for actions committed in the past by their own groups”, and from what I can gather Hillbilly Elegy does very much do that, it’s part of why the good people of Appalachia hate it and Vance so much… so, technically, I suppose it fits the description, but… it feels somehow like that’s not why it was done. It feels a bit more like those instances of the Bible being banned as a sort of malicious compliance:

House Bill 900 – also called the Restricting Explicit and Adult-Designated Educational Resources (Reader) Act – took effect in September 2023 and requires library vendors to rate materials for explicit content, inform parents of potentially explicit books and recall materials already in circulation when required. More broadly, the law requires library content to align with state educational standards.
While the bill, sponsored by Representative Jared Patterson, was intended to shield students from obscene content, critics say it could restrict their constitutional freedoms, and the bill has faced legal challenges since before its implementation.
Citing HB900, the full text of the Bible was temporarily banned from Canyon independent school district, which serves 11,000 students across 21 schools in Amarillo and Canyon counties.

For some reason this banning of J. Divans’ book gives me a similar vibe to this, like the librarian ordering its withdrawal did so out of spite more than anything… Surprising how little reaction there seems to have been so far, though, you’d think the government would be less than pleased that a book written by one of their own number had been pulled like that. But then again, we’re talking about that couch-fucking clown. Do they even remember he’s the vice-president?

Now I wanna be your god?

So here’s me browsing through some pictures I’ve downloaded to pick some out for the Important Images department, and I come across this:

Hmmmmmm, says I. I don’t know what the squiggly graphic is, nor who the young lady might be, but that male character at bottom right looks oddly like Iggy Pop…

..and that would be, evidently, because it IS Iggy Pop. I don’t know why but I was put in mind of this photoshoot of this early 1971 incarnation of the band, with messrs S. Asheton, Recca, R. Asheton and Williamson lurking menacingly behind Mr. Osterberg who appears to be attempting jazz hands but can’t get quite get them upright. Wonder how he ended up on the cover of this thing? Did the illustrator somehow see this particular photo and think Iggy looked like he was doing some sort of magical gesture or something? Cos I know Iggy was experimenting with a bunch of things at that time, but I never thought the occult was one of them…

Goodbye Gaiman

Apparently I haven’t had anything to say about Neil Gaiman’s sexual assault debacle from a few months ago. I wouldn’t call myself a megafan, but I always did find him interesting to follow on social media… which I can’t do any more cos he’s gone into hiding, and, well, understandably so. That’s a new article about him that’s just come out on the subject, which I think I can’t not say something about… but what is there to say? Gaiman’s absolutely fucked now. The details in the article are suitably horrible, but the most interesting part is the Scientology-related stuff, cos Gaiman never says anything about that and it’s kind of easy to forget that he grew up in HubbardCorp. And it evidently did him no good in the long run… (EDIT: apparently as well as paywalling the article—12ft.io is your friend here—they cut the whole Scientology bit. David Miscarriage doesn’t like the dirty laundry about abusing kids being aired, evidently. Wonder what his wife thinks.)

The whole story is so grotesque that I can’t see any way he’ll bounce back from it; good thing he’s made so much money from his career in the last few decades cos it’s more or less over now… as it pretty much is for the people that have been working on TV and film adaptations of his work; another series of Sandman and one of Anansi Boys are still waiting to be aired, but a bunch of others have been put on hold or cancelled and the ones that do get shown are hardly going to get much push now. Nice one, Neil, you fucked it for a lot of people. Anyway, that’s enough for this story, I just find the whole thing so awful I don’t want to say anything else.

Faster than a speeding Fabian

Here’s a rather delightful photo I’ve seen in a couple of places today. This is George Bernard Shaw outside his writing hut, “London”—apparently so called because when unwanted visitors popped by his staff could tell them he was “in London” without technically lying—and just… what a pose. What a very odd way to stand. Like Superman coming out of a phone booth after changing clothes… or should that be “man and superman” in this case?

And then the hammer came down

I have seen many odd things on the Internet over the decades…

…but THIS is so fucking peculiar I can barely get my head around it. Spotted it on Tumblr this afternoon and was… perplexed. Indeed, I thought it had to be some rather esoteric joke or something; the idea that a spoken word album of the fucking Malleus Maleficarum read by Francis Urquhart is something that a record label—even a spoken-word specialist label like Caedmon which contained some very curious items in its catalogue like the Marcel Marceau album (no, really)—thought there was a market for just strikes me as impossibly unlikely. Surely this was an exceeding abstract joke…

…OH.

No, Caedmon actually produced this baffling object in the 1970s. And, as further proof of its existence…

…here it is on Youtube. Have not listened yet, but I’m weirdly excited to…