Category Archives: subversion

Parisian “book hell” open to public

Dessin d’un boudoir () – J. J. Lequeu

Three days ago, I reported that it was Jean-Jacques Lequeu‘s 250th anniversary. My good friend Dominique alerted me that the Parisian “enfer” will open its doors from December until March of next year. This will be a unique opportunity to see books and illustrations which have been hidden from the general public for more than 170 years.

Enfer is French for hell. In this instance it refers to the private case of the French national library. The contents of this library were cataloged by Pascal Pia and Guillaume Apollinaire in the 1913 Les livres de l’Enfer, and in 2007 the “Enfer” will be shown to the public in an exhibition titled Eros au secret. Children are not admitted.

I hope this will be an impetus for other European libraries to do the same. Let the gates be opened of all private cases, Giftschränke and Remota.

View the original French advertisement here and my entry Eros au secret.

Now where was I?

Of all the books I bought in 2007, I’m happiest with Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor (1968) by Gershon Legman. I’ve reported on the book here and here. Yesterday evening I was reading the jokes on marriage and was alerted to Legman’s use of the term sex-hatred so I googled for it and found a very funny imaginary phonecall between Mr. Gershon Legman and “Fredric Wertham” (Ethan Persoff) partly quoted here:

“Now where was I? Oh, yes. It is no accident that the end of Restoration bawdry coincided precisely with the fullest flowering of literary sadism in England. The Elizabethans had wrung blood in plenty out of sex — in Romeo and Juliet, a ‘love’-play, seven of the characters are carted off dead — but there was no dearth of lust. Times change. The elegant eighteenth-century littérateurs, Johnson and Pope, are famous equally for the sexual purity of their writing, the sadistic cruelty of their speech. Sex being forbidden, violence took its place.”

In the early 1970s, Germaine Greer would elaborate on Legman’s sex-hatred by coining the term cunt-hatred used in such essays such as “Lady love your cunt“. I love Greer.

Redrup v. New York and the end of American censorship

The 1967 Redrup v. New York case is generally considered the end of American censorship. Robert Redrup was a Times Square newsstand clerk who sold two Greenleaf Classics pulp sex novels, Lust Pool [1] and Shame Agent [2] to plainclothes police. He was tried and convicted in 1965.

In true nobrow fashion Hamling did not believe he was selling “commercialized obscenity,” nor would he admit to “titillating the prurient interests of people with a weakness for such expression.” Hamling felt his books were giving people who would never have the skills to read and enjoy Ulysses or Fanny Hill or Naked Lunch what they wanted.

With financial backing from William Hamling, Redrup appealed his case to the Supreme Court where his conviction is over-turned by 7-2. The court’s final ruling on May 8 in 1967 affirmed that materials that were not pandered, sold to minors, or foisted on unwilling audiences were constitutionally protected.

After this decision, the Supreme Court systematically and summarily reversed, without further opinion, scores of obscenity rulings involving paperback sex books, girlie magazines and peep shows.

Tip of the hat to Patrick J. Kearney and thanks to Earl Kemp.

Proto-performance artists

‘Augmented’ Mona Lisa (1882) by Sapeck

Sapeck (Eugène Bataille) (born in Mans in 1854) was a French proto–performance artist who was known to travel the streets with his head painted blue. In the first show of the Incoherents in 1882, he contributed an ‘augmented’ Mona Lisa (Mona Lisa smoking a pipe) that directly prefigures the famous Marcel Duchamp image L.H.O.O.Q. of 1919.

Speaking of Duchamp, Ombres Blanches recently wrote Duchamp’s Dahlia or The Man Ray Mystery, an essay on the possible inspiration of Duchamp’s Etant donnés by the Black Dahlia murder.

On whimsy and monochromatics

Combat de nègres dans une cave pendant la nuit

My previous post on Cohl led me to the French avant-garde of the 1880s and 1890s. Above is what is now generally held to be the first monochrome painting, rendered here in an appropriated version by Allais.

Here is the background:

Paul Bilhaud (born in Allichamps, December 31, 1854 – Avon, 1933) was a French poet and dramatist who belonged to the avant-garde group the Incoherents. He is the author of an all-black painting called Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night.

On October 1 1882 the “Exposition des Arts Incohérents” in Paris featured a black painting by the poet Paul Bilhaud titled Combat de nègres dans une cave pendant la nuit, which was appropriated in 1887 by the French humorist Alphonse Allais, in an album of monochrome pictures of various colors, with uniformly ornamental frames, each bearing a comical title. Allais called his all-red painting Tomato Harvest by Apoplectic Cardinals on the Shore of the Red Sea.

Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night predates Malevich‘s, Black Square on a White Field by 31 years.

Compiling this documentation, I stumbled on Il Giornale Nuovo’s post on Allais: Primo-Avrilesque and on Monochrome (une enquête) by L’Alamblog.

Wet Dream Film Festivals

Poster for first the Wet Dream Film Festival (1970) in Amsterdam

At the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, Amsterdam was somewhat of a countercultural capital. It was where Suck, The First European Sex Paper was published. Around this time two Wet Dream Film Festivals were organized. The first took place in the autumn of 1970, It had an international jury consisting of Germaine Greer, Jay Landesman, Richard Neville, Michael Zwerin, Didi Wadidi and Al Goldstein. The first prize went to Bodil Jensen in A Summer Day. The “Blast from the Past” award went to Jean Genet‘s film: Un chant d’amour. The Walt Disney Memorial Award went to Christie Eriksson‘s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Other prizes were awarded for Peter Flemming, Walter Burns and Falcon Stewart. The Second Wet Dream Film Festival was held in 1971 between October 20 and October 25, again organized by Jim Haynes. Festival jury included Germaine Greer, Al Goldstein, William Holtrop, Didi Wadidi, Anna Beke and Michael Zwerin plus new-comers Mama Cass, Roland Topor, Heathcote Williams, William Burroughs, Carlos Clarens, Tomi Ungerer, Betty Dodson, Marie-France and Miss Angel. Jens Frosen (“Quiet Days in Clichy”) documented the event. Lou Sher, president of Sherpix, who picked up “Adultery For Fun and Profit” at the first festival, put up $1,000 for the first prize this year plus a promise of U.S. theatrical distribution. Organizer Haynes told Variety: “What most people don’t understand about last year’s Wet Dream Festival is that we are not concerned with pornographic aspects primarily, but with the libertarian concept. It is an attack on paternalism because it asks why people can’t see any image they want.”

This post is dedicated to the work of Earl Kemp.