Archive for the ‘Weirdness’ Category

“Happy Day!”

Thursday, October 4th, 2012

COTSPAINTING

Click for Stewart Lee discussing Children of the Stones.

I first saw the show when I was seven or eight, when it was repeated on HTV during the summer holidays. I re-watched it recently and everything about it is still rather brilliant. And as a bonus it features Freddie Jones in one of his best mad-as-a-brush performances (almost as good as his sweaty stooging in Hammer’s The Satanic Rites of Dracula). It’s probably a strange thing to admit but this show had a profound effect on me. I think about it often.

The opening theme is still quite eerie. Though that may be due to nostalgia on my part.

Sam

Saturday, July 23rd, 2011

Ten years yesterday

Monday, July 4th, 2011

. . . since Delia Derbyshire passed away.

Delia RWS 1965

Strange Numbers

Monday, March 21st, 2011
[audio:http://www.paroneiria.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/tcp_d1_06_the_lincolnshire_poacher_mi5_irdial.mp3]

3 – 9 – 7 – 1 – 5     3 – 9 – 7 – 1 – 5     3 – 9 – 7 – 1 – 5     3 – 9 – 7 – 1 – 5

Bravo. The entire four disc set of The Conet Project – Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations is now available for free download on archive.org

If you’re the kind of person who likes to relax by listening to permanent loops of the Shipping Forecast (and let’s be honest, who doesn’t?) this will be right up your street.

Excellent Radio 4 audio documentary here.

Yeats and Crowley (thoroughly mad bastards)

Monday, April 20th, 2009

I had an afternoon to kill in Dublin last week so went along to the WB Yeats exhibition at the National Library.

Some remarkable objects on display…

Samples of Yeats’s automatic writing.

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Samples from his notebooks.

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His elemental weapons, made while an “Adeptus Minor” in The Hermetic Order Of The Golden Dawn. Pentacle, Dagger, Wand and Cup.

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Yeats was a member alongside Aleister Crowley (before Crowley was more or less chucked out following a great power struggle). Crowley fancied himself as a bit of a poet too and looking up my old copy of his Confessions has yielded some excellent quotes about Yeats…

I remember one curious incident in connection with this volume. I had a set of paged proofs in my pocket one evening, when I went to call on W. B. Yeats. I had never thought much of his work; it seemed to me to lack virility. I have given an extended criticism of it in The Equinox (vol. I No. II, page 307). However, at that time I should have been glad to have a kindly word from an elder man. I showed him the proofs accordingly and he glanced through them. He forced himself to utter a few polite conventionalities, but I could see what the truth of the matter was.

I had by this time become fairly expert in clairvoyance, clairaudience and clairsentience. But it would have been a very dull person indeed who failed to recognize the black, billious rage that shook him to the soul. I instance this as a proof that Yeats was a genuine poet at heart, for a mere charlatan would have known that he had no cause to fear an authentic poet. What hurt him was the knowledge of his own incomparable inferiority.

I saw little of him and George Moore. I have always been nauseated by pretentiousness; and the Celtic revival, so-called, had all the mincing, posturing qualities of the literary Plymouth Brother.

and…

There was one literary light, W. B. Yeats, a lank dishevelled demonologist who might have taken more pains with his personal appearance without incurring the reproach of dandyism…

I’m almost certain I remember reading that Yeats later described Crowley as a “poet of merit.” But I can’t find the quote.

You can read one of Crowley’s earliest collections of poetry, White Stains, published under the pseudonym George Archibald Bishop and is full of thinly veiled erection metaphors like “My Gigantic Charms” here.


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