“They Hate Me More Than I Hate Them” — Michel Houellebecq on Critics and the Press

INTERVIEWER

What about your critics? Can you just sum up briefly what you hold against the French press?

HOUELLEBECQ

First of all, they hate me more than I hate them. What I do reproach them for isn’t bad reviews. It is that they talk about things having nothing to do with my books—my mother or my tax exile—and that they caricature me so that I’ve become a symbol of so many unpleasant things—cynicism, nihilism, misogyny. People have stopped reading my books because they’ve already got their idea about me. To some degree of course, that’s true for everyone. After two or three novels, a writer can’t expect to be read. The critics have made up their minds.

From his Paris Review interview.

I Burn Paris (Book Acquired, Some Time Last Week, Or Maybe Late the Week Before)

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Bruno Jasieński was one of the leaders of the Polish Futurist movement, and his novel I Burn Paris looks fascinating. It’s also a beautiful looking book — publisher Twisted Spoon has done a lovely job here — an embossed hardback with no superfluous jacket, and even a nice lace bookmark (doesn’t show up in my photo). There are also illustrations by Cristian Opris.

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I’m hoping to get into this this weekend, but for now, here’s publisher Twisted Spoon’s description:

I Burn Paris has remained one of Poland’s most uncomfortable masterstrokes of literature since its initial and controversial serialization by Henri Barbusse in 1928 inL’Humanité (for which Jasienski was deported for disseminating subversive literature). It tells the story of a disgruntled factory worker who, finding himself on the streets, takes the opportunity to poison Paris’s water supply. With the deaths piling up, we encounter Chinese communists, rabbis, disillusioned scientists, embittered Russian émigrés, French communards and royalists, American millionaires and a host of others as the city sections off into ethnic enclaves and everyone plots their route of escape. At the heart of the cosmopolitan city is a deep-rooted xenophobia and hatred — the one thread that binds all these groups together. As Paris is brought to ruin, Jasienski issues a rallying cry to the downtrodden of the world, mixing strains of “The Internationale” with a broadcast of popular music.

With its montage strategies reminiscent of early avant-garde cinema and fist-to-the-gut metaphors, I Burn Parishas lost none of its vitality and vigor. Ruthlessly dissecting various utopian fantasies, Jasienski is out to disorient, and he has a seemingly limitless ability to transform the Parisian landscape into the product of disease-addled minds. An exquisite example of literary Futurism and Catastrophism, the novel presents a filthy, degenerated world where factories and machines have replaced the human and economic relationships have turned just about everyone into a prostitute. Yet rather than cliché and simplistic propaganda, there is an immediacy to the writing, and the modern metropolis is starkly depicted as only superficially cosmopolitan, as hostile and animalistic at its core.

This English translation of I Burn Paris fills a major gap in the availability of works from the interwar Polish avant-garde, an artistic phenomenon receiving growing attention with recent publications such as Caviar and Ashes.

Easter in Shakespeare

From Thomas Firminger Thiselton-Dyer’s indispensable volume Folk-lore in Shakespeare:

Easter. According to a popular superstition, it is considered unlucky to omit wearing new clothes on Easter Day, to which Shakespeare no doubt alludes in “Romeo and Juliet” (iii. 1), when he makes Mercutio ask Benvolio whether he did “not fall out with a tailor for wearing his new doublet before Easter.” In East Yorkshire, on Easter Eve, young folks go to the nearest market-town to buy some new article of dress or personal adornment to wear for the first time on Easter Day, as otherwise they believe that birds—notably rooks or “crakes”—will spoil their clothes. In “Poor Robin’s Almanac” we are told: “At Easter let your clothes be new, Or else be sure you will it rue.” Some think that the custom of “clacking” at Easter—which is not quite obsolete in some counties—is incidentally alluded to in “Measure for Measure” (iii. 2) by Lucio: “his use was, to put a ducat in her clack-dish.” [649] The clack or clap dish was a wooden dish with a movable cover, formerly carried by beggars, which they clacked and clattered to show that it was empty. In this they received the alms. Lepers and other paupers deemed infectious originally used it, that the sound might give warning not to approach too near, and alms be given without touching the person. A popular name for Easter Monday was Black Monday, so called, says Stow, because “in the 34th of Edward III. (1360), the 14th of April, and the morrow after Easter Day, King Edward, with his host, lay before the city of Paris; which day was full dark of mist and hail, and so bitter cold, that many men died on their horses’ backs with the cold. Wherefore unto this day it hath been call’d the Blacke Monday.” Thus, in the “Merchant of Venice” (ii. 5), Launcelot says, “it was not for nothing that my nose fell a-bleeding on Black Monday last at six o’clock i’ the morning.”

21 Citations on Pablo Picasso — David Markson

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, oil on canvas, 1907 (MoMA)

Painting is not done to decorate apartments –PICASSO

People speak of naturalism in opposition to modern painting.
Where and when has anyone ever seen a natural work of art?
Asked Picasso.

Depressed at the apparent lack of interest in one of his early still lifes, Matisse visited his dealer to retrieve it, only to learn that it had been purchased after all.
By Picasso.

The interrelationship of Picasso and Braque during Cubism:
Like being roped together on a mountain, Braque said.

The oddity that Velazquez and Picasso, surely two of the three greatest Spanish-born painters, each used his mother’s name rather than his father’s.

Among the many paintings in her Paris flat, Gertrude Stein had two exceptional Picassos.
If there were a fire, and I could save only one picture, it would be those two. Unquote.

The Bateau-Lavoir, the legendary former Montmartre piano factory broken up into artists’ studios, where Picasso contrived any number of his early masterpieces — while living with no running water and only one communal toilet.

The so-called anarchist artist who in 1988 smeared a large X in his own blood on a wall in the Museum of Modern Art — and in the process splattered an adjacent Picasso.

Picasso. Cézanne. Matisse. Braque. Bonnard. Renoir.
All of whom painted portraits of Ambroise Vollard.

Cartier-Bresson. Brassaï. Man Ray. Lee Miller. Robert Doisneau. Robert Capa. David Douglas Duncan. Cecil Beaton.
All of whom photographed Picasso.

Picasso’s play, Desire Caught by the Tail — which could be performed for the first time only privately, because of the Nazi occupation of Paris.
But avec Camus, Sartre, Michel Leiris, Raymond Queneau, Dora Maar, Pierre Reverdy, Simone de Beauvoir.

There is no such thing as abstract art, said Picasso.
You always have to start somewhere or other.

Gertrude Stein once delighted Picasso by reporting that a collector had been dumbfounded, years afterward, to hear that Picasso had given her her portrait as a gift, rather than asking payment.
Not understanding that that early in Picasso’s career, the difference had been next to negligible.

You never paint the Parthenon; you never paint a Louis XV armchair. You make pictures out of some little house in the Midi, a packet of tobacco, or an old chair.
Said Picasso.

Future generations will regard Bob Dylan with the awe reserved for Blake, Whitman, Picasso and the like.
Said an otherwise seemingly rational writer named Jonathan Lethem.

Picasso, avec laughter, after being asked if he had used models for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon:
Where would I have found them?

Picasso’s admiration for Charlie Chaplin.
Diego Rivera’s.
Stalin’s.

Kees van Dongen’s admission that there were occasions during his own early Montmartre years when he was forced to filch milk and/or bread from neighborhood doorsteps — with an accomplice named Picasso.

Picasso, in Paris during the Nazi occupation and learning that someone had accused him of having Jewish blood:
I wish I had.

A rejection of all that civilization has done.
Said the London Times of a first Post-Impressionist exhibition, in 1910 — which included Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, others.

My old paintings no longer interest me. I’m much more curious about those I haven’t done yet.
Said Picasso, at seventy-nine.

From David Markson’s The Last Novel

Consider Gérard de Nerval’s Pet Lobster

I’ve been reading Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel The Map and the Territory on my Kindle Fire, which is handy because I can easily hover my index over an unknown reference and figure out what Mich-dawg is getting at. Anyway, near the beginning of Part III, H-bomb drops a reference to French Romantic poet and essayist Gérard de Nerval, whom I will cop to not recognizing. But the detail seemed significant, so let my index finger hover I did, but, no dice, Nervs wasn’t in the preloaded dictionary—so I went to the next option: Le Wikipedia. And here’s a snapshot of what I saw:

The man’s life is divided into seven neat sections there on Wikipedia, and what’s right square in the middle? Pet lobster. Holmes had a pet lobster:

I’m guessing if you know about Nerval you probably know about his lobsterkins, but I didn’t. Harper’s ran a piece about Nerval and his lobster back ’08. From the piece:

 With all due respect for cats, however, let us consider the case for the humble lobster. The poet Gérard de Nerval had a penchant for lobsters, or at least for one lobster. Nerval was seen one day taking his pet lobster for a walk in the gardens of the Palais-Royal in Paris. He conducted his crustacean about at the end of a long blue ribbon. As word of this feat of eccentricity spread, Nerval was challenged to explain himself. “And what,” he said, “could be quite so ridiculous as making a dog, a cat, a gazelle, a lion or any other beast follow one about. I have affection for lobsters. They are tranquil, serious and they know the secrets of the sea.” (The episode is captured by Guillaume Apollinaire in a collection of anecdotes from 1911). Was there any basis to this story? A generation of Nerval scholars attempted to debunk it, but then a letter to his childhood friend Laura LeBeau was discovered. Nerval had just returned from some days at the seaside at the Atlantic coastal town of La Rochelle: “and so, dear Laura, upon my regaining the town square I was accosted by the mayor who demanded that I should make a full and frank apology for stealing from the lobster nets. I will not bore you with the rest of the story, but suffice to say that reparations were made, and little Thibault is now here with me in the city…” Nerval, it seems, had liberated Thibault the lobster from certain death in a pot of boiling water and brought him home to Paris. Thus we know that it was Thibault, and not just “some lobster,” who went for that celebrated promenade in the gardens of the Palais-Royal.

RIP Jean Giraud aka Moebius

French comic book legend Jean Giraud, also known as Moebius, died today in Paris at 73.

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Although Giraud’s work is more famous in Europe, and particularly France and Belgium, where comics tend to get more of the artistic esteem they deserve, his influence on contemporary American comics and sci-fi film design should not be underestimated.

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His take on Wild West culture is exemplified in what is likely his largest body of work Blueberry, but folks new to Giraud might wish to start with The Airtight Garage (or just check out this cool gallery).

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Giraud/Moebius was never simply a genre artist; instead, his work taps into the mythological, exploring themes that seem at once both strangely familiar but also wildly divergent from our expectations. His imaginative disruptions made him a key partner for film directors like Alejandro Jodorowsky; he also worked on the art team behind Alien, among other films, like The Abyss, Willow, and Tron. Giraud was also close friends with Hayao Miyazaki.

Giraud leaves a rich, vibrant legacy. The imaginative spaces of his worlds will undoubtedly captivate generations to come.

 

Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues (Book Acquired, 2.10.2012)

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I try to spend 10 or 20 minutes with every book that comes in to Biblioklept World Headquarters—assessing plot and prose, trying to get a sense of the potential audience for each volume, etc. Sometimes this task is difficult, and especially difficult when I find myself with too much to read, yet intrigued by the book at hand.

This is a lot of hemming and hawing leading up to: I very much enjoyed the first fifty or so pages of Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues. Here’s a plot description from the Man Booker Prize website:

‘Chip told us not to go out. Said, don’t you boys tempt the devil. But it been one brawl of a night, I tell you…’ The aftermath of the fall of Paris, 1940. Hieronymous Falk, a rising star on the cabaret scene, was arrested in a cafe and never heard from again. He was twenty years old. He was a German citizen. And he was black. Fifty years later, Sid, Hiero’s bandmate and the only witness that day, is going back to Berlin. Persuaded by his old friend Chip, Sid discovers there’s more to the journey than he thought when Chip shares a mysterious letter, bringing to the surface secrets buried since Hiero’s fate was settled. In Half Blood Blues, Esi Edugyan weaves the horror of betrayal, the burden of loyalty and the possibility that, if you don’t tell your story, someone else might tell it for you. And they just might tell it wrong…

Edugyan writes in an energetic colloquial syntax, one that matches–and embodies—the spirit of the jazz musicians at the forefront of her narrative.  So far, great stuff.

Picador has picked up the book and given it a wider distribution in the US. Check it out.