Blavatsky meets Vonnegut

While the progeny of Madame Blavatsky and Dennis Wheatly remain on display, they've piled up into the corners to make way for a selection of Kurt Vonnnegut - although five minutes in Slaughterhouse 5 has already gone.

Vonnegut - who died this year - was one of the great minds of SF (although the literary estblishment might claim he wasn't anything so low; like Margaret Atwood's claims for Oryx and Crake at which we shake our heads and smirk a little, eyebrow's raised).

Slaughterhouse 5 seems to have found its way onto many a sylabus these days, and so is fairly widely read - it was made into a fairly decent film as well if memory serves, directed by George Roy Hill, who directed BUTCH & SUNDANCE...

But I digress.

We've got some of his other stuff:

GALAPAGOS, CAT'S CRADLE, DEADEYE DICK, SLAPSTICK and GOD BLESS YOU MR. ROSEWATER are all currently sitting in our window. Why don't you come and take a peak, pull a tooth as I like to think of it, since when a book sells from the window, it leaves a gap... buy a book, put it under your pillow and make a wish. You never know what might happen...

The Brood Of Madame Blavatsky...

An almost complete set of 'Dennis Wheatley's Library Of The Occult' came into the shop this morning, and are now lining the front window on display.

Some good titles and some very good authors (J.K. Huysmans, William Hope Hodgeson, John Cowper-Powys, Mathew Lewis)... though the covers are sadly lacking in black cockerels and scantily clad women - they're almost tasteful (and in case of W.H. Hodgeson's Ghost Pirates frankly dull). Not at all the illicit looking books I used to see on market bookstalls in my youth.

Ukraine's Got Talent...

Dave McKean tweeted a link to this clip and it really is something beautiful to behold, so I'm reposting it here.

Watch in wonder...



Great isn't it.

And while we're at it, did you ever see this:



There are things in the world that make me smile at their seemingly simple wonder. Things that are like honest to god magic to watch. Art god-dammit, with all the attendant affects that Art is supposed to have on you when you see it.

Listening to Sir Christopher Frayling's commentary on La Belle Et La Bete as I write this. Marvelling as I look up at the gorgeous images and simple old fashioned 'stage magic' effects, that despite their - in a sense - overt unreality, are so completely enchanting, so completely moving and magical, how they reach right inside you to tickle the heart and mind, and make you smile.

After a sort of grumpy, clenched up week (which I may go into later, if I've got something productive to say about it - I don't want to bore you with it), things like these - and finding great new writers and writing - are like ice water in the desert.