Category Archives: literature

Nobrow manifestos, #1

 

Playboy magazine, December 1969 in which Cross the Border — Close the Gap was first published in English.

Cross the Border — Close the Gap (1968) is a nobrow treatise on postmodern tendencies in literature by American literary critic Leslie Fiedler.

The treatise coincides with a trend in which literary critics such as Leslie Fiedler and Susan Sontag started questioning and assessing the notion of the perceived gap between “high art” (or “serious literature“) and “popular art” (in America often referred to as “pulp fiction“), in order to describe the new literature by authors such as John Barth, Leonard Cohen , and Norman Mailer; and at the same time re-assess maligned genres such as science fiction, the western, erotic literature and all the other subgenres that previously had not been considered as “high art”, and their inclusion in the literary canon:

The notion of one art for the ‘cultural,’ i.e., the favored few in any given society and of another subart for the ‘uncultured,’ i.e., an excluded majority as deficient in Gutenberg skills as they are untutored in ‘taste,’ in fact represents the last survival in mass industrial societies (capitalist, socialist, communist — it makes no difference in this regard) of an invidious distinction proper only to a class-structured community. Precisely because it carries on, as it has carried on ever since the middle of the eighteenth century, a war against that anachronistic survival, Pop Art is, whatever its overt politics, subversive: a threat to all hierarchies insofar as it is hostile to order and ordering in its own realm. What the final intrusion of Pop into the citadels of High Art provides, therefore, for the critic is the exhilarating new possibility of making judgments about the ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’ of art quite separated from distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ with their concealed class bias.

In other words, it was now up to the literary critics to devise criteria with which they would then be able to assess any new literature along the lines of “good” or “bad” rather than “high” versus “popular”.

Accordingly,

  • A conventionally written and dull novel about, say, a “fallen woman” could be ranked lower than a terrifying vision of the future full of action and suspense.
  • A story about industrial relations in the United Kingdom in the early 20th century — a novel about shocking working conditions, trade unionists, strikers and scabs — need not be more acceptable subject-matter per se than a well-crafted and fast-paced thriller about modern life.

But, according to Fiedler, it was also up to the critics to reassess already existing literature. In the case of U.S. crime fiction, writers that so far had been regarded as the authors of nothing but “pulp fiction” — Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and others — were gradually seen in a new light. Today, Chandler’s creation, private eye Philip Marlowe — who appears, for example, in his novels The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell, My Lovely (1940) — has achieved cult status and has also been made the topic of literary seminars at universities round the world, whereas on first publication Chandler’s novels were seen as little more than cheap entertainment for the uneducated masses.

Nonetheless, “murder stories” such as Dostoyevsky‘s Crime and Punishment or Shakespeare‘s Macbeth are not dependent on their honorary membership in this genre for their acclaim.

P.S. This article is based on freely available Wikipedia code remixed by myself for the Art and Popular Culture wiki.

A last farewell to Grillet

The French paper Le Monde reports [1] on the cremation of Alain Robbe-Grillet, who died last week. The attendance was small, about 80 people and members of the literary establishment were absent.

A text was read, a text that had been written by Robbe-Grillet for the occasion of Roland Barthes‘s death.

My translation from French:

“I love life, I do not like death. I like cats, I do not like dogs. I like little girls, especially when they are pretty, I do not care very much for little boys. (…) I dislike journalist gossip. I distrust psychiatrists. I like to irritate people. I don’t like people who annoy me.”

Via Papieren Man

A wanderer on the face of the earth

Rice terrace in The Philippines

“He who has attained the freedom of reason to any extent cannot, for a long time, regard himself otherwise than as a wanderer on the face of the earth – and not even as a traveller towards a final goal, for there is no such thing. But he certainly wants to observe and keep his eyes open to whatever actually happens in the world; therefore he cannot attach his heart too firmly to anything individual; he must have in himself something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transitoriness.” –from The Wanderer, of Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human

Introducing Bxzzines

Charles Fort
Image sourced here.

 

Bxzzines [1], is a French-language blog by an anonymous internet user who goes by the pseudonym of Clifford Brown, indicating a link to Jess Franco (Franco worked under innumerable pseudonyms and was a big fan of jazz music, many of his pseudonyms are taken from famous jazz musicians, such as Clifford Brown and James P. Johnson).

Bxzzines is dedicated to zines and has featured posts on film directors Max Pécas, Michel Lemoine, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Jean Rollin, Jess Franco, Jean-François Davy and 1970s magazines such a Midi-Minuit Fantastique and Sex Stars System.

The illustration shown depicts a part of a promotional insert [2] for the Le Terrain Vague publishing imprint of Eric Losfeld, inserted in Midi-Minuit Fantastique n°15/16 (12/1966). The page depicted above is an advertisement for Charles Fort‘s The Book of the Damned, in its second French translation, translated by Robert Benayoun; with a forward by Tiffany Thayer.

The censored title on the same page is George de Coulteray‘s Sadism in the Movies.

Recent entries on the Bxzzines blog include:

 

Blazon of the Ugly Tit

Contreblason du Tetin (1535) (Eng: Blazon of the Ugly Tit) is a poem by Clément Marot on ugly female breasts.  Here in a translation by Helene Marmoux [1]. Clément Marot (1496–1544), was a French poet of the Renaissance period, for his poems on body parts, known as blasons and contreblasons. The  ugly woman is a surprisingly common figure in Renaissance poetry, one that has been frequently appropriated by male poetic imagination to depict moral, aesthetic, social, and racial boundaries. The subject has been treated in dept by Patrizia Bettella in The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque ( 2005).

Tit, skinny tit,
flat tit that looks like a flag,
big tit, long tit,
tit, must I call thee bag?
Tit with its ugly black end,
forever moving tit.
Who would boast having touched you?
With their hand fondle you? more…

Tip of the hat to On Ugliness

Spinoza and bondage (“He swore he’d never touch her again”)

Of Human Bondage He Swore

“He swore he’d never touch her again and then she whispered his name and he was lost” -film tagline

Of Human Bondage 1964

“When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune: so much so, that he is often compelled, while seeing that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse. ” —Ethics of Human Bondage or the Strength of the Emotions, Spinoza

I believe my first exposure to radical Dutch enlightenment philosopher Spinoza was via Gilles Deleuze or via the “perishable monuments” of Thomas Hirschhorn which I discovered in Germany at documenta in 2002.

Via Guy de Maupassant and William Somerset Maugham‘s Of Human Bondage I discovered this bit on human bondage.

In the 1660s, the Dutch philosopher Spinoza writes, in his Ethics of Human Bondage or the Strength of the Emotions (a part of his Ethics), that the term “bondage” relates to the human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions.

Milyunanochesco

Il Fiore delle mille e una notte/Arabian Nights (1974) – Pier Paolo Pasolini [Amazon.com]

Comparing Antoine Galland‘s and Richard Burton‘s translations of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, Jorge Luis Borges wrote:

“Another fact is undeniable. The most famous and eloquent encomiums of The Thousand and One Nights – by Coleridge, Thomas de Quincey, Stendhal, Tennyson, Edgar Allan Poe, Newman – are from readers of Galland’s translation. Two hundred years and ten better translations have passed, but the man in Europe or the Americas who thinks of the Thousand and One Nights thinks, invariably of this first translation. The Spanish adjective milyunanochesco [thousand-and-one-nights-esque] … has nothing to do with the erudite obscenities of Burton or Mardrus, and everything to do with Antoine Galland’s bijoux and sorceries.” –Jorge Luis Borges, “The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights“

The image above is from the 1974 film adaptation by Pasolini. It laterally depicts a nude man and woman facing each other. The woman sits, legs apart; the man kneels in front of her and points a bow to her genital area. The tip of the arrow has a phallus attached.

Cult fiction #2

The Diceman (1971) – Luke Rhinehart

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

The Dice Man is a comedic novel published in 1971 by George Cockcroft under the pen name Luke Rhinehart and tells the story of a psychiatrist who begins making life decisions based on the casting of dice. The novel is noted for its subversivity, anti-psychiatry sentiments and for reflecting moods of the early 1970s. Due to its subversive nature and chapters concerned with controversial issues such as rape, murder and sexual experimentation, it was banned in several countries. Upon its initial publication, the cover bore the confident subheader, “This book can change your life” and quickly became a modern cult classic.

Previous entries in this series.

 

Cult fiction #1

Musk, Hashish and Blood

Musk, Hashish and Blood

Musk, Hashish, and Blood is a French language collection of tales by Hector France, translated into English By Alfred Allinson, designed and etched by Paul Avril.

Its original title was Sous le Burnous (1886).

The book is mentioned in Sax Rohmer‘s Dope:

“Which of these three rooms you choose?” she asked, revealing her teeth in one of those rapid smiles which were mirthless as the eternal smile of Sin Sin Wa.
“Oh,” said Rita hurriedly, “I don’t know. Which do you want, Mollie?”
“I love this end one!” cried Mollie. “It has cushions which simply reek of oriental voluptuousness and cruelty. It reminds me of a delicious book I have been reading called Musk, Hashish, and Blood.”
“Hashish!” said Mrs. Sin, and laughed harshly. “One night you shall eat the hashish, and then–”
She snapped her fingers, glancing from Rita to Pyne.
“Oh, really? Is that a promise?” asked Mollie eagerly.
“No, no!” answered Mrs. Sin. “It is a threat!”

Richard Francis Burton mentions it in the comments to his translation of The Book of One Thousand and One Night:

“All the splendour and squalor, the beauty and baseness, the glamour and grotesqueness, the magic and the mournfulness, the bravery and the baseness of Oriental life are here: its pictures of the three great Arab passions, love, war and fancy, entitle it to be called “Blood, Musk and Hashish.””

From a description by Alexander Books, its most recent publisher:

This graphic and exciting picture of the Algerian desert, its tribes and their astounding customs is a sensational recounting of France’s experiences in North Africa. With little hyperbole describing his fascinating life, France tells the stories of his adventures in the nineteenth century Arab world from an eyewitness view that is as exciting today as it was a century ago. Not much is known of Hector France, except that he lived an adventurous life and wrote about it with style and gusto. When this book was first printed in a limited edition of only 500 copies in Britain in 1900, France felt, perhaps with some cause, that many of the things he described would have sent his Victorian readership into shock. Yet there is a certain romance to be discovered amid the exquisitely described barbarism, an exoticism that cannot be found in today’s world.

This post is part of a new series: cult fiction