Category Archives: French culture

The “pin-up girl” of the French Surrealists

Charcot‘s Louise Augustine, later dubbed the “pin-up girl” of the French Surrealists, attempted many escapes. The hospital’s last entry concerning Augustine, dated September 9, 1880, notes that she “escaped from the Salpetriere, disguised as a man.” [2]

Surprisingly, Les démoniaques dans l’art – Charcot et Richer[3], a book I acquired over the summer, does not feature the photograph depicted above, nor others from this set[4].

British writer Helen Kitson has written a fictionalized account of the Charcot/Augustine history here[5].

An excerpt:

‘I have named her Augustine.’

‘Named a lunatic after a saint! Well, perhaps they are much the same. The idiot, the mystic…’

‘She is not an idiot.’

She listens at the door, biting her fingernails. She needs to know what they want from her so that she can perform when asked. She has to know how mad she’s supposed to be. Satisfied, she goes back to her room where she dreams of blood and fire. Faces hidden behind shrouds. Dead men.

Visual postscript:

Some eye candy for the weekend

All covers from Midi Minuit Fantastique

–

1- 05/1962 2- 08/1962 3- 10/1962 4-5- 01/1963 6- 06/1963

7- 09/1963 8- 01/1964 9- 07/1964 10-11- 12/1964 12- 05/1965

13- 11/1965 14- 06/1966 15-16- 12/1966 17- 06/1967 18-19- 12/1967

20- 10/1968 21- 04/1970 22- 07/1970 23- 10/1970 24- 12/1970

Check the the wiki for image IDs

I had a list of three thousand words arranged in advance, and I used all of them.

L’Homme foudroyé

Litblog A journey round my skull brings Blaise Cendrars interviewed for Paris Review in 1966 in which Cendrars reveals the importance of vocabularies to his work. Vocabulary is a linchpin to my own publishing: every subject or sensibility can be expressed in a core vocabulary … I notice people’s idiosyncratic word usage … I noticed last summer that Cities of the Red Night uses the word surmise quite frequently.

Cendrars went one step further in a loosely constrained writing technique, stating that:

“For several years, each time that I prepare to write a book, I first arrange the vocabulary I am going to employ. Thus, for L’Homme foudroyé, I had a list of three thousand words arranged in advance, and I used all of them. That saved me a lot of time and gave a certain lightness to my work. It was the first time I used that system.” –from [1] via [2]

More Cendrars eye candy from my Flickr account[3].

“Carrier/Carrière is surrealist in drowning”

In the history of 20th century subculture, the surreal sensibility, and Surrealism in particular takes center stage.

Surrealism itself deserves a decentralized and regionalized historiography.

Polish surrealism for example brings the work of latter surrealist Jacek Yerka [1].

More than just a celebration of the new, Surrealism sought to find itself in the past and opened a revisionist approach to historiography. It sought to trace a sensibility in retrospect.

Faustino Bocchi (ill. above) would have been dubbed surrealist, if Breton had known him.

Arcimboldo

Arcimboldo (ill. above) would have been dubbed surrealist, if Breton had known him

In “What is Surrealism?” Breton defines what we can label proto-Surrealism.

See the insets for the Carrier/Carrière debate

“Young‘s Night Thoughts are surrealist from cover to cover. Unfortunately, it is a priest who speaks; a bad priest, to be sure, yet a priest.
Heraclitus is surrealist in dialectic.
Lully is surrealist in definition.
Flamel is surrealist in the night of gold.
Swift is surrealist in malice.
Sade is surrealist in sadism.
Carrier is surrealist in drowning.
Monk Lewis is surrealist in the beauty of evil.
Achim von Arnim is surrealist absolutely, in space and time
Rabbe is surrealist in death.
Baudelaire is surrealist in morals.
Rimbaud is surrealist in life and elsewhere.
Hervey Saint-Denys is surrealist in the directed dream.
Carroll is surrealist in nonsense.
Huysmans is surrealist in pessimism.
Seurat is surrealist in design.
Picasso is surrealist in cubism.
Vaché is surrealist in me.
Roussel is surrealist in anecdote. Etc.”

This list comes from a lecture given by Breton in Brussels in 1934, either on May 12 or June 1 of that year, and published as a pamphlet immediately afterwards by René Henriquez, with as cover art Magritte‘s The Rape, which was created for that purpose. The enumeration in the lecture harks back to a list published in the first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924.

Other versions exist, one was published in the “Surrealist Number” of This Quarter. Another version was translated to Czech and published as “Co je surrealismus?” (1937), with a cover by Karel Teige. This list reprised the 1924 version.

Many of the names on the list are obscure, but I have managed to track all … but one.

When Breton says “Carrier is surrealist in drowning,” I have no idea who he means. Apparently, I am not the only one.

Marguerite Bonnet says in the 1975 André Breton: naissance de l’aventure surréaliste

… “Nous n’avons pas encore retrouvé le texte français de cet article, dont la version anglaise donne au « nom « Carrière » que Breton a corrigé en Carrier”

… “We have been unable to find the French text of this article, of which the English version gives as name Carrière, which Breton later correct as Carrier”

If Bonnet confesses that she could not find the French text (published by René Henriquez) there is even more room for confusion. The “Surrealist Number” (1932) of Parisian “little magazine” This Quarter‘ (edited by Edward W. Titus)[2]; and André Breton: naissance de l’aventure surréaliste [3] each mention additional names such as Helen Smith (surrealist in tongue), Uccello (in the free for all fight), Radcliffe (in the landscape), Maturin (in despair); and can’t agree on the spelling Carrière/Carrier.

Tony Duvert (1945 – 2008)

Tony Duvert, the most infamous French gay writer (similar enfant terrible Pierre Guyotat was hetero) since Jean Genet is dead, says the The Paper Man.

[Amazon.com]
[FR] [DE] [UK]

Tony Duvert (1945 – 2008) was a French writer. He was the winner of the Prix Médicis, author of When Jonathan Died and contributor to French gay journal Gai pied.

In 2007 an English translation by Bruce Benderson Good Sex Illustrated (Le bon sexe illustré) was released by Semiotext(e).

Dennis Cooper described him as “A writer criminally undertranslated and consequently barely known in the primarily English-speaking areas of the world…. Duvert is one of the more significant and idiosyncratic contemporary French fiction writers. He’s also one of the most mysterious.”

Audrey Vernon, gratuitous nudity and French culture

French eroticism and French culture

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrLge_qkFw8]

Audrey Vernon at Canal plus Décalé strips nude

The work of Audrey Vernon as an announcer at French channel Canal plus Décalé is stupendous. She is the next big thing after Max Headroom. Above is the notorious announcement where she strips nude, sulkingly claiming that “nobody is watching anyway.” Phil Bloom [1] is her predecessor, this Dutch model showed her naked torso on national Dutch television in 1967.

Comparing Audrey Vernon to Max Headroom [3] reminds me of the eighties with kitsch such as the 1985 “Moments in Love“[4], both previous clips produced by Trevor Horn (more on him later). The eighties was also the time of Double Dutch [5] by McLaren (and btw, when was the similarly-styled “Freestyle“[6] by Bambaataa, a play on Kraftwerk‘s “Numbers“, produced?).

But I digress.

Back to French culture.

Le Roman populaire. Recherches en paralittérature (1975) by Marc Angenot

Above[6] is the elegant book cover to Marc Angenot‘s Le Roman populaire. Recherches en paralittérature, a 1975 work on paraliterature and popular fiction.

Excuse this hodgepodge of a post.

P. S. Click the footnoted numbers to watch.

Genre scenes, trompe-l’œils and occasional dashes of eroticism

La Toilette intime by Louis-Léopold Boilly

Passer_payez_detail1 by Louis-Léopold Boilly

Slurping_Oysters_1825 by Louis-Léopold Boilly

L'effet_du_mélodrame by Louis-Léopold Boilly

Via Suzanna of Wurzeltod [1] comes the work of French painter Léopold Boilly, whose work ranges from genre scenes to trompe-l’œils and occasional dashes of eroticism.

Before production of the Sade biopic Quills[2] began, costume designer Jacqueline West gave Kate Winslet a copy of Boilly’s “Woman Ironing”[3] to give her a feel for the character, which Winslet said greatly influenced her performance.

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

YouTube mashup of Quills (set to Nine Inch Nails “Closer“)

The sadly defunct arts blog Lemateurdart has one more Boilly [5] and Jahsonic previously on Quills[6][7].

Quills is WCC #59. Toilette intime[4] is IoEA #33.

Most of the afternoon has been spent on

Charles Nodier‘s Infernaliana

Most of the afternoon has been spent on literary lunatics and morosophy, inspired by researching Charles Nodier‘s Infernaliana[2], brought to my attention by Au carrefour étrange [3]. One encounters[4] the recently discovered but already inevitable JRMS [5] on the way. Do listen to the latter’s current Studio One muxtape [6].

I’m kind of happy that I managed to dug out the special issue Hétéroclites et fous littéraires[7][8] from Bizarre at L’Alamblog and particularly satisfied with my translation of the French-language Wikipedia article on “literary lunatics“:

Fous littéraires is a French term used to denote outsider writers who have failed to attract any recognition, not by the intellegentiae, not by the public, not by art critics, not by publishers (since they are largely self-published), and which treat subject matter considered – at least by those who qualify these writers as fous littéraires – as offbeat and amusing, without this being the intention of the author. A prime example in this category is Jean-Pierre Brisset, French author of Les dents, la bouche, a poem which is untranslatable due to its reliance on paronymy.

The study of literary fools starts in 1835 with a bibliography compiled by Charles Nodier (Bibliographie des fous : De quelques livres excentriques, published by Techener in 1835) and is continued in 1880 with Gustave Brunet (aka Philomneste Junior) in Les Fous littéraires, essai bibliographique sur la littérature excentrique, les illuminés, visionnaires, etc., published by Gay et Doucé in 1880.

In the 1930s, Raymond Queneau continues the projet by spending years of research at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, fruits of which include Les Enfants du limon[9] (1938) and the posthumously published Aux Confins des Ténèbres, les fous littéraires.

Official Oulipo photo, André Blavier in cardboard cutout on table

In 1982 Henri Veyrier published Les Fous littéraires, a work of Belgian surrealist André Blavier [10], a continuation of his predecessors (and work he had published in Hétéroclites et fous littéraires in Bizarre of April 1956) with an augmentation by Malombra/Roger Langlais estate. This veritable encyclopedia features more than 1000 pages and 3000 reviewed “auteur“s. It features inventors of perpetual motion, theorists who claim the answer to squaring the circle, the inexistence of hell, universal languages, the structure of the universe, medicine, algebra or human sexuality.

In 2007, a group of French-language writers, found the IIREFL (Institut international de recherches et d’explorations sur les fous littéraires, hétéroclites, excentriques, irréguliers, outsiders, tapés, assimilés, sans oublier tous les autres…) or in English: International Institute for Research on Literary Lunatics, Outsiders, Weirdoes, Assimilated, say nothing of the others….

Proving that I do venture outside at times:

after Sherrie Levine, after Edward Weston

Taking photos of photos seems to be my thing. With my new camera, after Sherrie Levine, after Edward Weston, I took a picture of this polaroid [11] by Guy Bourdin (Bourdin used the pola in [12]) yesterday night (which was museum night) at the Antwerp fotomuseum. There are some more of my snapshots of Bourdin’s polaroids[13].

2008 art intervention at MuHKA

My friend and I also had our picture taken[14] at the Guillaume Bijl installation TV Quiz Decor[15]. We were chased away by a museum attendant, but I managed to soothe her saying it was an art intervention.

Man of a thousand prefaces dies

Francis Lacassin dies, reports De Papieren Man.

Edith Scob, at her father’s masked ball in Judex (Franju, 1963), sourced here[2]

Francis Lacassin, (November 18 1931 in Saint-Jean-de-Valériscle (Gard), France – August 12, 2008, Paris), was a French journalist, publisher, writer, screenwriter and essayist.

From 1964 onwards he contributed to the literary magazine Bizarre, published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert. He wrote on fantastic literature and detective fiction for Magazine Littéraire, and contributed to l’Express and Point.

He was also the literary advisor for Christian Bourgois‘s 10/18 series.

Connoisseur of popular culture, he was instrumental in giving comic books (already more respectfully known as bandes dessinées in France), its respectability as the ninth art and was a contributor to the film magazine Midi Minuit Fantastique and a co-screenwriter to Franju‘s Judex.

He prepared and prefaced a great many reference works, author profiles or series, most notably at Éditions Robert Laffont where he supervised the series « Bouquins » since 1982 including Eugène Sue, Gustave Le Rouge, Maurice Leblanc, Fantômas, Lovecraft and Jack London.

He was nicknamed the “man of a thousand prefaces”.

Possibilities of Michel

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

Trailer to Possibility of an Island

On September 10 France will get the chance to see Michel Houellebecq‘s own film adaptation of The Possibility of an Island[1]. It was rumored that Rem Koolhaas would design the decors, but in the end he did not, I believe. Fernando Arrabal was prominently present at the film’s recording.

Houellebecq is a contemporary French writer and everyone’s current cult favourite.

He has his detractors however … he was disparagingly compared to Thomas Bernhard by a friend “with infallible judgement” of litblogger Stephen Mitchelmore in 2005[2] and English novelist Will Self, commonly called the French counterpart (see equivalents and synchronicity) of Houellebecq, described his equivalent as “just a little guy who can’t get enough sex” (The Trouble with Michel).

I’ve yet to read Bernhard and Self. Since I haven’t read The Possibility of an Island, I’ll try to catch the film, but … after seeing Eichinger’s botched adaptation of The Elementary Particles … I fear for the worst. The only film adaptation of Houellebecq I can vouch for is Extension du domaine de la lutte by Philippe Harel. That was an excellent film. From the trailer of Possibility, I can only say that the film feels like another Jahsonic fave: Christophe Honoré‘s 2004 My Mother, probably due to the shared Ibiza scenery.

Staying with French literature, Anglophone litblog A journey round my skull celebrates Maurice Blanchot‘s “The Madness of the Day“. [3][ notes].

Post scriptum: I didn’t publish yesterday‘s notes. If you wish to follow my daily note-taking, visit my bliki.

Previously at Jahsonic: Carnivalesque damsels