(↝via Giornale Nuovo)
From The Natural System of Colour by Moses Harris, 1766.
The curious should check out Sarah Lowengard’s The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe.
Related: This Bibliodyssey Post on the History of Color Systems. I bookmarked this for MCing a long time ago, but I don’t think it ever made it.
Lovecraft Meets Bladerunner
Gene Wolfe’s newest novel, An Evil Guest is now available for preorder, and set to be released on September 16th.
I linked Neil Gaiman’s review of a draft a while back, but the Amazon page has some more information.
It seems Wolfe indulges himself in a bit of a genre stew– mixing noir’s private detectives, Broadway glitter, sorcerers, iPods, cold war intrigue, and Cthulhu, itself.
From Caitlín R. Kiernan’s blurb:
The distinctions we draw between past, present, and future are discriminations among illusions. This paraphrase of Einstein stands as a sort of thesis statement for this deliriously anachronistic novel, which, though seemingly set near or at the end of the 21st century, feels more like a wild confabulation of the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, with a bit of the ’80s sprinkled here and there, and just a dash of the first decade of our new millennium.
Even as Wolfe warps time and space, he also warps and dismisses the too often indulged expectations of genre readers. There is no slavish devotion to dull futurism, but a swaggering, romantic, unabashedly unlikely tomorrowland.
Really, really poor cover choice though. Luckily, the UK edition appears to have a more tasteful design, thankfully avoiding the goth-vampire-meets-fairy-romance cover of the US version.
One of Gustave Doré’s numerous illustrations for Rabelais’ Gargantua and His Son Pantagruel.
Thus, said Panurge; for when with pleasure I beheld this jolly fire, jesting with myself, and saying—Ha! poor flies, ha! poor mice, you will have a bad winter of it this year; the fire is in your reeks, it is in your bed-straw—out come more than six, yea, more than thirteen hundred and eleven dogs, great and small, altogether out of the town, flying away from the fire. At the first approach they ran all upon me, being carried on by the scent of my lecherous half-roasted flesh, and had even then devoured me in a trice, if my good angel had not well inspired me with the instruction of a remedy very sovereign against the toothache. And wherefore, said Pantagruel, wert thou afraid of the toothache or pain of the teeth? Wert thou not cured of thy rheums? By Palm Sunday, said Panurge, is there any greater pain of the teeth than when the dogs have you by the legs?
“The format of prss release is simple. Weekly we collect the ten posts of the past week that we think are cool, interesting, thought provoking, funny or which are worth publishing for any other reason we come up with (or not). We put these posts in a clean readable lay-out with the appropriate credits to those of who’s content we publish. We publish it as a PDF file, which is available for download for a few weeks, we keep an archive of all issues in the form of a hyper-linked tables of content to the original posts we used in each issue of prss release.”
(↝via things)
“
His “great Work” (it may be philosophy or biography now, and is certainly to be begun, after a series of long walks, this very spring) only takes shape, I believe, in that hour between tea and dinner, when so many things appear not merely possible but achieved.
—Virginia Woolf
(↝via crowley)
ouch. I’m afraid of…never mind.
ouch indeed.
Amazing scans of satirical Russian magazines published between 1905 and 1908. From The Nonist, of course.
I also enjoyed 5 Questions for Vaughn Oliver.