David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas has been on my tottering TBR pile for an awfully long time now—one day, it will make it to the top. But I have only recently discovered that cloud atlases are actually a thing, via the excellent SOCKS website/blog, “a non-linear journey through distant territories of human imagination” written by Italian architects Mariabruna Fabrizi and Fosco Lucarelli.
I frequently make quick sketches from the kitchen window to try and capture the often beautiful light and cloud formations in the skies visible from that vantage point. The examples from a 1930s cloud atlas provided in the blog post are intriguing as an aid to recording these fleeting skyscapes from an artistic rather than a scientific point of view (friends, I am no meteorologist: there, I've said it!)
"I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; "
Since I didn’t entirely snooze my way through school and university, I have a certain basic familiarity with some of Byron’s work. However, I had not come across his poem ‘Darkness’ until I read a post on Mastodon by Dr. Amy H. Sturgis, who posted about the poem in relation to a course she was teaching on Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.
A bit of further digging revealed that Byron’s poem, like Shelley’s Frankenstein, was written in 1816 in the literal shadow of the ‘Year without a Summer’. The 19th century saw the genesis of modern western speculative fiction in a fusion of the romantic sublime, scientific discovery, philosophy, and the visionary and/or apocalyptic.
"A Personal Anthology is a regular bulletin from a series of guest contributors, each of whom is given the opportunity to dream-edit their own personal anthology of short fiction. The task is to pick and introduce a dozen stories."
I was familiar with Jonathan Gibbs as an author, having read his novel Randall, but he is a man with many strings to his bow. I have only recently come across A Personal Anthology, which is a great way to discover short fiction that might not otherwise have come within range of my radar. Among the luminaries who have contributed anthologies since the project began almost eight years ago are Rónán Hession and M. John Harrison.
This time, it is a new phrase that has caught my attention rather than a new word—and a phrase in translation, at that.
As a smallholder interested in trying to understand how to minimise the negative aspects of my impacts as a human on the rest of the natural world, I follow the work of technology writer Kris De Decker in Low-Tech Magazine and his shorter pieces in the associated No Tech Magazine. A post in the latter, in which De Decker quotes Michael Saalfeld, provided the new-to-me phrase; the context is a failed project to grow warm-climate fruits in Stalinist-era Hungary:
"[T]his was so unsuccessful that it spawned a liberal political magazine by the name 'Magyar Narancs' (Hungarian Oranges) to refer to the goofiness of the Hungarian communist system of that era. … Apparently 'Magyar narancs' is still used in Hungary as an expression meaning 'an impossible task' or 'a stupid enterprise which will doubtless fail.' "
I try to keep up with what’s going on so that I have something other than the grumpy prejudices of my curmudgeonly mind to inform my writing and my knowledge of the world about me. This means subscribing to various newsletters and feeds, not all of which turn out to be of interest or that I get the time to check.
Irritatingly, it is often the case that the most promising items end up in the latter category, as in the present instance: it turns out that I have already missed the first three lectures in what looks like a very interesting series by Prof. Evans Lansing Smith, provided by the inestimable Last Tuesday Society. However, I will be able to pick it up with the forthcoming lecture on ‘The Splendor Solis and Nicholas Flamel’:
"The presentation continues with a focus on one of the most famous and splendidly illuminated texts of the Hermetic Renaissance, The Splendor Solis, and the transition to the Rosicrucian era exemplified by the narrative and iconography in the work of Nicholas Flamel, with its synthesis of alchemy and the Christian Apocalypse."
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| from Salomon Trismosin's 'Splendor solis' - Wellcome Collection - CC BY |
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