Since 1996, Nick Veasey has been taking x-ray photographs of pretty much everything. From shoes, insects and kitchen appliances to enormous composite shots of Boeing 777s.
A book of Veasey’s work, X-Ray, will be published in October. More. And. Related.
This is very clever. Marion Bataille’s ABC3D. Published in October.
You know, for kids. Via Infosthetics.
Via Photoshop Disasters, I stumbled across a romance novel whose cover promises a little more than is delivered. Behold Christina Dodd’s historical yarn, Castles in the Air. From the blurb: What man would have her once he discovered her secret...?
Ms Dodd’s publishers have subsequently fashioned a corrected - and, alas, less intriguing - jacket.
Morten Postrup has a rather fine collection of patterned Swedish book covers, 1950 -1962.
Related. Via Coconut Jam.
Here’s a little something for fans of the outlandish and uncanny. BBC4’s documentary series on British science fiction, The Martians and Us, can now be viewed online. Part one, Apes to Aliens, takes evolution as its theme and traces a brief and entertaining history, from H.G. Wells’ anonymous time traveller to John Wyndham’s unearthly schoolchildren. The three-part series covers the obvious and the obscure, the inspired and the unhinged, and teases out what has often made British science fiction different from, and darker than, its American cousin.
Here’s a taste.
Part 2, Trouble in Paradise, and part 3, The End of the World as We Know It, are also online. Well worth watching. (h/t, The Thin Man.) Related: The original 1960 trailer for Village of the Damned. And here’s George Sanders having trouble keeping secrets.
Browsing this website’s visitor stats, I discovered two posts that continue to attract an unexpected level of interest. One is a short item on the phenomenon of superhero pornface, which remains a search engine favourite. The other involves a fleeting reference to the hilarious controversial subject of Japanese tentacle porn. I do, of course, feel obliged to cater to my readers’ appetites, even the ones they don’t admit to publicly. Thanks to the wonderful people at Coudal, I stumbled across what cephalopod enthusiasts may well regard as a tentacle pornfest: Poulpe Pulps - Vintage Octopus Pulp Covers. The site, hosted by Francesca Myman, is quite possibly the place to find “hard-to-locate images of science fiction, fantasy, and adventure pulp and comic covers featuring the wily octopus.”
More tentacles at the Octopia blog. An extensive video archive of cephalopods in action can be found here. Related: this, this and this. Knock yourselves out. You know who you are.
The New York Public Library collection of Russian book jackets, 1917-42.
Also, the Museum of Russian Posters and the Socialist-Realist art of North Korea.
Caution: realism aspect somewhat doubtful. (H/T, Coudal.)
Update: I’ll be away for a couple of days. Back Friday with more ephemera.
Over at Samizdata, Perry de Havilland has a few thoughts on recent efforts by the Commission for Racial Equality to have Hergé’s Tintin in the Congo removed entirely from the shelves of British booksellers:
“The fact is, Tintin is racist. So what? It is a very good illustration of the attitudes of the era in which these stories were written (Tintin in the Congo was published in 1930), which was during the Indian summer of colonialism (with apologies to the people of Tibet still under Chinese colonial occupation circa 2007). I personally find books glorifying Socialism hideous as history has proven again and again that Socialism is repression and its end state is mass murder and horror. Maybe I should demand Borders stop selling those. Better yet, maybe bookshops should not sell anything that offends anyone, which should limit them to selling phone books in all likelihood.”
Tintin in the Congo has been moved to Borders’ adult graphic novel section and can be bought online here. Predictably, sales of the title have risen dramatically in the wake of the CRE’s protests. The book also comes with a warning that its contents include “bourgeois, paternalistic stereotypes of the period - an interpretation some readers may find offensive.” Readers will be thrilled to hear that Tintin in the Land of the Soviets is still available too. More on Tintin here.
I mention this because a few hours ago I caught part of the 1955 film The Dam Busters in which Richard Todd plays Wing Commander Guy Gibson, whose dog, a black labrador, is, unfortunately, called “Nigger”. Which raises the question of whether subsequent screenings will entail some discreet redubbing at the hands of the CRE.
I’ll be taking a short break for the rest of the week. Meanwhile, those with a taste for the fleshy artwork of Dave Cooper should look over his Flickr photo sets, some of which document the gestation of his unwholesome yet fascinating handiwork.
Cooper’s books are available via Fantagraphics. But his toys are harder to come by. (H/T, Drawn!)
Back Monday 9th.
Further to my article on the ludicrous Carolyn Guertin, here’s another example of how not to impart knowledge to soft student brains. From Jacques Derrida’s 1994 book, supposedly on the relevance of Marxism, Spectres of Marx, the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International:
“Capital contradiction. At the very origin of capital. Immediately or in the end, through so many differential relays, it will not fall to induce the ‘pragmatic’ double constraint of all injunctions. Moving about freely (aus freien Stucken), on its own head [de son propre chef], with a movement of its head but that controls its whole body, from head to toe, ligneous and dematerialised, the Table-Thing appears to be at the principle, at the beginning, and at the controls of itself. It emancipates itself on its own initiative: all alone, autonomous and automaton, its fantastic silhouette moves on its own, free and without attachment. It goes into trances, it levitates, it appears relieved of its body, like all ghosts, a little mad and unsettled as well, upset, ‘out of joint’, delirious, capricious, and unpredictable…”
“But also at stake, indissociably, is the differential deployment of tekkne, of techno-science or tele-technology. It obliges us more than ever to think the virtualisation of space and time, the possibility of virtual events whose movement and speed prohibit us more than ever (more and otherwise than ever, for this is not absolutely and thoroughly new) from opposing presence to its representation, ‘real time’ to ‘deferred time’, effectivity to its simulacrum, the living to the non-living, in short, the living to the living-dead of its ghosts. It obliges us to think, from there, another space for democracy. For democracy-to-come and thus for justice. We have suggested that the event we are prowling around here hesitates between the singular ‘who’ of the ghost and the general ‘what’ of the simulacrum.”
Now it’s possible you find this meaningful and “skilfully poetic”, as others claim to do, and you might argue that I’ve taken these passages out of context and thus obscured some deep and elegant insight. In fact the sequence of many paragraphs appears arbitrary and I suspect one could rearrange them in any number of ways to much the same effect. And if you think I’ve been unfair and scoured for the most “difficult” passages, please feel free to read a much longer extract here, from which these passages were taken. Caution is advised, however, as prolonged exposure may induce fits of nausea or hilarity, or an urge to bite one’s own fist. Those who survive will, no doubt, be rendered very, very clever.
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