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London’s Lost Rivers exhibition
The fantastic and learned folks at Maggs Bros (counterculture division) are hosting an exhibition of unusual London photographs by SF Said – who took the amazing Polaroids for our London’s Lost Rivers: A Walkers Guide – and Jon Savage, author of England’s Dreaming, the essential critical history of punk in 1970s England.
The exhibition runs from 22 March until 19 April at
Maggs Counterculture, 50 Hays Mews, London W1J 5QJ.
Entry is free, Mon-Fri 11am-15pm.
Original photographs and prints will be on sale.
Download the PDF catalogue here
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Forthcoming from SAP
2012 is shaping up to be another bumper year for Strange Attractor Press, with a number of new books in the works, and our involvement in two new exhibitions planned for the first half of the year.
Full details will appear here on the site in time, but until then here’s a peek at some of what we can look forward to:
– The Natural Death Handbook, Fifth Edition
A thoroughly updated and revised edition of the Natural Death Centre‘s celebrated handbook (left). Now presented alongside a new collection of essays on death, dying and funeral practices by doctors, historians, authors, poets, theologians and artists including Richard Barnett, David Jay Brown, Dr Sheila Cassidy, Charles Cowling, Bill Drummond, Stephen Grasso, Maggi Hambling, Graham Harvey, Gary Lachman, Nick Reynolds, and Dignity in Dying. [May 2012]
– Savage Pencil presents Trip or Squeek’s Big Amplifier
The collected Trip or Squeek comics. Over 100 strips, as featured for the past ten years in The Wire magazine. Savage Pencil’s (aka Edwin Pouncey) acerbic, lysergic, razor-sharp observations on music, art and life. [May 2012]
– The Influencing Machine by Mike Jay
A revised and updated edition of Mike Jay’s The Air Loom Gang (2003), a true tale of 18th century mind control, revolution and madness. [May/June 2012]
‘One of the greatest books you’ve never read’ – William Gibson
‘A wonderful book…exceptional scholarship and psychological insight’ – Oliver Sacks
Strange Attractor is also involved with two forthcoming exhibitions at Maggs Gallery in Mayfair, London:
From the Westbourne to the Wandle:
Jon Savage’s Uninhabited London photos and SF Said’s London’s Lost Rivers Polaroids
for Maggs Counterculture, at Maggs Gallery, 50 Hays Mews. London W1J 5QJ
Thursday 22nd March –Thursday 19th April
Maggs Counterculture and Strange Attractor present ‘Unstable’.
New and old artwork from Battle of the Eyes (Savage Pencil and Eyeball), Joel Biroco, Julian House and Cathy Ward, at Maggs Gallery; 50 Hays Mews. London W1J 5QJ
Tuesday 8th May – Friday 8th June 2012, Monday to Friday 1030-1700.
More details soon all of the above, and some other very exciting books planned for later in the year.
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Moon magic: Steve Moore interviewed at The Quietus
I was born at the full moon atop a crescent-shaped hill, the main mineral found here (on Shooter’s Hill) being selenite, and I have a slightly rough-edged crescent birthmark on my left forearm … so I was obviously destined to be either a werewolf or a lunatic…
My first attempt at handling the subject was actually the blank verse play, written sometime in the early 1980s, which I ended up inserting into the final version of Somnium, and the hero of the book, Kit Morley, actually refers to it as a work he’d written in his youth… Come 2001, I decided to combine a certain amount of magical practice centred on Selene with writing the novel that became Somnium. The two things were pretty much inseparable, but that’s often the way Alan and I do Moon And Serpent things … the magic and the art combine in a creative process and the ‘working’ ends up as a ‘work’, in this case Somnium.
In a rare in depth interview, Somnium author Steve Moore reveals almost all to Aug Stone over at the excellent The Quietus, along with an extract from one of the book’s tales with tales.
You can buy the special edition of Somnium, signed and numbered by Steve and Alan Moore, with a litho print of John Coulthart’s cover artwork, here.
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English Heretic Wyrd Tales 2 anthology and CD
140 pages of new art and writing by Lisa Cradduck, Mark Fisher, English Heretic, Ken Hollings, Dean Kenning, Phil Legard, Mark Pilkington and Sarah Sparkes.
English Heretic is delighted to announce the delivery of Wyrd Tales 2: a salvaged miscegenation of occult pulp, speculative meta-fiction, neolithic fantasy and mythic sci-fi. Wyrd Tales 2 will transport you to the horrific record collections of R’lyeh and the submerged libraries of a comic book Crowley.
Within its lurid pages, futuristic crab men crawl and the Machiavellian spectre of Joe Kennedy plots. Reports come in from the east coast of radical cannibal cults, we scry the haunted inner cinema of Norfolk beaches and shamanic lights are seen in ancient Britain’s aeyr ways.
Featuring contributions by a renowned and talented roster of guest artists and writers, together with a CD of The Dunwich Mix Tapes’ by English Heretic, Wyrd Tales 2 promises to provide the magical vehicle for an archetypal voyage to England’s deep.
Available over at the English Heretic souvenir shop
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Listen Close to Me
SAJ contributor Catherine Isolde Eisner has a new collection of short stories, Listen Close to Me, out now, from Salt Publishing:
Subtitled Hidden Lives of Love, Madness, Murder, Loss and Deception, this new collection by Catherine Eisner traces often with darkest black humour the misadventures and behavioural tics of women driven by bizarre and sometimes criminal compulsions… These are tales that probe the intimate lives and crimes of unreliable narrators to prompt disturbing confidences told in voices from the sidelines that we wouldn’t normally hear.
‘Extraordinary writing. Mesmeric reading.’
Ambit magazine.
More info about the book here
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Final Solstmas post has now gone
With the shimmering peaks of Solstmas looming ever nearer, and Post Office queues growing ever longer, the last chance to order direct from SAP has now passed. We’ll continue sending books out over the festive period, but can no longer guarantee that copies will arrive before 25 December.
We wish you all a Merry Solstmas, and watch this space for news of our exciting 2012 titles.
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‘Welcome to Mars’ on Kindle
Ken Hollings’ Welcome to Mars is Strange Attractor’s first book to be converted to the Kindle e-book format. We plan to make it available in an e-pub version soon.
It’s available via Amazon US at $6.99
or from Amazon UK at £5.99
A remarkable book… quite simply, essential reading.
Fortean Times
Welcome To Mars draws upon newspaper accounts, advertising campaigns, declassified government archives, old movies and newsreels from this unique period when the future first took on a tangible presence. Ken Hollings depicts an unsettled time in which the layout of Suburbia reflected atomic bombing strategies, bankers and movie stars experimented with hallucinogens, brainwashing was just another form of interior decoration and strange lights in the sky were taken very seriously indeed.
Ken Hollings shows brilliantly how the extraordinary web of technologies that drove the Cold War have shaped not just our culture but the very way we think of ourselves as human beings. Welcome to Mars offers a rare and fascinating glimpse of the roots of the strange humanoid culture we live in today.
Adam Curtis
Seamlessly interweaving developments in technology, popular culture, politics, changes in home life, the development of the self, collective fantasy and overwhelming paranoia, Hollings has produced an alarming and often hysterically funny vision of the past that would ultimately govern all of our futures.
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‘All I want to do is write’: Steve Moore interviewed
Somnium wouldn’t have been written at all, if I hadn’t spent my life on Shooters Hill. It’s a pretty strange place, especially when you start digging into its history. There’s a burial mound here that’s three to four thousand years old, and the woods that cover the hill are thought to be eight thousand years old. That’s almost back to the Ice Age. And there’s something about living on top of a hill that moulds your viewpoint. It’s not that you ‘look down’ on the people living around you, but it makes you feel different. There’s an awful lot of sky and a very wide horizon. So there’s geographical breadth and temporal duration. And I’m part of that. A native.
Somnium author Steve Moore interviewed by Pádraig Ó Méalóid on Forbidden Planet.
Pádraig hosts the excellent Glycon site where he recently also posted Steve and Alan’s Technical Vocabularies – Games for May, a short collection of poems.
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Mike Jay on Richard Dadd
Mike Jay, SAJ regular and author of our forthcoming book The Influencing Machine discusses the artist Richard Dadd and mental illness in the 19th century at Tate Britain:
Thursday 1 December 2011, 18.30–20.00
One of the most brilliant young artists of the Victorian age, Richard Dadd is a unique but little recognised figure in the history of art. In this evening discussion, Nicholas Tromans, author of Richard Dadd: The Artist and the Asylum, talks to author and cultural historian Mike Jay about the artist’s legacy, and uses his life as a case history to investigate the relationship between art and the treatment of mental illness in the nineteenth century. Draws on archival material only recently released.
Tate Britain Auditorium
£8 (£6 concessions)
Order tickets here
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London: Mythologies of Loss
London: Mythologies of Loss
with Iain Sinclair, Sebastian Groes and Tom Bolton
7pm, Thursday 27th October
at Pages of Hackney, 70 Lower Clapton Road, Hackney, London E5 0RN
Tel 020 8525 1452
Tickets £3
Iain Sinclair, Sebastian Groes and Tom Bolton read from their work and explore London as a city that can be read as a cartography of loss. The discussion is based on the research for Dr Groes’ book, The Making of London, in which Groes warns that conservationism and the fetishisation of London’s past can also blind us to new possibilities offered by the city.
More info at Pages of Hackney
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