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La Bibliothèque de Babel
It was perhaps inevitable that this small collection of works of fantastic fiction was named after its director’s most famous creation, the Library of Babel. Jorge Luis Borges chose the titles, and...
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MC Escher book covers
1963. Art: Other World (1947). MC Escher’s prints have been touring the UK this year: a few months ago they were in Scotland, this month they can be seen at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. The...
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Weekend links 352
Table-Tipping Workshop at Rev. Jane’s House, Erie, Pennsylvania, 2014 by Shannon Taggart. • Canadian electronic musician Sarah Davachi talks to Erik Davis about analogue synthesizers, reverberating...
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Weekend links 353
The Critics (1927) by Henry Scott Tuke. • Geeta Dayal talks to ambient musician Midori Takada about Through The Looking-Glass (1983), an album being reissued this month by Palto Flats/We Release...
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Weekend links 387
Japanese (?) poster for Liquid Sky (1982). • The announcement this week of the death of Carl T. Ford, former editor of Dagon magazine, prompted a handful of memorial pieces. Dagon was notable for...
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Weekend links 389
I Had Sweet Company Because I Sought Out None. Collage by Helen Adam. • Readers of The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges continue to be compelled to either illustrate the impossible archive or...
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Weekend links 226
Fly (2012, detail) by Zhao Na. • This week in psychedelia: the UK now has its own Psychedelic Society (just in time for the mushroom season), and is using some of my psychedelic...
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Weekend links 233
Alchemical Stone (2014) by Daniel Lasso Casas. Via full fathom five. • “I am unsure if this reality is an everyday one. We don’t know if the universe belongs to a realist genre or a fantastic one,...
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Donald Cammell and Kenneth Anger, 1972
Another resurrected article. Cinema Rising was a short-lived newsprint film magazine that ran for three issues in the UK in 1972. I have a few pages from the rare first issue that was part of a batch...
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Weekend links 192
“Chloromgonfus detectis, a dragonfly that can detect volatile pollutants.” A speculative insect by artist Vincent Fournier. • “…a modern taxonomist straddling a Wellsian time machine with the purpose...
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Weekend links 208
The Blue Girl (2013) by Sungwon. • “Meanwhile, in her parents’ room [Max] Ernst painted aardvarks eating ants and big human hands around the windows. ‘Sexual connotations, I think,’ she says shyly.”...
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Spiderweb, a film by Paul Miller
The Spider’s Stratagem (1970) is Bernardo Bertolucci’s adaptation of the Jorge Luis Borges story The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero; Death and the Compass (1992) is Alex Cox’s adaptation of the...
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Invasion, a film by Hugo Santiago
From a film adapted from Borges to a film co-written by the man himself. Invasion (1969) is not to be confused with the British science fiction film of the same name made three years earlier, this is...
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Borges and the cats
To a cat Mirrors are not more wrapt in silences nor the arriving dawn more secretive; you, in the moonlight, are that panther figure which we can only spy at from a distance. By the mysterious...
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Hinton’s hypercubes
Illustration from The Fourth Dimension (1906) by Charles Howard Hinton. A slight return to the worlds of Borges. I happened to be re-reading some of the stories in The Book of Sand (1975), one of the...
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Weekend links 214
San Francisco Sound (1967). Art by Wallace Studio, Seattle. • RIP gay porn pioneer Peter de Rome. BUTT posted de Rome’s surprisingly daring Underground (1972), a film in which two men have an unfaked...
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Borges in the Firing Line
Jorge Luis Borges was interviewed on TV a number of times in later life but most of the available appearances are in un-subtitled Spanish. His 1977 meeting with William F Buckley on Buckley’s...
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Weekend links 459
• “Their graves were covered with cement tiles to block the radiation emanating from their corpses.” Sophie Pinkham reviews three books about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. • At Dangerous Minds:...
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Weekend links 492
Cover art by Gahan Wilson for Monster (1980) by Herbie Hancock. • RIP Gahan Wilson, a great cartoonist with a flair for horror, the macabre and grotesque. Many of his best cartoons are buried in back...
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Picturing On Land
The ruined tower of All Saints Church, Dunwich, 1919. I became interested in inventing places for sounds. I often listen to music and get a picture of a certain time of day, a certain type of light. I...
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Borges on Ulysses
Random House offering readers a guide to the labyrinth in 1934. I’ve not done a Bloomsday post for the past couple of years so here you go. Via Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-Fictions (1999), edited...
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Weekend links 584
Cover for the 1970 US edition of Moonchild by Aleister Crowley. No artist credited (unless you know better…). Update: The artist is Dugald Stewart Walker, and the drawing is from a 1914 edition of...
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The Immortal by Jorge Luis Borges
“This City” (I thought) “is so horrible that its mere existence and perdurance, though in the midst of a secret desert, contaminates the past and the future and in some way even jeopardizes the...
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The Rejected Sorcerer
Cover art by Ed Emshwiller. More Borges. While checking the details of yesterday’s post I discovered this oddity, an American SF magazine that published a two-page Borges story in March 1960, and put...
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Goodfellow and Borges
Last week’s story search had me looking through this handful of Penguin volumes again, all of which have cover illustrations by Peter Goodfellow. These were the first Borges books I bought, beginning...
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The Others, a film by Hugo Santiago
The Others (1974) is the second of the feature-length collaborations directed by Hugo Santiago from screenplays developed with Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges. The film was produced in Paris...
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Morel’s inventions
1: The Invention of Morel (1940), a novel by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Cover art by Norah Borges. A fugitive hides on a deserted island somewhere in Polynesia. Tourists arrive, and his fear of being...
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Weekend links 668
The Drowned Cathedral (1929) by MC Escher. • “All Saints’ was the last of the seven parish churches to fall headlong into the waves. The drowned church was doomed to lie in a gulley not far out to...
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Weekend links 680
15 Miles into the Earth (1944) by Hendrik Wijdeveld. • “He realized that there were individuals around him who had never appeared in the great altarpieces and frescoes, individuals who had been...
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Weekend links 691
Arcus (2019) by Markus Matthias Krüger. • “Listeners can only make an educated guess as to what the experience of working with Slapp Happy might have done for Faust.” Fergal Kinney on the 50th...
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