Category Archives: underground

Most of the evening was spent on

Most of the evening was spent on researching JRMS interview[1] with Gilbert Alter-Gilbert:

Genealogy of the Cruel Tale by you.

Gilbert Albert-Gilbert’s Genealogy of the Cruel Tale from Bakunin v.6, 1997) [1]

and especially Gilbert‘s intriguing “Genealogy of the Cruel Tale“[2] a perfect example of the kind of thematic literary criticism I’m rather fond of. The chart reminds of the aestheticization of violence and cruelty in general, of which Nietzsche said:

“One ought to learn anew about cruelty,” said Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil, 229), “and open one’s eyes. Almost everything that we call ‘higher culture‘ is based upon the spiritualizing and intensifying of cruelty….”

For your pleasure, here is the wikified version (information is scarce on the 20th century authors mentioned):

Overview

Genealogy of the Cruel Tale is a chart by American intellectual Gilbert Alter-Gilbert documenting the origins of the cruel tale, which begins etymologically with Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam‘s Contes cruels anthology and has content- and style-wise similarities with cult fiction and horror fiction, Dark Romanticism and the roman frénétique, black humor, transgressive fiction, grotesque literature and folk tales. Sholem Stein says that it is a continuation of the research done by Breton in Anthology of Black Humor. Texts such as Walter Scott‘s On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition, Lovecraft‘s Supernatural Horror in Literature, Mario Praz‘s Romantic Agony and Todorov’s The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre also come to mind. Notably absent is Sade.

Taxonomy

Introducing A Journey Round My Skull

I’ve briefly mentioned the Anglophone litblog A journey round my skull in my previous post[1]. Today is the day to give this wonderful blog[2] a proper introduction.

The occasion is the blog’s recent post[3] on Xenos Books‘ translation of the 1932 Scarecrow & Other Anomalies by Argentine poet Oliverio Girondo.

The blog takes its name[4] from Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy‘s autobiographical novel A Journey Round My Skull (which reminded me of Maistre’s A Journey Around My Room) and is self-described as an “unhealthy book fetishism from a reader, collector, and amateur historian of forgotten literature.” Cult fiction and experimental literature receive encyclopedic treatment. This encyclopedism does not preclude lack of actual experience. Like myself, Will (the first name of its author), is in the habit of posting about books he has not yet read but is investigating for future reference:

“I haven’t read all the books I’m listing on this blog (including this one and Karinthy‘s Grave and Gay …). I realized that I gather a lot of information about books before I buy them, but never record this research. Writing about books in my collection is forcing me to research them again. This time I’ll have a record. When I do finally get a chance to read the book, I’ll re-post the entry with my comments.”[5]

The blog features information on cult fiction from the likes of Gilbert Alter-Gilbert[6], Marianne Thalmann[7], Clemens Brentano[8], Roger Caillois[9], Jean Paul[10], Robert Walser[11][12][13], Marcel Schwob[14], Johannes R. Becher[15], P.F. Thomése[16], Julien Gracq[17] and Joao Guimaraes Rosa[18], as well as informative profiles on French science-fiction[19], erotica[20] and cheap avant garde books[21].

The blog leads to ubiquitous connections …


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

The book above, with an interesting preface by Xenos Books:

“The crazy thing is so spectacularly original that even though alerted by my advance notice you are still going to be more surprised by Scarecrow than by anything else you have ever read in your life, even if you are ninety-five and have spent every free moment fiendishly consuming all of the most fantastic symbolist, futurist, cubist, surrealist, expressionist, anarchist, dadaist, existentialist, creationist, ultraist, vanguardist, magical realist, modernist, postmodernist and every other -ist compositions that you could lay your hands on, plus the farthest-out non-ist compositions as well, including Lucian‘s True Story, Rabelais‘ Adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel and Fyodor Dostoyevsky‘s Bobok. There is no way that you can prepare for the experience of coming face to face with Girondo’s scarecrow.” –from the Anti-Preface of Karl Kvitko

… leads to a film it inspired in 1994:

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PokBvBXrT3U]

The Dark Side of the Heart (1994), directed by Eliseo Subiela.

(Spanish language, but be sure to watch until the end)

See previous Jahsonic introductions.

Introducing Barry Burman (1943-2001)

Beham, Hans SebaldTartan_Ribbon, the first colour photographBarry Burman
Which one is Burman? Click.

Salome by British artist Barry Burman (1943-2001)[1] via Trevor Brown[2] . Trevor notes Burman’s work as a personal inspiration after reading Peter Webb‘s The Erotic Arts and makes a comparison to the work of Graham Ovenden. Burman committed suicide in 2001.

Notes of the previous days:

2008 August 1

Valter of Surreal Documents has written the first post in a series devoted to Stefan Jaworzyn‘s exploitation film fanzine Shock Xpress. These posts will present to you YouTube videos of the films featured in the three books which collect the fanzine’s best articles. He starts with biographical information on Jaworzyn.[4]

The previous thematic outing of Valter was centered around Exotica by Toop[5].

2008 August 2

Web 2.0 is slowly becoming a reality. WordPress, Flickr, YouTube, Last.fm, Del.icio.us, LibraryThing and Facebook made me realize that. I need an API-driven platform that can integrate the aforementioned, with my wiki as backbone. Things such as Spinlets which let you create “mashups“. Something as easy to use as the defunct Hypercard, which was my first hypertext experience, in the pre-internet days. It would allow Amazon.com integration for my Wiki too.

2008 August 3

On the difference between nakedness and nudity .

I am sceptical that Leiber and Stoller wrote “Hound Dog“. They probably heard it in an African American Vernacular English version in a juke joint (I heard a version not so long ago which went “you ain’t looking for a woman, you just looking for a ho“), bowdlerized it and released it in a version palatable to the WASP crowd. Cfr. Elvis‘s “One Night (song)” and Cole Porter‘s “I Get a Kick Out of You“. The latter had its drug reference “I get no kick from cocaine,” changed to “I get perfume from Spain,” for radio airplay, the earlier was first titled “One Night of Sin.”

Most therapists have knowledge of psychology but too many of them are at a loss when it comes to philosophy. Most culturati look to philosophy and sociobiology rather than psychology for an answer to “meaning of life.” Contemporary therapists who wish to cater for a sophisticated crowd should watch I Heart Huckabees, read about existential humanism and existential therapy, and study Emmy van Deurzen and others on the Passion Paradox.

See also, Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic

Saw Demonlover, my second and hopefully last film of Assayas. The previous one was Irma Vep … just as terrible. The only redeeming element Demonlover was the introduction of the concept of Hellfire Club. Even the SY soundtrack is barely audible. Glad I got to see Chloë Sevigny, aka miss Brown Bunny.

2008 August 4

The Fold is a new web-based film series written by husband-and-wife writing team, Ray Sawhill and Polly Frost. It will be viewable at http://www.thefold.tv as from now. It is an erotically-based science fiction series.

Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dies

World music classics #39, 40 and 41

Beastie Boys - Cooky puss
Beastie Boys – Cooky puss
04:30
Added: 6 months ago
From: iwillluvher
Views: 7,489
Ciccone Youth -
Ciccone Youth – “Into the Groovey”
02:47
Added: 3 months ago
From: dipsetmuthafucka
Views: 2,381
Liquid Liquid -
Liquid Liquid – “Cavern” 1983
04:38
Added: 6 months ago
From: tertolkin
Views: 7,336

Background info:

Notes: There is a better version on Youtube of “Cavern” (sound-wise), but the one featured here has the original music video, and the only one commissioned by New York record label 99 Records. “Cooky Puss” was a revelation when it came out, and my first exposure to the Beastie Boys. “Into the Groove(y)” was also my first exposure to SY, there are two alternative versions of this Madonna spoof/cover.

If you have the time, check dipsetmuthafucka‘s Youtube channel, he, or rather his musical selection, is the incarnation of taste.

Do you want to control me?

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixKSHqMFKj0&]

“Soul Control” by Theo Parrish

Along Moodymann and Terrence Parker, Theo Parrish (Washington, DC, 1972) represents the third wave of Detroit techno. Theo Parrish juxtaposes elements of soul, jazz, disco, funk and techno with simple but hypnotic funky 4/4 house rhythms.

It’s hard in the internet era to recreate that excitement of the unknown when you encounter a dusty, entirely mysterious artifact in a record shop. There’s no such thing as a rare record these days [cfr. Death of the underground], with the advent of eBay, and music available in digital forms is so extensively propagated around the internet that it’s rare to encounter something you don’t know at least something about … .

However, Detroit producer Theo Parrish (whose Sound Sculptures Volume 1 was reviewed recently in The Wire 291) makes a fair stab at preserving that sensation in a manner that’s neither drearily nostalgic nor hermetically self-referential. — Derek Walmsley (The Mire, The Wire’s blog) on Theo Parrish .

Erutarettil, or, Treasures from the Antwerp library

I went to the Permeke library in the center of Antwerp yesterday evening and loaned these:

Two of these books I had already loaned, the work by Rachleff, which is excellent, and the sublime Sade / Surreal, which I’ve mentioned before here. Sade/Surreal is a pricey book (a French bookseller currently wants more than 300 EUR for it, but a German vendor is currently letting it go for less than 40 Euros, which is a bargain, if you have deep pockets, consider buying it for me as a present). For the last hour of so, I’ve been updating my wiki with the names found on the opening and closing pages of the book (pictured below), which reads like a who’s who of Sadean thought, a summa sadeica, as it were.

Sade Surreal inside page

Opening and closing page of Sade/Surreal

There were only a couple of names I could not identify, any help is welcome: Retz (either Gilles de Rais, or the cardinal with the same name, Young (perhaps Mr. Young of Night Thoughts?), de Saint Martin, Bertrand (probably Aloysius Bertrand ?) and Constant (Constantin Meunier?). The rest is indentified.

Also in the same book is the engraving below, which I find lovely, like a cake-building or a building of collapsing blubbery wet clay.

Tomb of Pompeii by Jean-Baptiste Tierce, 1766

Tomb of Pompeii by Jean-Baptiste Tierce, 1766

Icons of erotic art #10

As we have learnt from the first nine issues in this series, in the nebulous realm of erotic art, uneroticism runs rampant. Not with the photos I am about to present. NSFW, previously unpublished online, here is Unica Zürn photographed by Hans Bellmer [1].

Previous entries in Icons of Erotic Art here, and in a Wiki format here.

World cinema classics #28

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCpyqiee-Z8]

El Topo (1970) – Alejandro Jodorowsky

“El Topo is not a Western, it goes further than any Western … El Topo is not a religious film, it contains all religions … This film is bloody… El Topo is miraculous and terrible … El Topo is monstrous and cruel”

This slightly overrated curio premiered exactly 37 years today at the Elgin, New York.

Previous “World Cinema Classics” and in the Wiki format here.

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.