THE RAVEN

Louis Friedlander (USA, 1935)
 

WHITE ZOMBIE

Edward Halperin (USA, 1932)

RAINER MARIA RILKE

"Cemetery"

____________________

Is there an after-taste of life in these graves? And in the flowers’ mouths do bees find the hint of a word refusing speech? O flowers, prisoners of our instincts toward happiness, do you return to us with our dead in your veins? Flowers, how can you escape our grip? How can you not be our flowers? Does the rose really use all its petals to fly away from us? Does it want to be only a rose, nothing but a rose? No one’s sleep beneath so many eyelids?

—Translated by A. Poulin, Jr.

[Photographer unknown.]

MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE

Robert Florey (USA, 1932)

E. M. CIORAN
On the Heights of Despair

____________________

As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?

Vintage trick ghost photography.
 

SON OF FRANKENSTEIN

Roland V. Lee (USA, 1939)

H. L. MENCKEN

____________________

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN

James Whale (USA, 1935)

MARK TWAIN
____________________

If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.

[Photohrapher unknown. This happens to be one of those images that half a million people have claimed as their own original work. About 499,999 are lying. Jeeze. Okay, I'm exaggerating but ...]

BOB SMITH

____________________

I come from a very conservative family and it wasn’t easy telling my parents that I’m gay. 

I made my carefully worded announcement at Thanksgiving. 

I said, “Mom, would you please pass the gravy to a homosexual?” 

She passed it to my father.

FRANKENSTEIN

James Whale (USA, 1931)

[Photographer unknown.]

 H. P. LOVECRAFT
____________________

From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.

DAVE CHAPPELLE
THE CLOSER

Stan Lathan
USA, 2021

 

PATRICIA BRIGGS
Dragon Blood

____________________

A man says a lot of things in summer he doesn't mean in winter.

[Photographer unknown.]

H. P. LOVECRAFT

__________________

I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes with not as shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism - religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality.

-

me·tem·psy·cho·sis

/ˌmedəmˌsīˈkōsəs,məˌtemsəˈkōsəs/

noun

the supposed transmigration at death of the soul of a human being or animal into a new body of the same or a different species.

IT FOLLOWS

David Robert Mitchell

USA, 2014
 

[Artist unknown.]

THE DIABOLICAL DR Z.

Jess Franco
Spain/France, 1965

 

 

THE MORNING STAR
____________________

Karl Ove Knausgård

Translated by Martin Aitken
 

ROBERT G. INGERSOLL

____________________

Marriages are made by men and women; not by the state; not by the church; not by supernatural beings.

[Photographer unknown.]

THE DEVIL RIDES OUT

Terence Fisher
UK, 1968

 

JOSEPH CONRAD

Under Western Eyes

____________________

The belief in a supernatural evil is not necessary. Men alone are quite capable of every evil.

[Photographer unknown.]

THE SUN

____________________

Issue 550
October 2021

 

DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS

Harry Kümel

Belgium/France, 1971

[Photohrapher unknown.]

HARDCORE HENRY
(ХАРДКОР)

Ilya Naishuller
Russia, 2015

 

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Dispossessed

____________________

A man wants his virility regarded. A woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. Here one is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.

Les Edwards
 

THE BEYOND

Lucio Fulci
Italy & USA, 1981

 

MAUD HART LOVELACE

Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown

____________________

“It looks like something out of Whittier's Snowbound," Julia said. 

Julia could always think of things like that to say.

DRACULA

Composed by Philip Glass

Performed by Kronos Quartet

[Artist unknown.]

'Murica, fuck yeah.

SPIRAL

Darren Lynn Bousman (USA, 2021)

CABARET - Original Soundtrack Recording

Mark Riddick

THE STYLIST

Jill Gevargizian (US, 2021) 

SPACECRAFT
____________________

Timothy Morton

 

YOUNG SHERLOCK HOLMES - Original Recording Sessions from the Motion Picture Score

Bruce Broughton

[Photographer unknown.]

OSCAR WILDE
"Symphony in Yellow"
____________________

An omnibus across the bridge
Crawls like a yellow butterfly
And, here and there, a passer-by
Shows like a little restless midge.
Big barges full of yellow hay
Are moored against the shadowy wharf,
And, like a yellow silken scarf,
The thick fog hangs along the quay.
The yellow leaves begin to fade
And flutter from the Temple elms,
And at my feet the pale green Thames
Lies like a rod of rippled jade.

GLORIA E. ANZALDÚA

"To Live in the Borderlands"

____________________

To live in the borderlands means you

are neither hispana india negra espanola

ni gabacha, eres mestiza, mulata, half-breed

caught in the crossfire between camps

while carrying all five races on your back

not knowing which side to turn to, run from;

To live in the Borderlands means knowing that the india in you, betrayed for 500 years,

is no longer speaking to you,

the mexicanas call you rajetas, that denying the Anglo inside you

is as bad as having denied the Indian or Black;

Cuando vives en la frontera

people walk through you, the wind steals your voice,

you’re a burra, buey, scapegoat,

forerunner of a new race,

half and half-both woman and man, neither-a new gender;

To live in the Borderlands means to

put chile in the borscht,

eat whole wheat tortillas,

speak Tex-Mex with a Brooklyn accent;

be stopped by la migra at the border checkpoints;

Living in the Borderlands means you fight hard to

resist the gold elixir beckoning from the bottle,

the pull of the gun barrel,

the rope crushing the hollow of your throat;

In the Borderlands

you are the battleground

where enemies are kin to each other;

you are at home, a stranger,

the border disputes have been settled

the volley of shots have scattered the truce

you are wounded, lost in action

dead, fighting back;

To live in the Borderlands means

the mill with the razor white teeth wants to shred off

your olive-red skin, crush out the kernel, your heart

pound you pinch you roll you out

smelling like white bread but dead;

To survive the Borderlands

you must live sin fronteras

be a crossroads.

MIHÁLY BIRÓ

Hungarian anti-alcohol poster from 1912

CARRIE - 45th ANNIVERSARY

Brian DePalma (USA, 1976)

DOUGLAS ADAMS

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

____________________

The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

#ALIVE

Il Cho
Korean, 2020

 

I'M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS

Charlie Kaufman

USA, 2020

KNUT HAMSUN

Pan

____________________

The other one he loved like a slave, like a madman and like a beggar. Why? Ask the dust on the road and the falling leaves, ask the mysterious God of life; for no one knows such things. She gave him nothing, no nothing did she give him and yet he thanked her. She said: Give me your peace and your reason! And he was only sorry she did not ask for his life.

HOMUNCULUS

Takashi Shimizu
Japan, 2021

MARILYN MONROE
____________________

I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best. 

GERALDINE CHAPLIN

____________________

It's the change of rhythm which I think is what keeps me alive. In Spain I hear so much noise from my window that can't stand it. In Switzerland it's the lack of noise that drives me crazy.

I IS ANOTHER
SEPTOLOGY III - V
____________________

Jon Fosse

Translated by Damion Searls
 

 

QUENTIN HUFF

"Deeper"

____________________

He poured it in her ear, the idea

of him on top, slowing time down

to enter her, convincing her

that everything would stay between them,

with his back to the air

and her bottom on the mattress,

their motions surrounded by

the smell of love and fabric softener.

She wanted him behind her, a position

of trust, tossing aside suspicions

of what he might do behind her back

and how easily he could hide

who else he might be thinking of.

But he did not want to look over her shoulder,

he wanted to be in her eyes,

moving his hips in slow clock-

wise

rotation,

making the cold stone expression

on her face crumble.

She'd been wearing her countenance that way

since the first day they met,

after one lover refused to stay inside her

and another was so indecisive, she was forced

to mount the problem and dominate.

But no more.

And she cried because he did everything

he said he would do to her

but when he was finished, he did not leave.

IRIS MURDOCH

The Sea, The Sea

____________________

Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.

W. B. YEATS

"All Things Can Tempt Me"

____________________

All things can tempt me from this craft of verse:

One time it was a woman's face, or worse -

The seeming needs of my fool-driven land;

Now nothing but comes readier to the hand

Than this accustomed toil. When I was young,

I had not given a penny for a song

Did not the poet Sing it with such airs

That one believed he had a sword upstairs;

Yet would be now, could I but have my wish,

Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish.

GEORGE SAND

Mauprat

____________________

We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.

ALEXANDER PUSHKIN

"A Winter Evening"

____________________

Sable clouds by tempest driven,

Snowflakes whirling in the gales,

Hark—it sounds like grim wolves howling,

Hark—now like a child it wails!

Creeping through the rustling straw thatch,

Rattling on the mortared walls,

Like some weary wanderer knocking—

On the lowly pane it falls.

Fearsome darkness fills the kitchen,

Drear and lonely our retreat,

Speak a word and break the silence,

Dearest little Mother, sweet!

Has the moaning of the tempest

Closed thine eyelids wearily?

Has the spinning wheel’s soft whirring

Hummed a cradle song to thee?

Sweetheart of my youthful Springtime,

Thou true-souled companion dear—

Let us drink! Away with sadness!

Wine will fill our hearts with cheer.

Sing the song how free and careless

Birds live in a distant land—

Sing the song of maids at morning

Meeting by the brook’s clear strand!

Sable clouds by tempest driven,

Snowflakes whirling in the gales,

Hark—it sounds like grim wolves howling,

Hark—now like a child it wails!

Sweetheart of my youthful Springtime,

Thou true-souled companion dear,

Let us drink! Away with sadness!

Wine will fill our hearts with cheer!

Translated by Martha Dickinson Bianchi

BRUCE SMITH

"Beautiful Boy"

____________________

1

After the beautiful boy killed himself I killed myself

and lived in the trash vortex, the j’accuse of the US

with gear and the beclouded night kindness and a mind

like a mule deer in the poorest of zips. My affection

got only so close before I withdrew into self-protection,

my white tail an insolent so long. I lived by borrowing

the stillness and dominion and circumference and how dare I

be anything at all, mud under his boot sole, the roux

of the cookbooks he borrowed from the library,

and I returned and wanted stew and the simmering of him.

2

Where was the equipment for living? Where was the witness?

And where was the Very Rich Hours: the exchange of rings,

the gathering of flowers? Both beautiful and boy and April

gone the way of trumpeting May and ghost structures

of the Gothic, costly blue and gold depicting ...

Could you say beautiful and boy after the beautiful boy

killed himself? April felt like retrograde February,

impoverished color fields of angry, blowing on our hands

in the Middle Ages of Syracuse where we lived in a university

city, joining faith to magical thinking to tactics for fleeing.

3

After the beautiful boy killed himself was

became impossible to hold in one mind, my mind,

and I could not look directly at is, the wind

and the thinly branched sapling that is/was his height

and others wore shoes like his shoes, like

was legal and the swellings of April illegal

made up as it was [was] of gaps and lapses.

I depended on the vertical hell of other people

for story, for a narrative however broken,

a tolerance that could be that charmed or bitter,

could be what takes the place of nouns and verbs.

4

After the beautiful boy killed himself I was a mackle

of presence, a blurred capital letter that marked

a person’s breathing, while he was immaculately

gone except for all the damage to our throats

and to our umbilical selves. Touch was too much

or not enough. White space was obliterated by April’s

mute riot or was it organized into caravans stopped ...

Ah, what luxury to have his crossed letters on paper,

rationed wartime material we have now in abundance,

and map what we know in scratches and around that what?

5

Cuts, knots, rips, fissures, dots, the ink drips

from the person after the beautiful boy killed himself,

stopgap concept, the grief counselor kept it together

or at arm’s length so the ________ can’t find the ________.

I asked her for experience and I got a view from above—

grace, I’ll take it, the casserole, the pepper pot;

I’ll take the fix, the unopened bills for the services

rendered, the renderings billed. Any fix is myopic,

like a mother’s look at the child’s flaws as virtues,

as self-incrimination, the crime being the rich

attachments of subjects, objects, finishes.

6

Clouds blocked the sun all April

after the beautiful boy killed himself,

blocked by the body and the next steps, blocked

the pronouns, blocked and, blocked then,

although, before, so after the beautiful boy

we loved the jagged now for its promise and threat,

for its torn map of Detroit and its alternate plans

of duration and what was it yesterday I said

after the beautiful boy killed himself about stopping

me while I was weeping to say ghost = get = go on.

7

What energies and economies of the daily,

the obvious snows and obliteration and shoveling

disrupted when the beautiful boy killed himself?

He keeps moving down or is it up? Is there up

in the pedestrian advance to the drugstore for more

pain medication, buying a coffee to go and a doughnut?

Why not start from the start, from the hesitant

and make a progress that’s disrupted by the end,

disrupted by the currency? Are you paying for what

you break or the opposite? How do you intend to pay?

8

Come back, come back—we’re asking the highest power

of corporate capital to make you vertical once more

without metaphor—the corporeal you. We will assign the pronoun

by shareholders and trustees who will agree to your exceptional

growth potential, no, growth imperative, to the cult of you

and the evangelism of the ask. We burn, we spread like disease

but the brutal agglomeration of you we love, we pull you up

by your bootstraps, we trade in the sublime machine for you.

We will endure you as you did not endure the terrible world,

I thought after the beautiful boy killed himself.

THE OTHER NAME
SEPTOLOGY I - II
____________________

Jon Fosse

Translated by Damion Searls
 

BOBBY SEALE
____________________

A people who have suffered so much for so long at the hands of a racist society must draw the line somewhere.

ALDOUS HUXLEY
Ape and Essence
____________________

Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth. What remains in the bum or studiedly jocular desperation of one who is aware of the obscene Presence in the corner of the room and knows that the door is locked, that there aren’t any windows. And now the thing bears down on him. He feels a hand on his sleeve, smells a stinking breath, as the executioner’s assistant leans almost amorously toward him.

“Your turn next, brother. Kindly step this way.”

And in an instant his quiet terror is transmuted into a frenzy as violent as it is futile. There is no longer a man among his fellow men, no longer a rational being speaking articulately to other rational beings; there is only a lacerated animal, screaming and struggling in the trap. For in the end fear casts out even a man’s humanity.

And fear, my good friends, fear is the very basis and foundation of modern life. Fear of the much touted technology which, while it raises our standard of living, increases the probability of our violently dying. Fear of the science which takes away the one hand even more than what it so profusely gives with the other. Fear of the demonstrably fatal institutions for while, in our suicidal loyalty, we are ready to kill and die. Fear of the Great Men whom we have raised, and by popular acclaim, to a power which they use, inevitably, to murder and enslave us. Fear of the war we don’t want yet do everything we can to bring about.

REGINALD SHEPHERD

"Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair"

____________________

In the painting by Guido Reni of Saint Sebastian

in the Palazzo Rosso, which reproduction makes available

to those who travel only on the page, the saint to be 

(he’s not yet assumed by artifice, encumbered

with perfections) endures continual martyrdom 

with a visual sigh, gazing almost directly upward 

as if to ask What now my love, or hum a chorus of

Is that all there is, the body always some song

or another. The eye tramping the simulacrum 

of a surface hands have touched can’t help but note

how lush the uncorrupted flesh appears: the curve, for one 

example, of the waist (narrowest circuit of the boy),

just beneath the instance of an arrow’s entrance, or

the shadow just above the tangled loincloth that is surely

pubic hair. One grasps that sainthood is an attribute of youth,

the wondrous fair, as in old ballads; they always end.

The boy in the Eagle Discount Supermarket, 

for another, an apparition in a backwards baseball cap 

appraising cuts of meat in artificial light, 

deciding what he can afford

to buy, how much each cut costs. I love the ground

on where be stands. His face? Unverifiable.

ITALO CALVINO

Invisible Cities

____________________

There is no language without deceit.

 

H. P. LOVECRAFT

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we learn and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. 

But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.

INTO THE NIGHT
Season 2

Nabil Ben Yadir, Camille Delamarre
Belgium, 2021

ECLOGUES
____________________

Guy Davenport
 

ELIAS CANETTI

____________________

What will become of all that has piled up within you, so much, so much, an enormous stock of memories and habits, deferred questions, frozen answers, thoughts, emotions, tender feelings, hardships, everything there, everything there, what will become of it all the moment life extinguishes within you? The disproportionate size of this pile—and all of it for nothing?

INTO THE NIGHT
Season 2

Nabil Ben Yadir, Camille Delamarre
Belgium, 2021

 

IRIS MURDOCH

Under the Net

____________________

I hate solitude, but I'm afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.

THE GREEN KNIGHT

David Lowery 

Ireland / Canada / USA / UK, 2021

CHARLES DARWIN

____________________

We stopped checking for monsters under our bed when we realized they were inside us.

THE PLATFORM

(EL HOYO)

Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia

Spain, 2019