The deep-sea octopus Vulcanoctopus hydrothermalis, which lives around hydrothermal vents on the floor of the Pacific (image from Octolab)
Elsewhere Other-Engageable
• Guise and Molls — review of Front cover of Octopus: The Ocean’s Intelligent Invertebrate: A Natural History (2010)
• Magna Mater Marina — review of The Illustrated World Encyclopedia of Marine Fish and Sea Creatures (2007)
Tripod fish, Bathypterois sp.
The very Lovecraftian Loriciferan Pliciloricus enigmaticus (Higgins & Kristensen, 1986)
N.B. The title of this incendiary intervention is a paronomasia on Kenneth Anger’s film Lucifer Rising (1972) (which I ain’t never seen nohow).
A Venus comb murex, Murex pecten (Lightfoot 1786)
Lionfish fry photographed by Steven Kovacs off Palm Beach, Florida, 2017
Papyrocentric Performativity Presents:
• Bullets and Butterflies – Mad Dog Killers: The Story of a Congo Mercenary, Ivan Smith (Helion / 30° South Publishers 2012)
• Jaundiced on George – George Orwell: English Rebel, Robert Colls (Oxford University Press 2013)
• Crabsody in View – RSPB Handbook of the Seashore, Maya Plass (Bloomsbury 2013)
Or Read a Review at Random: RaRaR
Previously pre-posted (please peruse):
• Slug is a Drug — Collins Complete Guide to British Coastal Wildlife (2012)
Papyrocentric Performativity Presents:
• Bits of the Best – The Shorter Strachey, Lytton Strachey, ed. Michael Holroyd and Paul Levy (Oxford University Press 1980)
• Shaman On U! – Copendium: An Expedition into the Rock’n’Roll Underworld, Julian Cope (Faber and Faber 2012)
• Scorpions and Sea-Lords – Philip’s Guide to Seashells, A.P.H. Oliver, illustrated by James Nicholls (various)
• Spike-U-Like – The Cactus Handbook, Erik Haustein, translated by Pamela Marwood (Cathay Books 1988)
• Glasguitargang – Dog Eat Dog: A Story of Survival, Struggle and Triumph by the Man Who Put AC/DC on the World Stage, Michael Browning (Allen & Unwin 2014)
Or Read a Review at Random: RaRaR
I like this illustration of a scene in Jules Vernes’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) even more because it has at least one mistake in it. At least, I think it’s a mistake: the jellyfish on the upper left are two Portuguese men-o’-war (really colonial hydrozoans, not jellyfish). They have gas-filled float-bladders, so in reality you see them only on the surface, not hanging in midwater like that. The mistake makes the scene like a dream. The absence of colour is good too: it fixes the illustration firmly in the past and the colours you imagine are more vivid. The artist is imagining, dreaming, conjuring a vision of an oneiric ocean.
