February 2012
26 posts
1 tag
Zizek on detective fiction.
The role of the detective is…to dissolve the impasse of…universalized, free-floating guilt by localizing it in a single subject and thus exculpating all others. (Looking Awry, 1991).
Some numbers on film genres, 1904-1929 →
Rough breakdown of dime novels by genre. →
Anlu. →
The most metal ritual I’ve ever read about. HARDCORE.
Arabic/Muslim proto-slipstream of the 12th...
From Pierre Cachia’s Exploring Arab Folk Literature, which focuses far more on poetry than prose, but whatever. From an essay on the formation of the elite:
Even more extreme and more difficult to ignore in this respect is Abu-Bakr Muhammad ibn-Tufayl’s (c. 1100-85) Hayy ibn Yaqzan. Cast in the form of a long narrative about a child who grows up on an island where he has no contact...
Roman baths and the Evil Eye.
There could also be a darker side to the world of beauty and pleasure which the baths create. Excessive beauty, like any other exceptional achievmeent, risks provoking phthonos, the envy which works through the Evil Eye of the envious, with disastrous consequences. Such danger could threaten every sort of human activity, and buildings of every type are found protected by apotropaic inscriptions...
A visual walk through the Crystal Palace. →
Lost Films Week: Hands Up!
Continuing onward…
Hands Up! was a serial from 1918, co-directed by veteran filmmakers Louis Gasnier and James Horne—seriously, click on the links and read their list of credits. Gasnier discovered Max Linder, who only created silent slapstick film, and Horne did all those Laurel and Hardy films for Max Roach. Hands Up! was written by Jack Cunningham, who wrote for everyone from W.C....
Apes, jongleurs, and 13th century Paris.
From the simply wonderful Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance:
The connection between apes and money is illustrated further by the French expressions, fourni d’argent comme un singe de queue (to have no money at all) and payer en monnaie de singe (to pay with fine words and promises instead of ‘real’ money). The latter phrase is usually explained as the...
Apes and man
Quoting from H.W. Janson’s Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance:
The ape’s lack of tail had, of course, been noted in classical times, but it was not until the advent of Christianity that this member—or the absence of it—achieved metaphysical significance. Had not the Lord himself, according to Leviticus XXII, 23, declared the tail to be a necessary...
The Planet of the Apes as racist metaphor
But not the one you think.
Writing of Pierre Boulle’s Planete des singes, Laurence Porter says:
It was published in 1963. France had just lost nearly all her overseas empire between 1945 and 1962, ending with the bitter uprooting of a million French “pieds noirs” in Algeria, and nearly provoking, in France, a civil war between the hawks and the doves. The story of a...
Lost Films Week: The Radio King
I’ve got an article coming out soon on io9.com about 24 of the weirdest and most wonderful lost film. Naturally, my initial list was much larger than just 24, so rather than let that research go to waste, I thought I’d post here those films which didn’t make the cut.
Starting off Lost Films Week…
Originally created by George Bronson-Howard as a serial in Radio News in...
Queen Cahina's potlatch.
From Volume 2, Chapter 514, of Gibbons’ The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
The Greeks were expelled, but the Arabians were not yet masters of the country. In the interior provinces the Moors or Berbers, so feeble under the first Caesars, so formidable to the Byzantine princes, maintained a disorderly resistance to the religion and power of the successors of Mohammed. Under the...
Surprise guest at the Crucifixion
Even more extraordinary than the ape of the Tura Pieta is the one we encounter in a Crucifixion by the unknown Dutch painter of the last years of the fifteenth century nicknamed the Master of the Virgo inter Virgines. In this panel, one of the treasures of Northern art preserved in the Uffizi, a particularly sinister simian sits near the foot of the cross, but instead of holding an apple he...
Obscure historical mysteries: Amy Johnson.
Amy Johnson was a significant pilot in the 1930s. She died under mysterious circumstances in 1941. Or did she?
The Tiber as ritual cleanser of the unclean &...
For centuries refuse and bodies, notably of those perceived to be contaminating the state, wree dumped in the Tiber. Traditional and convenient, this added the insult of denial of burial; the water removed the pollution, and it offered purification against hostile spirits. Disposal via the Tiber was a rejection of disruptive elements, a restoration of order, and a lustration. Topography,...