Category Archives: experimental

Postmodern American literature

In search of Cross the Border—Close the Gap and Playboy magazine.

For our discussion, the term [postmodernism] only really becomes interesting with the debate on American literature, as introduced by Irving Howe, who in his essay Mass Society and Postmodern Fiction (Partisan Review XXVI, 1959, pp. 420-36) heralded in a complete reversal with his use of the term. He describes contemporary literature as being characterised by limpness, as having lost its potency. This was an accusation (although he also considered it a natural development) inasmuch as he stated that the new mass society with its egalitarian forms found its approximation in literature, i.e., no longer possessed innovative power. Worth mentioning are also Leslie Fiedler: Cross the Border—Close the Gap ( Playboy, December 1969) (so there was “transcending of borders” already then!). The term first became a central topic of debate in American literature of the 1950s. — via wsws.org

See also: postmodern literature

Jean Painlevé

Via Invisible Cinema comes this announcement of a special curated by Valeria Mogilevich entitled Nouvelle Vague: Submerged Scientific Films & Firefly Cinema: Somewhere not Here? screened at the Anthology Film Archives. One of the films shown is the one pictured below, which I’ve had the pleasure of seeing in a double bill with Georges Franju’s 1949 The Blood of the Beasts at the Antwerp film museum. The 1934 The Sea Horse is scored by French impressionist composer Darius Milhaud, as are some of his others.

The Sea Horse (1934) – Jean Painlevé

Jean Painlevé (1902-1989) was the director of more than two hundred science and nature films and an early champion of the genre. Advocating the credo “science is fiction,” Painlevé scandalized the scientific world with a cinema designed to entertain as well as edify. He portrayed sea horses, vampire bats, and fanworms as endowed with human traits – the erotic, the comical, and the savage – and in the process won over the circle of Surrealists and avant-gardists he befriended, among them the filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Vigo, and Luis Buñuel.

Free Music Festival XXXIII

I went to the 18th edition of the Free Music Festival at the Singel in Antwerp where I saw Marc Ducret (guitar) & Scorpène Horrible (video performance).

The surprise of the evening was the Italian band Zu accompanied by Mats Gustafsson, although I left when my ears started to hurt after a prolonged electronic noise interlude.

Free Music Festival is an initiative of Fred Van Hove, a free jazz musician best known for his collaborations with Peter Brötzmann.

Exercises in Style (1947) – Raymond Queneau

Exercises in Style (1947) – Raymond Queneau

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I’m in the midst of reading 1001 Books and I am in 1947 now. Time for a bit on Raymond Queneau. Using The Reading Experience as quality qualifier method explained in my previous post I came up with two interesting posts:

via Native Sensibilities:

“But then we Americans inhabit a culture that seems to find “literary” writing in general (much less the “complex negotiations” of a Perec) to be suspiciously “effete.” That American postmodernists might seem laggardly in their capacity for game-playing and their delight in “incongruity” when compared to a Georges Perec or a Raymond Queneau would no doubt strike certain no-nonsence American readers and critics as outlandish. Too many American writers disdain “psychological realism” or good old-fashioned storytelling as it is. Thus, except through the admirable efforts of publishers like Godine (publishers of Perec) or Dalkey Archive, we probably shouldn’t expect to see books by such unmanly Europeans make much of an incursion on American literary life any time soon.”

via More on Oulipo

” The Oulipo – in full, the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature – was founded in France in 1960 by the French author Raymond Queneau and the mathematical historian François Le Lionnais. “