The Centaurs, a Fragment (1921)

"The only surviving fragment of Winsor McCay’s now lost The Centaurs, produced in 1921 by Rialto Productions. The animation is notable for it’s particular quality of line and movement way ahead of its time (20 years before Disney would reach such heights with Fantasia) and for a strange little moment when one of the centaurs strikes down a bird with a stone for seemingly no reason. McCay is best known today for his Little Nemo in Slumberland comic strip and for creating, arguably, the first true character in animation, Gertie the Dinosaur." Source.

Barbarians of the Eighties

This is a scan of the series bible for the cartoon/comic strip Masters of the Universe and its spin-off SheRa, commissioned by Mattel who needed a backing story for their new toy line.

The Myth of the Birth of the Hero by Otto Rank (1914)

Source.

Title Page
I. Introduction

II. The Circle of Myths

Sargon
Moses
Karna
Oedipus
Paris
Telephus
Perseus
Gilgamesh
Cyrus
Tristan
Romulus
Hercules
Jesus
Siegfried
Lohengrin

III. The Interpretation of the Myths

Modern Theater is Epic Theater - Bertolt Brecht (1930)

An excerpt.

Preface to Cromwell by Victor Hugo (English Translation)

Where Hugo defines the modern and the grotesque, especially where the latter acts as a remedy for the beautiful and the sublime.

In full.

Stalker (1979)

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Transcript (in English).

c/f Andrei Tarkovsky’s Very First Films: Three Student Films, 1956-1960 | Open Culture
c/f Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online | Open Culture

P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses Arthur Golding, Ed.

Source.

Christian Chapman Paintings - 2007-2010

Source.

5000 Geese - 2010

peeping squaw - 2007

sioux lookout - 2007

the blueberry pickers - 2007

squaw bay church - 2007

lion of loch lomand - 2008

holy fox! - 2008

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pigs of loch lomand - 2008

kathleen saw angels -2008

RCMP triptych - 2009

cowboy - 2009

ANEMKI - 2010

the great susquatch - 2010

Kafka Short Stories Online

A Hunger Artist
A Report to an Academy
The Neighbour (transl. Annika Eder)
The Neighbour (transl. Tanya Ellerbrock)
The Metamorphosis
Selected shorter writings, transl. by Ian Johnston (Before the Law, The Hunter Gracchus, Up in the Gallery, An Imperial Message, Jackals and Arabs)
A Hunger Artist (transl. by Ian Johnston)
In the Penal Colony (transl. by Ian Johnston)
A Country Doctor (transl. Ian Johnston)
A Report for an Academy (transl. Ian Johnston)
The Metamorphosis (transl. Ian Johnston)
The Great Wall of China (transl. Ian Johnston)
My Destination (transl. Alex Flores)
On the Gallery (transl. Maja Sinn)
Unhappiness (transl. Claudia Furrer)
Five short texts from Kafka's youth

Henry Darger, The Vivian Girls and The Realms of the Unreal

At the folk art museum.
Hidden in Henry's Room: The Secret Life of a Janitor
Google Images.

"At the heart of Darger’s work is the massive tale, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. Begun around 1910, In the Realms of the Unreal took Darger over twenty years to complete and provided the foundation for his art for the rest of his life. The story follows the misadventures of his seven heroines—the Vivian sisters, aged five to eight—as they fight countless battles in a war of good against evil.

Through tracing, carbon copying, and collage, Darger appropriated elements of popular culture to create the mural-sized collages and drawings that illustrated the fantastical scenes of In the Realms of the Unreal . He lifted settings, figures, flora, and fauna from children’s books, comics, newspapers, and magazines. Breathing life info the figures, he added personalized touches that divorced them from their original contexts: little girls gained penises or were given bird or butterfly wings and ram horns to form “Blengiglomeanean Spirits,” creatures who aided the Vivian girls in battle.

Darger was a fervent collector, and his one bedroom apartment was filled with his writings, art, and source materials. His complex drawings, which were stitched together to form compositions up to nine and a half feet in length, were so large that they could not be opened in the small apartment. Instead, they were stored in a stack on the artist’s bed; Darger himself slept in a chair. Yet there was an underlying order to this seemingly chaotic environment. Darger’s attention to detail can be seen in the way he handled his supplies. He attached individual labels to small paint pots to identify the colors inside. He gave whittled down pencils extending devices so that every last stub could be used. He transformed coloring books or even city phonebooks into receptacles for his collected imagery, filling every page with clippings and bundling the scrapbooks in stacks bound by twine." Source.

Proclus Diadochus - On The Sacred Art (411-485 AD)

Source.

Another interesting description of pagan and neoplatonic theology.

Holderlin in Translation Online

 A selection, translated, by David Constantine.

Conviction

Remembrance

Hyperion's Song of Destiny

All the Fruit...

Bread and Wine, Part 7

More Translations
As On A Holiday
At The Middle Of Life
Bread And Wine
Celebration Of Peace
For Zimmer
Homecoming
Human Applause
Hyperion's Song Of Destiny
Looking outward
Mnemosyne
Once Gods Walked...
Out For A Walk
Patmos
Remembrance
The Course Of Life
The Neckar
To The Fates
To The Sun God
When I Was A Boy

From Wilhelm Waiblinger's essay: "Friedrich Hölderlin's Life, Poetry and Madness" (1830)

Princess Mononoke (1997)

Film here.

Script here.

Wizards (1977)

Frank Lima's Sacttered Vignettes

Frank Lima's Scattered Vignettes.

One of the few contemporary poems I stumbled across in my adult life and felt it contained a world within that I could inhabit, Frank Lima's Scattered Vignettes remains for me one of the most magical sustained invocations of language (English).

Elsewhere in this quixotic library and toy store, I have collected material of those who address misery by making an aesthetic object of consumption out of it. That is, while enjoyable, often, the trap. One cannot possess meaninglessness (the ultimate ghost of upheaval and trauma) by turning it into a product, buying and consuming it. Meaninglessness is more elusive than, say, delicious candy. In meaninglessness (death, violence, despair), the hunger is not sated by eating more of the same.

The groping towards any space of serenity in this relationship between observer, meaning and world, one that retains not only the images of trauma, violence and beauty but also the meaninglessness of those very things which make our time here storied, would require one to communicate or build something actually transformative.

This is not easy. Misery has stubbornly resisted prognostication and prescriptions, as in Marx, or magical solutions, as in Fascism. Often it hovers just outside the purview of Liberalism, the phantom limits of its ability to act. The nostalgia of religious fanaticism can only hold it at bay for so long. Ignoring it does not dispel it.

Frank Lima, so despairing, so ritually beautiful in his figures, so uncomplicatedly attuned to myth and the ceremonial gestures of magic, in a matter of a few pages, manages to cover a continental scourge of difficult and ambivalent territory. The miracle in these vignettes is how he never drops out of poetic voice. He takes things that are already meaningless (failed lives, the sad household objects that are the props for traditional magic) and uses them to help communicate the ultimate things, which are generally resistant to meaning (violence, ultimate taboos, spirit). Somehow the ineffable--by sheer conjuration of this sensitive but semantically perilous alchemy--manages to pass through.

For More on Frank Lima:
Here is an interview.

Oedepis Rex

Oedepis Rex by Sophocles.

Original 1937 Time review for Cocteau's adaption (including set descriptions, etc.).

Christian Bérard, Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1932
Mural for Jean Cocteau’s flat, Paris

This play is perhaps the hardest-to-look at, harshest, eeriest dramatizations of Fate as well as one of the clearest articulations of it and the earliest. One looks into crime and the despair of the world, and through the maze of accusations, despair, evidence and hunches, at the end of the journey, one finds oneself. In this, the plot is almost dream-like.

For Freud, this play is the statement of the primal taboo and its punishment: a man kills his father to bed his mother. In how Sophocles describes fate we see, also, something like what for Freud would become the unconscious: this terrible crime is committed while hidden from Oedipus' (the perpetrator's) concious knowledge. And yet one can read Freud through Sophocles as well: one looks too hard at Freud's theory, and one sees only Freud. The theory dies and withers away.

Unlike in Freud, Sophocles' Fate is also a trap of external riddles and prophecies. Everything is laid bare in advance. The struggle to cheat Fate's inexorable bureaucracy is often the fulfillment of its miseries. What we call plot, though in meticulous evidence here as each move by Oedipus furthers the revelation of his guilt, leading to his ultimate punishment, is less to uncover what is true, but to be drowned in truth, destroyed by it. The tendrils of fate and plot affix to Oedipus like strands of quicksand to a drowning man. One does not, with knowledge, cheat death.

Greek drama keeps close to a religious, ceremonial practice. One senses in the elevated, poetic invocations and liturgical recitations of the chorus that this crime is ritualistically reenacted to address similar, uncanny signs of doom in the present. In this, the fate of Oedipus also resembles agrarian ceremonies where the fertility god is ritually sacrificed to appease the dying fields.

Power: Roger Caillois, George Bataille, in Translation

Available, in full.

Goethe's Faust - Part 1

Introductory Note
Dedication
Prologue for the Theatre
Prologue in Heaven
Part I. Night
Auerbach's Cellar in Leipzig
The Neighbour's House
Night. Street Before Margaret's Door
Walpurgis-Night
Walpurgis-Night's Dream
A Gloomy Day. A Plain
Night. Open Country
Dungeon

Other Faust Folklore, Literature and Materials

• THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS  from The Quarto of 1604 by Christoper Marlowe
• Faust Legends at Folk Text
• The Devil's Charter (1607) - Among its sources, Marlow's Faust, this is Barnabe Barnes take on Pope Alexander VI reign, the papal reign described as a pact with the devil for worldly gain.

On the Concept of History - Walter Benjamin (1940)

Available online, in full.

One feels few writers have appeared besides Benjamin to have such a sensitivity for the breadth and quality of issues that needed to be addressed by Marxism for any Marxist-influenced thought to continue to have any legitimacy, beyond the inert barbarism of force, proletariat in name only, of Stalinism and its successors.

Paradoxically, the realpolitik of Marxism, always Marx's professed aims of his "theory" (not to interpret the world, but to change it), was the aspect of Marxism that stopped it dead in its tracks. The actual Marxist (-Leninist) state became incapable of interpreting the course of events in any way other than to paroxysm in knee-jerk, farcical enactments of its own party line, whether those solutions rang true or untrue before the tactical dictates of time: a petrified totalitarianism. As a result, its economy parodied liberalism (i.e. Napoleon) at its most appallingly imperialistic (having no example of economy of its own, only a critique), and the barbarity of its anti-humanism reached fiats of slaughter only debatably second to that of Fascism.

Paul Chan - My Birds . . . Trash . . . The Future.

The immediate problem that put Benjamin so far outside the purview of (and even hope for detection from) his Western Marxist contemporaries was that he recognized some sort of engagement needed to happen between Historicity and myth. When History was continuously being rewritten to suit the aims of the powerful, one could not, as dialectical Marxism seemed to rely on, posit simply that, on the on hand, the bourgeoisie conceptualization of time was ahistoric, and, on the other hand, an absolutely unequivocal discipline of Historicity existed.

Compounded with this problem was Marxist intellectuals own cupidity in relying on prognostication: that a salvation in the form of the total revolution would resolve "contradiction." Rather than perform the tortuous gymnastics needed to deny that myth, a literary trope even, was being invoked in these claims, or to dismiss the yearning inherit in the discipline of history, or worse (from a Marxist lens), to disavow history in favor of a transcendental, out-of-time conception of timeless fate (as in Heidegger), Benjamin begins to give an account of Historicity, expressly sensitive to myth, that includes the avowal of the mythic themes invoked in any accessing of the past, part and parcel of the writing of any history.

He begins to address the actual theological and mythic underpinnings of the writing of history, not to find the project out as an absurdity, but to flesh out its serious aims, those necessary to our cognitive and humane survival. He writes an actual myth, a myth that posits body and public before the forces of its actual gods, who are, in fact, non-deities: progress, labour, organization, power (capital) and the future.

Paul Chan - My Birds . . . Trash . . . The Future.

That is, he revisits Marx to save what is salvageable in Marx but needing articulation in the light of the  present--the present, which is always a surprise. Not accidentally, then, one of the themes that take relief in this concept of a cumulative, progressive (not transcendent, timeless) history is: garbage. But the dustbin of history (Marx's phrase) is not, precisely, just oblivion. It is the storage of ruins by which, in a process akin to the archaeological dig, we may yet illuminate our way to the future. It is, then, a myth for the progressive. At that, it is only marginally an optimistic one.

Perhaps its most serious philosophical critique lies in the sketch of a world of facts-- a view given articulation in the 20th century famously by Wittgenstein--rather than one of base materials. This is where Liberalism consistently outpaces radicals, in political terms: is it a fact, does it yield real world feedback capable of being reduplicated in real time? Or is it a theory, strictly surface interpretation, in the mode of detail-oriented, world-renouncing monks? A question I am really not equipped to deal with but recognize it is there; and for radicals: The Begging Question.

Paul Chan - My Birds . . . Trash . . . The Future.

Objections aside, this is the climate and background I imagine to have been part of the writing of this mesmerizing, intellectually fervid document. To my mind, it is to seek in a history grounded in base materials (history's trash) our fate, but interpreted backwards through history's long train of wrecks.

A Panegyric upon Abraham by Sören Kierkegaard

Source.

Chapter 1 of Fear and Trembling includes a negative theology account of faith; that is to say: a theological analogy for meaninglessness.