John Coulthart announces[1] J. G. Ballard. Autopsy of the new millennium, an exhibition on the work of British writer and cult favorite J. G. Ballard at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona curated by Jordi Costa.
The exhibition runs from from 22 July to 2 November 2008.
Its poster features an abandoned and rusty car wreck in desert Tunisia, Chott el Jerid (a location used for filming Star Wars) by Sami Sarkis.
On intertextuality and litblogging
When I wrote a couple of months ago, echoing Grillet, that I am not a cinephile[2], I meant that I am interested in more than films, but more on the lookout for certain sensibilities which also steer my publication bias. By the same token, I am not a bibliophile. But I love books, and books is mainly what I’ve bought the last couple of years. By books I do not necessarily mean fiction (have you ever noticed how reading has come to equal reading fiction?), I only read fiction when on holiday. When I do read fiction, I love metafiction, which can consist of a number of varieties. One particular variety is fiction steeped in the history of literature. The first one I consciously read of this type was probably Erica Jong‘s Fear of Flying in the summer of 2006.
A book of pure intertextuality has recently been brought to my attention: Montano’s Malady by Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas. On the book’s intertextuality Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading notes that Enrique Vila-Matas is a writer “who entertains the notion that contemporary literature amounts to scribbling in the margins of the great works.”[3] and Melissa McClements in the Financial Times adds:
Books such as Montano’s Malady teach you about literature (what I usually expect of non-fiction) while still manage to entertain.
A great way to learn about literature today is to read litblogs (please note how the list of litblogs[5] has defied Wikipedia’s notability criteria). The first litblog I started to frequent was The Reading Experience in May 2006 (when I was researching literary realism).
Other litblogs friendly to Jahsonic (or vice versa) are The Existence Machine [6], This Space[7], The Reading Experience[8], Tales from the Reading Room[9], and the Spanish Portuguese and Spanish language blogs Livros de Areia [10], Pimenta negra[11] and Moleskine Literario[12].
But the blog which informs me most consistently of literature, and in my own tongue, is De Papieren Man[13].
Please forgive me if I’ve left out fellow-traveling litblogs.
I watched the 1999 film adaptation of Breakfast of Champions yesterday evening. I decided to check this film – after having read the delightful novel in Spain a week ago – because I considered the novel unfilmable. Unfilmable because of the book’s tone, which hovers perfectly between the surreal and the very mundane. Unfilmable also because it is an illustrated novel (with crude illustrations by Vonnegut himself, the anus illustration at the beginning sets the tone) and because the novel features many matter-of-fact explanations (what is a cow?, what is earth?, etc.).
The film was written and directed by minor American director Alan Rudolph and stars Bruce Willis, Albert Finney, Nick Nolte and Barbara Hershey. The film was widely panned by critics. It is indeed painful to watch.
Some feebly redeeming elements include the score by Martin Denny, revisiting Barbara Hershey, Glenne Headly in lingerie and the over-the-top cross-dressing scene by Nick Nolte towards the end.
The only way to adapt this unfilmable novel would have been to add at least a third person omniscient voice-over, instead of trying to hide its novelish antecedents.
This [1] unidentified excerpt – from a Vonnegut documentary I presume – is exactly what I have in mind.
Breakfast of Champions (the novel) is cult fiction item #8.
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.
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.
“The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.” —Giambattista Vico, The New Science
New Science (1775) by Giambattista Vico
depicted is a revised 1744 edition
Giambattista Vico or Giovanni Battista Vico (June 23, 1668 – January 23, 1744) was a Counter-Enlightenment Italian philosopher, best known for his New Science. Vico was an outsider genius, who lived in near poverty and never met a thinker of equivalent magnitude.
New Science (original Italian Scienza Nuova) is his magnum opus; it was poorly received during his own lifetime but has since inspired a cadre of famous thinkers and artists. New Science’s core concepts are the eternal return (the age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of humans), verum factum and common sense.
James Joyce was influenced by Giambattista Vico’s New Science. Joyce puns on his name many times in Finnegans Wake, including the “first” sentence: “by a commodius vicus of recirculation”. Recirculation is a reference to Vico’s theory of eternal return. Finnegans Wake begins in mid-sentence, with the continuation of the book’s unfinished final sentence, creating a circle whereby the novel has no true beginning or end.
In addition, Feldman and Richardson (1972: 50-61) argue that the study of popular culture as a scholarly discipline can be traced back at least as far as the writings of Giambattista Vico, who anticipated today’s cultural studies programs as he attempted to discover the “principles of humanity” in his New Science of 1775.
To end on a personal note: I discovered Vico through the concept of eternal return, and first actually read him in Adultery in the Novel, where he etymologically explained the origins of civilization.
From memory from that book: At first humans lived in blissful ignorance, everyone was doing “it” with everyone and nobody knew which children were whose. Then came the concept of matrimony (notice the word mater or mother in that word), which allowed one to know which offspring was whose, and also introduced the hereditary system (whereby property is passed along from generation to generation and which allows long term projects), et voila, the birth of civilization. I just ordered a copy of New Science via Amazon.
Histoire anecdotique des Cafés & Cabarets de Paris (1862) Alfred Delvau
Histoire anecdotique des Cafés & Cabarets de Paris is a book on Parisian cafés by Alfred Delvau with illustrations by Gustave Courbet, Félicien Rops and Léopold Flameng.
Delvau also wrote Dictionnaire érotique moderne (1864):
This edition printed by Gay et Doucé in 1876 for the members of the “Biblio-Aphrodiphile Société” with an engraved frontispiece by Chauvet after Félicien Rops. With a “Glossaire érotique” by Louis de Landers (= August Scheler). The volume was also published by Editions 10/18.
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]
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
Bird’s Nest and Ferns (1863) by Fidelia Bridges
“When we examine a nest, we place ourselves at the origin of confidence in the world.” -—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Principes d’une esthétique de la mort by Michel Guiomar
And just when you think you’ve seen everything, a book manages to come out of nowhere and amaze you. Today, at the Antwerp book store Demian, I bought Principes d’une esthétique de la mort, les modes de présences, les présences immédiates, le seuil de l’Au-delà, a book essay by French writer Michel Guiomar, published in 1967 by French cult publisher José Corti. The book has not been translated to English, a possible translation of the title is Principles of an aesthetics of death. The book extensively references jahsonic favourite Gaston Bachelard.