Digital Events Archive - Page 48 of 61 - The Last Tuesday Society

The Cornish Gothic: Haunted Cornwall in Victorian Literature – Joan Passey

In the mid-twentieth century Daphne du Maurier seemingly established Cornwall as a Gothic place through such celebrated novels as Rebecca and Jamaica Inn. Yet, having lived in and studied Cornwall, she was likely aware of a longer tradition of the representation of Cornwall as a frightening, haunted space. Indeed, a Gothic Cornwall emerged in the popular imagination a century earlier, with authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Thomas Hardy, Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon writing Victorian Gothic tales set in the county.

This talk asks why Cornwall was such a fertile site for the Gothic imagination at this time, and why a Gothic Cornwall has been hitherto neglected as a topic of study. Cornwall is often pressed to the margins of literary and cultural histories, but throughout the nineteenth century was a locus for the popular imaginary and a microcosm for a host of Victorian anxieties. In the period Cornwall was undergoing radical seismic changes, with a failing mining industry, connection to the rail network, and the birth of coastal tourism, and these factors all contribute to the emergence of a distinct and particular flavour of the Gothic unique to the Duchy. We will explore Cornish ghosts, bodies aboard trains, creatures lurking in dark, dim mines, and reanimated mummies on Cornish shores, to name but a few of the terrifying tales set in the county.

Joan Passey Bio

Joan Passey is a lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. She completed her PhD on Victorian Gothic Cornwall in 2020 at the University of Exeter and her monograph, Cornish Gothic, is upcoming with University of Wales Press. She has released an anthology, Cornish Horrors: Tales of the Land’s End with the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series and has spoken on BBC Radio 3 about haunted shores and nineteenth-century Cornwall. She has additionally published on Ann Radcliffe, Wilkie Collins, and Shirley Jackson, and is co-founder of the Haunted Shores Network. Please feel free to contact her on [email protected], @JoanPassey or joanpassey.com

Spirits of the Otherworld: Cocktail Book Launch Party

Join us for an evening of cocktails & curiosities as we celebrate the launch of Spirits of the Otherworld: A Grimoire of Occult Cocktails & Drinking Rituals — the first cocktail book by Directors of The Last Tuesday Society, Allison Crawbuck & Rhys Everett.

Special £5 cocktail menu will be available all evening featuring recipes from the book.

£5 Ticket includes a Devil’s Botany London Absinthe & Soda or Gin & Tonic upon arrival

£15 Ticket includes a signed copy of Spirits of the Otherworld and a Devil’s Botany London Absinthe & Soda or Gin & Tonic

Entry times are staggered to allow for safe social distancing. Select your preferred time of arrival: 6PM, 7PM or 8PM.

ABOUT SPIRITS OF THE OTHERWORLD

Alcohol meets alchemy in this fun and darkly fascinating collection of cocktail recipes to suit your every mood and whim.

Astrology, tarot, palmistry, and other spiritual arts are having a moment—and that includes the spirits we enjoy during cocktail hour. With this deeply researched collection of intoxicating treats, readers will be able to mix a drink that reflects their interests and satisfies their curiosity. Over the course of five chapters, the authors map out esoteric philosophies that have fueled the dark arts of their times. Each recipe is presented in a double-page spread that includes an engaging history, clear instructions, and original photography. Curious about druids? Try the Oak and Mistletoe, reminiscent of ancient European forests. Into voodoo? Enjoy a citrusy rum cocktail that’s finished with Peychaud’s bitters from an infamous New Orleans apothecary. If vodka’s your jam try the Devil’s Daughter, which pays tribute to England’s most famous prophetess, Mother Shipton. More than just a collection of recipes, this dive into the occult tells you everything you need to stock your bar and kitchen with, while offering compelling background information on natural ingredients, botany, herbs, and spices—all points of interests that connect the cocktail enthusiast and the practitioner of magic. Whether you’re serious about cocktails or the occult—or just getting acquainted with either one—this ingenious blend of mixology and magic will add a drop of mystery to every drink you make.

Published by Prestel/RandomHouse (7 Sep 2021 | ISBN 9783791387147).

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Allison Crawbuck and Rhys Everett have always shared a passion for unearthing curious tales and rendering them in liquid form. The duo are co-owners of The Last Tuesday Society’s cocktail bar in East London, transforming Hackney’s best-kept secret into the city’s favourite absinthe and cocktail haunt for half a decade. In 2019, it was voted the Best Bar in London at the 7th annual Design My Night Awards by a public vote of over 180,000 Londoners, and in 2020, their absinthe menu was shortlisted for Imbibe’s Specialist List of the Year.

In December 2020, Allison Crawbuck and Rhys Everett launched London’s first Absinthe distillery: Devil’s Botany located in the city’s east end.

Wine Tasting at The Last Tuesday Society

About this event

The Last Tuesday Society invites you to join us on 28th July for a special tasting of one of our favourite tipples… wine! An indulgent selection of three outstanding and unusual wines have been carefully selected for the occasion.

The tasting will be led by master of wine, Philip Stephenson-Oliver, and hosted by the directors of the Society.

Tickets are required and spaces are limited.

We look forward to welcoming you at The Last Tuesday Society for this live event!

Dates:
31st Aug

Photo credit: Oskar Proctor

Kate MccGwire’s Marvellous Menagerie by Dr Catriona McAra – Zoom Lecture

Kate MccGwire’s Marvellous Menagerie by Dr Catriona McAra

An in-conversation celebrating a major new monograph on the mesmerizing sculptures of English artist Kate MccGwire! She is joined by essayist Catriona McAra to explore the themes of the feminine grotesque that have come to characterize MccGwire’s work. McAra will trace over two decades of MccGwire’s career as it segues through the lessons of soft sculpture, surrealism and postminimalism, drawing from the likes of Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Dorothea Tanning towards the raw animal masses of Berlinde De Bruyckere and others.

The book is published by Anomie Publishing, edited by Mark Sanders and designed and produced by Peter B. Willberg. It features essays by curators and writers, Catriona McAra and Jane Neal. Now available: Kate MccGwire | (anomie-publishing.com)

Biographies

Kate MccGwire is an internationally recognized sculptor known for her distinctive aesthetic formula and innovative use of feathers. The feminine grotesque and the uncanny have sustained a significant hold over MccGwire’s creative imagination over the last twenty years, with interlocking thought-forms and otherworldly beings dominating her oeuvre. Her muscular, epic, knot-like artworks exploit dichotomous feelings of revulsion and desire, troubling boundaries of the wild and the civilized.

Dr Catriona McAra is Assistant Director, Heritage Collections and Curation at the University of St Andrews. She is a specialist in modern and contemporary art history with particular interests in feminist-surrealist legacies. Her forthcoming books include Ilana Halperin: Felt Events (MIT and Strange Attractor, 2021) and The Medium of Leonora Carrington (Manchester University Press, 2022). Recent writing on MccGwire includes ‘Boundary Creatures’ (Anomie, 2021) and ‘Menagerie’ (C8, 2020).

Piskies & Pobel Vean: Cornwall’s Capricious Little Folk/ Siân Esther Powell

The Unnatural History of Cornwall – curated by Dr. Amy Hale brings stories of the weird and wonderful from Cornwall to a wider audience, with an emphasis on Cornish voices from the past and the present.

The Cornish piskie is arguably one of the most well-known creatures of British folklore. They’re often portrayed as cheeky and mischievous but ultimately harmless. You can find them on charm bracelets and tourist souvenirs when visiting Cornwall. You can even spot them in children’s pop culture like Harry Potter. But Cornwall’s fascination with the Pobel Vean, the little folk, is not always so winsome. There are many types of piskies in Cornwall: those in rags who dance merrily on the moors, those who conjure up storms to protect their treasure, those who dwell in the darkest places underground and those who steal away children. Like the sea itself, that surrounds Cornwall on three sides, the folklore of this land is capricious. Piskies are capable of helping humans and also causing them great harm. So, let us explore the Cornish Pobel Vean, just how harmless are they really?

Speaker: Siân Esther Powell is a museum professional, podcaster and amateur folklorist from Cornwall She is Exhibitions and Engagement Officer for Wheal Martyn China Clay Museum. She recently graduated with a Master’s Degree in Celtic Studies where she explored and challenged the common narrative of Cornwall’s industrial decline in the 19th century. She has a particular interest in the relationship between community and industrial landscapes. Growing up Cornish and Welsh, she developed a fascination for the folklore and mythology of both places, eventually leading to the creation of the Celtic Myths and Legends podcast. She has recently written and recorded a BBC Arts commissioned audio piece set in a fictional Cornish village where piskies, mermaids and giants exist as an everyday part of life. She likes to use folklore as a tool to explore contemporary issues in Cornwall and beyond.

Curator: Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta-based anthropologist and folklorist writing about esoteric history, art, culture, women and Cornwall in various combinations. Her biography of Ithell Colquhoun, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, is available from Strange Attractor Press, and she is also the editor of the forthcoming collection Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses from Palgrave Macmillan. Other writings can be found at her Medium site https://medium.com/@amyhale93 and her website www.amyhale.me.

Occult World, Art & Poetry of Marjorie Cameron – Dr. Manon Hedenborg White

“In early 1946, 24-year-old illustrator and artist Marjorie Cameron (1922–1995) met the autodidact rocket scientist and occultist John “Jack” Whiteside Parsons (1914–1952), one of the earliest followers of the religion Thelema, founded by the British occultist Aleister Crowley (1875–1947). Parsons, who was magically trying to bring the Thelemic goddess Babalon to earthly incarnation, was struck by Cameron’s flaming red hair and dramatic looks, and the pair became lovers. Playing a key role in Parsons’ “Babalon Working”, Cameron soon began studying occultism under Parsons’ tutelage. Following Parsons’ accidental death in 1952, Cameron delved deeper into Thelema, magic, and visionary states, experimenting with peyote and seeking the guidance of her Holy Guardian Angel. She devoted the rest of her life to occultism as well as her art and poetry, which continuously explored themes of metamorphosis, eroticism, and death. As an icon of the Los Angeles artistic avantgarde, Cameron inspired filmmakers Curtis Harrington and Kenneth Anger, starring as the “Scarlet Woman” in the latter’s Crowley-inspired Inauguration of the Pleasure-Dome (1954). This talk will delve into Cameron’s art, poetry, and occultism, situating her as one of the most enigmatic mystical visionaries of the twentieth century.”

Manon Hedenborg White holds a PhD in the History of Religions from Uppsala University. She is the author of ”The Eloquent Blood: The Goddess Babalon and the Construction of Femininities in Western Esotericism” (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Eroticism and Surrealist Sewing Machines by Dr Abigail Susik – Zoom

Why were surrealists so preoccupied with the imagery of the sewing machine? Artists such as Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Óscar Domínguez, and Joseph Cornell devoted artworks in different mediums to the iconography of the sewing machine. Elisa Breton, Alan Glass, Maurice Henry, Konrad Klapheck, and others followed suit later in the 20th century. Certainly, surrealists were inspired by the infamous simile of the late-19th century writer Comte de Lautréamont in his experimental text, Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror) (1868–69): a desired male lover is as handsome “as the chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table!” However, a closer examination of surrealist texts from the interwar period reveals that figures such as André Breton and Óscar Domínguez were also deeply interested in the sensational 19th century French medical discourse about the gynecological dangers of sewing machine work for women.

In this lecture devoted to surrealist sewing machines and the surrealist movement’s interest in female masturbation as a form of social-sexual resistance, art historian Abigail Susik will share research from her new book, Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester University Press, October 2021). Focusing on paintings and objects by the Canarian artist Óscar Domínguez, as well as other surrealist artworks from the 1930s, this talk will uncover some of the secrets of surrealism’s sewing machines and its other objects of self-pleasure and autoeroticism.

Abigail Susik

is Associate Professor of Art History at Willamette University and author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (2021). She has written numerous essays devoted to Surrealism and is co-editor of Absolutely Modern Mysteries: Surrealism and Film After 1945 (2021) and Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance (2021). She is co-curator of the 2021–22 exhibition Alan Glass: Surrealism’s Secret at Leeds Arts University and also curated a major survey of Imogen Cunningham’s photographs at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem, OR, in 2016. Susik is a founding board member of the International Study for the Society of Surrealism and co-organised its 2018 and 2019 conferences.

New Orleans Voodoo, A fully illustrated lecture by Dr Louise Fenton

When walking around the Vieux Carré, the French Quarter, in New Orleans, there is the sound of Jazz, steamy heat and Voodoo. In this lecture Dr Louise Fenton will take you on a journey through the history of Voodoo, explaining how it evolved in this part of the USA. She will introduce you to key figures such as Dr John and Marie Laveau, show you key sites both within the French Quarter and beyond, take a look at Voodoo dolls and how Voodoo permeates the very soul of New Orleans. This lecture will introduce some of the practitioners in the Quarter now and discuss how people incorporate Voodoo into their daily life. By exploring literature, tourist guides, shops and Museums Louise will also show how Voodoo has been represented and how the authentic Voodoo can be differentiated from the tourist version.

Dr Louise Fenton is a senior lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton and a cultural and social historian. She teaches contextual studies in the School of Art and supervises PhD students; she is also an artist and illustrator and uses drawing within her research. Her interest in New Orleans Voodoo began when studying for her PhD which she was awarded from the University of Warwick in 2010. Most recently Louise has appeared on the BBC Radio 4 programme, ‘Beyond Belief’ and is a consultant on a new drama for BBC 3. Her research covers Haitian Vodou, New Orleans Voodoo and Witchcraft, especially curses and cursed objects.

a recording will be emailed to ticketholders after the event

Children of the Night: The History of the Wolf in Britain – Derek Gow/ Zoom

The wolf’s strange imaginative hold over us is reflected in the wealth of spurious falsehoods that persisted about it long after the species had been hunted and hounded to the dark edges of the British landscape. There seems little certainty about when the wolf became extinct here, though Anglo-Saxon place names that refer to wolves are relatively commonplace, indicating the species was still widespread (or at least recently had been) during the period; this is backed up by the considerable numbers of successfully hunted wolves recorded as late as the second-half of the tenth century.

Already on the wane as a British species, however, the increasing penchant of the monarch and the ruling class for the pursuit of deer led to an escalation of wolf-removal efforts after the arrival of the Normans. In 1281 Edward I commissioned Peter Corbet, a Shropshire knight, to bring out about the final extermination of the species from England – a feat he is said to achieved nine years later (though there is written documentation of eight cattle being killed by wolves at Rossendale in Lancashire at the start of the fourteenth century); by this point wolves had already likely long-vanished from Wales. Canis lupus lingered much later north of Hadrian’s Wall (and later still in Ireland), with a 1427 law passed during the reign of James I of Scotland making wolf-hunting a compulsory activity there. This did not lead to a nine-year removal like the purported extirpation south of the border, as Mary, Queen of Scots was still enjoying the hunting of wolves in the Forest of Atholl during 1563. However, the intensive forest exploitation of the period would have meant that any remnant wolf populations still clinging to Caledonian survival must have been approaching their final days by the end of the century. Perhaps the animal’s last stand was made in 1743 along the lonely middle stretch of the River Findhorn, thirteen miles east of Inverness. There, according to Victorian accounts composed nearly a century later, a six-foot seven-inch giant of a man named MacQueen slayed a huge black wolf: the last of its kind left in the land.

Derek Gow is a farmer and nature conservationist. Born in Dundee in 1965, he left school when he was 17 and worked in agriculture for five years. Inspired by the writing of Gerald Durrell, all of whose books he has read – thoroughly – he jumped at the chance to manage a European wildlife park in central Scotland in the late 1990s before moving on to develop two nature centres in England. He now lives with his children at Coombeshead, a 300-acre farm on the Devon/Cornwall border which he is in the process of rewilding. Derek has played a significant role in the reintroduction of the Eurasian beaver, the water vole and the white stork in England. He is currently working on a reintroduction project for the wildcat. Derek’s book, Bringing Back the Beaver: The Story of One Man’s Quest to Rewild Britain’s Waterways, was published in 2020.

Your host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of ‘Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country’. Edward Parnell lives in Norfolk and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He is the recipient of an Escalator Award from the National Centre for Writing and a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

Arthurian Legend – Elizabeth Archibald – Zoom lecture

For more than a thousand years, the adventures of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table have been retold across Europe. They have inspired some of the most important works of European literature, particularly in the medieval period: the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. In the nineteenth century, interest in the Arthurian legend was revived by Tennyson, Wagner and Twain, with T. H. White’s 1958 novel The Once and Future King – as well as Hollywood and the small screen – showing a more-recent interest.

Elizabeth Archibald has been Professor of English Studies at Durham since 2012, from where she is due to retire in August 2021. Before that she held posts at King’s College, Cambridge, the University of Victoria (Canada), and Bristol University. She specializes in medieval romance and the classical tradition in the Middle Ages, with a particular interest in the Arthurian legend. She is co-editor of the journal Arthurian Literature, and a past President of the British Branch of the International Arthurian Society. Her current research project is an interdisciplinary study of bathing in medieval literature and society. Elizabeth has published monographs on Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Variations (1991), and Incest and the Medieval Imagination (2001), and has co-edited A Companion to Malory with A.S.G. Edwards (1996), and The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend co-edited with Ad Putter (2009). Her many essays and chapters range over classical and medieval themes and texts, including Chaucer, Malory, and Scottish literature.

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