Monthly Archives: March 2009

André Pieyre de Mandiargues @100

Yesterday would have been André Pieyre de Mandiargues‘s 100th birthday, had he not died in 1991.

Some quick finds:

Les Incongruités monumentales, Robert Laffont, 1948.

Featuring his story “The Diamond”

Prefaced by Mandiargues

Arcimboldo le merveilleux, Robert Laffont, 1977.

His story La Marée and the 1967 novel La Marge were both made into film by Polish film director Walerian Borowczyk and it is de Mandiargues’s collection of pornographic items that is featured in Borowczyk’s Une collection particulière . He wrote several prefaces, amongst others to Pauline Réage‘s Story of O and a catalogue raisonné of Hans Bellmer engravings.

La Motocyclette

His novella La Motocyclette was the basis for Jack Cardiff‘s The Girl on a Motorcycle. He was also the author of works of non-fiction, such as a photography book devoted to Bomarzo entitled Les Monstres de Bomarzo and a book on Arcimboldo. His stories are collected in Le Musée Noir [The Black Museum] (1946) and Soleil des Loups [The Sun Of The Wolves] (1951).

His book Feu de braise (1959) was published in 1971 in an English translation by April FitzLyon called Blaze of Embers (Calder and Boyars, 1971).

One of his most controversial books is L’Anglais décrit dans le château fermé (1953).

Salute to Bacchus

Today is the feast of the Roman god Bacchus, known by the Greeks as the Greek god Dionysus. In my hometown Sint Niklaas, there used to be a bar called Bacchus. That was in the late seventies and early eighties.

I had to wait until the 1990s and the first issue of Wired Magazine to be properly introduced to Bacchus via Camille Paglia’s interview on her recently published Sexual Personae in which Paglia mentions the Nietzschean dichotomy of Apollonian and Dionysian.

Popular perceptions of Dionysus and Bacchus

Dionysus was seen as the god of everything uncivilized, of the innate wildness of humanity that the Athenians had tried to control. The Dionysia was probably a time to let out their inhibitions through highly emotional tragedies or irreverent comedies. During the pompe there was also an element of role-reversal – lower-class citizens could mock and jeer the upper classes, or women could insult their male relatives. This was known as aischrologia – αἰσχρολογία or tothasmos, a concept also found in the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Bacchus is less wel documented in text, but all the better in painting (Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio). His name is connected with bacchanalia, a term in moderate usage today to indicate any drunken feast; drunken revels; as well as binges and orgies, whether literally or figuratively.

Rubens

Bacchanalia

The bacchanalia were wild and mystic festivals of the Roman and Greek god Bacchus. Introduced into Rome from lower Italy by way of Etruria (c. 200 BC), the bacchanalia were originally held in secret and only attended by women.

Bacchanalia by Auguste (Maurice François Giuslain) Léveque

The festivals occurred on three days of the year in a grove near the Aventine Hill, on March 16 and March 17. Later, admission to the rites was extended to men and celebrations took place five times a month. According to Livy, the extension happened in an era when the leader of the Bacchus cult was Paculla Annia.

Cornelis de Vos

Paculla Annia

Paculla Annia was a priestess from the southern Italy who, according to Livy, largely changed the rules of Bacchanalias so that regarding nothing as impious or forbidden became the very sum of Bacchus‘ cult. In the rites, men were said to have shrieked out prophecies in an altered state of consciousness with frenzied bodily convulsions. Women, dressed as Bacchantes, with hair dishevelled, would run down to the Tiber with burning torches, plunge them into the water, and take them out again. The rites gradually turned into sexual orgies, particularly among the men, and men who refused to take part were sacrificed. It is said these men were fastened to a machine and taken to hidden caves, where it was claimed they were kidnapped by the gods.

Prohibition by the Roman Senate

The festivities were reported to the Roman Senate which authorized a full investigation. In 186 BC, the Senate passed a strict law (the Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus) prohibiting the Bacchanalia except under specific circumstances which required the approval of the Senate. Violators were to be executed.

Cecil Taylor @80

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP5L8tjnB6w]

Excerpt from Ron Mann‘s 1981 “Imagine the Sound” documentary.

Cecil Percival Taylor (born March 15 or March 25, 1929 in New York City) is an American pianist and poet.

Along with saxophonist Ornette Coleman, he is generally acknowledged as on of the innovators of free jazz. Taylor’s music is cited by critics, however, as some of the most challenging in jazz, characterized by an extremely energetic, physical approach, producing exceedingly complex improvised sounds, frequently involving tone clusters and intricate polyrhythms. At first listen, his dense and percussive music can be difficult to absorb, and his piano technique has often been likened to drums and percussion rather than to any other pianists, and resembling modern classical music as much as jazz.

Pierre Bourgeade III

Plexus (? – ?)

Plexus was a French language magazine, started under the auspices of Planète science fiction magazine to which the late Pierre Bourgeade contributed.

Planète (The Planet) was a French fantastic realism magazine created by Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels. It ran from 1961 to 1972.

On inspiration

On inspiration

Giovanni Bellini Prayer of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane by you.

Prayer of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane by Giovanni Bellini

Surely Salvador Dalí must have known about Giovanni Bellini‘s Prayer of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane[4] when he painted the epitome of dripping surrealism The Persistence of Memory by [5]

See works of art in the collective unconscious, cryptomnesia, rediscovery, déjà vu, memory failure, false memory syndrome, confabulation, automatic writing, memory bias, memoir, collective unconscious.

Pierre Bourgeade book covers

Passions by Irina Ionesco with prefaces by Lonsdale and Bourgeade

Contrary to popular opinion, it is entirely possible to judge a book by its cover, anyone inclined not to is a fool. —Sholem Stein

RIP Pierre Bourgeade (1927 – 2009)

RIP Pierre Bourgeade

Yaba Yayınları published Ölümsüz Bakireler, presumably a Turkish translation of Les Immortelles. –Sholem Stein

Pierre Bourgeade (November 8, 1927 – March 12, 2009) was a French writer, novelist, dramatist, poet, screenwriter, journalist, literary critic and writer. Rita Renoir met with her first critical success in the theatrical piece Les Immortelles by Bourgeade.

More on his importance to my universe in the coming hours.

Update: He wrote for French film magazines Positif and L’Écran français.

He is known to write in the category black comedy.

He participated in Peter Weibel‘s project Phantom of Desire.

He was a member of the jury of the Prix Sade.

He wrote prefaces for such authors as Stéphen Lévy-Kuentz and most recently Medi Holtrop.

RIP Claude Jeter (1914 – 2009)

Maurice Bottomley says: RIP Claude Jeter.

Click for credits

Listen to him here[1] on “Stand By Me“.

Claude A. Jeter (October 26, 1914 – January 6, 2009) was an African American gospel music singer.

Jeter was best known for his falsetto with the Swan Silvertones in which his graceful high melodies served in contrast to the rougher voices of the group’s other members. The group recorded for the several different labels, but never achieved financial success, despite its widespread influence. (I have a very special fondness for this category of artists, the ones whose influence osmotically make their own name disappear).

During the 1950s the group was popular and many of the elements of the group’s style resembled the then-prevalent rhythm and blues vocal group style. Jeter received many offers to perform R&B or rock and roll, but rejected them all, citing a commitment he had made to his mother that he would always sing for the Lord.

Elements of his performances in songs were picked up by later singers such as Al Green and Eddie Kendricks of The Temptations and another of his songs served as Paul Simon‘s inspiration to write his 1970 song “Bridge over Troubled Water“. Paul Simon subsequently gave Jeter a check for $1,000 for inspiring Simon to write “Bridge over Troubled Water”. See for this last trope: cultural appropriation in western music.

Normal love

Click for credits

My dear friend Walter gave me Cinema of Obsession[1] as a present.

Cinema of Obsession traces the history of obsessive love and erotic fixation. Seminal works of obsession, The Blue Angel, Peter Ibbetson, and Phantom of the Opera are seen as setting the groundwork for films that follow. The book defines and surveys examples of the explosive nature of amour fou, issues of male control (no matter how tenuous), and the fugitive couple – love on the run – in such films as Romeo and Juliet, Last Tango in Paris, Vertigo, Basic Instinct, and Wild at Heart. Male masochism is explored through film noirs, including Criss Cross, The Killers, Gilda, and The Postman Always Rings Twice. The book shifts gears in its finale and concentrates on the female gaze, films of female obsession: Jane Eyre, The Piano, The Lover, Fatal Attraction, and Vanilla Sky.

The introduction to the book mentions new (to me) theoretical work on love and fetishism. First there is Max Dessoir (pseudonym Ludwig Brunn) and a 1888 essay entitled “The Fetichism of Love,” from which comes this clever quote:

“Normal love appears to us as a symphony of tones of all kinds. It is roused by the most varied agencies. It is, so to speak, polytheistic. Fetichism recognises only the tone-colour of a single instrument; it issues forth from a single motive; it is monotheistic.”

“Fetichism of Love” reprises the final two chapters of Alfred Binet‘s “Du Fétichisme dans l’amour” published the previous year, which is generally regarded as the first work on sexual fetishism.

The book also references Denis de Rougemont‘s L’Amour et l’Occident (1939, revised 1972), translated as Love in the Western World as well as the standard work in this category, Georges Bataille‘s Erotism.

From that last book.

“eroticism differs from animal sexuality in that human sexuality is limited by taboos and the domain of eroticism is that of the transgression of these taboos.”

The phrase that inspired this post and above all the photo above is “normal love“.

Jahsonic

Aantekeningen uit Dodenstad.