The Violet Apple news

Alexander Crawford in Wormwood #11

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Wormwood #11, from Tartarus Press, opens with an article, "Resurrecting Alexander Crawford" by Douglas A Anderson, and a printing of "The Experiment" by Crawford himself. "Alexander Crawford" was the pseudonym of David Lindsay's brother, Alexander, and as his works are difficult to find, this looks like being a rare treat.

Wormwood will be available later this month, and can be ordered direct from the publishers.

Surtur included in the Daily Telegraph's list of literature's 50 greatest villains

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The Daily Telegraph places Surtur at #37 in its list of the "50 greatest villains in literature", beating C S Lewis's White Witch and Mervyn Peake's Steerpike, but failing to top Lovecraft's Cthulhu, Tolkien's Sauron, or Milton's Satan (who's in the #1 spot).

Of A Voyage to Arcturus, Christopher Howse (whose other picks are Svengali from Trilby and Claudius from Hamlet) says:

"No one in this anomalous classic of science fiction comes off very well. Despite his best intentions, the hero, Maskull, keeps killing people. Surtur is the greatest villain in the universe because he is its malevolent maker."

Petty as it seems to quibble with any promotion of Lindsay's work, it is, of course, Crystalman who is the villain — or, at least, whose name is the most unambiguous term for the book's villain. Exactly who "Surtur" is is a bit of a confused issue in Arcturus, starting with Joiwind saying "Surtur" is another name for Shaping, "Shaping" later being identified with Crystalman. But on the last page, Krag says to Nightspore that he is Surtur.

Surtur perhaps gets his villainous air from his origin as destroyer of the world in Norse Myth:

"The one who sits there at land's end to guard [Muspell, the region of flames,] is called Surt; he has a flaming sword, and at the end of the world he will come and harry and will vanquish all the gods and burn the whole world with fire."

— Kevin Crossley-Holland, The Penguin Book of Norse Myths, p. xxiii

Philip Pullman includes A Voyage to Arcturus in his "Writer's Table"

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Author of the highly successful His Dark Materials trilogy, Philip Pullman, has chosen A Voyage to Arcturus as one of the forty titles on his "Writer's Table". The Writer's Table is a Waterstones promotion in which big-name authors are invited to recommend a selection of forty books, which will presumably be laid out on the "3-for-2 deal" style of table in Waterstones' UK bookshops.

The full list of Pullman's selection can be found on the Waterstone's site. Pullman explains how he arrived at his choices in this article from The Times:

One interesting thing was the growing realisation that my list was less about literature than about story, or about something else that wasn't fine writing, but was more important. Some of these books are badly written, but unforgettable: Lovecraft's stories, or David Lindsay's extraordinary A Voyage to Arcturus.

Pullman has, elsewhere (in this interview snippet from BBC4's Open Book, for instance), distanced himself from fantasy as a genre (even whilst praising A Voyage to Arcturus), so it's nice to see Lovecraft, M R James, James Hogg and H G Wells as well as Lindsay on the list, which has a variety of graphic novels, non-fiction, poetry and novels, none of which, really, can be classed among the "usual suspects", so it's worth a look.

The Philip Pullman's "Writer's Table" promotion is due to go live on the 4th of September.

Postscript: One aspect of this news item — that phrase "badly written" — led me to add an opinion piece to this site, "Is David Lindsay a Bad Writer?"

Paul di Filippo's Cornucopia "is a tribute to... David Lindsay"

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Prolific author Paul di Filippo, interviewed on the Enter the Octopus blog, says his latest book, Cosmocopia, "is a tribute to the art of my pal Jim Woodring, and to the author we both love, David Lindsay, famed for his A Voyage to Arcturus." Cosmocopia is being published by Payseur & Schmidt. See the book's page on their website for a blurb and a brief excerpt.

Markings magazine tribute to J B Pick

Sat, 17 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Only tangentially related to David Lindsay: issue 26 of Markings magazine features a tribute to J B Pick, a poet, reviewer and writer probably best known to visitors of this site for his valuable critical and editorial work regarding David Lindsay.

The tribute section of the magazine contains a small selection of Pick's wonderful, award-winning short poems (which one contributor describes as "lucid and Zen-like"), a short story, an article on Neil Gunn, several personal tributes by other writers, and a bibliography. The rest of the magazine contains poetry and short fiction from a variety of hands.

Ordering details for Markings can be found on the magazine's website.