A Week of Kindness
In 1933, as America was repealing it’s farcical Prohibition laws and releasing the film King Kong, and as Germany was voting in the Nazi party, with Hitler already planning his defiance of the Treaty of Versailles and developing his concept of Liebstraum that was to shape the political landscape for decades to come, in Italy the surrealist artist Max Ernst was cutting up pictures.
Under his knife, works by Gustave Doré, illustrations from pulp novels, others that have never been identified, the individual elements were reassembled into one of the high points of surrealism: the “novel” Une Semaine de Bonte (translation: A Week of Kindness).
The book was originally published in 5 volumes and loosely divided into the seven days of the week, each with a corresponding “element”.
In these pages are nightmares. Groups of chicken-headed men abduct women from a burning train, an amorous kiss between two lovers is undercut by the scaly wings sprouting from the man’s back and a sleeper languishes while the waters of a deluge submerge her. Everything is familiar and nothing makes sense. Motifs return again and again. The lion, the serpent. Violence, seduction.
Part of the fun is playing “spot the join” so skilfully are disparate elements integrated into the the whole, but, as one might expect from one of the early proponents of Dada-ism and later the surrealist movement, most of the books appeal lies in the rejection of the rational and the embracing of the illogical.
There is, in their horrors, a foreshadowing of everything that was to come after 1933. At least for Ernst Max it was only a week of nightmares.
Mouth-taping.
I was first made aware of the benefits of breathing “correctly” by James Nestor’s Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.
According to Nestor:
The nose filters, heats and treats raw air. Most of us know that. But so many of us don't realize — at least I didn't realize — how [inhaling through the nose] can trigger different hormones to flood into our bodies, how it can lower our blood pressure ... how it monitors heart rate ... even helps store memories. So it's this incredible organ that ... orchestrates innumerable functions in our body to keep us balanced.
I’m someone particularly prone (or if we’re being generous, ‘curious’) to theories that promise a better way to use my body (yes, I’m one of those that tried to run barefoot after reading ‘Born To Run’), and one of the things I decided to experiment with was eliminate “mouth-breathing” at night.
As the author explains in this video, mouth-breathing is bad for a number of reasons:
I tried microporous tape as recommended but found that it had fallen off by morning (the idea is not to actually seal your mouth, but to train your jaw to stay closed while you sleep). I then tried zinc oxide tape and had the opposite problem. Sore lips and wincing as I peeled it from my beard in the morning and wrestling it from face at 3AM so as to ask the kids what they’re doing in my room at that time.
Eventually I found these Sleep Strips, 60pcs for under £4 (at the time of writing) and just the right amount of adhesive.
Vintage 80’s horror comics
Scream was a horror comic published in the UK by IPC during 1984-1985. It disappeared after only 15 issues (although it had disappeared from the shelves of our local newsagent long before then). I had fond memories of it, some of the stories had remained in my subconscious for thirty-five years, and I had periodically made attempts to track down back issues of it.
Now there is no need.
Backfromthedepths.com has collected and digitalised all fifteen issues so I can read them all!!