M.J. Rose

What could be more mysterious than the discovery of a rare manuscript in a defunct magic shop’s collection?

The discovery of a rare manuscript created for Houdini, of course!

Enjoy…

Long-lost Lovecraft manuscript penned for Houdini found

by Bonnie Burton (cnet.com)

The man who brought us Cthulhu wrote a book for the man known to escape everything. But if you want to read the unfinished work, it’s going to cost you.

“Nothing could be more exciting to fans of legendary horror author H.P. Lovecraft than the discovery of a rare manuscript in a defunct magic shop’s collection.

But it gets better. “The Cancer of Superstition,” written by Lovecraft in 1926, was commissioned by magician Harry Houdini. A Houdini memorabilia collector found the book and is selling it to the public.

Anyone who wants to read the 31 typewritten pages for themselves can buy the work as part of a Houdini lot from Potter & Potter Auctions in Chicago on April 9.

Previously, most Lovecraft and Houdini scholars believed the book might exist only in outline form since the work was suspended soon after Houdini’s death in October of 1926.

The famous magician’s widow, Beatrice, did not want to pursue the completion of the work after his death…”

For the rest, click here.

Love is still a mystery.

“Perhaps it is expected that I should lament about how I have suffered living with a man like Diego. But I do not think that the banks of a river suffer because they let the river flow, nor does the earth suffer because of the rains, nor does the atom suffer for letting its energy escape. To my way of thinking, everything has its natural compensation.” – Frida Kahlo

Those words seem like a metaphor for everything. Frida is speaking of her love for Diego, and yet isn’t this how all of everything really is? Work, art, health, beauty, age…and on and on. The darkness is the very home of light. Without it, light has nowhere to go…

From Brain Pickings,

Frida Kahlo on How Love Amplifies Beauty: Her Breathtaking Tribute to Diego Rivera

By Maria Popova

 
“As artists, Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907–July 13, 1954) and Diego Rivera (December 8, 1886–November 24, 1957) each possessed boundless talent bolstered by an unbending will. As partners, they possessed each other with a ferocious love, intense and complicated and all-eclipsing — the kind for which, in Rilke’s immortal words, “all other work is but preparation.” They wed when Kahlo was twenty-two and Rivera forty-two, and remained together until Kahlo’s death twenty-five years later. They had an open marriage long before the term existed as a trend of modern romance — both had multiple affairs, Rivera with women and Kahlo with both men and women, most notably with the French singer, dancer, and actress Josephine Baker and with the Russian Marxist theorist Leon Trotsky. Still, both insisted that they were the love of each other’s life — a deep conviction crystallized in Kahlo’s passionate love letters and Rivera’s affectionate account of their first encounter.

But nowhere does their uncommon love come more vibrantly alive than in Kahlo’s short portrait of Rivera, included as an afterword to his My Art, My Life: An Autobiography (public library). In just a few wholehearted, wholebodied paragraphs, she captures the enormity of their love. Her sincere humanity radiates a testament to the enormity of all love as a transfiguring force, the ultimate wellspring of beauty and grace…”

For the rest, click here.

We know David Bowie would have loved this guy — and by guy we mean Tesla, obviously – but also the incredible artist and illusionist Marco Tempest who does the most compelling and jaw-droppingly cool Ted Talk tribute to Tesla that we’ve ever encountered…

Enjoy!