WATCH REPAIR

At artist John Coulthart's blog feuilleton, always a cornucopia of the strange and wonderful, he mentions his design for the cover of a new work of modern experimental music by Watch Repair. "The perfect accompaniment to an Autumnal afternoon reading a good book", according to Matt at Piccadilly Records, Manchester, where the release may be found.

I've been able to listen to these recordings as they developed and have certainly been impressed by their stark and austere beauty. This is fragile music that requires close listening, drawing on barely-touched guitar strings and echoes and shimmers from treated clock chimes augmented by the subtlest possible electronic treatments. There's a sense of a chiselled work, whittled to its purest form so that it exists close to the margins of silence. In my experience, the compositions bring a brittle sense of otherness for the listener, which lingers long after the work has come to an end.

Mark Valentine

NIMROD IS LOST IN ORION AND OSYRIS IN THE DOGGESTARRE - Richard Skelton

For some time I have greatly admired the music and writing of Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson, who together comprise Corbel Stone Press. They produce rare compositions and publications, works of austere beauty, with delicate attention to detail and a fine sense of form and of space. Drawing on time dwelt in landscapes they study and inhabit with care, their work is infused by melancholy and loss: but it also makes an affirmation in the way it records and memorialises the things we have lost.

The latest project from Richard Skelton, available now for pre-order and to be released in early October, is Nimrod is Lost In Orion and Osyris in the Doggestarre, an album and book inspired in part by the prose of Sir Thomas Browne, some of the most elaborate and arcane in the English language (Arthur Machen, amongst others, was a great appreciator of his work).

Here is part of the description by the Press:

"Richard Skelton's first solo album in two years is preoccupied with 'the great volume of nature', its delicacy and violence, light and dark, solace and psychological burden. The music hovers between the empyreal and the subterranean, and - framed by the accompanying book of texts, art and photography - offers what Skelton describes as a 'picture of a wood through which slanting light dimly traces other forms'."


Mark Valentine

THE EPHEMERAL IS THE ETERNAL - Sidney Hunt

THE EPHEMERAL IS THE ETERNAL: THREE ART POEMS by Sidney Hunt

Sidney Hunt is Britain’s lost art deco experimental poet. An artist, engraver, designer and fervent spirit in the Nineteen Twenties and Thirties, he worked always on the boldest, most outré edges of art and literature. He contributed to many of the leading modernist journals of interwar Europe, and was known amongst the radical artists and poets of Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam and London. Yet until recently he has been almost completely overlooked.

This new handmade edition offers the first British publication of three works by Sidney Hunt from Contimporanul, the Romanian avant-garde magazine, in 1927-8. They are probably amongst the first “sound poems” and “visual poems” by a British poet. The three typographically adventurous pieces are reproduced in a paper chapbook with black linen card covers, together with an introductory note by Mark Valentine. The design, by Jo Valentine, also includes a hand-produced thermofax silk screen print, in white on black, of one of the poems, ‘Sea on Jetty’. This is housed in a black Canson paper envelope with Nineteen Thirties cambric reinforcers and black hemp cord. The print, envelope and booklet are presented in a hard cover binding in black buckram, tied with black grosgrain ribbon.

This is the sixth handmade publication from the Valentine & Valentine imprint. It is in a limited, numbered edition of 25 copies only (and 3 not for sale). All copies have now been taken.

THE SURVIVOR - Dennis Parry

The Survivor (1940) by Dennis Parry, newly reprinted by Valancourt, is a distinctive novel of the supernatural that has been too long overlooked. As I say in my introduction, "it is surprising that it has not gained a greater reputation among enthusiasts of supernatural fiction. It is true that the near-omniscient E.F. Bleiler does give it qualified praise, noting the book’s “many good touches and flashes of wit”..." but very few other readers or critics seem to have noticed it.

It is a story of possession set in the wintry fens around Ely during a virulent epidemic. The haunting is not a matter of fine shading and ambiguities. The spirit that returns is arrogant, boisterous and cunning: it exercises a sardonic sway over a remote village just as it had in life. Dennis Parry presents us with a cuttingly modern ghost story inflected with irony and Saki-like wit. At the same time, in the remorselessness of the fatal plague afflicting the country, he creates a chilling dystopia that adds to the bleakness of his work.

It seems to me that Parry achieved with The Survivor a strikingly different and contemporary kind of supernatural story and it is a pity he did not continue to extend the possibilities of the form. I can imagine him working towards a smilar achievement as Robert Aickman or Elizabeth Bowen. As it is, this book is well worth our attention as an impressive contribution to the field.

My introduction provides some detail about the author, but briefly (from Valancourt's announcement), "Dennis Parry (1912-1955) was the author of ten critically acclaimed novels but fell into an undeserved obscurity after his untimely death in a car accident at age 42. His third novel, The Survivor (1940), a classic story of the supernatural, earned rave reviews from critics, who ranked it alongside Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and the works of Algernon Blackwood."

THE WANDERER - Timothy J Jarvis

A lost writer, an old manuscript (partly in unknown tongues), a sinister puppet show, a timeslip into the far future, and a bitter understanding of what lies behind the façade of the world.

It’s a brave writer who could take those ancient rituals of the dark fantastic and make them work in a fervid new form. But that is the achievement of The Wanderer by Timothy J Jarvis, an astonishing debut novel deeply infused with the traditions of supernatural and metaphysical fiction.

It has been devised with a subtle understanding of the motifs and mechanics of the strange and visionary in literature. The skilful use of stories within stories suggests Arthur Machen’s The Three Impostors, while the scenes of a ruined city after a catastrophe, bring to mind images from M P Shiel’s The Purple Cloud, or Edward Shanks’ People of the Ruins. And there are also suggestions of a wider cosmic tragedy such as we encounter in Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, and even of the serene realm of Shangri La in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon.

It is an unusual meditation on the nature of fantasy, that shunned half-brother of literature, which also astutely exemplifies the form: a book essentially about the mainsprings of the macabre that works itself as a significant new coiling of the dark. But it is far from an academic treatise. The book shifts between sordid pubs and smeared rooms, evoked with grimy authenticity, and weird horizons in worlds of dream or hallucination.

Most of all, though, The Wanderer is that rare thing, a thoroughly engrossing and exhilarating story, laced with playfulness, which also glimmers with intelligence and audacity. We should be wary, though. The book itself reveals a force seeking out certain artists, poets, and others, as prey it can pursue forever through the underworld – an infinitely dark and cruel game of the kind hinted at by Sarban in The Sound of His Horn, but vaster still in its remorselessness and terror. How do we know it isn’t one more lure in that labyrinth?

Don’t read this book unless you’re ready to defy the gates of Hell.

Mark Valentine

Le Visage Vert no. 24

A belated note to call attention to the recent new issue (June 2014) of Le Visage Vert, which showcases two American stories, "Marjorie Daw" by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and "The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell, and includes an article by Xavier Mauméjean on the latter writer.  Other stories in this issue include "The Air Serpent" by William Page  and "Le Visionnaire" by Rudolf Lindau (a German diplomat who lived for many years in Paris), the latter story being best known in English as "The Seer" from Blackwood's Magazine (January 1881) and the subsequent Lindau collection, The Philosopher's Pendulum and Other Stories (1883).  Michel Meurger discusses William Page's story as an inspiration of Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Horror of the Heights".  Another fine issue of Le Visage Vert.  Ordering details can be found here (scroll down). 

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF BOOKS - Henry Wessells

'In musty blackness above old stables,
Forgotten shelves in crowded, disused rooms
Where a faded rose silk wallpaper blooms ; ...'

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF BOOKS: Six poems by Henry Wessells on reading, memory, books, and the second law of thermodynamics. Photographs by Paul Schütze. Published by Temporay Culture.

A fine meditation on the nature of books and of book collecting and of much else, and a fastidious example of the book-maker's craft, hand-bound and hand-assembled by a kitchen-table publisher, with delicate care and attention to detail.

With eight duotone photographs tipped-in, full of the ancient texture and dimmed light of old books. Text printed on Mohawk Via Vellum Jute. Set in original foundry Centaur types, digitized by the Nonpareil Typefoundry. Design by Jerry Kelly. Hand sewn in heavy card covers, pictorial dust jacket.

An edition of 226 copies presently emerging from the bindery.

'...sleeping gods of old empires await
Some new interpreter to light a fire
Against the slow and irreversible cold.'

LOST CARTOGRAPHIES - Cyril Simsa

The adventurous Invocations Press of Brighton have announced a new publication, Lost Cartographies: Tales of Another Europe, a collection of curious fiction by Wormwood contributor Cyril Simsa of Prague. "Europe has always been Other, and there have always been other Europes" they remind us, and offer "Six stories, six Europes. All of them teetering on the very edge of the map."

In his introduction, the author explores how the idea of the Other has haunted the European imagination, sometimes located in terrain close by, just across a boundary, sometimes far away, in realms regarded as exotic and truly outland. He tells us: "These are my reports from the far side of our culture's ambivalent European identity. From the weird germ-lines and the mapless demesnes on the left-hand side of the family."

The stories are in the Central European fantastic tradition of Gustav Meyrink and Leo Perutz, where travellers encounter places stranger than the coasts of Bohemia, and ancient spirits adapt themselves to modern shapes.