Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Paul Gregor ...'Journal d'un Sorcier' ( A Wizard Diary)



Paul Gregor (aka Paul Sebescen, 1914-1988) became famous in the french occult world when he published, in 1964, his famous 'Journal d'un Sorcier' (A Wizard Diary). He was relating in this book his astonishing adventures in Brazil, just after World War II, when he plunged into the world of the 'Quimbanda', the darker side of Macumba.



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an excerpt from unfinished novel 'Circe's Island'...


"We are both living inside our two bodies and also far beyond them. We are part of the exuberant nature which surrounds us, of its soothing quiet and also of its sadistic Black Masses. We are ceaselessly changing. Into night-flowers, birds, trails of blood, rags of skin lacerated by razor-blades - now we are hoarse yells, now the murmur of brooks under the moon. Only in our imagination? Where does imagination begin? Where does it end? Is it morbid? Why should we care?"

"The only thing I know for certain: this is eternity. Our sighs are sighed by our innermost life. Our breathing follows the rhythm of permanent orgasm, we are cast in the iron mould of unending lust: ceaselessly ebbing and flowing."

"We are that fabulous being of Plato, with two heads, four arms and four legs."


Hail to thee, oh Whirling Dove!
Hail, oh Woman-Exù!
She is waiting at her crossroads
Doing whatever she wills to do.



* Many thanks to Philippe Pissier for all the above


Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Unica Zürn ...excerpt from the Man of Jasmine...




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Unica Zürn  Berlin - Grunewald 1928



You ghostly gaze! Shy and radiant,
wicked with loneliness and humour; your sombrenes,
seemingly without beginning
and thus without end, shines
through my dream-lit rooms. I ask myself
whether angels might have such eyes?

from The Man of Jasmine



Sunday, March 21, 2010

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

The Songs of Bilitis... Willy Pogany & Pierre Louÿs...





I sing my flesh and my life...
Stay softly couched, oh, my body, according to your voluptuous mission! Taste daily joys and passions whose tomorrow never comes. Leave no pleasure unexplored, lest you regret the evening of your death....

 




Friday, January 22, 2010

Johann Joachim Becher...Physica subterranea ... 1669





Johann Joachim Becher (6 May 1635 – October 1682), was a German physician, alchemist, precursor of chemistry, scholar and adventurer

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"... chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost insane impulse to seek their pleasure among smoke and vapor, soot and flame, poisons and poverty, yet among all these evils I seem to live so sweetly, that [I'd die before I'd] change places with the Persian King..." JB

Friday, December 25, 2009

The Act of Drawing... Unica Zurn







The pen "floats" tentatively above the white paper, until she discovers the spot for the first eye. Only once she is "being looked at" from the paper does she start to find her bearings and effortlessy add one motif to the next....


The Man of Jasmine - Atlas Press 1994



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Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Quentin Crisp... How to Have a Life-Style...

a few scans and excerpt from a favourite book and treasured memories...



° Quentin Crisp °
(25 December 1908 – 21 November 1999), born Denis Charles Pratt, was an English writer and raconteur


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... I am not hiding in the shadow of Mr Socrates and merely reiterating that the purpose of education is self-knowledge. This is but 'O' level stuff; at 'A' level, the stylist's level, we must learn self-projection.

....
What we need is not massive grants for the visual arts but encouragement to learn singing, dancing and a whole syllabus of self-glorifying techniques. Painting is only a rebus of self-expression. Why not learn expression itself?

...
We do not need the perfectly designed chair; we want a capacity for relaxing even on a bed of nails. We ought not to waste time constructing a 'with-it' telephone kiosk; we should rather cultivate such perfect diction that we can communicate against all odds. We shall find we already have a golden city when we have all become divine beings.

...
All we need to do is to esteem the freedom to reject as highly as the licence to accept; to reform ourselves instead of other people; to be aware of the quality of our experience instead of its quantity; to live for living's sake - with style...



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" I have always lived my life in the profession of being."


Saturday, November 7, 2009

Histoire d'O... Leonor Fini... part 1...



A few scans from a favourite possesion...

Histoire d'O

The Story of O


(1975)

Pauline Reage (Pseudonym for Dominque Aury)
illustrated by Leonor
Fini


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