Odds and ends

I added this "topic" as a "place" to store various pieces of pertinent information, sales, upcoming publications, interesting purchases, and, well, anything else that comes into any given head among us.

David X has a Lorrain post: http://dxsuperpremium.blogspot.com/2007/10/monsieur-de-phocas-by-jean-lorrain.ht...

I picked up Monsieur De Phocas, but haven't read it yet.

Yes, David's post is informative. As opposed to the mercantile blurb that I cited in ill-humor and which, as it was neither useful nor entertaining, I deleted (I think the bookseller I cited had pitched his hopes on some head-banging pubertoid coming up with the $175 he wanted for his copy of Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker).

Anway...

Lorrain deserves to be known for more reasons than his drug abuse. He had a genius for irritating his more revered literary contemporaries. As a result of his acerbic journalism (I suppose he was the equivalent of the type of journalist published in papers like The Daily Mirror), he was more than once challenged - most notably by his Norman neighbor, Guy de Maupassant, as well as by Marcel Proust and Paul Verlaine.

The National Library of the Netherlands has a good deal of information on Lorrain and beautiful images of various editions of his books, including the Devambez edition of Monsieur de Bougrelon:

http://www.kb.nl/bc/koopman/1890-1919/c35-en.html

There is a new publishing house, Ex Occidente Press, specializing in decadent works.

From the publisher:

"Ex Occidente Press is an independent publishing house from that doubtful place that was once called 'la Porte de l'Orient' by travellers, seers and esoterists, generals and freemasons, poets and spies, prostitutes and rakes, salon artists and theologians, but which is known nowadays under the name of Bucharest. Ex Occidente Press specialises in rara et nova fiction of the supernatural, the odd and the weird, the strange and the decadent, the fantastic and the obscure, the very holy and the luxuriously heretical. Ex Occidente Press places equal emphasis on introducing both new works from contemporary writers and works from an earlier age of European literature that has been neglected in the English-speaking world."

http://www.exocccidente.com/index.html

Looks promising so far.

still chuckling over "head-banging pubertoids!"

Great link!

Sorry for the odd question, but might anyone know if Geoffrey Madan was related to, if not the son of, Falconer Madan?

Possibly - dates do not exclude it - but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falconer_Madan would probably mention it. Inconclusive!

Like most La-z-boy scholars, I ran it by Wikipedia first, but as you see, it let me down. I will lay into it with slightly greater effort after I get back to the lab this evening. Thanks!

I've been wasting my time reading the literary snobs (god save me) - Falconer & Geoffrey being related never crossed my mind, so I assume they weren't (they barely speak the same language.) Now that is lazy. but efficient :)

And it certainly encourages my habitual demeanor... it was just my way of watching the paint dry. (Even so, I hope I don't speak the same language as my relative... a distinct dialect at least. Penance enough bearing same nose...).

Yes. Son of Falconer (confirmed in the Notebooks introduction).

damn - and now I need to re-conceive the world. I'll try to create a better one this time

interloper.

Does anyone know anything about the author and painter, Pierre Bettencourt, and his work?

This is good:

http://01fragments.blogspot.com/2009/01/pierre-bettencourt-mosaic-world-of.html

Well, judging from the comments, the Greeks seem to like him.

Does anyone know anything about Paul Morand's Magie Noire?

Aaron Douglas did the illustrations (well, of the English Black Magic).

Well it's a bit "dated" and a little too much right-wing Morand for my liking. In a certain way it's more a testimony of these times' attitude and conceptualization of Africa than litterature. Morand is better when he writes about what he knows.

I thought I had created a "new topic" for links... but I'm either too lazy or too blind to track it. So - here is a link to an interesting but apparently defunct website (articles on Beresford Egan, grotesquerie, etc.):

http://www.spamula.net/blog/

Neglected writers, decadence, supernatural fiction:

http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/search/label/Neglected%20Writers

And this, of course (posted elsewhere here, I think...:

http://freepages.pavilion.net/tartarus/lost.html

Only a couple of blog posts so far, but Tartarus Press has a very interesting titles list. Have we made reference to them before?

A great find!
.
.

Maybe they would consider discounts for members of the Chapel?

And if anything, I would expect a reply of " 'chapped members' is not a recognized charity". Let me know though!

Huysmans et son nain:

http://www.societe-huysmans.paris-sorbonne.fr/1Accueil/Accueil_actualite2007.htm

This interesting.... (goth hippies?):

http://www.blackphoenixalchemylab.com/rsal.html

Some familiar sites listed here:

http://livrenblog.blogspot.com/2009_01_01_archive.html

If anyone would like a free copy of "An Anthology of Spanish American Modernismo (Texts and Translations)", drop me a note on my profile page. Just so you know, this copy - which had been offered by the seller as having clean pages - contains a fair amount of underlining and notation.

Check its listing in my library, under "Comments", for a complete table of contents.
------------------------------------------------------
(act now and get a free slim jim, still in the wrapper).

26: Interesting about the flap caused by the kids of the Spanish President. Apparently they were labeled as "goth kids" too.

Some sparkling prose from the always genteel and urbane New York Post:

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/goth_bam_outs_spain_prez_kids_ltejLqUMsUDo...

KSW - I think the Post, although not genteel or urbane, is the most stylistically interesting paper in the U.S. The prose there DOES sparkle (at least more often than in other papers) even if it doesn't in that bit. Goth? I'm thinking Addams family, specifically.

From a long poem by Ezra Pound:

"Siena Mi Fe', Disfecemi Maremma"

Among the pickled fœtuses and bottled bones,
Engaged in perfecting the catalogue,
I found the last scion of the
Senatorial families of Strasbourg, Monsieur Verog.

For two hours he talked of Gallifet;
Of Dowson; of the Rhymers' Club;
Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died
By falling from a high stool in a pub ...

But showed no trace of alcohol
At the autopsy, privately performed --
Tissue preserved -- the pure mind
Arose toward Newman as the whiskey warmed.

Dowson found harlots cheaper than hotels;
Headlam for uplift; Image impartially imbued
With raptures for Bacchus, Terpsichore and the Church.
So spoke the author of "The Dorian Mood",

M. Verog, out of step with the decade,
Detached from his contemporaries,
Neglected by the young,
Because of these reveries.

que ferais-je sans ce monde (what would I do without this world)

- Samuel Beckett

what would I do without this world faceless incurious
where to be lasts but an instant where every instant
spills in the void the ignorance of having been
without this wave where in the end
body and shadow together are engulfed
what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die
the pantings the frenzies towards succour towards love
without this sky that soars
above its ballast dust

what would I do what I did yesterday and the day before
peering out of my deadlight looking for another
wandering like me eddying far from all the living
in a convulsive space
among the voices voiceless
that throng my hiddenness

(SBB's translation)

Speaking of femmes fatales:

http://www.herodote.net/histoire/evenement.php?jour=19140316

Lyrics from Coil's Titan Arch:

Crown the dark animal
Black Jackal crawling
Eternal returning
An end to the waiting
There are thrones underground
And monarchs upon them
They walk serene
In spaces between
At the head of the storm
Darkness is rising
In the Garden of Jaws
His wounds are shining
Angels take poisons
In rotting pavilions
Under shivering stars
The sickness is gilding.

>34 Randy_Hierodule:, Ben nice lyric.

The music of England's Hidden Reverse has only come into my purview recently, but the likes of Coil, Current 93 and NWW seem to have a real connection with some of the decades old literature you all speak of on this group.

And Current 93 has republished some of said literature. David Tibet's reprinting of Stenbock's Studies of Death is by now about as scarce as the original!

Although let us not forget that Tibet also cites Louis Wain as a key influence....

I'd have to remember to forget what I never knew! Off to look that one up....

Want to help support the effort of restoring Ernest Dowson's gravesite? : http://www.ernestdowson.com/Campaign.html

...a sort of Keats-like face, the face of a demoralised Keats...

Arthur Symons describing Dowson immediately after the latters death.

In Medium Raw, Anthony Bourdain opens his new collection of essays with a positively decadent meal. He has ortolan and the descriptions verge on the prurient.

"There's a vestigial flavor of Armagnac, low-hanging fumes of airborne fat particles, an intoxicating, delicious miasma. ... I bring my molars slowly down and through my bird's rib cage with a wet crunch and am rewarded with a scalding hot rush of burning fat and guts down my throat. Rarely have pain and delight combined so well. ... With every bite, as the thin bones and layers of fat, meat, skin, and organs compact in on themselves, there are sublime dribbles of varied and wondrous ancient flavors: figs, Armagnac, dark flesh slightly infused with the salty taste of my own blood as my mouth is pricked by the sharp bones. As I swallow, I draw in the head and beak, which, until now, has been hanging from my lips, and blithely crush the skull."

Bon appetite!

Symbolism conference for those interested:

Between 25-28 April, 2012 ALMSD (Art, Literature, Music in Symbolism and Decadence) will be hosting a second International
conference, "Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences" with the theme
Light and Shade or Light and Obscurity in Symbolism, its origins and its
consequences, which will take place at the beautiful Allerton Park, near the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana campus, in Monticello, Illinois. The organization would like to invite you to submit a
proposal which will address the theme of the conference in art,
literature and music. The proposal should be about 300 words and should
be sent to symbolismabstracts@uis.edu before May 10, 2011. Please
include a short version of your CV. If you have questions, please
contact Rosina Neginsky at rnegi1@uis.edu. The website for further information, please refer to: http://www.uis.edu/hosted-orgs/ALMSD/conference.html

Somewhere between Jarry and Twain:

http://hilobrow.com/2011/04/06/georges-darien/

The Bohemians by Marquis Pelleport:

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14674.html

If anyone would like a copy of John Davidson's novel A Full and True Account of the Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender, please contact me. Willing to trade or transmit for a modest fee. It is an 1895 first edition, with the Beardsley illustration, but is a rebound copy.

The description sounds intriguing. I hope someone has taken you up on your generous offer. For the rest of us, the text is available for download on Internet Archive.

I hadn't really considered decadence in the fashion world until I read this review of a museum showing of Alexander McQueen's work. http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article06291101.aspx

This is a great insight: I think there is definitely a case to be made that the fabulous aesthetics of the 1890's took roost in the houses of fashion after being driven from the galleries. (Extravagant Dandyism was, of course, always a key element of decadent living.) I love the way the author of this piece slides between being seduced and fulminating righteously against Decadence in a truly nineteenth century way. "Why, it's nothing but a freakshow - you couldn't possibly walk to work in those shoes!"

I did enjoy the creations of Alexander McQueen very much indeed, but I do believe that he learned a great deal from Vivienne Westwood and Jean-Paul Gaultier.

48: Jean-Paul Gaultier did the costumes for The Fifth Element -- a decent actioner by French director Luc Besson. Like with Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, the costumes outshine the plot.

And for those interested in opulent fabrics, rakish sexuality, and the twisted machinations of Church and State, check out The Tudors, starring Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, aka Maxwell Demon from Velvet Goldmine

Well, I was in NYC and tried to see the Alexander McQueen show, but the lines were down the steps and in both directions around the block at the MMoA. We told the cabbie to just head down to the East Village. As luck would have it, we later found two packs of post cards from the show featuring some of the more outlandish fashions, stuffed down in the sofa of the hotel room. I think somebody missed their souvenir. It closes this week, so I suppose if you were really determined you could still make it.

Just came across this magazine which I think may be of interest to some of the people liable to read these missives. Despite the slightly crass advertising angle the magazine looks interesting, even if only for the articles on Mateiu Caragiale's neglected masterpiece The Rakes of the Old Courtyard. A taster to stave off hunger during the long wait for the complete translation from Ex Occidente...:

http://www.absinthenew.com/pages/information.html

Additionally I feel slightly bad about using this venue to plug my own auctions but if anyone's interested I'm auctioning of a reasonably priced copy of the Tartarus Nightmares of an Ether-drinker:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Nightmares-of-an-Ether-drinker-by-Jean-Lorrain-Hard/25...

In the event there is anyone from the DC area in the group: Roger Lathbury, a professor/publisher with an interest in the Decadence, will be speaking on the evening of 13 September in Fairfax to a small gathering of bibliophiles.

The event is free of charge.

A Symbolist art exhibition in New York:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/arts/design/invitation-to-the-voyage.html

Hey Doc, I think I have Baudelairean fever dreams.

Those always make for a fun time.

I was reading The Pleasure of the Text by Barthes. He mentioned the work Cobra by Severo Sarduy Here's the summary blurb:

"Cobra (1972) recounts the tale of a transvestite named Cobra, star of the Lyrical Theater of the Dolls, whose obsession is to transform his/her body. She is assisted in her metamorphosis by the Madam and Pup, Cobra's dwarfish double. They too change shape, through the violent ceremonies of a motorcycle gang, into a sect of Tibetan lamas seeking to revive Tantric Buddhism."

Sounds interesting and seems to carry a Decadent frisson.

Or something ;).

Funny how memory fails... I need to revisit Barthes. As for forgetting and the pleasure of the text, check out Patrick Süskind's essay, "Amnesia in litteris. The books I have read (I think)".

This may be of interest to the brew enthusiasts among us ...

http://alesmith.com/beers/decadence/

A local San Diego brewery. I have a fifth of their Wee Heavy Scottish Ale in the pantry. Waiting for a rainy day. I won't hold my breath.

Just found a fascinating tome at the local thrift shop:

Pompei: the erotic secrets

Plenty of naughty visuals from the last days of Pompeii.

I was at Pompeii in April. From one of the souvenir stalls outside I bought, from a crone of at least 90+ or at least certainly well-weathered lady, a refrigerator magnet with a picture from one of the brothels of a lady being pleasured. As I was paying her she pressed upon me a card with a picture of the Virgin Mary. I am still greatly bemused.

Off-topic current thoughts:
I'm really disappointed in Obama for the crack-down on medical marijuana.
Disappointed enough to question whether I'll vote for him again. In that case,
it'll have to be none of the above, unless there's an "occupy" candidate.

Maybe it's time for an "American Spring"?

Bust the banks, not pot!

Occupy for president!

I'm really disappointed in Obama for the crack-down on medical marijuana. I guess I would be too, if I wasn't born yesterday. My cynicism and contempt is an abyss. Candidate A will do anything and saying that will insure his re-election. It's all a stupid numbers game anyway. One understands why Nietzsche had such contempt for participatory democracy. The rat-faced populism of the Right is only slightly more vile and repellent than the same populism of the Left. At this point, it's all damage control and survival instinct, since politicians, like other job-holders, simply want to stay employed. "Occupy" has become an omnipresent brand almost as annoying as the pink Breast Cancer Awareness(TM) merchandise. I don't disagree with the overarching political aims -- since money will allow any knuckle-dragging simp to run for office who can parrot vague catchphrases for idiot voters -- but my desire is for the movement to become less Michael Moore and more Alfred Jarry I say it's high time to put on a performance of Pere Ubu on the steps of Wall Street, then burn some money, and nominate a pig as Dow Jones Stock Exchange President. It is important to be earnest, but it does boring after a while.

An extremely beautiful and strange animation.

Madame Tutli-Putli

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGyLP6R4HTE&feature=related

Nina Simone's rendition of "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp7Ln9q6Yyk

Subservience, a Beckett rip-off, but well done.

http://www.nfb.ca/film/subservience

The Spine

http://films.nfb.ca/the-spine/

This looks promising: Decadence: An Annotated Anthology (http://www.amazon.com/Decadence-Annotated-Anthology-Jane-Desmarais/dp/0719075513/ref=lh_ni_t)

I hope the editors might include writers/cultures (Latin America, Scandinavia, etc.) typically overlooked in anthologies of this sort.

Neglected Books: http://neglectedbooks.com/?page_id=67

68
Neglected Books is a fantastic site.

I'm curious about the forth-coming film of John Carter of Mars
based on A Princess of Mars. Might be interesting.

"Film" by Samuel Beckett w/ Buster Keaton 1965, 17:29 min

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26H5YjXeCjs&feature=related

"Our Lady of Hatred," in Brittany:

http://clocherstregor.centerblog.net/43-tredarzec-notre-dame-de-la-haine

An anonymous ghost story:

http://books.google.com/books?id=a4pGAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA225&lpg=PA225&dq=...

I was trying to explain Saint Jude to a colleague at work (who was praying for a very modest car repair bill), and I came across this:

http://listverse.com/2007/10/12/top-10-unusual-patron-saints/

What, no St. Expedite? Could it be his fame never spread outside New Orleans? I used to count the novenas promised to him vs. St. Jude in Times Picayune.

Stendhal wrote somewhere about a Sister Scolastica (in Chroniques italiennes? Or the novels?) who was, predictably, getting it on with a canon or so I rhyme to pass the time.

The extravagant saints - those with no clear place in the canon or on the calendar: St Drogo: patron of mutes, cattle and ugly people; Blessed Columba of Rietti: Patron against sorcerers. Let me put up an extravagant pic of St. Denis while we're on the topic.

St. D is thinking, "Look at those abs. I'm ripped! I ought to be the patron saint of sit-ups."

Finished reading the exhaustive new art anthology, Decadence: In Morbid Colours- Art and the Idea of Decadence in the Bohemian Lands 1880-1914

This is perhaps the only catalog I know of that focuses exclusively on "decadent" art as opposed to broader symbolism.

I recommend all of you seek out this huge volume, which features very rare art and excerpts of prose and poetry. There are over 500 reproductions here and most of them are striking, some even unique and worthy of being considered alongside Redon, Munch, and Beardsley: artists like Kobliha, Hlavacek, Konupek, Bilek, Bromse, and Vachal. Also noteworthy is Drtikol's photography, particularly his stunning depictions of Salome.

Chapter headings like these give you an idea of what to expect: The Gloomy; The Debauched; The Morose; The Demon of Love; Satanic Hallucinations; The Purgatory of Death.

All decadent lovers will want this book in their personal library. It's an expensive monograph, but it's worth it for all the art they crammed in here. Even though its emphasis is on the Bohemian region, I rate it the most important work on decadent art since Philippe Julian's Dreamers of Decadence: Symbolist Painters of the 1890s

Thanks for the reminder - it had been in my ABE basket for awhile.

Strindberg bio reviewed in the WSJ today: Occultural Ambassador

Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life

1 of 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTMHUIN6ciM

2 of 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUDD7j8p9RE

3 of 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eccLAZvTpk

Does anyone know anything about the author/origins of the following quote?

"Why do you want to die? Why don’t you want to exist? If you don’t want to participate, my darling, if you don’t want to be part of the happy anxious societies, then turn. Don’t wish to disappear, wish to find something satiating, even if it’s destruction and malcontent. Because I love you so, my darling, and would rather see you evil than dead."

- Jhang Moon-Jin

Here's another. Is this an author or a literary character?

"It’s okay, you can tell me. All those tiny pinpricks in your head, you think them and you want to share them, but then you think: is that okay? Can I think that? Is that scary? God forbid you’re scary. God forbid you’re subject to the same brand of animal passion we all filter. God forbid you love someone so much that they spark disgusting, vulgarian, base parts of your brain. Sensory input is a storm against the craggy rocks of standard. Where is your safe harbor in that? Die in a public fire, die in a solitary corner; which do you prefer?"

Jhang Moon-Jin - The Myriad

Nothing in WorldCat or LC authorities for "Jhang Moon-Jin". I don't know enough about the oriental languages to try other transliterations. Couldn't find "The Myriad" either. A google search shows the excerpts you mentioned being mirrored in a large number of blogs. Have you looked at each one for clues?

Such was the source of the quotes, which I found interesting enough (such is my day) to poke at.

They are striking little passages and I'd like to know where they come from too. You could try contacting the blog poster(s) about them.

It seems to come from this person: Seth David-Andrew Hubbard. I hope to hear from him.

At the bottom of the Abyss, we'll probably find remaindered copies of Fifty Shades of Grey and a musical mash-up of Ke$ha and Justin Bieber played way too loud, using way too much Autotune and Cher samples.

And the prince of heimat harmonies: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq3XaZo3DOw&feature=related

Woe, gloom and despair! Gore Vidal lives no more. Our greatest man is gone.

I burn Paris by Bruno Jasienski just arrived from Twisted Spoon in Prague. Haven't started on it yet, but it's a beautifully designed hardcover and very reasonably priced.

Side Real Press just released a cool new book ('DANCES OF VICE, HORROR, & ECSTASY') on Anita Berber and her partner in burlesque Sebastian Droste. Looks pretty interesting as it includes their poetry (of which I was completely unaware of) and a lot of photos that have never been published. Looks pretty collectible.

http://www.siderealpress.co.uk/

Also for anyone who is not aware (it doesn't look like many people added this to their list) there is a translation of the decadent Goncourt novel La Faustin available by two mercenary presses (Nabu, Hardpress). The hardpress one I have is pretty readable once you get used to it.

Readable as in weird OCR mayhem or clunky translation?

Not really mayhem, but the letters are stretched out to fit the page in a slightly distorted way. Maybe the Nabu one is better. Translation was a bit cumbersome grammatically but not horrible by any means.

If you are ever in Asheville, North Carolina (which I direct you to be, if ever possible, for your own pleasure) be sure pack a mortgage payment for food and books. The Captain's Bookshelf, run by Chandler Gordon, is a candy store (candy I can't really afford - but...). I picked up a first US edition of MR James' Five Jars, Thomas Burke's Limehouse Nights and a couple of things by Norman Douglas. I left behind firsts, with dustjackets of HR Wakefield, MP Shiel and others. And then my idea of heaven is not too far down the street: The Battery Park Book Exchange Champagne Bar. It sounds very precious, but it really is a lot of fun. There are used and antiquarian books - many of which are real bargains (as opposed to the other shop), and you can wander through the stacks with a pint in your hand.

Speaking of Wakefield, check out Imagine a Man in a Box.

As it happens, I picked up Wakefield's Old Man's Beard just the other day - my first eBook for the kindle. Ash-Tree Press reissued his five original collections of ghost stories, with extras, in the nineties, along with a further volume of previously unseen tales. All six volumes are now available in electronic format from their site, at a very reasonable price.

Never been that enthused about the idea of ebooks, but the Ash-Tree OOP back catalogue is well beyond my pocket as printed books, and the electronic format makes their definitive editions of the canon of classic ghost story writers accessible.

This weekend Larry McMurtry is auctioning off 300,000 collectible and antiquarian books from his famously gigantic used bookstore in Archer, Texas. The books will be auctioned in lot's of 100 books.

96. Congratulations on your new treasures. Asheville is now on my list of places to visit sometime.

Here's a review of Decadent Verse edited by Caroline Blyth. http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.5/colin_fleming_late_victorian_decadent_poetry....

Atlas Press is releasing a volume of work by Hans Henny Jahnn in early November. It contains the novella Night of Lead as well as three stories from Thirteen Uncanny Tales. It seems the ideal place for the english language reader to jump in to the work of Jahnn. All of this has been previously published in english translation, but is not readily available without paying a premium for vg used copies.

http://www.atlaspress.co.uk/index.cgi?action=view_eclectic&number=13&rem...

Several good things on that list (these Atlas Press editions quickly disappear and get resold at those premium rates - Night of Lead, for example.).

Interesting to see Atlas are to reprint Don't Tell Sybil, and intrigued by the 'new illustrative material'. I thought it was an uneven book, but it contains some startling details not included in Melly's earlier, autobiographical writings, perhaps because the individuals concerned were no longer around. All three volumes of his autobiography are well worth reading, with Rum, Bum and Concertina perhaps the best and most scabrous - confessions of an able (and very willing) seaman Surrealist.

I recently paid one of those premium rates for their original paperback edition of Desnos' Liberty or Love but I can see I'll be buying it all over again in hardcover format for the addition of Mourning for Mourning.

This is really of secondary interest but Nigel Tourneur wrote a couple of decadent short stories that Loeonard Smithers published. Not much is really known about the author. I believe this title Hidden Witchery has been mentioned in one of the wormwoods.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Tourneur

And speaking of secondary interest there's also the american decadent Orson Durand's short story book Necromancy Street and Other Tales. Limited to 50 copies. He seems to have been a book publisher in the 30s.

hello all,

104: Orson Durand is new to me. Do you have any further info on him?
REGARDS!
John

Hi, I first read about the book in Wormwood No.11
Apparently Orson Durand was from Indiana and ran a small imprint called
the Raven's Head Press in the 30's and the Press of Orson Durand in the 40's. Aside from Necromancy
Street (a collection of 4 stories) he also published Berenice by Edgar Allen Poe and
later Ernest Dowson's poetry.

Ha!

thanks for this. I actually own that Wormwood am thus ashamed that I seemed to have learnt nothing from reading it.

A copy of 'Necromancy Street...' is now on its way to me. I shall report back to everyone on this site on its contents. Thanks for letting us know of its existance again

REGARDS!

J

What does the Chapel of the Abyss make of the late Jacques Barzun's work From Dawn to Decadence? I have not read it, albeit in tiny snippets. Is this a modern version of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West or a highbrow version of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock? Is "the West is doomed" apocalyptic rhetoric or "You kids get off my lawn!" hectoring from an old guy out of touch with modern times?

I am about 15 pages from the end. A very breezy (as it has to be - 800 pages for 500 years) and highly readable survey of cultural history. Toward the last few pages, 1950s-1990s, it does get to be a bit Spengler AND old guy hectoring (especially the latter) - but from a source I didn't mind hearing it from; it also bears thinking about. The guy not only recalls hearing Big Bertha during WWI (!), he was a gifted scholar. It is not a sustained study of turn of the century before last decadence/yellow stuff, but it was there. He'd include up through the present in the decadent period he is talking about.

More to the point: There are no orgies, that I recall, and Hitler is barely mentioned.

Sounds like a dull party, indeed!

109: He'd include up through the present in the decadent period he is talking about.

So what is Barzun's notion of decadence vs. Mr. Waugh's mystico-religious notion of decadence/Decadence? Having read Spengler's sprawling 2-volume Decline of the West and William McNeill's revisionist Rise of the West, I'll have to take a crack at Mr. Barzun. Also props to Barzun for being intellectually rigorous yet readable. Not an easy feat.

> 111: Well, you can have a good party without actually mentioning Hitler :-)

113: Just remember to invite Andrew WK and bring the taco dip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xemLz_fR1Ac

Mr. Waugh's mystico-religious notion... I must have been off my meds when I ladled out that impression. I blame society. No transcendence where none intended :).

113: Ok. But I'll fight for the orgies

Speaking of the abyssmal, kswolff recently linked an English language translation of Celine's Bagatelles for a Massacre. Celine must have gone mad is all I can say. I could not believe how hateful irrational and paranoid it was. Seemingly (I say because I don't read Francais) really well-translated though. Randomly flipped through and found a representative piece of writing that was offensive in a provocative rather than hateful and tiresome manner and dropped it in a common knowledge entry.

http://www.librarything.com/work/6159157

IN RE your question, or at-least one aspect of it. Sometimes it's not a bad idea to watch the surrounding world (revolting though it is, in the main), and the comings and goings of supposedly conventional celebrities. Case in point, the late Jacques Barzun who died recently, old and full of years. While I disagree with much of what he wrote, he was a redoubtable scholar, and his skill-set -- as later generations would come to say -- was a standing rebuke to most persons who presume to open their mouths on literature, music, history and the rest. He probably knew more in his fourth language than most of us do in our first. The later posts by slickdpdx are absolutely on target. As are "Chaplain" benwaugh's, though for rather different reasons.

I think Barzun's ultimate definition of decadence is the will without the act or something like that. Slacktivism would be further evidence of decadence in Western culture. E.g. I elect to "like" Let's End Hunger on Facebook but I don't actually do anything to feed any starving people.

119: Slacktivism would be further evidence of decadence in Western culture. Not to be confused with Slack as a Religious Calling, see Church of the SubGenius and the like. His Serene Eminence JR "Bob" Dobbs used the zine aesthetic and kooky screeds to bewail a world that has been ensorceled by the Protestant Work ethic, empty industriousness, and seeing one's status as a Rotarian-of-merit being comparable to the holy acts of the Church Fathers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNmPamZelVQ

I would never! I am a big fan of Mr. Bob Black. I don't think Mr. Barzun would be, but I think he would appreciate him all the same.

Uniting those themes: history, slack and slacktivism - http://www.t0.or.at/bobblack/bbtxt01.htm

Being a slacker seems like the opposite of 19th Ce. Decadence. The hero in decadent literature is inactive outwardly but a cerebral workaholic internally.

118: Oh pray, enumerate them.

IN RE 123. O, come-on, Chaplain. You've walked into a classic joke with the punch-line "One, Two, Three, Four".

IN RE #119. I have a personal horror of coinages like "slacktivism", though I certainly get what you mean. And without in the least suggesting any fault in you -- for we all, God knows, could do better -- may I dare to hope that the First Person in your example ("I elect to like . . .") is in fact an abstraction, rather than a confession? Of course, it's an entirely different discussion to address -- or preferably annihilate-- the word-poisoning inextricably bound to the words "like" on Facebook. Ditto "follower" on whatever-the-Hell site uses that. So who in their right mind wants to be a follower?? But, as I said, that's another discussion, for those with a higher Boiling Point than mine.

It was an abstraction. I would never "like" "Let's End Hunger". I prefer Watch to Follow, it smacks of voyeurism.

A post on Dennis Cooper's blog about Julien Gracq and Chateau d'Argol

http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.fr/2012/12/spotlight-on-julien-gracq-c...

Excellent. Thank you!

Upcoming release of some obscure lost decadent novel written by the publisher of Maldoror and Rimbaud. Released in 1891 it remained unknown for 100 years.

2013. Published by Atlas press.

Princess Sappho (Léon Genonceaux) The Tutu, morality of the fin-de-siècle

http://www.atlaspress.co.uk/index.cgi?action=news

The description says "it was never sold in bookstores as the author realised it would see him jailed". I can hardly wait. Thanks for the tip.

From amazon.fr:

Tous les personnages du Tutu sont des excentriques, des extravagants, voire des monstres - au sens propre du mot. Le premier d'entre eux, Mauri de Noirof, épouse une riche héritière obèse et portée sur la boisson, engrosse une femme à deux têtes qui s'exhibait dans les cirques, devient député, ministre de la Justice, et se livre en compagnie de sa mère à des orgies de débris anatomiques. Imprimé en 1891 par Léon Genonceaux (alors éditeur de Rimbaud et de Lautréamont), découvert par Pascal Pia qui en révéla l'existence dans un article de la Quinzaine Littéraire en 1966 : Le Tutu n'a été rendu public qu'en 1991, par les Editions Tristram, provoquant émoi et sidération chez nombre de critiques et lecteurs. Si l'absence d'un auteur clairement identifié et la surprenante modernité de l'écriture - qui annonce Jarry, Queneau, le Surréalisme - ont pu faire soupçonner à certains une supercherie, l'authenticité de ce chef-d'œuvre est aujourd'hui établie de manière irréfutable. En complément de cette édition définitive du Tutu, la seconde partie du volume comprend, outre une postface inédite de Julian Rios et la reprise du texte fondateur de Pascal Pia, une enquête détaillée et illustrée sur le destin rocambolesque de ce roman hors normes, due au spécialiste de Rimbaud et de Lautréamont, Jean-Jacques Lefrère.

This is of course a description of the French edition, the extra material may or may not be available in the English one.

http://englandshiddenreverse.tumblr.com/

The back end of the midden.

The Judith Gautier short stories are out on Black Coat Press. I look forward to reading it.

Thank you. I'm excited. Here's the link.

http://www.blackcoatpress.com/gautier.htm

The Pope announces he will retire:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/world/europe/pope-benedict-xvi-says-he-will-re...

He pulled a Nixon, except that Nixon had ethical standards, unlike Pope Benedict XVI, who treats children like Gilles de Rais or John Wayne Gacy Call me crazy, but I tend to be a little harsh on anyone who coddles, protects, and bankrolls the defense attorneys of pedophiles.

Black Coat has also - I just discovered - put out a collection of Jean Richepin's Cruel Tales.

We have a new Pope! Huzzah and excelsior!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s9SYX7TSJ0

Supposed to be 80 degrees in CA tomorrow. If you freezing your tush off back east or in the midwest, you can get a tan in CA.

Too much sunshine will give you cancer.

The new pope is a jesuit. Scary.

Habent papam, I say.

Oh! Some of my best friends are Jesuits. Honestly.

> 140: For a moment there I read "habent spam' - the hazards of living in modern times, sigh.

Nihil obstat, I hope.

> 141

Some of the best Jesuits are friendly.

Des Essientes valued his Jesuit education highly, didn't he?

ETA: And the reason there's never been a Jesuit pope before: Will the white pope answer to the black pope? I figure they'll just be pals. If not, get the popcorn!

It's the dead of winter here, still, and my water heater has abdicated. Unless the pope can help me out, he, she or it can be hanged.

Religion seems to be a popular disguise for pedophiles.
Kind of ironic.

Let's just forget about spring and go directly to summer. Might have to turn on the air conditioning this afternoon.

144: Is your water heater piping white smoke or black smoke?

The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait looks like a fascinating oneiric opium hallucination. Another Stableford adaptation worth looking into. It appears that Gabriel de Lautrec was acquainted with nearly all the symbolists including Verlaine, Schwob, Regnier, Lorrain, and Oscar Wilde and later on became an Alfred Jarry-esque proto-surrrealist. His early poetry collection Poemes en Prose was modeled after Baudelaire's. He also translated The Purple Cloud into french.

>133 VolupteFunebre:
>134 DavidX:

Is there a particular reason why the books are "adapted" instead of "translated"? Or is it supposed to mean the same thing?

It's probably up to that specific publication as I haven't seen anywhere else. Amazon even lists their books as published by Hollywood Comics, which I don't see anywhere in the actual Black Coat Press website. Anyway they have some good titles come out once in a blue moon. There's going to be a new Jean Lorrain title coming out next Christmas. Good stocking stuffer.

Black Coat Press seems to proofread the adaptations prior to publication. The Borgo Press, which published Stableford's translation of Champavert, clearly skipped that preliminary. Black Coat is as egregious in their cover art as Borgo - giving Borel, Gautier, Kahn, etc., something in common with Molly Hatchet albums and Conan the Barbarian's wet dreams.

>149 VolupteFunebre:
Ah, thanks. The reason why it says Hollywood comics might be that, as far as I was able to gather from Black Coat Press's website, it's a part of Hollywood Comics.

>150 Randy_Hierodule:
I really like your talent for describing their book covers. They do indeed go quite... creative with it.

Thanks for the replies, both of you. It seems that the "adaptation" part probably makes no difference and means the same as "translation", so I think I'll be doing some shopping soon.

>148 cinnamonshops:

Academic semantics?

Presumably an "adaptation" allows the adaptor greater artistic liberty in interpreting and conveying the originally intended artistic message of a work than a word-by-word literal "translation". If so, I think the use of "adaptation" would often be more appropriate than "translation" for works of fiction. On the other hand... I suppose adaptation could mean that the adaptor is simply using the original work as a matrix and then adding things not part of the untranslated original.....(?)

I've also seen the term "englishing" utilized in older works.

>150 Randy_Hierodule:

I agree with you about the Black Coat cover art... must have something to do with Brian Stableford's massively prolific SciFi/Fantasy background and Black Coat's/Hollywood Comics' apparent primary market of youthful SciFi/Fantasy readers who can afford the $20+ per book???

I wondered about Black Coat Press' use of "adaptation" and it seems to stem from an idea that the role of translator is under-appreciated. True enough, no doubt, but adopting "adaptation"/"adapter" as an alternative just causes confusion.

I'm still grateful he sneaks in these more literary "fantasies" anyway.

I don't know about talent - but along with the horrible profusion of typos (Borgo) that tastelessness is a sincere disservice to the material (and, typo-wise, of course, to the reader). I reluctantly admit I acknowledge the tie in between the satirical pornography of Rops and the mythic nudity of Moreau ("adapted" to the perceived tastes of the Borgo Black Coat fan-base as "monsters and boobies". There is a time and place for such trivia. Tomorrow night, mine) - so maybe it's just a bigotry on my part. As to the use of the term "adapted" in place of "translated" - it leaves much unsaid (as pointed out above).

155: I am too. I just wish they'd give a standard attention to quality. The cover art is a quibble. Having to translate as you read the translation due to miserable editing is a legitimate complaint. I know they can't be making much of a profit on the authors they select - and I would like to applaud and support their courage (Black Coat, graphics quibble aside, has done a quality job), but Wildside's impress, Borgo Press, really did a cheap job on the Borel book - which is priced at $15 on Amazon. It makes me hesitant to buy anything else from them.

Have we covered specifically Asian decadents? (Europeans seduced by the charms of the East I'm sure has been thoroughly trod upon.) I mention this because I picked up Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata. The back cover blurb compared it to Against Nature by Huysmans. It would be a fruitful discussion to compare and contrast the notion of sensualism in both East and West.

Junichiro Tanizaki's short stories and novellas are rife with morbid decadence and eroticism.
And you can't go wrong with Edogawa Ranpo. Watch the Blind Beast if you get the chance.

Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties, where shriveled old men pay for the sensual jolt of fondling young women as they slumber (drug-induced, if I recall correctly), has a sort of creepy loveliness to it.

Izumi Kyoka's early short stories are excellent examples of this japanese erotic decadent sensibility as well.

For those who like their visions of hell to be in 3D (who doesn't?), here's something to look forward to this coming October...

http://www.londonstereo.com/diableries/index.html

Hi all,

The Diableries are amazing! This will almost certainly be the best book I will buy this year. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED without even having having seen it!
J

Not 3-d, but Diableries: A Trip To The Underworld: 19th Century Images Of Satan and Hell is available and quite nice.

Henry Chapront's illustrations for La-Bas: http://www.bethlemheritage.org.uk/gallery/pages/LDBTH111.asp .

The Chapel might be interested in the work Gottfried Benn, the great german expressionist/nihilist poet. In particular I'd like to draw attention to his 1912 collection Morgue and other Poems which deals with "physical decay of flesh, with blood, cancer, and death". A large collection of his work is coming up soon by FSG.

A new exhibit at the Poe Museum (in Richmond, VA) covers Poe's influence in Paris:
http://www.styleweekly.com/richmond/city-of-frights/Content?oid=1909551

Oahspe ... and it is very odd:

http://www.angelfire.com/in2/oahspe3/oindex.html

Like a steampunk Urantia Book, although that doesn't make it any less odd.

168
For more of this homegrown American weirdness, you could check out Penguin's anthology American Scriptures: An Anthology of Sacred Writings.

> 169

What a useful digest! I'm surprised I didn't know about that one.

169: High Weirdness by Mail, a SubGenius anthology of pre-Internet strangeness (religious, political, etc.) is another nice resource.

> 171

Not really objective or sympathetic, though. It's mostly useful as a guide to contacting freaky individuals and communities in order to privately mock them, which is not what I had hoped for, based on the author's other output.

171: When one anoints oneself as a prophet/shaman/salesman, some mockery is inevitable. America is, after all, the birthplace of Mormonism, Oahspe, and Urantia

Front Free Endpaper, the blog of Callum James, book collector, book dealer, publisher, writer, et al. Publications on offer include Vincent O' Sullivan, Rolfiana, etc.

http://callumjames.blogspot.com/

Thanks, David. I have bought some Corvo pamphlets from him in the distant past.

Here is an interesting article (from a collector's perspective) on artist, author, aesthete and dandy, Phillipe Jullian:

http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2010/12/13/philippe-jullian-connoisseur-...

This gentleman does interesting things with his time.

http://www.denisproteor.tumblr.com

Thanks, Dreamers of Decadence is an old favorite. The Symbolists and The Triumph of Art Nouveau are on their way.

an interesting painting from The Symbolists

The Voice of Evil 1895 by Georges de Feure

http://www.librarything.com/pic/3979499

Links to information on Starrett and Cabell: http://www.ulib.niu.edu/rarebooks/vincentstarrett.cfm

Arthur Symon's book of short stories Spiritual Adventures is mentioned as a good example of decadent style in Decadent Style. A nitpicking sort of book about the distinction of books with decadent themes like naturalist novels, and books of decadent style like A Rebours. Also includes chapters on art and music of the period.

French language link for Le nouvel Attila review's Prix Nocturne (http://www.editions-attila.net/nocturne/selection.html) "awarding forgotten works of fantastic or unusual inspiration". Although one or two of the winners and too many of the books short-listed for the prize don't appear to be available in english translation/adaptation, the site does appear to identify a goldmine of mostly obsure treasures.

Just picked up a vintage copy of Erik Dorn by Ben Hecht. Having enjoyed Fantazius Mallare, I'm curious what this little book holds.

183. I'm very glad to see that The Marquis of Bolibar by Leo Perutz made the list. I've been reading all his translated works and they are all amazing. Perutz should be much better known than he is.

184. I'll look for Eric Dorn. I'm very interested in Hecht as I am an old movie fan. He wrote many screenplays and was Burt Lancaster's partner in one of the first artist owned production companies, Hecht-Lancaster Productions.

A whiff of the poet's afflatus: http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/HermesGod.html#Fables ("GOD OF ANIMAL FABLES").

Must have been those sour grapes.

>177 poetontheone: That really should have included a warning for NSFW content. Also, unless I'm missing something, this is just a porn tumblr and with images whose look make me think of spy cams... which seems dodgy and creepy (not in a good way).

These are all his photographs, and all consensually arranged. Sorry, my art/porn boundary is a bit shaky. I blame my postmodern sensibilities.

For anyone interested, this is MY tumblr: liquoredgoat.tumblr.com

>189 poetontheone:: If they were consensually arranged then I see no issue, but I still think a NSFW warning would have been in order since not all of us want to randomly open a page with sexual content at all times.

My tumblr, for the interested, is listed on my profile page. Can't remember the URL, I've changed it enough times and I'm undercaffeinated.

Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann is a praiseworthy early work (mostly vignettes) of the great German modernist and would be of interest here as his obsession with decadence seems to be at its height early on in his career up until the Magic Mountain (and then again in his last novel Doctor Faustus.

The Thelemic Temple's Revised Rules (a parody):

http://www.somethingawful.com/news/thelema-temple-rules/

Jakob Wasserman's World's Illusion

http://jakobwassermann.blogspot.ca/2011/01/jakob-wassermann-worlds-illusion.html

CIA facial recognition software identifies pic of ‘unknown woman’ as Francis Bacon in drag:

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/cia_facial_recognition_software_identifies_pi...

I posted this elsewhere, but it clearly belongs in the chapel:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/us/its-not-the-living-dead-just-a-funeral-with...

I don't remember having seen this site mentioned

http://www.diseasedgardens.com/MyNewBlog/front-page/

but it looks a good place to spend the next rainy evening when nothing's happening in Brazil.

Where do the publications Heavy Metal and 2000 AD fit in the spectrum of decadence?

Echo's Bones, the tenth and final story from More Pricks than Kicks but was excised at the last minute. Highly recommended for Beckett addicts. Belaqua returns from the dead!

Very recently a translation has been published of the Al-Quran, Ash Sheitan; a religious text of the Yazidi "devil worshipers", portrayed so vividly in William Seabrook's book Adventures in Arabia. The book is published under the title "The Devil's Quran" (Martinet Press, isbn: 9780692260845).

This of particular interest considering current events in Iraq.

Anyone see Guardians of the Galaxy? I found The Collector (played with maximum strangeness by Benecio Del Toro akin to Jean des Esseintes ... IN SPACE! Just check out the poster:

http://cdn.screenrant.com/wp-content/uploads/Guardians-of-the-Galaxy-Poster-The-...

He also has his base of operations inside a planet-sized skull of an extinct alien being and its called Knowhere.

Devil Baby Attack:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUKMUZ4tlJg

Because children are our future ... our dark future.

The chap who, for no reason whatsoever I assumed was Hungarian, briefly glimpsed at 1:33: Is he imploring or decrying?

Jean Ray, Thomas Owen, etc. http://www.diseasedgardens.com/MyNewBlog/jean-ray-the-end-of-the-street/

Paschal Beverly Randolph, black esotericist and advocate of mystic sex:

http://hilobrow.com/2014/10/08/paschal-beverly-randolph/

Randoph's Ravalette is a paragon of the novelized quasi-autobiography common among occultists (see Frabato the Magician, Diary of a Drug Fiend, and others), and it's an unjustly-neglected window on the 19th-century emergence of occultism from the spiritualist milieu.

ETA: The 20th-century occultist who most prominently announced her sympathy for Randolph was probably Maria de Naglowska, whose works on sex magic are now happily available in English due to the efforts of Donald Traxler.

The Yellow Nineties Online. Includes biographies, essays and digitized journals.

http://www.1890s.ca/

All things Huysmans:

http://www.huysmans.org/en/about.htm

"Weasels" by rogue taxidermist Liz McGrath:

http://www.elizabethmcgrath.com/sculpture/LizMcGrath_Weasels.jpg

new groups

world music

https://www.librarything.com/groups/worldmusic

Hashish Club, a private group, invitation on request

https://www.librarything.com/groups/thehashishclub

Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan:

http://us.macmillan.com/breathturnintotimestead/paulcelan

Commentary on Jean Lorrain, Count Stenbock, and others: http://strangeflowers.wordpress.com/

Cluub Zarathustra, comedy in a Nietzschean vein:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtwCkqla1PA

Recent release from Alejandro Jodorowsky, Where the Bird Sings Best: http://www.restlessbooks.com/bookstore/where-the-bird-sings-best

I haven't read it yet, but if it's anything like his movies (e.g., El Topo, The Holy Mountain, Santa Sangre) it should be the wildest of rides...oh yeah, and Kanye West recommends it.

Zibaldone by Giacomo Leopardi. Reminds of Philip K. Dick's Exegesis in its epic scope:

http://theamericanreader.com/the-book-of-twenty-million-pages-leopardi-and-the-z...

Not to be confused with: http://ireadoddbooks.com/

Thanks for that Karl, another book that is going to take me a lifetime to get to grips with.

Jung, PKD, Musil, Pessoa, and now this guy.

On decadent illustrators: http://www.banger.com/art/index.html

And poems of Harry Crosby:

http://www.banger.com/crosby/index.html

> 148 cinnamonshops:

Answering your 13 month old question, here's how Black Coat Press explains adaptation v. translation: http://www.blackcoatpress.com/adaptedby.htm

https://thirdeyecinema.wordpress.com/2013/03/10/journal-of-decadence-children-of...

Not sure if this one has come up before?

It is good to see reviews of these books, but I wonder how the author came up with this:

"Further, unlike Dedalus’ higher quality, bright white paper stock and easy to read font, Twisted Spoon uses what would appear to be the lowest quality of recycled pulp, a dull and mealy yellow in tone, which is quite difficult to read in all but the very best lighted of circumstances, and printed in a crappy Times New Roman font (which is supposedly “easy to read”, but is actually rather strain-inducing, particularly on a low grade paper stock of this sort."

I am grateful to Dedalus for many reasons, but the quality of the paper and bindings (and occasionally, the translations: Camillo Boito's Senso, for instance) are not among them. The Twisted Spoon Press, however, does produce books of quality. I have never had one of their books jaundice or fall out of its binding. The paper and binding of their titles are of good quality and many of them are quite beautiful (e.g.: the Ladislav Klima and Paul Leppin hardcover editions).

I noticed that comment too and don't remember any problems with TSP books. Maybe, he was confusing
TSP with Dedalus Press? I've had a couple of DP books fall apart. In spite of their shoddy bindings,
I'll still buy Dedalus for reading copies of hard-to-find titles.

On a similar note, I found a vintage Dedalus paperback at my local Barnes & Noble. It's Monsieur de Phocas by Jean Lorraine (released in 1994). Why that was in the new books section is beyond my comprehension. Due to its age, the pages are yellowed. But it's strangely fitting for the decadent subject matter.

"The beauty of the twentieth century is the charm of the hospital, the grace of the cemetery, of consumption and emaciation. I admit that I have submitted to it all; worse, I have loved with all my heart."

It's not that old. My copy is from 1997 (well, almost 20 years for a Dedalus paperback....), and it's yellowed as well.

Has anyone read "Sins of the Fathers: Decadence in France 1870 - 1914" by Jennifer Birkett?

I just ordered a copy - thank you for the notice. I can only assume that the study has been suffused and strained through some tired/tiring institutional dogma (Freud, gender theory, etc.) - but I do hope, given the date range, that some unknown curiosities might be brought to light: persons, untranslated texts, etc. Or that author might be an impassioned and erudite proselyte, like Norman O. Brown.

229: Birkett has a new academic monograph coming out this July on Samuel Beckett She is Emeritus Professor of French Studies at the University of Birmingham, so its suffusion with academic-ese is probably inevitable. But an occasional sojourn to the Ivory Tower isn't always a bad thing, although wrestling with the specialist, academic jargon can be challenging.

No - scholarship is wonderful and revered; alacrity with jargon probably is as well, on tenure committees (I have done the same, so I understand the obligation- but just can't read it any longer).

I would recommend reading Sins of our Fathers. I didn't find it too p0m0, if you know what I mean. Here's a list of my favourite literary criticism works:

Waiting for Pegasus (for it's shear depth and breadth of otherwise unknown works)
Decadence and the Making of Modernism (for most successfully showing the link from decadence/parnassianism/symbolism to modernism)
Decadent Style (for elucidating the dichotomy and blending of the themes of decadence and the decadent style)

232: Picking up on the same thread, I'd highly recommend Art Nouveau and the Erotic, by Ghislaine Wood. I concise study (with ample illustrations) of the Art Nouveau visual style and the erotic, ranging from the kitschy to the outre to the blasphemous.

Not sure if this site has been posted previously... Complete texts of The Yellow Book and some other magazines: http://www.1890s.ca

Excellent!

Slavoj Zizek's Board Game Reviews, courtesy of Somethingawful.com:

http://www.somethingawful.com/news/zizek-hungry-hippos/

Underworld Amusements has a new release of Edgar Saltus's best (and most decadent) fiction combined into one volume: http://www.underworldamusements.com/product/the-truth-about-tristrem-varick-mr-i.... Sometime back they'd released Saltus's brilliant decadent/pessimist philosophical works The Philosophy of Disenchantment and The Anatomy of Negation, also in one volume.

The philosophical works are definitely worth getting in one volume.

237: Excellent! The D'Annunzio t is going into the wardrobe ASAP. And the publisher, a topically erudite fellow, is an ordained minister.

Arthur Symons' introduction to Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher: http://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1970/p1976205.htm

Not really sure where to put this: An excellent review of both Dancer From the Dance by Andrew Holleran and Faggots by Larry Kramer:

http://www.donshewey.com/arts_articles/dancer_faggots.html

From the review: "At the end," of Dancer from the Dance "when in one cataclysmic weekend, Sutherland ODs, Malone disappears, and the Everard Baths burns down, it is unclear whether an era has passed or whether the beat goes remorselessly on. And we care enough to wonder which is better."

While not Decadent Literature per se, the novel fits a lot of the criteria. World War I ended European Decadence, the same way the AIDS epidemic ended the hedonism and clandestine nature of gay life in the United States.

The Eccentropedia by Chris Mikul at ireadoddbooks.com:

http://ireadoddbooks.com/the-eccentropedia-by-chris-mikul/

Picked up a copy of The Doyle Diary by Michael Baker, about "the strange and curious case of Charles Altamont Doyle":

http://www.fright.com/edge/doyle_diaries.htm

"Here’s a truly amazing artifact for the ages, a sumptuous reproduction of a sketchbook kept by Charles Altamont Doyle, father of Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle, during his 1889 internment in a Scottish lunatic asylum. The purpose of the drawings was allegedly to prove that their creator was unjustly incarcerated; the opening line reads, “Keep steadily in view that this book is ascribed wholly to the produce of a MADMAN. Whereabouts would you say was the deficiency of intellect? Or depraved taste? If in the whole book you can find a single evidence of either, mark it and record it against me.”

"What the book does reveal is a rich and strange netherworld of fairies and demons. Charles Doyle was an extraordinarily accomplished artist, and his work here, in its amazing boldness and color, can stand up to that of nearly any Victorian draftsman. It’s been favorably compared (by individuals far more authoritative than me) to the work of big names like Fuseli and Blake."

Between his mad dad, medical studies, proto-feminism, inventing the most famous fictional hero ever, anti-colonialism, spiritualism and fairy suffrage, A. C. Doyle had one hell of a colourful life experience.

I just bought a book about another Victorian artist who spent most of his life in a madhouse (Broadmoor--he had killed his father in a delusional fit and was committed as criminally insane), Richard Dadd.

Many of his paintings feature dense structure of exquisite detail:

Sebastian Horsley, dandy and martyr: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arQkLGvAOjg

Ob Intimacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIKPG6VEKxk

On Drugs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUFyC53mJ9Q

Crom Your Enthusiasm, a new essay series from Hilbrow.com, looking at fantasy from the 1930s:

http://hilobrow.com/2015/08/02/crom-your-enthusiasm-intro/

"As I’ve noted elsewhere, if the Nineteen-Teens gave us adventures that were romantic and uncanny, and the Twenties adventures that were wised-up and hardboiled, then the Thirties offered up a dialectical synthesis of these modes. The twenty-five adventures about which HiLobrow’s twenty-five contributors will write, over the course of this month, are at one and the same time romantic and wised-up, uncanny and hardboiled. Thirties fantasy lit is an extraordinary juggling act, one that has inspired the best fantasy writers of subsequent decades."

Two Poems
by José Asuncíon Silva

One night

One night
One night heavy with the scent of perfumes, with murmurings
and music of wings,
One night
As phantasmal fireflies flickered in humid, nuptial shadows,
We walked together, slowly, our bodies close, and you,
Silent, pale,
As if a presentiment of infinite pain and sorrow
Had shaken you to the most secret depths of your being,
Came strolling along the garden path through
Fragrant gardens,
And in the indigo
Of the vast, farthest heavens, the full moon shed its unearthly light,
And your shadow,
Languid, mellow,
And my shadow,
Lengthened by the moonbeams falling upon
The path’s somber sands
Were blending,
Forming one
Forming one
Forming one long, lonely shadow!
Forming one long, lonely shadow!
Forming one long, lonely shadow!

Tonight,
Alone, my soul
Overflowing with the unfathomable grief and agony of your death,
Separated from your being by shadows, by time and distance,
By the infinite darkness
No mortal voice can penetrate,
Alone, silent,
I walked that lonely path,
And somewhere far away dogs were barking at the moon,
At the pale moon,
And frogs were
Shrilly croaking,
I felt cold; it was the chill of the chamber where you lay,
The cold of your cheeks and temples, of your beloved hands
Among the snowy folds
Of mortuary sheets,
It was the icy chill of the tomb, it was the chill of death,
It was the chill of nada . . .
And my shadow,
Lengthening by the falling moonbeams,
Walked alone,
Walked alone,
Walked alone through the deserted garden!
And your slim, supple shadow,
Languid, mellow,
As on that warm and humid night of springtime death,
As on that night filled with sweet perfumes, with murmurings
and music of wings,
Appeared and walked with mine,
Appeared and walked with mine,
Appeared and walked with mine … O shadows entwined!
O shadows that seek each other, blending together on nights
Of tears and black despair!

—Written circa 1895, published posthumously in El libro de versos, 1923.

Tropical Landscape

The river spills its soporific magic
Into the journey’s calm monotony,
And in the distance vistas are erased
As shadows lengthen toward infinity.

A lone thatched hut slips past, glimpsed
Through a matted jungle tapestry
That casts designs of tangled leaves and vines
Worked in tones of dusk’s variety.

Venus comes to life in purest space,
Below, a native hollowed-out canoe
Grooves the drowsy current, swift and sure,

As in the west, the fiery setting sun
Forges a second green and rose-tinged sky
In the lazy river’s liquid mirror.

—Published in El libro de versos, 1923



Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden.

Margaret Sayers Peden is a translator living in Columbia, Missouri. Among her translations are the works of Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, and Jose Emilio Pacheco. Her most recent publications include Iasbel Allende’s Paul, Aphrodite and Daughter of Fortune.



—The history of poetry abounds with tragic legends, but the story of the Colombian poet José Asunción Silva, who shot himself in the heart in 1896, is difficult to surpass. Born into a wealthy family, Silva died broke, having been sued by dozens of his creditors. The year before his death, the boat in which he was returning to Colombia from Europe sank and with it vanished two collections of stories, two volumes of poems and a short novel. Suva’s reputation is based on a novel, De sobremesa, which he reconstructed. Of the surviving poems, the haunting and melodic Nocturno (published here as One Night) became the most beloved Colombian poem of all time, and one of the most influential poems in Latin American literature. Today, José Asunción Silva is recognized as Colombia’s national poet, and the house where he died in Bogota, Casa Silva, is a museum and meeting place of Colombian poets. The face of the poet who killed himself to get away from his creditors adorns Colombia’s five-peso coin.

(http://bombmagazine.org/article/2363/two-poems)

To Cross This Distance
by Jaime Saenz

Ill.

At the touch of the fleeting secret, of stopped time, of
self-consuming fire, and of ice, present and eternal,

every eye, every image, will blaze up and burn.

Every hollow within the earth, every darkness that falls,
will forever remain.

(If you’re a sorcerer, laugh. But if not, hearing the devil’s
on your tail, don’t laugh.)

With the passing of the years and the turning of these
worlds and the lights I’ve
gathered from contemplating the stars, I’ve become aware.

In the torrential waters every soul dissolves into universalsoul.



IV.

The immense malaise cast by shadows, the melancholic
visions surging from the night,

everything terrifying, everything cruel, that without
reason, that without name,

one has to take it, who knows why.



If you have nothing to eat but garbage, don’t say a word.

If the garbage makes you sick, don’t say a word.

If they cut off your feet, if they boil your hands, if your
tongue rots, if your spine splits in two, if your soul fines
down to nothing, don’t say a word.

If they poison you, don’t say a word, even if your bowels
slide from your mouth and your hair stands straight up; even
if your eyes well with blood, don’t say a word.

If you feel good, don’t feel good. If you fall behind, don’t
fall behind. If you die, don’t die. If you’re sad, don’t be sad.
Don’t say a word.

Living is hard; it’s hard work to not say a word.

Putting up with people without saying a word is tough.

It’s very hard—inasmuch as they expect to be understood
without saying a word—

to understand people without saying a word.

It’s terribly difficult yet very easy to be a decent person;

the truly difficult thing is to not say a word.



VI.

I feel the coming of a dark day, a closed space, an incom-
prehensible event, a night endless as immortality.

What I feel has nothing to do with me, nor with you; it’s
nothing personal, nothing particular, this thing I feel;

but it has to do with I don’t know what

—perhaps the world, or the kingdoms of the world, or the
mysterious enchantments of the world;

across the waters a deep fissure comes into view.

One can perceive, through the odor of things and through
the forms they assume, the exhaustion of things.

In what grows, in what has ceased to grow, in what echoes,
in what stays, in what doesn’t stay, in the soundless air, in the
metamorphosis of the insect, in the murmuring of trees,

one can sense the joy of a coming end.

The devouring darkness, dying to devour—the allotment
extinguished, nothing shall be.

Save perhaps a breeze, high above some place, maybe
deep inside some place,

floating on the farthest waters.

The gasping without end or beginning, ashroud for stillness,

enshrouding the circular motions of the eternal return

—I don’t know how to explain, I don’t know how to name
this feeling I feel



Translated by Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson.

Forrest Gander is the author of several books, most recently Science and Steepleflower (New Directions, 1998) and is the editor of Mouth to Mouth: Poems by 12 Contemporary Mexican Women. The poems featured here will be included in Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz, edited and translated by Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander, forthcoming from the University of California Press.

Kent Johnson is editor of Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry (Shambhala), and Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry (Michigan). He is a translator of A Nation of Poets: Writings from the Poetry Workshops of Nicaragua (West End Press).



—Jaime Saenz (1921-1986) is considered Bolivia’s leading 20th-century writer. Prolific as a poet, novelist and nonfiction writer, his baroque, propulsive syntax and dedication to themes of death, alcoholism, and otherness make his poetry among the most idiosyncratic in the Spanish-speaking world. As a poet who championed the disenfranchised and the author of one of Latin America’s first openly homosexual novels, Saenz stands as a singular example of artistic and personal courage. The selections presented here are from To Cross This Distance (1973), an extended, serially constructed meditation on presence and absence, love and death, and the imagined possibilities of building a bridge between I and Another. These poems will be included in Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz, edited and translated by Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander, forthcoming from the University of California Press.

(http://bombmagazine.org/article/2362/to-cross-this-distance)

Not sure where to put this, but it is about the Nez Perce War, contemporaneous with the European Decadence movement, in The Dying Grass by William T. Vollmann:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/books/review/the-dying-grass-by-william-t-voll...

"The Dying Grass" is part of Vollmann's Seven Dreams project. I have not read any of The Seven Dreams books, but I have read The Royal Family, an epic account of San Francisco prostitutes that comes across like a cross between Lautreamont, Das Kapital, and Norman Mailer at his most bombastic.

This is curious....

The Death-Wake; or Lunacy. A Necromaunt in Three Chimeras: by Thomas Tod Stoddart

http://faculty.virginia.edu/nowviskie/deathwake.html

Beerland - Part 1

http://dw.com/p/1GIRp

Early George Gissing stories, published by Covici, Chicago:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

http://davidtibet.com/collections/frontpage/products/the-moons-at-your-door-an-a...

A collection of 30 of David Tibet's 'most loved stories', including:

"Robert Aickman, Algernon Blackwood, DK Broster, AM Burrage, RW Chambers, Aleister Crowley, Sheridan Le Fanu, Elizabeth Gaskell, WW Jacobs, MR James, Vernon Lee, LA Lewis, Thomas Ligotti, Arthur Machen, Guy de Maupassant, Charles Perrault, Thomas De Quincey, Saki, Count Stenbock, Montague Summers, HR Wakefield and Edith Wharton. The volume also has an introduction by David, which includes brief extracts and translations by him from Akkadian, Coptic and Biblical texts, alongside poems and fairy tales that he also loves."

New Tartarus Machen book: http://tartaruspress.com/machen-the-children-of-the-pool.html

253 > I wonder what's going on with that Stenbock omnium he's threatened to publish for several years.

255 it is apparently nearly ready for publication. Tibet always has so many projects under way, it is surprising that any see fruition.

The Knights of Malta have a fancy charity ball in New York City:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/27/fashion/order-of-malta-white-cross-ball.html?_...

"Dirty realism":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_realism

As Bill Buford, who coined the term, defines it as:

"Dirty Realism is the fiction of a new generation of American authors. They write about the belly-side of contemporary life – a deserted husband, an unwed mother, a car thief, a pickpocket, a drug addict – but they write about it with a disturbing detachment, at times verging on comedy. Understated, ironic, sometimes savage, but insistently compassionate, these stories constitute a new voice in fiction."

It seems to have some affinities to the darker aspects of the Decadent movement.

I don't know how new that voice is, but his Among the Thugs - documenting his experiences hanging out with racist skinheads and football oiks in England - certainly adheres to that formula ("disturbing detachment, at times verging on comedy. Understated, ironic, sometimes savage, but insistently compassionate"). It reminded me quite a bit of Hunter Thompson's Hell's Angels epic, save that Buford was spared a good stomping.

258> I think (or thought) the term "Dirty Realism" derived primarily from the poetry/prose of Charles Bukowski and other such beacons of modern decadence/reality (e.g., Hubert Selby, Jr., Dan Fante, Tony O'Neill, Pedro Juan Gutierrez, Mark SaFranko, Houellebecq) evolving somewhat out of Beat and Noir literature, and perhaps Henry Miller. Indeed, the belly-side subject matter (Death/Drugs/Violence/Sex/Discontent) is more than similar, but this "new generation" has little in common style-wise with the decadent movement of old...

260: I would add Brian Alan Ellis to that list, since his work dwells on the socioeconomic underbelly and has a darkly comic worldview. A perfect accompaniment to those who enjoy the nostalgie de la boue of such entertainments like Trailer Park Boys and Shameless (UK or US versions).

If Decadent literature can often be defined by an over-refined florid style, then Dirty Realism might be identified by a lack of refinement and terseness. If Decadence is absinthe, opium, courtesans, and degenerate aristocrats living in mansions, then Dirty Realism is cheap beer, meth, hookers, and tired blue-collar workers living close to the streets. Regardless of styles, both movements function like literary Punk rock to épater le bourgeois and both delve into the (Nietzschean) abyss, striving to pull some sort of meaning from the depths of banal quotidian existence.

How would the work of Samuel Beckett fit along that spectrum? More Pricks than Kicks is florid in its wannabe Joycean flavor, but his work becomes more stripped down and it dwells more on tramps and other derelicts. How it is, Endgame, and Molloy leap immediately to mind.

Not to mention other gutter-poetic works like those of John Rechy and Jean Genet

"Strange Flowers" blog:

https://strangeflowers.wordpress.com/

Callum James is having a Halloween Sale.

http://www.callumjamesbooks.com/sale.pdf

David Michael Tibet has just published his first academic paper.

https://www.academia.edu/18317258/A_Magical_Request_for_Revelation_P.Stras._Inv....

266: one more for my gnosticism shelf. I wish he would get out the complete Stenbock.

267. Me too. I check his Facebook page periodically. So far he hasn't said anything about the Stenbock project. If he does I will certainly let you know.

It may be worth following Tibet on twitter as he tends to tweet links to any new entries on his Facebook page.

I follow Tibet on Facebook already. I'm not on twitter. His posts are always very interesting.

I wanted to buy Tibet's lyric book, Sing Omega, but the price was steep. I haven't really dug any of the Current 93 releases since Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain. I'd love to see C93 live though. Sadly, they never play here. By contrast, Death in June is coming through California for the second time is just less than a year. Can't wait to see them again. Maybe Tibet doesn't like coming to the States?

Perhaps it's just a matter of economics? Would it be worth him touring the states? So many bands big overseas (All the offshoots of Radio Birdman, Hugo Race, The Tindersticks, etc.) have a much smaller audience over here than they should have.

I think it is intended that Sing Omega will eventually be released in cheaper paperback format.

At least that's what I'm hanging my hat and on.

However, given the time it is taking to release England's Hidden Reverse in cheaper format, we may see pigs flying over a blue moon before either book eventuates.

David X, you aren't on Twitter? You obviously aren't living the Spectacle to the full yet.

Like benwaugh says, given their limited exposure over here it's hard to imagine C93 playing anywhere in the US except perhaps NYC - maybe San Francisco. I suppose they could headline a larger "goth" or neofolk oriented festival in the northeast (are there any?), but economics probably say otherwise. I understand that many of the myriad C93 collaborators are distributed throughout Europe with a few even residing in the US. It must make any touring a logistically challenging special event.

271: I guess Death in June has a substantial cult following in California dating back to their pre-neofolk/post-punk days? You'd expect them to tour more, seeing how they're just Douglas P and one or two oft changing others...

Whatever happened to Kendra Smith? Permanent hermitage? I mean, Steve Wynn manages to get around... which is ok, I guess.

Recently posted by Sir Baron Earwig on the blog "The Menace of Objects":

the marionettes not only speak: the fiction of gabrielle wittkop

https://themenaceofobjects.wordpress.com/2015/12/04/the-marionettes-not-only-spe...

An Op. Ed. on Unica Zürn:

http://www.vice.com/read/the-hallucinatory-terror-of-unica-zrn

This video/reading should prompt Dark Vales (Raimon Casellas) to the peak of the heap:

http://www.dedalusbooks.com/our-books/video.php?id=00000249&id2=00000016&amp...

http://www.boxofsquare.com/

in Software/Apps, GIMP is an excellent graphic/photo editor.

Hello friends in the Chapel,

I started an etsy store recently for some odds and ends. I opened with a series of badges and buttons featuring various occult, decadent, and pulp references I think many of you will enjoy. I have badges of Huysmans, Lautremont, Felicien Rops, and even Phillipe Julian. More personalities to come including Evola, Baudelaire, Peledan, and Jarry/Ubu Roi. Since this is by far my favourite place on the internet I'm extending a coupon code just for Chapel members. Use the code chapeloftheabyss to get a 20% discount. I hope you enjoy!

https://www.etsy.com/shop/BattleRabbit?ref=hdr_shop_menu

Madeleine

The Mystery Conman
http://dw.com/p/1HdHD
Who is the talented fraudster, smuggling counterfeit antiques onto the art market? Experts have named him the "Spanish master" but his exact whereabouts are still unknown. An investigative journey into the wheelings and dealings of the art world.

The Perfect Flaneur:

http://hilobrow.com/2016/02/14/the-perfect-flaneur/

Thanks, Karl - that's a very good article (though I wish he had resisted the syrupy flourish in his sign-off paragraph. Again, after more than a quarter century, that gd Bob Seger song is stuck in my head like a publicity anthem).

The "flaneur = holy fool" did strike me as both precious and misguided. Furthermore, it denies the flaneur his or her agency, reducing the revolutionary/critical pose to that of "lone crackpot." Baudelaire's flaneur is no Father Sergius or yurodivy.

This tome would definitely fit the "odd" category:

https://www.librarything.com/work/597062/book/127451995

Sounds a companion volume to Grossed-Out Surgeon Vomits Inside Patient.

Review for the upcoming Process Media release of Priestess of Morphine (previously mentioned by kswolff in another thread):
https://heathenharvest.org/2016/03/02/priestess-of-morphine-the-lost-writings-of...

The Virgin Orient by
Mauclair, Camille

to be released soon by Black Coat Press:

The Virgin Orient, an Epic Novel of the Year 2000 (1897) is the account of a preventive strike by Europe, united under the government of Anarchism, against the perceived Yellow Peril. Even though his accounts of two crucial battles fought in India are extended and bloody, Mauclair's primary purpose is not to detail the war but rather to analyze the crisis of conscience suffered by the Anarchist "dictator" once it is won.

Included in this volume are nine other fantasy stories, including Crown of Clarity (1895) and The Poison of Precious Stones (1903), written in the Symbolist style, remarkable for their sheer bizarrerie and flamboyant imagery.

Camille Mauclair (1872-1945) was one of the younger recruits of the Symbolist Movement that was a highly significant feature of the Parisian fin-de-siècle and included Stéphane Mallarmé, Remy de Gourmont, Jean Lorrain and Marcel Schwob.

An extra reason to visit Echo Park, Los Angeles:

http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/tom-house-tom-finland-los-angeles

The sort of little thing that amuses me greatly--Libération, talking about the Pope, paraphrases Sade ("Français, encore un effort si vous voulez être républicains" from La Philosophie dans le boudoir):



It was on the front page this morning, but darn, didn't have the time to snip it then.

I should think that if Liberation is going to run a story on the king of the Vatican on the first page, it should at the very least pair him with Sade. I am going to search that out.

Life in the Folds by Henri Michaux, a new translation from Wakefield Press:

http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/life

Thanks, Karl. I haven't read Michaux in many years, but your fine review has prompted me to pick up a few titles. The Wakefield Press, I think, is one of the best small presses out there. I really admire what they've been doing.

Thanks for the positive kudos. I've never read Michaux before, but he reminded of Beckett and Celine. I'll need to keep on the lookout for more of his work. Truly mind-blowing stuff.

If you have any interest in quality facsimile dust-jackets, this company provides an excellent product: http://www.facsimiledustjackets.com/advSearchResults.php?authorField=Hanns+Heinz.... The items are also clearly (though not glaringly) identified as "facsimile". I found it particularly useful for tarting up my dumpy orange John Day edition of Vampire.

Aestheticism and Decadence at the British Library: http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/aestheticism-and-decadence

>296 Randy_Hierodule:

Someone had a cool idea! I wonder whether printing covers off the archive databases would work... probably not worth it on a poky printer such as mine...

Nor for primates like me, wot don't even got a decent box of crayons ;). But here is an article on the counterfeit dj trade:

http://www.betweenthecovers.com/btc/articles/17

I met Mr facsimile dust jackets a few years ago (obtaining copies for my John Day Ewers books and he is a nice chap. He has a very high quality scanner and spends a long time filling in broken chips, tears etc to make a very slick product. The facsimile doesnt add any 'value' to the book but it sure makes 'em look nice on the shelves!
J

>>300 Siderealpress: Indeed it does. He has covers for Alraune and SA as well, but those titles look better without the jackets. Vampire is ugly. Orange?

I solve the problem of to jacket or not to jacket by owning multiple copies of the Day versions of Alraune and SA so I can have with and without. I agree that Orange is not good and its a great jacket to cover it with. The UK version (released as Vampires Prey) has an ordinary black binding (good) and a pretty boring d/j of circles. One day I will scan it and put online for all to...er...enjoy.
J

An article on Bibi la Purée (André-Joseph Salis), and his reception.

http://jdurno.com/pemberton-vs-picasso/

The art of Majeska, book illustrator and costume designer of the 1920s:

http://www.galleryeastnetwork.com/madame-majeska-henriette-stern-full-gallery/

http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-picture-of-dorian-gray-illustrated-by-maje...

I enjoy books on books and particularly books on conceptions/histories of libraries. This is worth a look, and free:

The Perverse Library, by Craig Dworkin: eclipsearchive.org/Editor/DworkinPerverse.pdf

New Morgan Exhibition Explores Artists and Writers of the Symbolist Movement :

https://www.finebooksmagazine.com/press/2016/12/new-morgan-exhibition-explores-a...

This may have been mentioned on here previously, but I couldn't find it; so sorry if it's a repeat: reprint of the 1939 Leon Bloy novel, The Woman Who was Poor by Christian (conservative?) press St. Augustine's: http://www.staugustine.net/our-books/books/the-woman-who-was-poor/

Also, Belgian Victor Joly's "significant contribution to the rich tradition of Romantic satanic fantasies," The Unknown Collaborator and Other Legendary Tales," just came out from Snuggly: http://www.snugglybooks.co.uk/the-unknown-collaborator/

Because no self-respecting Decadent aesthete or urban flaneur should go without absinthe and absinthe-related accessories:

https://www.absinthes.com/index.php

Given the rather ignominious times, perhaps an evening with The Green Fairy isn't uncalled for.

Let's party like it's 1932. Perhaps the populist fascists will ration it out like the government gin in Orwell's book.

Recently acquired the first volume of Aquablue by Thierry Cailleteau and Olivier Vatine I had purchased Aquablue: Blue Planet years ago. The plot is similar-ish to James Cameron's Dances with Wolves IN SPACE, aka Avatar But like James Cameron's mega-budget schlockfest, its simple plot is saved by the gorgeous visuals. (Plus Aquablue French origins means lots of nonchalant amphibious alien toplessness.)

http://www.bedetheque.com/media/Planches/PlancheA_39752.jpg

Just finished reading The Episodes of Vathek by William Beckford. Much like Vathek and Other Stories: A William Beckford Reader this is another baroque decadent re-telling of traditional Arabian tales. It is not the same tales as the penguin edition; the character of Vathek is absent except mentioned in passing in one of the novellas. This collection was written in French originally and never published in Beckford's lifetime because of its incendiary nature. Highly recommended.

Very nice post on La Bas by James Champagne over on Dennis Cooper's blog:

http://denniscooperblog.com/sypha-presents-voyager-en-soi-meme-a-tribute-to-j-k-...

This popped up on my Facebook page, and may be of interest:

https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/mystical-symbolism-the-salon-de-la-rosecro...

Dear Esther

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlGdbziSwEY

The inevitable purging of books ... in this case, all my Tom Clancy "Jack Ryan" novels. Except for a couple of his non-fiction works, the only novel I'm keeping is a vintage hardcover for Red Storm Rising

Also getting rid of some aviation books, including The National Air and Space Museum by CDB Bryan and Warplanes of the Third Reich by William Green.

Alas, change must occur.

Reviewer and essayist, Michael Dirda on safari in York and Carlisle, with Mark Valentine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39NCvMWlNGw&feature=youtu.be

Found "Selected Prose and Poetry" by Mikhail Kuzmin It compared to Kuzmin to a Russian Oscar Wilde. My interest was piqued, especially since Kuzmin lived as an openly gay man during the oppressive regimes of Tsarist Russia and Stalin's Soviet Union.

A curiosity from Iran:

Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials

by Reza Negarestani

http://re-press.org/books/cyclonopedia-complicity-with-anonymous-materials/

If you are interested, or bored, there is a .pdf copy floating out in the barzakh for free download.

Oh, my word, yum yum: https://www.atlaspress.co.uk/index.cgi?action=news.

New translations of Leonid Andreyev stories.

http://www.leonidandreyev.com

Found a rarity at a used bookstore: Collected Tales and Fantasies by Lord Berners Born in 1883, he was a "composed, novelist, painter, and conspicuous aesthete." He seems to be of the milieu that includes Saki, Firbank, Wodehouse, and bits of Evelyn Waugh I'll be the first to admit I know nothing about him.

Quite a few of his (re)collections have been republished. I think Beverley Nichols includes a vignette in one his 20's memoirs.

There is this as well (an essay-review of Zinovieff's book):

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/books/review/the-mad-boy-lord-berners-my-gran...

and

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/only-in-britain/baron-berners-gerald-hugh-tyrwhitt-w...

Michael Dirda includes him now and then in his typically delightful and informative columns in the Washington Post (along with Firbank and Augustus Carp, Esq., By Himself: Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man (a book that has been mouldering near my water dish for ages).

322: I liked the Telegraph article. Very informative. I also enjoyed the image of Lord Berners driving his Rolls Royce with the harpsichord installed in back as he wore a pig's mask to scare the locals. It's a scene out of a Terry Gilliam fever dream.

I'm enjoying my exploration of the constellation of British aesthetes/eccentrics/oddballs.

Fans of film directors Jean Rollins' and Jess Franco's works, or simply la décadence esthétique, may be interested in this tribute of sorts: https://www.cathodelove.com/

For a cheap copy of Stenbock's Studies of Death:

http://www.snugglybooks.co.uk/catalogue/

This edition is a direct reprint of the original edition, so minus the extra stories included in the Durtro edition.

"I forced a bot to watch 1,000 hours of Donald Trump speeches and then asked it to write an Olive Garden commercial":

(The headline for this article makes no sense, but just read it. It's like Antonin Artaud, Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, and Harvey Kurtzman usurped a writer's room for a middling CBS sitcom.)

https://www.somethingawful.com/news/olive-garden-bot/

"RITES OF DESECRATION: SUICIDE, SACRILEGE AND THE CROSSROADS BURIAL":

https://www.cvltnation.com/rites-of-desecration-suicide-sacrilege-and-profane-bu...

A useful literary resource, named after the subtitle of Blood Meridian:

https://theeveningrednessinthewest.wordpress.com/

"Devil on the Canvas" dailies from Barton Fink:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVYo2Opzt5U

Certainly odd. And despite all the critical accolades, "Barton Fink" is still a really funny comedy.

**stomping at the camera**
"I WILL DESTROY HIM!!!"

"Tales of desire, delirium and decadence from fin-de-siècle Prague":

https://www.jantarpublishing.co.uk/product-page/and-my-head-exploded

Bagged it. Title is a Led Zeppelin concert t-shirt - but what a pleasant find! Thank you!

Ramble House http://www.ramblehouse.com/ just released a reprint of Henry S. Wilcox's ultra-rare and difficult-to-classify fantasy, "The Great Boo-Boo" (1892). Although I believe the title character may have gone on to become a Hanna-Barbera cartoon in the 1960s, the book's description(s) is enticing. Perhaps an early example of American literary decadence...or just pulp-erotica (?):

"Nautical adventure fiction, Robinsonade, crime, religious, social and political satire, and an early American pornographic novel, with cursing, torture, nudity, sexual foreplay, lesbianism, and more."

"... a unique mixture of fantasy and science fiction, social satire and farce, with bonus scenes of torture, blood drinking, nudity, homoerotism and lesbianism."

>332 vaniamk13:

Well, that might merit the use of one of the interminable series of Lulu.com discounts that litter my inbox.

332: "Nautical adventure fiction, Robinsonade, crime, religious, social and political satire, and an early American pornographic novel, with cursing, torture, nudity, sexual foreplay, lesbianism, and more."

Or just another evening at Mar A Lago

I'm sorry, that joke was lazy and obvious.

On another note, here's Lampedusa on Measure for Measure:

https://driftlessareareview.com/2019/01/23/commonplace-book-literary-wives-and-m...

I read Edgar Saltus' Imperial Purple yesterday for the ides of March and it turned out to be delightfully appropriate and entertaining. He is wickedly funny. Reminded me of Gore Vidal a little. It is a short thing one can read in a sitting if anyone is interested.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4250

P.S. Just discovered Edgar's bad boy brother Francis Saltus Saltus!

https://archive.org/details/honeyandgall00saltiala/page/n5

Reviews and essays:

https://publicdomainreview.org/essays/?category_name=literature

The images: Mad Max: Fury Road; the music: "Jesus Built My Hot Rod," by Ministry

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTHjv33d200

Here's a treat for those planning to visit London: http://theviktorwyndmuseum.org/

Check out the downloadable Museum Guide.

Richard Robinson at Sunny Lou Publishing is translating many of the previously ignored extant works of Leon Bloy, Restif de la Bretonne, Verlaine, and other less known French curiosities:

https://sunnyloupublishing.com/

This is fantastic - never heard if SLP. Thank you!

Yes, thank you. They are new to me as well. I have just ordered the Bloy book on Huysmans.

I don't know whether this link is captured elsewhere, but Crosby, Alastair and Schiele and others are here:

https://unquietthings.com/harry-crosbys-black-sun/

>340 vaniamk13: I just lobbied them to translate Crebillon's Le Sylphe.