Over at ArtandPopularCulture book of the month is:
Anthology of Black Humor (1940) – André Breton
While I am antipathetic to André Breton as a person – his misogyny, his homophobia, his arrogance, his misguided tyranny – I have learned to appreciate his work of tracing the literary and artistic antecedents of surrealism. In this book he successfully delineates a corpus of writers that have shaped the sensibilities central to cult fiction.
“An intelligent woman is a woman with whom one can be as stupid as one wants.” — Mauvaises pensées et autres by Paul Valéry
Unidentified portrait of Ada Lovelace
Looking for Alfred (2007) by Johan Grimonprez
On the cover: Delfine Bafort
Today I went into the city, looking for books on Freddy de Vree. I spotted a book on Hitchcock which accompanies the short subject film Looking for Alfred by Johan Grimonprez and ‘The Wrong House‘, an expo on Hitchcock and architecture at DeSingel. Then I found Nagelaten Bekentenis by Emants. I paid a visit to Demian book store in search of – again – de Vree. René sold me a book by Baj with text by de Vree and told me about the expo he will be holding from October 27 until December 1 dedicated to de Vree, in collaboration with Christophe Vekeman. The exposition is subtitled Freddy de Vree, Antiquaire du surréalisme.
“On The Necessity of Violation” by Jean-Jacques Lebel in TDR T41 (1968)
Description: Incl. photos of happenings – ‘Sunlove’ happening with the Soft Machine, 1967 (Mike Ratledge with naked girl), ‘Miss Festival Contest’ happening with a naked Yoko Ono in background, Lebel’s ‘Happening on the theme of Playtex bras’, etc. Also: Arrabal; Stefan Brecht; Ann Halprin; interviews with Jerzy Grotowski (17pp.) and Charles Ludlam
A large part of my wiki is about tracing certain sensibilities around the globe. Recently, I made two discoveries which ‘opened’ Portugal and Belgium for me.
I found – what I believe to be – the Portuguese equivalent of Western publishing houses Losfeld, Pauvert, Olympia in France, März in Germany, Calders & Boyars in the UK or Grove Press in the U. S. : Edições Afrodite run by Fernando Ribeiro de Mello. Most of the info comes from the Portuguese Wikipedia and much of it still needs to be translated. My Portuguese is limited, so any help is welcome.
Quite a wonderful cover:
Textos Malditos, an Edições Afrodite edition
Rita Renoir, enz.
In Belgium I found Freddy de Vree, Belgian intellectual, cult figure and companion to Sylvia Kristel in the last years of his life. He was a friend of Topor and W. F. Hermans, wrote critiques on such diverse topics as Pigalle stripteaseuse Rita Renoir or French ‘excremental’ philosopher Georges Bataille.
Below are two images from De Bezige Bij editions of Hermans’s King Kong by publisher De Bezige Bij, of which I found the graphics amazing. De Bezige Bij, an interesting Dutch publishing house.
Two very impressive Bezige Bij covers:
King Kong
King Kong tweede druk
De Bezige Bij also published De Vree’s book on W. F. Hermans: De aardigste man van de wereld.
I thought it would be nice to leave you with an image of Rita Renoir:
Mémoires d’un vieux con (1975) Roland Topor
Published by André Balland in 1975.
“Memoirs of an Old Fart”, I believe untranslated in English. Translated into Dutch by Edu Borger as Memoires van een oude zak.
In the history of co-dependent relationships there is Hans and Unica, there is Scott and Zelda.
Zelda Fitzgerald
Of his relationship with Zelda, Scott says:
“Perhaps fifty percent of our friends and relations will tell you in good faith that it was my drinking that drove Zelda mad, and the other half would assure you that it was her madness that drove me to drink. Neither of these judgements means much of anything. These two groups of friends and relations would be unanimous in saying that each of us would have been much better off without the other. The irony is that we have never been more in love with each other in all our lives. She loves the alcohol on my lips. I cherish her most extravagant hallucinations. In the end, nothing really had much importance. We destroyed ourselves. But in all honesty, I never thought we destroyed each other.”
Inspired by the chapter “1874: Three Novellas, or “What Happened?”” in Gilles Deleuze Félix Guattari‘s A Thousand Plateaus (which begins with an illustration by Outcault). The chapter features the short stories/novellas “In the Cage” by Henry James, “The Crack-up” by F. Scott Fitzgerald and “The Story of the Abyss and the Spyglass” by Pierrette Fleutiaux and begins with an analysis of the difference between the short story (nouvelle in the original French version, rendered as novella in Brian Massumi‘s translation) and the tale:
Camille Paglia was at the height of her popularity in the early and mid 1990s, right after the publication of her magnum opus Sexual Personae. While she is currently dismissed as a provocateur (or should I say une provocatrice?), her thought and writing are still valuable to me and she still is one of my main inspirations in the nobrow canon. Consider for example a speech she gave exactly 26 years ago at the M.I.T. where she said the following about black music:
“[…] you cannot be graduating from an American liberal arts college without knowing about black music. This is a great art form we have given to the world. Jazz, blues, Billie Holiday, Coltrane, Charlie Parker–there is no true liberal arts education in this country without that. We must do something to the curriculum to build that in. Right now dance, which is this enormous form, the most ancient of all art forms, is off there in the Phys. Ed. department–you go and take an aerobics class! You are not a liberal arts graduate until you know about dance–you know about it. You know about Martha Graham, you know about ballet, you know about the incredible contributions that African-Americans have made to dance.”
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmMCObgu_jc]
For reasons I better keep to myself, lest I bore you with my personal life, I feel today like superfluous man. So instead of boring you with stories of myself, I will try not to bore you within The Diary of a Superfluous Man (1850) by Turgenev, the Russian writer better known as the author of Fathers and Sons.
March 23. Winter again. The snow is falling in flakes. Superfluous, superfluous. . . . That’s a capital word I have hit on. The more deeply I probe into myself, the more intently I review all my past life, the more I am convinced of the strict truth of this expression. Superfluous–that’s just it. To other people that term is not applicable, . . . People are bad, or good, clever, stupid, pleasant, and disagreeable; but superfluous . . . no. Understand me, though: the universe could get on without those people too . . . no doubt; but uselessness is not their prime characteristic, their most distinctive attribute, and when you speak of them, the word ‘superfluous’ is not the first to rise to your lips. But I . . . there’s nothing else one can say about me; I’m superfluous and nothing more. A supernumerary, and that’s all. Nature, apparently, did not reckon on my appearance, and consequently treated me as an unexpected and uninvited guest. A facetious gentleman, a great devotee of preference, said very happily about me that I was the forfeit my mother had paid at the game of life. I am speaking about myself calmly now, without any bitterness. . . . It’s all over and done with!