Category Archives: grotesque

Introducing Gaston Burssens (1896 – 1965)

DSC02544

Fabula rasa (1945) by Gaston Burssens (this edition 1964)

I am not much of a fiction reader, nor have I ever been much of a poetry reader. My favorite literature is books about books. Literary criticism or literary theory.

I make exceptions.

The best work I read last year was Michaux’s Plume[1] which happens to be a work of prose poetry, a genre which can be traced most readily to Baudelaire and Poe. A genre which is plotless but nevertheless more concrete than pure poetry.

Saturday I bought the work above. It is worth its price for the introductory notes alone.

Literary critic Paul de Wispelaere reviewed it in the chapter “De groteske wereld en de wereld van de groteske,” in his collection Het Perzische Tapijt (1966). In this essay de Wispelaere juxtaposes Fabula Rasa with the paraprose of Gust Gils, another Flemish writer who wrote in the tradition of the literary grotesque. Fabula Rasa’s Belgian-French counterpart is Plume by Henri Michaux.

While researching this post I also stumbled upon prose by Flanders’ cult poet par excellence Paul Van Ostaijen: De bende van de stronk (The stump gang, 1932, grotesques). I will want a copy of that.

Edgar Allan Poe @200

Edgar Allan Poe, American writer and poet @200

A photograph of a daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe 1848, first published 1880

A photograph of a daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe 1848,

first published 1880

Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, and one of the leaders of the American Romanticism. Best known for his tales of the macabre and mystery, Poe was one of the early American practitioners of the short story and a progenitor of detective fiction and crime fiction. During his lifetime he was more popular in France (thanks to the translations of Baudelaire) than in his native country. After his premature death at the age of 40 he became internationally renowned. The Japanese writer Edogawa Rampo derived his pseudonym of his name. He came to the attention of 20th century audiences via the low-budget film adaptations by Roger Corman starring Vincent Price.

If you only want to read one story by Poe, read “Loss of Breath.”

“Loss of Breath: A Tale Neither in nor Out of “Blackwood” (1832) is a short story by Poe, first published on June 9 or November 10 1832. It concerns a man who suspects that his wife has stolen his breath.

David Ketterer describes the story as: “A surrealistic fantasy in which the idea that death involves not loss of life but merely loss of breath is combined with a whimsical but, for biographers of Poe’s psyche, revealing equation between loss of breath and loss of sexual potency on the narrator’s wedding night”.[1]

“Behold me then safely ensconced in my private boudoir, a fearful instance of the ill consequences attending upon irascibility—alive, with the qualifications of the dead—dead, with the propensities of the living—an anomaly on the face of the earth—being very calm, yet breathless.”

…

“The purchaser took me to his apartments and commenced operations immediately. Having cut off my ears, however, he discovered signs of animation. He now rang the bell, and sent for a neighboring apothecary with whom to consult in the emergency. In case of his suspicions with regard to my existence proving ultimately correct, he, in the meantime, made an incision in my stomach, and removed several of my viscera for private dissection. “

RIP Bill Landis (1959 – 2008)

Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square (2002) – Bill Landis, Michelle Clifford [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Via Tim Lucas comes the news that Bill Landis is dead.

Bill Landis (1959 – 2008) created the Xeroxed fanzine Sleazoid Express in 1980. It featured reviews of the exploitation films playing New York City’s Times Square’s 42nd Street grindhouse and reports on the local scene. The later issues also featured reviews from acclaimed Jimmy McDonough.

Sleazoid Express (1980-1983, and later editions) was the house journal of the grindhouse movie scene in New York circa 1964-1984. Edited by Bill Landis, a projectionist and devotee of the crime-ridden sleaze houses, the magazine not only captured the genre affections but the whole Times Square milieu of drugs, violence and prostitution. Typical films shown in the movie houses, which centred around the city’s 42nd Street, included Bamboo House of Dolls, Blood Sucking Freaks, The Corpse Grinders, Mad Monkey Kung Fu, Miss Nymphet’s Zap-In and The Ultimate Degenerate.

Far from representing a marginal off-shoot of the movie business, the grindhouse films would be later plundered for ideas and imagery by mainstream cinema, while the trash ethic and aesthetic of the magazine itself would be effortlessly copied by many others.

Bill Landis co-wrote with his wife for 22 years Michelle Clifford, who is the principal author of Metasex.

Footnote: Bill Landis was fond of Alice Arno and Karin Schubert

RIP Harold Pinter (1930 – 2008)

Harold Pinter is dead @78

Harold Pinter (1930 – 2008) is the man I know from his auctorial descriptive Pinteresque, his connection to the Theatre of the Absurd and his screenplay work on other writers’ novels, such as The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1970), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1980), and especially The Comfort of Strangers[1][2] (1990), one of the more devastating film experiences of the eighties.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjdKxVFd_K8]

The Comfort of Strangers

Outside of theatre, Pinter’s most popular lemma is the title of his play The Birthday Party, which survives to this day as Nick Cave‘s band The Birthday Party.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5I2vEcVC_I&]

“Nick The Stripper” (1981) by The Birthday Party

Theatre of the Absurd

Harold Pinter is a defining playwright of the 1962-coined Theatre of the Absurd theatrical movement along with French Eugène Ionesco, British Samuel Beckett, French Jean Genet, and Russian Arthur Adamov. The movement’s avant-la-lettre predecessors include Alfred Jarry, Luigi Pirandello, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Guillaume Apollinaire, and the Surrealists. Other playwrights associated are Tom Stoppard, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Fernando Arrabal and Edward Albee.

Pinteresque

I don’t know what to think of Pinteresque. I feel as if Pinter and Buñuel share a set of the same sensibilities but I wonder. If one does a Celebrity Deathmatch between Pinteresque[3] and Buñuelian[4], Pinter wins with 19000+ vs 6000+ for Bunuel. Which is a pity, because I find Buñuelian absurdism a fuller experience than the Pinteresque, Buñuel manages to add spiritualism, humor and sensuality to his work whereas Pinter seems to bog down in kitchen-sink-naturalism. But Pinteresque is clearly the winner here, with Wikipedia defining Pinteresque in their separate article characteristics of Harold Pinter’s work and clearly no Buñuelian counterpart.

The Pinter pause

Another interesting aspect of Pinter’s work is his use of pauses, typographically represented by ellipses. Pinter uses it to such an extent that it has gained fame as the “Pinter pause“, a theatrical technique used for example to great effect in the water dripping faucet seduction scene in The Servant (1963).

The following exchange between Aston and Davies in The Caretaker is typical of the Pinter pause:

ASTON. More or less exactly what you…
DAVIES. That’s it … that’s what I’m getting at is … I mean, what sort of jobs … (Pause.)
ASTON. Well, there’s things like the stairs … and the … the bells …
DAVIES. But it’d be a matter … wouldn’t it … it’d be a matter of a broom … isn’t it?

Still, I prefer my ellipses by Céline (although he shares Pinter’s pessimism), who famously used them in Death on the Installment Plan in 1936, and which then became his trademark style, giving innovative, chaotic, and antiheroic visions of human suffering. In Death on the Installment Plan, he extensively uses ellipses scattered all throughout the text to enhance the rhythm and to emphasise the style of speech.

An example of Céline’s ellipses:

“So I start moseying down the Boulevard Sebastopol, then the rue de Rivoli . . . I’ve kind of lost track. It’s so stifling you can hardly move . . . I drag myself through the arcades . . . along the shop fronts . . . “How about the Bois de Boulogne!” I says to myself . . . I kept on walking quite a while . . . But it was getting to be unbearable . . . unbearable . . . When I see the gates of the Tuileries, I turn off … across the street and into the gardens . . . There was a hell of a crowd already.” —Death on the Installment Plan

I am the Dying Gaul

The Dying Gaul

I am the Dying Gaul

This is my death scene, I was not given a deathbed. I do not represent the most famous death scene. I am outdeathed by Jesus Christ who died on the cross and Jean-Paul Marat , both after me.

I seem to have been born in a culture of death, yet I was not given any last words. This fascination with death in Western culture. Why? Why so pervasive?

Why did Jane write A Death-Scene?

So I knew that he was dying-
Stooped, and raised his languid head;
Felt no breath, and heard no sighing,
So I knew that he was dead.

Why this fasicnation with crime scenes?

Why did Andy Warhol produce The Death and Disaster paintings?

And why is every sensationalist  corner of video-libraries around the world filled with copies of Faces of Death?

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5GDcs8i2ng&]

Bonnie and Clyde

Why do we enjoy the slow motion death of Bonnie and Clyde and countles other movie death scenes?

Aristotle, had I known him, would have answered me:

Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. —Aristotle via the Poetics.

RIP Forrest J. Ackerman (1916 – 2008)

Famous Monsters Of Filmland by modern_fred

Famous Monsters of Filmland

Forrest J Ackerman (November 24, 1916 – December 4, 2008) was an American collector of science fiction books and movie memorabilia and a science fiction fan. Ackerman was influential to the wider cultural acceptance of science fiction as a literary, art and film genre. To a general audience, Ackerman is best remembered as the editor-writer of the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland, as the producer of Vampirella, and as literary agent.

Vampirella magazine (France, 01/1970), published by Publicness
image sourced here.

Most of us have a passing interest in horror. In his Ways of Hearing book presentation, David Toop revealed that he discovered the Price, Corman and Poe-connection (the connection between 19th century literary horror to 20th century cinematic horror) via Famous Monsters of Filmland.

The swarm of spirits came clambering up to her

Bertalda, Assailed by Spirits by Theodore Von Holst by you.

Bertalda, Assailed by Spirits by Theodore Von Holst

“Bertalda then showed the piece of gold she was given to the goblins below, and they laughed themselves half-dead over it and hissed at her. At last they all pointed at me with their metal-stained fingers, and more and more wildly, and more and more densely, and more and more madly, the swarm of spirits came clambering up to her.” –remix of Undine

Damsel in distress trope in Undine, actually a take on tentacle eroticism of which I am so fond.

Thomas Kyd @550

Thomas Kyd, author of The Spanish Tragedy @550

The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd by you.

The Spanish tragedy: or, Hieronimo is mad againe: Containing the lamentable end of Don Horatio, and Belimperia; with the pitifull death of Hieronimo

Publisher: London : Printed by Augustine Mathewes, for Francis Grove, and are to bee sold at his shoppe, neere the Sarazens Head, upon Snovv-hill, 1633.



When one researches the history of horror[1], one encounters the revenge tragedy in the 16th century, featured because of the genre’s cruelty. In the 1580s, an incredible series of gruesome revenge plays were performed on the stages of England.

An example of the gruesomeness of these plays:

“Enter the empress’s sons with Lavinia, her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out, and ravished.” —stage direction to Shakespeare‘s Titus Andronicus. (Chiron and Demetrius had taken Lavinia away and raped her over her husband’s body. To keep her from revealing what she has seen and endured, they had cut out her tongue and cut off her hands.)

The Spanish Tragedy (d. 1594) by Thomas Kyd is exemplary and one of the earliest items in the history of the revenge play.

The play is also noted for being an early instance of the metatheatre (play-in-play) trope. Aditionally, Thomas Kyd is also an icon in the history of counterculture (he was put on the rack for allegations of heresy).

The history of horror is an interesting subject because of its ontological and temporal issues. It starts with horror fiction and horror art and ends at the commodified terrain of the horror film and gothic fashion.

Most recently the concept of horror was explored by Collapse journal volume 4.

Saint Anthony at the movies

Perhaps the ultimate and most underrated dream vision (underrated because it is not recognized as a dream vision) in the history of Western literature is the The Temptation of St. Anthony, here [1] painted by Domenico Morelli as Le Tentazioni di Sant’Antonio, also the title of an Italian film of 1911 which depicts Flaubert’s version.

Domenico Morelli - Le tentazioni di Sant'Antonio by you.

[1] painted by Domenico Morelli as Le Tentazioni di Sant’Antonio,

Saint Anthony has not been popular among writers nor filmmakers but has been very influential to painters, the dream visions lend themselves perfectly to exploring taboo subject matter.

Temptation of Saint Anthony by Melies with woman on cross by you.

[2]

Only two notable filmmakers had a go at the story, Georges Méliès in 1898 and the aforementioned Italian version of 1911.

Then there is the curious case of The Private Affairs of Bel Ami[3]. For the realisation of this film Loew-Lewin Productions announced a “Temptation of St. Anthony” contest. David Loew and Albert Lewin had persuaded twelve modern artists to paint Anthony’s vision. Each artist was commissioned for $500. Max Ernst was the $3,000 prizewinner.

The work was to be shown in a close-up at a key moment in the film.

max_ernst_anthony by youngmanblues.

[4]

Although Max Ernst‘s rendition (here[5] in a better scan) was the winning work, Salvador Dalí‘s contribution[6] (featuring a parade of spider-legged elephants tormenting the saint) went on the become better-known.