Category Archives: literature

The Valley (1989) – Burroughs/Haring

Via American author Dennis Cooper’s blog, comes:

“”The Valley” is a group of etchings by Keith Haring with text by William S. Burroughs. The portfolio consists of sixteen etchings drawn by the artist in April of 1989, in his New York studio. ” –Dennis Cooper

“There is no way in or out of the Valley, which is ringed by sheer cliffs with an overhanging ledge. How did the people of the Valley get in there in the first place? No one remembers. They have been there for many years. Children have been born, grown up and died in the valley, but not many children. Food is scarce. A stream runs through the Valley, and they have dammed up a large pond to raise fish. There is an area along the stream where they raise corn. Sometimes they will kill birds, a few lizards and snakes. So most children must be killed at birth. Just an allotted number to continue the line.” –William Burroughs

The installments can be found here, here and here.

Tip of the hat to Georges Bataille.

Update:

From the Dennis Cooper website:

“Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer” – William Burroughs

“In another country or another era, Dennis Cooper’s books would be circulated in secret, explosive samizdat editions that friends and fans would pass around and savor like forbidden absinthe… This is high risk literature”
– The New York Times

Underground

Parent: underground – philosophy of place – culture

By medium: underground film – underground literature – underground press – underground music

“Ideas enter our above-ground culture through the underground. I suppose that is the kind of function that the underground plays, such as it is. That it is where the dreams of our culture can ferment and strange notions can play themselves out unrestricted. And sooner or later those ideas will percolate through into the broad mass awareness of the broad mass of the populace. Occulture, you know, that seems to be perhaps the last revolutionary bastion.” — Alan Moore

Related: alternative – banned – censorship – clandestine – controversial – counterculture – crime – cult – drugs – economy – forbidden – grotto – hidden – illegal – illicit – independent – a glossary of the non-mainstream – overground – prohibition – resistance – secret – subculture – subversive – taboo – transgressive – underworld – The Velvet Underground

Contrast: mainstream

Underground mining station, image sourced here.

A basement or cellar is an architectural construction that is completely or almost below ground in a building. It may be located below the ground floor.

The mainstream comes to you, but you have to go to the underground. – Frank Zappa


Interconnected underground stems are called rhizomes

Bibliography: Lipstick Traces, a Secret History of 20th Century (1989) – Greil Marcus – Outsiders as innovators (1998) – Tyler Cowen – Notes from Underground (1864) – Fyodor Dostoevsky

James Cain (1892 – 1977)

Lifespan: 1892 – 1977

Related: hardboiled – crime fiction – 1900s literature – American literature

Jealous Woman (1950) – James M. Cain
Corgi Edition published 1966
Image sourced here.
See also: jealousy

The seminal American writer in the noir fiction mode was James M. Cain—regarded as the third major figure of the early hardboiled scene, he debuted as a crime novelist in 1934, right between Hammett and Chandler.

Bonjour Tristesse (1954) – Françoise Sagan

Related: sadness – boredom – melancholy – pessimism – depression – spleen

After Laughter (Comes Tears) – Wendy Rene

Antonym: happiness – pleasure

Bonjour Tristesse (1958), Japanese soundtrack

Bonjour Tristesse (1958), Saul Bass film poster

Bonjour Tristesse (in English, Hello, Sadness) is a novel by Françoise Sagan. Published in 1954, when the author was only eighteen, it caused an overnight sensation.

The 1958 film Bonjour Tristesse was directed by Otto Preminger, featured music by Georges Auric, and had Jean Seberg and David Niven as lead actors. — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonjour Tristesse [Sept 2006]

Bonjour Tristesse (1958) Otto Preminger
Image sourced here.
Styling by Hubert de Givenchy

A Blue Book (1907 – 1912) – August Strindberg

“The pupil asked: “What is a woman-hater?” The teacher answered: “I do not know. But the expression is used as a term of reproach by noodles, for those who say what all think. Noodles are those men who cannot come near a woman without losing their heads and becoming faithless. They purchase the woman’s favour by delivering up the heads of their friends on silver chargers; and they absorb so much femininity, that they see with feminine eyes and feel with feminine feelings. There are things which one does not say every day, and one does not tell one’s wife what her sex is composed of. But one has the right to put it on paper sometimes. Schopenhauer has done it the best, Nietzsche not badly, Joséphin Péladan is the master. Thackeray wrote Men’s Wives, but the book was ignored. Balzac unmasked Caroline in Physiologie du Mariage, and Petites Misères de la Vie Conjugale; Otto Weininger, having discovered the treachery when he was twenty, did not wait for the revenge but left the scene.” — August Strindberg in A Blue Book (1907 – 1912)

August Strindberg (1849-1912), the Swedish playwright, novelist, poet and painter, wrote A Blue Book towards the end of his life. It came out in four parts, beginning in 1907. Strindberg originally intended it as a kind of universal breviary, with a passage of wisdom for each day of the year. As he wrote the plan changed and the book became a motley collection of thoughts, observations and scientific speculation. Most of the book takes the form of a dialogue between “the Pupil”, Johannes Damascenus, and “the Teacher”. Johannes Damascenus is more or less a pseudonym, in the style of Kierkegaard, for Strindberg and the Teacher appears to be a proxy for Emmanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish mystic and theologian to whom Strindberg dedicated the book. —Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Zazie dans le métro (1960) – Louis Malle

Zazie dans le métro (1960) – Louis Malle

I viewed the French film Zazie dans le métro (1960, an adaptation of the Raymond Queneau novel) by Louis Malle yesterday, and once again I enjoyed the DVD extras (can DVD extras be considered as secondary sources or paratexts?) more than the film itself. The film is a typical nouvelle vague product (Philippe Noiret self-referentially explaining in the scene where the taxi meter spins fast forward: “Qu’est ce que tu veux, c’est la Nouvelle Vague” (eng: “What do you know, this is the Nouvelle Vague“)).

Visual experience: a pop art styled colorful bonanza of surreal visual gags. Noiret’s wife Albertine is played by the beautiful Carla Marlier and one of the protagonists is Paris (the Eiffel tower scenes!) itself.

The DVD extras feature an interview with Philippe Collin, first assistant director, in which he explains the influence of Tex Avery (he did his thesis on Avery) and the influence of American photographer William Klein (Mr. Freedom, see picture below) and his focus on graphic design, advertising neon, etc…

Publicity shot for Mr. Freedom (1970) – William Klein, reproduced on the cover of Midi/minuit fantastique nr. 20 (clicking on the picture brings you to the Midi/minuit fantastique page, where all the covers are reproduced)

Final assessment: Psychological realism 2/10, Oddity value: 7/10, feelgood factor: 7/10 (I did get bored a bit.)

Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965) – Georges Perec

Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965) – Georges Perec [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Perec’s Things reflects Roland Barthes’s 1957 Mythologies, in which Barthes used semiological concepts in the analysis of myths and signs in contemporary culture. [Aug 2006]

I’ve been told that Myths & Memories is Gilbert Adair’s homage to both Roland Barthes’s Mythologies and to Georges Perec’s Je me souviens.

Henri Barbusse (1873 – 1935)

Henri Barbusse (1873 – 1935)

I was thirty years old. I had lost my father and mother eighteen or twenty years before, so long ago that the event was now insignificant. I was unmarried. I had no children and shall have none. There are moments when this troubles me, when I reflect that with me a line will end which has lasted since the beginning of humanity. —Hell (1908)


The modernist movement and the cult of ugliness

“The modernist movement is still dominant in literary culture, especially the post-World War II idea that a fiction is worthless unless everything ends badly. But a lot of science fiction and fantasy literature doesn’t end this way, because the books are based on the conflict of good v. evil [see Stephen King’s The Stand], and end with the triumph of good. —RM Vaughan, Weekend Post commenting on the release of, A Feast for Crows, the fourth of seven planned novels in A Song of Ice and Fire, an epic fantasy series by American author George RR Martin.