Category Archives: fiction

Cult fiction item #7

Björn Berg‘s illustration for one of Astrid Lindgren‘s Emil books.

Swedish graphic artist Björn Berg‘s (1923 – 2008, best-known internationally as the illustrator of Astrid Lindgren‘s Emil books) recent death allows me to introduce Astrid Lindgren‘s short story My Nightingale Is Singing, read it and weep. Other tales in this collection are equally strong, the whole collection of bleaker short stories by Lindgren is one of the best items of cult fiction of the 20th century. My Nightingale Is Singing is cult fiction item #7.

Daydreamt

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While reading Jenny Diski‘s Nothing Natural (1986) I daydreamt of publishing my own version of this 1980s version of the classic novel Gordon by Edith Templeton.

The Jahsonic edition had a cover photograph by American photographer Roy Stuart. It depicted either the “La Bonne” (the maid) scene — one of the most erotic scenes in contemporary erotica — or “The Wall” scenario, which is very similar (although with a reversal of gender) to a dream scene in Breillat‘s masterpiece Romance X.

My edition is rewritten to provide for more intelligent discourse and snappier metaphors, and the perspective is changed from Rachel to Joshua. Joshua being the voice of a post-war Sade.

Sly as a fox, or, picaros avant la lettre

One more film for Paul Rumsey’s cinematheque: Le Roman de Renard.

The Tale of the Fox, as the film is known in English, was stop-motion animation pioneer Ladislas Starevich‘s first fully-animated feature film. It is based on the tales of Flemish picaro avant-la-lettre Renard the Fox.

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

Le Roman de Renard

Lords, you have heard many tales,
That many tellers have told to you.
How Paris took Helen,
The evil and the pain he felt
Of Tristan that la Chevre
Wrote rather beautifully about;
And fabliaux and epics;
Of the Romance of Yvain and his beast
And many others told in this land
But never have you heard about the war
That was difficult and lengthy
Beween Renart and Ysengrin

Go ask the physiognomists, phrenologists, pathognomists and characterologists

“I love this word decadence, all shimmering in purple and gold. It suggests the subtle thoughts of ultimate civilization, a high literary culture, a soul capable of intense pleasures. It throws off bursts of fire and the sparkle of precious stones. It is redolent of the rouge of courtesans, the games of the circus, the panting of the gladiators, the spring of wild beasts, the consuming in flames of races exhausted by their capacity for sensation, as the tramp of an invading army sounds.” — Paul Verlaine, Les Poètes maudits (1884)

Heliogabalus or Elagabalus

“Heliogabalus was a remarkable example of psychopathia sexualis; but in his age there were no Krafft-Ebings to submit his case to scientific observation,” said John Stuart Hay in 1911 in The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus. Heliogabalus, or Elagabalus as he is also called, is indeed a prime example in the category of Roman decadence, along with other notorious emperors such as Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero.

Keywords in the history of Roman decadence are inbreeding, bacchanalia, orgies, vomitoria, Great Fire of Rome, gladiators and pederasty.

The classic account of Roman decadence is Edward Gibbon‘s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, a book that was instantly put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. The history of Roman decadence is a necessarily a hybrid mix of truth and fact, but is interesting to note that the view Europe had of Roman antiquity during the Renaissance was that of an highbrow ideal. It wasn’t perhaps — although the existence of Latin profanity was already known to Antiquity scholars – until the excavations of Pompeii and we found the erotic art in Pompeii and Herculaneum in the second half of the 18th century that our view of the Romans started to change. This gave rise to the very first secret museum, the Secret Museum of Naples.

Back to Heliogabalus.

Two years ago in Amsterdam, I saw a pleasant man who served us in a bar while we were having dinner. His face struck me as perverse. How can someone have a perverse face? Is the nature of your character readable on your face? Go ask the physiognomists, phrenologists, pathognomists and characterologists and they will answer “yes“. Their sciences are long out of fashion and definitely politically incorrect, but I concur, without of course, casting a judgment. You need only look at the face of Heliogabalus.

On caricatures and character

One could easily be tempted to ascribe common etymological roots to the words caricature and character. In fact their etymologies don’t connect but that does not stop us from associating the two concepts.

Characters Caricaturas (1743) by William Hogarth

Yesterday, I stumbled upon an epigraph by Poe: “Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul,” which translates to Such a great misfortune, not to be able to be alone. It is from Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd,” but Poe had quoted it before, in his earliest tale, “Metzengerstein.” Poe ascribes it to Jean de La Bruyère, who wrote the Caractères (Eng: The Characters of Jean de La Bruyère). Bruyère’s book is an “augmented” translation of Theophrastus‘s (371 – c. 287 BC) The Characters which contains thirty brief, vigorous and trenchant outlines of moral types, which form a valuable picture of the life of his time, and in fact of human nature in general. The genre of the “character sketch” is generally cited as originating in Theophrastus’s typology.

One of the thirty sketches of Theophrastus reads thus:

Of Obscenity, or Ribaldry

“Impurity or beastliness is not hard to be defined. It is a licentious lewd jest. He is impure or flagitious, who meeting with modest women, sheweth that which taketh his name of shame or secrecy. Being at a Play in the Theatre, when all are attentively silent, he in a cross conceit applauds, or claps his hands: and when the Spectators are exceedingly pleased, he hisseth: and when all the company is very attentive in hearing and beholding, he lying alone belcheth or breaketh wind, as if Æolus were bustling in his Cave; forcing the Spectators to look another way …” [1], translation by Joseph Healey

More recent writing inspired by Theophrastus includes George Eliot‘s 1879 book of character sketches, Impressions of Theophrastus Such.

Illustration in a 19th century book about physiognomy

What I particularly like about these character sketches are their plotlessness, their roots as inspiration for the psychological novel, there generalizations into stereotypes and stock characters, and finally, their link to caricatures and physiognomy.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here

Abandon all hope, you who enter here“.

Snuff (2008) Chuck Palahniuk

My first exposure to Chuck Palahniuk was the film Fight Club. My second was picking up the novel Haunted and reading the epigraph “There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust,” a quotation from Edgar Allan Poe‘s “The Masque of the Red Death.” My third exposure was Diary, a novel I started to read and stopped reading around page 30 for reasons I forget.

The first and second exposures were enough to canonize Chuck.

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Today, I present you Chuck’s latest novel Snuff, about a porn star on sabbatical, her attempt to break the world record of serial fornication and a portrait of three of the men obliging her in her attempt.

I was a huge Stephen King fan between my twenties and my thirties but if I still would be such an avid reader today, Chuck would replace Stephen. Stephen is a mere horror author while Chuck belongs in the tradition of the fantastique and the grotesque, genres which overlap with horror but which are more of a celebration of the ambiguity and ambivalence of expierence.

Back to the novel.

Since the book industry misses something akin to IMDb.com (although LibraryThing [1] comes close), which allows viewers to rate films, we resort to a randomly picked review [2] by minor writer Lucy Ellmann for the The New York Times who does not like the novel:

“What the hell is going on? The country that produced Melville, Twain and James now venerates King, Crichton, Grisham, Sebold and Palahniuk. Their subjects? Porn, crime, pop culture and an endless parade of out-of-body experiences. Their methods? Cliché, caricature and proto-Christian morality. Props? Corn chips, corpses, crucifixes. The agenda? Deceit: a dishonest throwing of the reader to the wolves. And the result? Readymade Hollywood scripts.”

Don’t you just love this? Negative criticism which makes you feel like reading the books involved. Lucy Ellman conveniently forgets all of the sensationalist writers from the past.

Introducing French Book Covers

French blog Au carrefour étrange has ceased its activities for the time being and started a new blog called French book covers [1] which is illustrated with a chic cover photo [2] by the Italian designer and photographer Carlo Mollino. Its author, who goes by the pseudo of Losfeld, has a very extensive collection of books, running the gamut from surrealist theory to sleazy paperbacks, what I like to call nobrow.

A recent post[3] at this new blog featured cover art by French publishing house La Brigandine, for which Jahsonic regular Jean-Pierre Bouyxou has written novels under the pseudonym Georges Le Gloupier before that name was appropriated by the entarteur Noël Godin, a highschool buddy of Bouyxou. One particular of those novels is called Les Accidents de l’amer (Eng: Accidents of the Sea, or accidents of Bitterness, depending on where you place the apostrophe or blank space) and has one of the sexiest covers[4] I’ve seen in some time, due to the particular areola shape of the woman depicted.

I cannot pinpoint (or haven’t tried) the date of these publications, but I would gather mid to late 1970s.

Three redeeming elements in Sex and the City: the Movie

I seem to have developed a strange predilection for women’s fiction over the last few years, and have become a regular viewer – that is, once or twice a month – of the Belgian women’s channel VijfTV since they started airing De Co-assistent . Part of my attraction to women’s fiction is due to the fact that I like to cry (remember, tearjerkers are one of the body genres). Last Friday that station broadcast Linda Hamilton and Jacqueline Bisset in Sex & Mrs. X and I fell asleep afterwards during Cruel Intentions, an interesting update to Les Liaisons dangereuses.

The thing that started my proclivity to chick flicks and women’s fiction was my viewing last summer with my girls of the series Sex and the City during our vacation at Le Crotoy. But even before that, there was my liking of Bridget Jones’s Diaries when it came out and more recently the riveting zipless fuck read by Erica Jong during the summer of 2006.

So it came to pass that I saw Sex and the City: The Movie over the weekend. Since I only do appreciative criticism on these pages I want to focus on three redeeming elements of this film, of which I can say that it lasts 142 minutes, which are 120 minutes too many.

Redeeming element number one:

Love Letters of Great Men. A fictional book, which will soon enough become a real one. Quotes from Beethoven‘s letter to his Immortal Beloved: “Though still in bed, my thoughts go out to you, my Immortal Beloved.” The letter ends in the unforgettable lines

ever thine

ever mine

ever ours

Redeeming element number two:

The love story between Miranda and Steve. Miranda is the only woman in Sex … whose acting moves me. I’ve always liked Steven.

Redeeming element number three:

Louise, the asistent to Carrie Bradshaw is quite endearing. She is played by Jennifer Hudson.

Finally, trying to stay clear of negative criticism, does not mean I cannot use somebody else’s words to lambast this film: Manohla Dargis of The New York Times found Sex and the City: The Movie “a vulgar, shrill, deeply shallow — and, at 2 hours and 22 turgid minutes, overlong — addendum to a show.”

Your doctor will look into your mouth …

Lazarillo de Tormes (1808–12) by Francisco de Goya

Your doctor will look into your mouth to see if your throat is red and your tonsils are swollen and covered with white or yellow spots. He or she will also look for small red spots on the roof of your mouth.

Are anyone of you familiar with Lazarillo de Tormes and able to tell me what this scene is about and why Goya decided to paint it? The painting, which I found today, has a strange attraction. It is as something forbidden is going on. The man looking into the mouth of the kid is not a physician, I gather.

Update: found the explanation of the painting. The man is a blind man and the guardian of Lazarillo, he suspects that the Lazarillo has stolen food and wants to inspect it. Lazarillo‘s can’t stand the feeling of the man’s nose stuck in his throat and throws up in his face.