Obscure and gloriously odd
Travis Elborough on Strange Attractor
Saturday September 17, 2005
<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk" target="new">The Guardian </a>

Strange Attractor: Journal Two (ISBN 0954805410) £14 (inc p&p) UK, £15 elsewhere

Any journal in which the contributors feel at liberty to drop in similes such as "like Madame Blavatsky's Akashic Record" or to confess to "an uncomplicated, youthful curiosity for the world of teenage public schoolgirls" is bound to be a bit odd. And Strange Attractor is very odd indeed - gloriously, frequently maddeningly so, in fact.

To call it esoteric, in the usual pejorative sense, would be both inadequate and to miss the whole point. This is a periodical that revels in the "unpopular" and the obscure - the arcane for arcane's sake. Although I'll admit that midway through an abstruse slice of woo-woo nonsense on Loki, the Norse god of trickery and sexual aberrance, I was gripped by a sudden, irrepressible urge to firebomb every new age emporium in the land, it is a beguiling and beautifully fashioned cabinet of curiosities.

Aside from pieces on those occult old chestnuts - alchemy, shamans, Peruvian psychedelic temples, homunculi and, er, Halifax - there are reappraisals (excavations almost) of the lives and works of the French writer and jazzman Boris Vian, the voodoo priestess and filmmaker Maya Deren and I Ching pioneer CF Russell. An associate of Aleister Crowley, Russell was, even by Strange Attractor standards, "a very peculiar gent"; until his adolescence he apparently preferred to defecate in his trousers rather than use a loo. Lovely.