"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

Well, we spent Caturday evening watching a new movie with Benedict Cumberbatch on Prime: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain.

It revolves around the figure of a British painter and illustrator specialized in animals, who created scandal and eventually started sketching cats posing as humans (or is it the other way around?), eventually ending up being one of the most visionary artists at the beginning of the Century.

The movie is good in some aspects, but to me it ultimately failed to convey the twists of Wain’s artistic evolution and, to some extent, even the depth of his mental struggle. Cumberbatch however is, as you might expect, absolutely incredible.

A typically eccentric work by Louis Wain of an ensemble of cats playing musical instruments on a moonlit night in the snow. Some mischievous pusses are creating mayhem with snowballs and an overwrought cat pours water into a tuba from a bedroom window. Louis Wain was born in 1860 and died in 1939: he was thought at the time to be insane and spent many years in mental hospitals.
From “The Children’s Friend” Volume XXXVII for 1897. Published in London by S.W. Partridge & Co.

comics and illustration

Leo Ortolani, Tapum

A un certo punto ci sarà una battuta, in questo fumetto, e riderete. Sappiate che è l’unica. Com’è giusto che sia. Se devo paragonare quest’opera a qualcosa, il confronto più azzeccato è probabilmente lo spettacolo che Marco Paolini trasse dal Sergente nella neve di Rigoni

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August 9, 2026 9:00 am
Summertime

Omeros in the Caribbeans

Derek Walcott was a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, and painter, and one of the major voices of Caribbean literature. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, and his work often explores Caribbean history, identity, colonial inheritance, and the meeting of European and African

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August 9, 2026 6:00 am
books and literature

Ioanna Papadopoulou’s The Castaway and the Witch

I had a genuine “oh shit” moment when I read the author’s preface saying this was darker than “Winter Harvest” because – and I absolutely ADORED “Winter Harvest” – that was pitch-black dark. I thought “we’re all going to die”. This maybe has something to

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August 8, 2026 9:00 am
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