Month: January 2017 (Page 6 of 6)

 

‘Susannah York was a vibrant, energetic personality with a devouring passion for work, strong political opinions and great loyalty to old friends. Her international reputation as an actor depended heavily on the hit films she made in the 1960s, including Tom Jones (1963) and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969, for which she received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. But, even when her movie career waned, she worked ceaselessly in theatre, often appearing in pioneering fringe productions. It was typical of her that, although diagnosed with cancer late in 2010, she refused chemotherapy and fulfilled a contractual obligation to do a tour of Ronald Harwood’s Quartet.

‘In her early years York was often cast as an archetypal English rose. But, although born in Chelsea, south-west London (as Susannah Yolande Fletcher), she was raised in a remote Scottish village and educated at Marr college, Troon. I suspect that the inbuilt Scottish belief that the devil makes work for idle hands stayed with her throughout her career. From school, she progressed to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, in London, where she won the Ronson award for most promising student. With her piercing blue eyes and gamine appearance, she quickly found work. She was Abigail to Sean Connery’s John Proctor in a TV version of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in 1959. But it was in cinema that she found herself cast as the perfect ingenue.

‘Although she actually made her big-screen debut in a Norman Wisdom film, There Was a Crooked Man, in 1960, it was her performance as Alec Guinness’s daughter in Tunes of Glory later that year that made one sit up and take notice. Behind the good looks, one sensed a certain impish wildness. That was confirmed by The Greengage Summer (1961), in which she played a schoolgirl awakening to the sexual power she had over men. And, while she hinted at darker powers when she played a disturbed psychiatric patient in John Huston’s Freud (1962), she seemed a shoo-in for the role of Sophie Western in Tony Richardson’s much-lauded film of Tom Jones. In fact, York later revealed that she had turned the part down three times and only guiltily accepted it after cooking a disastrously inept lunch for the determined director.

‘After Tom Jones, the film parts poured in. Some, such as a trendy boutique owner in Kaleidoscope (1966) and a cute codebreaker in Sebastian (1968), hardly extended her range. But, at her best, she showed signs of real emotional depth. She was quietly impressive as Margaret More in Fred Zinnemann’s film of A Man for All Seasons (1966). And although Eileen Atkins was the definitive, doll-clutching “Childie” in the original stage production of The Killing of Sister George, York gave the character a neurotic, waif-like edge in Robert Aldrich’s sensationalised, sexually explicit 1968 film. She even managed to look mildly aroused when Coral Browne lasciviously pawed her breasts.

‘She was also outstanding as a flapper who flips out in Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? which dealt with the world of marathon dance contests populated by Hollywood hopefuls. As the critic David Thomson said: “She was excellent as the English girl trying to break into sordid movies. There is a speculative flightiness about her in that film; especially in the breakdown in the shower scene, she seemed for the first time a human animal touched to the quick.”

‘Although she lost out to Goldie Hawn at the Oscars for that performance, she picked up the best actress award at the Cannes film festival for Robert Altman’s Images (1972). Here she played a possibly schizophrenic author of children’s books wrestling with her sexual identity. She put something of herself into the character, responded excellently to Altman’s sympathetic direction and, although some found the film mystifying, it retains interest, as Thomson wrote, “because of the actress’s resolute seriousness”.

‘By now it was clear that York was a fiercely independent spirit determined to fight against typecasting. She initially turned down an invitation to the Oscars when she said it offended her to be nominated without being asked. And she said, in one interview: “I hated that appellation of film star. I did not want to have an image and be seen as the blue-eyed, golden-haired ingenue. Being a ‘star’ seemed to lock you into an image and I was always frightened of that because I knew I would disappoint people.”

‘However, throughout the 1970s, she continued to appear in movies and on television. In Zee and Co (1972), she enjoyed an erotic relationship with Elizabeth Taylor, and in Superman (1978), she and Marlon Brando were the hero’s Kryptonian parents. Both were blatantly commercial. But others, such as The Maids (1975), where she and Glenda Jackson played Jean Genet’s murderous, implicitly lesbian servants, were more clearly aimed at the arthouse market.

‘Early in the decade she played Jane to George C Scott’s Mr Rochester in a TV movie of Jane Eyre (1970). She was in Conduct Unbecoming (1975), took the title role in the Australian film Eliza Fraser (1976) and played Mrs Fitzherbert in a TV series, Prince Regent (1979). But one sensed a growing frustration at the roles she was being offered and a feeling that her appetite for the adventurous and unusual could be best satisfied by theatre.

‘In 1978, at the instigation of the producer Richard Jackson – with whom she did 10 projects and who became a lifelong friend – she appeared at the New End theatre in London in a production of The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs. Exquisitely directed by Simone Benmussa, this was an adaptation of a George Moore short story about a woman who, for economic reasons, lives as a male hotel waiter and enjoys a relationship with a chambermaid. This gave a whole new dimension to York’s career. Further work with Jackson included Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice, which toured globally from 1984 to 1992, and Appearances, based on a short story by Henry James and again directed by Benmussa, which York initially played in French to highly appreciative Paris audiences.’ — Michael Billington

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Susannah York @ IMDb
Susannah York: One of the most memorable faces of the British film industry in the Swinging Sixties
SUSANNAH YORK · d’autres étoiles filantes
SUSANNAH YORK, “GOLD”
Ciaran Brown meets actress Susannah York
Notebook: Susannah York, 1939 – 2011
Qui se souvient de Susannah York ?
R.I.P. Susannah York @ The A.V. Club
Susannah York: I force myself to go to the shops
The loss of Susannah York
Remembering Susannah York
My perfect weekend: Susannah York
Portrait of the artist: Susannah York, actor
Podcast: Susannah York, War on Screen

 

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Extras

Interview (2011)

Susannah York gets drunk

Excerpts from Susannah York’s Production ‘The Loves of Shakespeare’s Women’

Actress Susannah York Claims Ghostly Experience At Old House & Bridge

Drag Queen lip-sync of Susannah York reading Shakespeare’s Sonnet 109

 

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SY on her temperament

“I have a very quick, strong temper. I don’t smash up things, I just go for people. And I never know when it’s going to happen to me. I can turn in a moment. The thing about my temper is that it takes me totally by surprise so, of course, it takes everyone else by surprise too. My temper is just so fast and after I’ve done something awful, I feel very bad about it. I’ve struggled so hard to reign in my temper because it actually terrifies me.

“Over the years I’ve hit my lovers and I’ve been whacked back in one or two relationships. Then we’ve both been so shocked we’ve sort of stopped dead. Usually, I’ve gone in with my fists to punch a man’s chest and he’s grabbed my arms and twisted them round to stop me. Very occasionally I hit my children, Sasha and Orlando, but not a lot. They taught me patience, even though I’m not wonderfully patient now, but I wouldn’t have learnt patience at all, if not for them.”

“I beat up John Huston, and he’s a very big guy. He made a hideous joke about Monty and I just saw red and laid into him. Monty was worried about his eyesight and Huston said he’d get him a guide dog for Christmas. I hit Huston with tremendous force and he staggered back against the wall. I’m very, very strong.

“The things that make me very angry are injustice and bullying. If I see someone bullying a woman or child in the street, or kicking a dog, I go completely mad.

“I would say I can look after my temper a little better now. “But I can’t answer for every situation. You never know what could happen. I don’t think I’ve hit anybody for a while and I always know never to hit somebody’s face. I get terribly angry with dawdlers in traffic, people who meander and potter about, and people who cut in. But since I’ve learnt about road rage, I’ve really tried to control myself. I tell myself to be careful and calm down, and I talk myself out of my anger. I think by the time I’d actually got out of the car to hit someone, I’d have realised the stupidity of it and stopped myself.

“I feel I’d like to share my luck and my life. Being in love is the best thing in the world. But I’m not interested in two-nights-a-week of sex and that’s your lot. Oh no! A relationship is lovely if you’re happy, comfortable in it and you really like the person. I can think of nothing better. But there’s nothing worse than having a relationship in which you feel no interest.

“Relationships are very hard work so you really have to think long and hard about whether you want to take that on again. A lot of the guys I meet are taken. One has to face that. But I’ve met two men in the past 18 months who are extremely interesting. I’m not going to elaborate and, as far as I know, neither of them are taken.

“I’m very cautious. I’m not a fly-by-night anymore. I’ve had a bit of that in the past, sowing my wild oats, but now it’s got to be worth it. I guess I’ve got quite high standards and can be selfish and opinionated. Men find it difficult because I’ve got so much energy and hardly sleep at night, only four or five hours. I wake up in the early hours and potter around.”

“I went through such terrible emptiness with my children, I almost did it in advance. A year before they left I’d wake up with this horrible ache in my stomach. It’s one of the things women have to go through. Men too, I suppose.

“I often lack confidence but, more than anything else, having children has helped to boost my confidence. My one beautiful thing is my children. If you’ve opened up to one beautiful thing in your life you then see beauty in other things. So much of our lives are dirty, filthy, ugly and cruel. I was actually terrified of having children and didn’t know whether I was capable of making a commitment. But when they came along I fell in love with them, and in a strange way it does open your heart.

“Now I recognise how lucky I’ve been in my life. I’ve had two or three long periods when I’ve been very unhappy, followed by the grief and emptiness of failed relationships. But more strongly than that I recognise past and present joys, and realise how fortunate I’ve been. And I’ve got a strong sense of hope in the future.”

 

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14 of Susannah York’s 106 roles

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John Huston Freud: The Secret Passion (1962)
‘John Huston originally commissioned a screenplay about Sigmund Freud from Jean-Paul Sartre. It proved overlong and unwieldy and the ultimate film came closer to one of the respectful Warner Bros biopics of great men on which both Huston and the film’s German-born producer, Wolfgang Reinhardt, had worked in the 1930s. Set in Vienna in the 1880s, it’s about what Huston in his prologue portentously describes as “Freud’s descent into a region almost as black as hell itself, man’s unconscious and how he let in light”. In his penultimate screen appearance, a troubled but generally impressive Montgomery Clift plays the young neurologist who challenges the medical establishment, moving from hypnosis towards psychoanalysis and developing his revolutionary theories, most especially about infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex. Susannah York and David McCallum play two key patients, with the long-blacklisted Larry Parks as Freud’s friend Joseph Breuer. Douglas Slocombe’s black-and-white photography is superbly atmospheric. It’s a serious, honourable film that makes an interesting comparison with David Cronenberg’s recent Freud film, A Dangerous Method.’ — The Guardian

Excerpt

 

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Tony Richardson Tom Jones (1963)
‘The film is notable for its unusual comic style: the opening sequence is performed in the style of a silent film, and characters sometimes break the fourth wall, often by looking directly into the camera and addressing the audience, and going so far as to have the character of Tom Jones suddenly appearing to notice the camera and covering the lens with his hat.’ — collaged

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Jack Smight Kaleidoscope (1966)
‘Kaleidoscope was Warren Beatty’s seventh movie, and his sixth bad movie. After starting his career with a bang in the terrific Splendor in the Grass, Beatty’s subsequent movies had all proved to be flops at the box office. Kaleidoscope was a typical mod mid-1960’s caper movie, trying to capture some of that James Bond-style magic. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work very well. Beatty plays Barney Lincoln, a wealthy American playboy living in London. Just for kicks, Barney breaks into the Kaleidoscope playing card factory in Geneva and makes small marks on the presses that print the cards so he can identify which cards his opponent has, and which card he’s about to get. Since Kaleidoscope seems to have a monopoly on supplying all of the European casinos with playing cards, his plan seems pretty fool proof, and he wins a ton of money. Along the way he meets flighty English girl Angel McGinnis, played by Susannah York.’ — Mark My Words

Excerpt

 

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David Greene Sebastian (1968)
‘Early in the production of Sebastian, somebody should have called a meeting to figure out what the movie was about. I guess nobody did. What we are stuck with, then, is a movie that moves confidently in three directions, arriving nowhere with a splendid show of style.’ — Roger Ebert

the entire film

 

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Robert Aldrich The Killing Of Sister George (1969)
‘Like Gertrude Stein, tweedy, randy, butch June Buckridge, the flawed heroine of The Killing of Sister George, has a fondness for the bovine. Stein liked to write about “making a cow come out,” which meant giving Alice B. Toklas an orgasm; Buckridge, one of the most inimitable characters in Robert Aldrich’s filmography, expressed her disgust with the world by letting out a long, plaintive moo!. Released in 1968, Aldrich’s film is one of several the director made about the vagaries of stardom—a mini-oeuvre that also includes The Big Knife, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and The Legend of Lylah Clare. While Baby Jane has long been appropriated by gay men, its most famous line (“But you are, Blanche! You are in that chair!”) repeated in bars and drag shows for decades, Sister George remains a lesbian cult classic that has the distinction of being the first “serious” film to receive an X rating. It was based on Frank Marcus’s London-set 1965 play, which was billed as a “new comedy hit” and opened at New York’s Belasco Theatre in 1966 after a successful West End run. The film, with a screenplay by Lukas Heller, who also wrote Baby Jane, unfolds as a bizarre love triangle. “George” (Beryl Reid, who originated the role onstage), née June Buckridge, is a middle-aged, alcohol-soaked actress on the popular soap opera Applehurst; although she’s nothing like Sister George, the sexless, kindhearted country nurse she plays, her character’s name essentially becomes her own. George lives with her much younger girlfriend, Childie (Susannah York), born Alice McNaught, so nicknamed because of her obsessive attachment to her doll collection. Rupturing the relationship is BBC executive Mrs. Mercy Croft (Coral Browne), who tells George her character is going to die—the “killing” of the title—before diddling Childie and spiriting her away. It was their 119-second love scene (not in the play) that gave the film its X rating.’ — Melissa Anderson, Film Comment

the entire film

 

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Sydney Pollack They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969)
‘The fascinating 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? stars Jane Fonda, Susannah York and Gig Young all of whom were Oscar nominated for their work. Gig Young has the Cabaret MC type of role and he won the supporting Actor Oscar. Jane Fonda is warming up for her even greater bitch-on-wheels Oscar winning tour de force in Klute (1971). But of the three performances I was must stunned by Susannah York who has one particularly yowza scene featuring one of the most chilling and sustained loss-of-sanity bits I’ve seen from an actor in aeons. The film is set during the great Depression but, in reflection of the late 60s reality-bites mindset is not some Seabiscuit/Cinderella Man style inspirational-triumph-of-the-human-spirit “we’re all winners” uplift. They Shoot Horses is a spawn of the “life is hell and then you die” school of filmmaking. But you already knew that all period pieces eventually tell us more about the time in which they’re made than the time that they’re about, didn’t you?’ — Film Experience

Excerpt

the entire film

 

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Mark Robson Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1971)
‘Directed by Mark Robson (who has given us such diverse films as Peyton Place, Von Ryan’s Express, Valley of the Dolls, and Earthquake), written by Kurt Vonnegut, and starring Rod Steiger, Susannah York and William Hickey, the film has the production values (and similar looking sets) of an episode of The Odd Couple. Based on Vonnegut’s first stage play, it tells the story of Harold Ryan (Steiger), adventurer, hunter, and war-hero (presumed dead), and his unexpected return home to his wife Penelope (York), and son Paul (Steven Paul). Harold had been trapped in an African jungle for eight years with his friend Looseleaf Harper (Hickey), the man who dropped the bomb on Nagasaki. The two return to an America that they no longer recognize — the peace movement and women’s liberation are just two examples of changes they are unprepared for. Though some of the issues the film addresses are a bit dated, Happy Birthday, Wanda June is probably the best adaptation of a Kurt Vonnegut piece, and the dialog is razor sharp throughout. Genuinely funny, this is a film that deserves to be resurrected from wherever it’s been buried — the performances by Steiger, Hickey and York simply must be seen to be believed.’ — Film Brain

Excerpt

 

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Robert Altman Images (1972)
‘Altman shot Images (1972) in Ireland during the wet autumn months of 1971, and premiered it the following May at Cannes. It won Susannah York the award for best actress (it’s the role she’s most proud of), but left its Cannes audiences mostly confused. It isn’t the sort of film you feel affectionate about. It’s complex and cold, although not nearly as hard to understand as some of the first reviews suggested. Images is a film Altman admirers should make a point of seeing. Its very differences with most of his work help illuminate his style, and he demonstrates superb skill at something he’s supposed to be weak at: telling a well-constructed narrative. It also shows him in inventive collaboration with Miss York, whose children’s book about unicorns is read on the sound track and supplies her character with an alternate fantasy universe in which strange creatures and quaint legends replace the challenges of real life. But the movie, as I’ve suggested, inspires admiration rather than involvement. It’s a technical success but not quite an emotional one.’ — Roger Ebert

Trailer

Excerpts

 

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Christopher Miles The Maids (1975)
‘Jean Genet, one of the most celebrated creative minds of the 20th century, receives an unbridled, expertly cinematic rendering in this long unseen film based on his perverse play. The Maids‘ volatile mixture of class confrontation, Freudian passion and criminal mischief frames an acid-etched portrait of two sisters whose hatred and desire twist their tortured lives together into a relentless downward spiral of guilt, degradation, and freedom at any cost. Glenda Jackson  and Susannah York play Solange and Claire, Paris maids who tend to cruel socialite Madame’s (Vivien Merchant) unending domestic needs. Whenever Madame is away, the sisters obsessively act out a complex role-playing psychodrama of domination and control that feeds their powerful lust for revenge upon the haughty, disdainful mistress they serve. But after falsely denouncing Madame’s lover to the police, Solange and Claire’s shared terror of arrest and the unchecked aggression with which they increasingly infuse their “ceremony” threaten to destroy them even as they perch on the threshold of ecstatic release.’ — Kino Lorber

the entire film

 

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Jerzy Skolimowski The Shout (1978)
‘Though Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout (1978) is equally as complex as Performance in terms of narrative linearity (or lack of it), Skolimowski’s film and its complexity derives not from the identity crisis surrounding individual characters within themselves but instead around the crisis of manipulated relationships; the power-play is not between two opposing (but ultimately singular) forces but really the reaction of a third party between a dominant and a submissive pair of characters. More importantly, however, Skolimowski uses the paintings and aesthetics of Francis Bacon to deploy the affect of this tension, more so than Cammell would do as The Shout features actual works by Bacon as well as a deliberate recreation of a specific painting by the artist as well.’ — Celluloid Wicker Man

Excerpt

 

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Richard Donner Superman (1978)
‘For those who know Jerry Siegel’s and Joe Shuster’s comic strip, which has been running since the ‘30s, no introduction to their hero will be needed. Others will be glad of the opening sequence, which is a prologue showing how Superman came to be launched towards Earth from the planet Krypton. Marlon Brando, the only well-informed member of Krypton’s council, ruling from a cast concrete capital in a landscape of ice, predicts the planet’s destruction within 30 days. When this is not heeded by such experienced colleagues on the council as Trevor Howard or Harry Andrews, he and his wife (Susannah York) decide to launch their baby son earthwards in a spacecraft that looks more beautiful than practical – like a starfish in pale pink ice. Krypton duly blowing up is suitably spectacular; and when, after a long journey, the baby arrives, he’s a little boy capable of holding up car with one hand when the wheel-jack fails. The middle-aged childless American couple with the car who pick him up in a field naturally adopt him, and by the time he’s in his late teens he’s kicking footballs over the horizon and outrunning fast trains, such are his powers.’ — Telegraph

Trailer

 

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Mel Damski Yellowbeard (1983)
‘If pitching, as Connie Mack once said, is 75 percent of baseball, what value might be assigned to a script destined to serve an extensive assortment of comic actors? For an answer, consider the pirate movie Yellowbeard as the vehicle for a trans-Atlantic cast starring Graham Chapman, John Cleese and Eric Idle of the Monty Python troupe, Cheech and Chong, Peter Cook, Peter Boyle, Madeline Kahn, Kenneth Mars, Spike Milligan and Marty Feldman, who died last year while in Mexico City making the movie. All these frequently ebullient, irreverent zanies are tossed – together with such customarily more staid types as James Mason, Susannah York, Beryl Reid and Peter Bull -into a tale of the quest for treasure cached in 1687 on a tropical island by the bloodthirsty Yellowbeard (Graham Chapman), before his incarceration in London.’ — NYT

the entire film

 

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Richard Franklin The Visitors (2003)
‘Venerable British actress Susannah York and up-and-coming star Radha Mitchell head up the cast of this Australian psychological thriller. Both actresses play the character of Carolyn at different stages of her life; bookended with scenes of the elder Carolyn (York) recalling her attempt to sail around the world, the bulk of the film involves the terror-stricken voyage itself. Only in her twenties, the young Carolyn (Mitchell) is filled with hope and fear for her daring solo journey, but once at sea, isolation and solitude begin to take their toll. Soon, Carolyn is encountering people and situations from her past, sometimes with violent, terrifying consequences. When she begins to notice physical evidence of her nightmarish visitors, Carolyn really begins to lose it.’ — collaged

Trailer (Spanish)

 

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Jan Dunn The Calling (2009)
‘Half Doubt, half Hollyoaks, Jan Dunn’s latest attempt to put Thanet on the cinematic map unfolds at the world’s busiest, bitchiest convent: St Bertha’s of Ramsgate. Barely a scene goes by without someone self-flagellating, getting pregnant, topping themselves or having a whopping skeleton pop out of the cupboard. But it’s also quite glam, full of female leads of a certain age: Rita Tushingham is sister booze, Susannah York a sinister Prioress, Pauline McLynn a sulky nun, Susannah Harker a slutty nun, and Amanda Donohoe a rookie nun’s mum. Second to none, though, is bonafide Ramsgate resident Brenda Blethyn as Sister Ignatius, she of the wry eyebrows and jaunty wimple, the progressive leanings and splendidly indignant reaction when someone explains they’re vegetarian: “Sister Kevin has already started the chicken pate, and as for the chicken chiplets …” Only she, really, manages to ride the rollercoaster jumps in plot and tone that sadly mean The Calling may fail to speak to many.’ — The Guardian

Trailer

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Palm Springs, weird. Living in Palm Springs always seems like the lifestyle equivalent of getting a tan in a tanning salon to me, no doubt unfairly. Oh, right, her daughter Gaby. Thanks for the update, D. ** Dynomoose, Whoa, hey, pal! And ha ha ha, very nice. You great? I sure hope so! Love, me. ** Steevee, Hi. Huh. I’m surprised that episode isn’t on youtube or somewhere. I scoured. The word Hitler is becoming like one of those once-shocking swear words whose overuse has turned whatever it’s applied to into hostile mush. I haven’t seen ‘Staying Vertical’ yet, no. Curious about it. Add me to your coterie that didn’t like ‘Stranger by the Lake’. ** Montse, Hi, Montse! Yeah, I was really surprised not to know it given my constant searching of master/slave sites where you’d think it would be a popular fetish. It embarrasses me a little to remember when I knew Paris patisseries so superficially that I would take you to Fauchon. Not that their stuff sucks or anything. But it’s sort of like if you’d asked to check out French couture and I’d taken you to Zara or something. Anyway, in my initial search, I didn’t find a single patisserie that uses its imagination on madeleines. They seem to be sacred cows. But now I’m more determined than ever to find madeleine auteurs. Oh, we have to shoot at least most of the movie in this region of France called Bas Normandie wherein Caen is the largest city because we received a big grant from the film commission there, and, in return for the money, we have to shoot there and employ people there as much as possible. I love working/writing by myself a lot, but nowadays I find I love working with others (Zac, Gisele, et. al.) just as much. But I am really lucky in those cases to have collaborators whom I’m completely simpatico with, which I’m sure colors that feeling. Japan! You guys must go there sometime. Really, really! It’s a dream. Did you have fun or interesting non-fun today? xxx ** B, Hi, Bear. Yeah, the context of in-flight entertainment can make totally standard, monetarily overfed brain-rot films strangely pleasurable. And yet it can’t, for me at least, rescue movies that are really horrible. So, like, the ‘Thor’ or ‘Hunger Games’ or etc. movies can be decent companions, but when a movie is absolutely dreadful inside and out like, say, ‘Batman vs Superman’ or that last X-Men movie, being trapped in a plane seat doesn’t disguise that. What is the bar gig? Great that another salon is soon upcoming. And have a wonderful time in Boston. I’ve only been to Boston a couple of times, and both times for gigs where I traveled very quickly in and out of the city, so I don’t know it at all. I can barely even remember what it looks like, weirdly. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Sure, of course, about the emotional whirlwind. You just have to see how it settles. Hearts are pretty welcoming things, so hopefully you won’t feel like the love you feel for the new dog is a cancelation of your lost/not lost love. Cool you liked ‘Witch Hunt’. Juliet’s a wonderful writer. My yesterday involved a lot of not so interesting (emailing, messaging, etc.) but useful film prep work. Today has started shittily because my reading glasses, which were already half-broken, completely broke this morning. I’m having to tilt my head back and hold it at an uncomfortable angle just to be able to do this p.s. So I have to go get new ones immediately, which isn’t a big deal, but it vexes me. And today? Your today? ** Bernard, Norman Vincent Peale! I remember that guy. He was a real adult touchstone when I wasn’t an adult. Interesting. Thanks, B. Hm, I wonder if France has grifter gurus. I would guess not unless the Le Pen brood counts, which I guess they don’t, but I’m going to ask Zac and Gisele. I’ve had some pretty good veggie burgers here. The place that had my favorite shut down about a year ago. My new favorite is at Le Potager du Marais, a fantastic in general vegan restaurant very close to the Pompidou on rue Rambuteau. Why do you ask? I think I either did a post ages back on La Specola or maybe had it in a general post. I’ll check. Re: Domenica del Corriere, nope. I’ll look into that immediately. I did quite an excellent Vincent Price Day, and I’ll get that restored and reposted asap. Good idea. I love questions. Lists and questionnaires are two of my fetishes, so keep ’em coming. ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff. Yeah, it was lurker for me too. Right? About that gif? Holy shit. I strangely have never watched ‘Glen and Randa’. I have seen ‘The Hired Hand’. It is pretty interesting and worth watching. I think maybe it’s a bit over-lauded, but it’s a thing to see at least. The A-Frames, yes, wow. I haven’t thought about them in a million years. Huh, I’m going to go revisit them today. Thanks for the tip/reminder! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. That ’50 Foot Woman’ movie gets a lot of traction in the Macrophilia message boards I found, no surprise. As does some mid-late, giant woman-featuring music video by the Rolling Stones. Cool, I’ll go check out the Crasher Kids. Thanks, man. Glad you got some high quality time with your YnY comrades. ** Derek McCormack, Derek! Yay! Well, you should have a firework named after you too. I wonder if there are custom fireworks designers the way there are custom piñata designers. I know there are custom piñata designers because in Zac’s and my new film one of the characters collects pinatas, and he has 37 of them on display in his garage, and we found a piñata designer in Paris who’s going to make 37 pinatas for us in any design we choose. Any ideas? ** Marilyn Roxie, Hi, Marilyn! Thanks, pal. Oh, yes, I see what you mean about your collage. It’s awesome! You take care too. ** Bill, Hi. No, Macrophilia is just as ‘big’, ha ha, among heterosexual guys. I just concentrated on the gay angle to give the post coherence or something. Slogging again already? Sorry, man. Fucking capitalism! Yeah, I’ve found that if you’re okay after the third night, you’re relatively safe. ** H, Hi. I got taught and pulled you guys into my education. Exciting about the Xmas experimental film discoveries. Especially now that’s it not Xmas anymore for some reason. ** Okay. I was thinking about the odd, very interestng actress Susannah York the other day, and … presto. See you tomorrow.

‘The publication in one volume of a work like Tropisms – which some considered to be a collection of prose poems – with what, quite obviously, is furthest removed from it: a series of essays on the novel, may cause legitimate surprise.

‘And yet this proximity is justifiable.

‘The great interest shown today in discussions of the novel, and especially in the theories advanced by the supporters of what, in France at present, is called ‘Nouveau Roman’, has led many to imagine that these theorising novelists are cool calculators who began by constructing their theories, which they then decided to put into practice in their books. This explains the fact that their novels have been referred to as ‘laboratory experiments.’

‘If this were the case, it might seem plausible that, one fine day, after having formulated certain opinions on the evolution, content and form of the present-day novel, I sat down at my table and undertook to apply them by writing Tropisms, and the books that followed.

‘Nothing could be more mistaken than this supposition. For no literary work can be a mere illustration of principles, however convincing. And, in fact, these articles, all of which were written in 1947, are far removed from the conception and composition of my first book.

‘I started to write in 1932, when I composed my first Tropism. At that time, I had no preconceived ideas on the subject of literature and this one, as were those that followed it, was written under the impact of an emotion, of a very vivid impression. What I tried to do was to show certain inner ‘movements’ by which I had long been attracted; in fact, I might even say that, ever since I was a child, these movements, which are hidden under the commonplace, harmless appearances of every instant of our lives, had struck and held my attention. In this domain, my first impressions go back very far.

‘These movements, of which we are hardly cognizant, slip through us on the frontiers of consciousness in the form of undefinable, extremely rapid sensations. They hide behind our gestures, beneath the words we speak and the feelings we manifest, all of which we are aware of experiencing, and are able to define. They seemed, and still seem to me to constitute the secret source of our existence, in what might be called its nascent state.

‘And since, while we are performing them, no words express them, not even those of the interior monologue – for they develop and pass through us very rapidly in the form of frequently very sharp, brief sensations, without our perceiving clearly what they are – it was not possible to communicate them to the reader otherwise than by means of equivalent images that would make him experience analogous sensations. It was also necessary to make them break up and spread out in the consciousness of the reader the way a slow-motion film does. Time was no longer the time of real life, but of a hugely amplified present.

‘These movements seemed to me to be veritable dramatic actions, hiding beneath the most commonplace conversations, the most everyday gestures, and constantly emerging up on the surface of the appearances that both conceal and reveal them.

‘The dramatic situations constituted by these invisible actions interested me as such. Nothing could distract my attention from them and nothing should distract that of the reader; neither the personality of the characters, nor the plot, by means of which, ordinarily, the characters evolve. The barely visible, anonymous character was to serve as mere prop for these movements, which are inherent in everybody and can take place in anybody, at any moment.

‘Thus my first book is made up of a series of moments, in which, like some precise dramatic action shown in slow motion, these movements, which I called Tropisms, come into play. I gave them this name because of their spontaneous, irresistible, instinctive nature, similar to that of the movements made by certain living organisms under the influence of outside stimuli, such as light.

‘This analogy, however, is limited to the instinctive, irresistible nature of the movements, which are produced in us by the presence of others, or by objects from the outside world. It obviously never occurred to me to compare human beings with insects or plants, as I have sometimes been reproached with doing.

‘The volume entitled Tropisms appeared in 1939, under the imprimatur of Denoël. The present edition, source of this translation, was published by the Editions de Minuit, in 1957. It is a corrected re-edition of the 1939 volume, to which have been added the six last texts, written between 1939 and 1941.

‘This first book contains in nuce all the raw material that I have continued to develop in my later works.

”Tropisms are still the living substance of all my books, the only difference being that they now play a more important role, the time of the dramatic action they constitute is longer, and there is added complexity in the constant play that takes place between them and the appearances and commonplaces with which they emerge into the open: our conversations, the personality we seem to have, the person we seem to be in one another’s eyes, the stereotyped things we believe we feel, as also those we discover in others, and the superficial dramatic action constituted by plot, which is nothing but a conventional code that we apply to life.

‘My first books: Tropismes, which appeared in 1939, and Portrait d-un inconnu in 1948, passed practically unnoticed in the post-war literary atmosphere, which was dominated by the Behaviourist tendency and by a metaphysics of the ‘absurd.’

‘As a result, if for no other reason than to seek justification, reassurance or encouragement for myself, I began to reflect upon the motives that impelled me to reject certain things, to adopt certain techniques, to examine certain works of both past and present, and to anticipate those of the future, in an effort to discover an irreversible direction in literature that would permit me to see if my own quest was in line with this direction.

‘Thus it was that, in 1947, I was prompted to study the works of Dostoievski and Kafka from a particular angle. In the article entitled L’Ere du soupçon, which appeared in 1950, I tried to show the results of the transformations of characters in fiction since Balzac’s time,as exemplified in the contemporary novel. And in Conversation et sous-conversation, published in 1955, I called attention to the out-moded nature of dialogue as practised in the traditional novel.

‘In connection with the latter article, I should like to stress the fact that when I spoke of the old-fashioned nature of the works of Joyce and Proust, or the naïveté of Virginia Woolf’s ideas on the subject of the novel, it was quite obviously to poke fun at those who had expressed themselves in this manner about these writers. Taken as a whole, it seems to me that this article is perfectly clear; I insist on this point, however, because it has been a source of occasional misunderstanding.

‘Lastly, in the article entitled Ce que voient les oiseaux, which appeared in 1956, I tried to show, among other things, the academic, formalist features of a certain type of ‘realism’.

‘Some of the ideas expressed in these articles have contributed to the essential bases for what, today, us called the ‘Nouveau Roman.’

‘And so, it seems to me that the present volume, to which two such dissimilar works as Tropisms and The Age of Suspicion may give an appearance of incongruity, by virtue of this very juxtaposition, gives a fair account of my endeavours, as they progressed from my first Tropisms to the theoretical viewpoints that derived from them.’ — Nathalie Sarraute, 1962

 

______
Gallery

Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Pinget, Claude Simon, Samuel Beckett, Nathalie Sarraute, 1959

Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Michel Butor, 1959

with Marie Darrieussecq, 1998

 

_____
Further

Nathalie Sarraute @ Wikipedia
NS @ goodreads
Nathalie Sarraute by Hannah Arendt
Lessons with Nathalie Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute interviewed
Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader: Identities in Process
Her novels broke with fictional realism, examining human behaviour at its most secretive
THE USE OF SPEECH BY NATHALIE SARRAUTE
Nathalie Sarraute and England
On Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms and why we write
Being Beside One’s Self
Nathalie Sarraute Fiction and Theory
A propos de Nathalie Sarraute
L’objet lumineux dans l’œuvre de Nathalie Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute et l’anti-roman
Le dialogue selon Nathalie Sarraute
Fiction et révélation : Vous les entendez ? De Nathalie Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute et la violence du texte
Eloge de NATHALIE SARRAUTE: Apprendre à dire l’indicible
Buy ‘Tropisms’

 

_____
Extras

Nathalie SARRAUTE Tropismes

Nathalie Sarraute “Vous les entendez?”

Un siècle d’écrivain 1995 Nathalie Sarraute

INVITEE : SARRAUTE

Tombe de Nathalie Sarraute au cimetière de Chérence

 

_______
Interview
from The Paris Review

You wrote your first novel at the age of twelve, then nothing until you were thirty-two. Why?

NATHALIE SARRAUTE: My mother wrote all the time, and to parrot her I wrote a “novel” full of all the platitudes I had read in love stories at the time. I showed it to a friend of my mother who said, Before writing novels one should learn to spell! Psychologists would see in that episode a typical childhood trauma. Actually, I think I did not write until much later because I had nothing to say.

At the lycée I liked writing essays because the subjects were imposed from outside. It made me realize how pleasant it was writing well turned-out sentences in a classical style—one was on equal terms with the classics, safe in their company. Whereas in my own writing I jump into a void, without any protection. I stumble and stammer, without anything to reassure me.

The traditional novel, with its plot and characters, etcetera, didn’t interest me. I had received the shock of Proust in 1924, the revelation of a whole mental universe, and I thought that after Proust one could not go back to the Balzacian novel. Then I read Joyce, Virginia Woolf, etcetera . . . I thought Mrs. Dalloway was a masterpiece; Joyce’s interior monologue was a revelation. In fact, there was a whole literature that I thought changed all that was done before. But as I said, I myself didn’t write because I had nothing to say then.

You started writing Tropisms when you were thirty-two; it is a short book of twenty-four pieces, yet it took you seven years.

SARRAUTE: It took five years, which is still long. Then I spent two years trying to find a publisher for it. Finally a very good publisher, Robert Lafont, who had discovered Céline and Queneau took it. He published it in the same collection as Queneau.

How did you arrive at the form for those first short texts?

SARRAUTE: The first one came out just how it is in the book. I felt it like that. Some of the others I worked on a lot.

And why did you choose the name Tropisms?

SARRAUTE: It was a term that was in the air, it came from the sciences, from biology, botany. I thought it fit the interior movement that I wanted to show. So when I had to come up with a title in order to show it to publishers, I took that.

How did you know what they were at the time, these tropisms? How did you know when you’d found one?

SARRAUTE: I didn’t always know, I might discover it in the writing. I didn’t try to define them, they just came out like that.

The tropisms often seem to work through a poetic sensibility.

SARRAUTE: I’ve always thought that there is no border, no separation, between poetry and prose. Michaux, is he prose or poetry? Or Francis Ponge? It’s written in prose, and yet it’s poetry, because it’s the sensation that is carried across by way of the language.

With the tropisms, did you feel that it was fiction, did you wonder what to call it?

SARRAUTE: I didn’t pose myself such questions, really. I knew it seemed impossible to me to write in the traditional forms. They seemed to have no access to what we experienced. If we en- closed that in characters, personalities, a plot, we were overlooking everything that our senses were perceiving, which is what interested me. One had to take hold of the instant, by enlarging it, developing it. That’s what I tried to do in Tropisms.

Did you sense at the time that that was the direction your work would go?

SARRAUTE: I felt that a path was opening before me, a path that excited me. As if I’d found my own terrain, upon which I could move forward, where no one had gone prior to me. Where I was in charge.

Were you already wondering how to use that in other contexts such as a novel?

SARRAUTE: Not at all. I thought only of writing short texts like that. I couldn’t imagine it possible to write a long novel. And afterwards, it was so difficult finding these texts; each time it was like starting a new book all over again; so I told myself perhaps it would be interesting to take two semblances of characters who were entirely commonplace, as in Balzac, a miser and his daughter, and to show all the tropisms that develop inside of them. That’s how I wrote Portrait of a Man Unknown.

In effect, one could say that all or most tropisms we might find in people could also be found in a single person.

SARRAUTE: Absolutely. I’m convinced that everyone has it all in himself, at that level. On the exterior level of action, I don’t for a minute think that Hitler is like Joan of Arc. But I think that at that deep level of tropisms Hitler or Stalin must have experienced the same tropisms as anyone else.

The tropisms would seem to enter the domain of the social sciences as well.

SARRAUTE: Yes. I’ve become more accessible, besides. My work used to be entirely closed to people. For a long time people didn’t get inside there; they couldn’t manage to really penetrate these books.

Why do you think that is?

SARRAUTE: Because it’s difficult. Because I plunge in directly, without giving any reference points. One doesn’t know where one is, or who is who. I speak right away of the essential things, and that’s very difficult. In addition, people have the habit of looking for the framework of the traditional novel—characters, plots—and they don’t find it; they’re lost.

That brings up the question of how to read these books. You do without plot, for example.

SARRAUTE: There is a plot, if you like, but it’s not the usual plot. It is the plot made up of these movements between human beings. If one takes an interest in what I do, one follows a sort of movement of dramatic actions that takes place at the level of the tropisms and of the dialogue. It’s a different dramatic action than that of the traditional novel.

You’ve said that you prefer a relatively continuous reading of your books. But all reading is a somewhat fragmentary experience. With a traditional novel, when one picks it up again to continue reading, there are the characters and the plot to situate oneself, to discover where one has left off. In your books, do you see other ways of keeping track of where one was?

SARRAUTE: I don’t know. I don’t know how one reads it. I can’t put myself in the reader’s place, or know what he’s looking for, what he sees. I have no idea. I never think of him when I’m writing. Otherwise, I’d be writing things that suit him and please him. And for years he didn’t like it, he wasn’t interested.

Even after several books you weren’t discouraged?

SARRAUTE: No, not at all. I was always supported, all the same, from the start. With Portrait of a Man Unknown, I was supported by Sartre. At the time Sartre was the only person who was doing something about literature; he had a review. My husband was also tremendously supportive, from the very start. He was a marvelous reader for me; he always encouraged me a great deal. That was a lot. It suffices to have one reader, who realizes what you want to do. So it was a great solitude, if you like, but deep down inside it wasn’t solitude. Sartre was impassioned by Portrait of a Man Unknown. So that was very encouraging. Then when Martereau was done, Marcel Arland was very excited and had it published with Gallimard. He was editing the Nouvelle Revue Française at the time. I always had a few enthusiastic readers. When Tropisms came out, I received an enthusiastic letter from Max Jacob, who at the time was very admired as a poet. I can’t say it was a total solitude.

Did Sartre or others try to claim you as an existentialist?

SARRAUTE: No, not at all. He said, I had better write a preface for it, otherwise you won’t find a publisher, because he had become very famous by then. But despite his preface nobody wanted the book, and in the end a small publisher took it. It had only one little notice and was ignored. Later Sartre told me, If you persist in writing like this you’ll sacrifice your life.

Simone de Beauvoir, while she didn’t mind Sartre being surrounded by, or even having affairs with pretty actresses and secretaries, was said to be terribly jealous of women of superior intelligence who got close to him, and she broke your friendship. Is that true?

SARRAUTE: It is true that she separated us completely. But I heard that she couldn’t bear Sartre having an intellectual relationship with anyone, male or female. She caused the break with Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Aron, Camus . . . She wanted to be the only one.

But I liked Sartre very much. He had an attentiveness that denoted generosity, and I think he was warm. Simone de Beauvoir, on the other hand, was cold and distant, and as they were very close it colored his attitudes too, sometimes. He listened marvelously.

That might explain why some women were seduced by him, despite his physique.

SARRAUTE: I don’t know, as I certainly wasn’t one of them! I liked him as a friend, but found him physically one of the most repulsive men I had ever seen—it was terrible! The physical aspect of a man was always very important to me.

What about your own feminism?

SARRAUTE: I militated for the women’s vote in 1935. I have always been a feminist in so far as I want equal rights for women. But the idea of “women’s writing” shocks me. I think that in art we are androgynous. Our brains are not different, but until now women were less educated, so they produced fewer works of art. People always compare women to each other. I was once asked at a conference what was the similarity between Marguerite Yourcenar and Marguerite Duras. I said that there was an enormous similarity: they were both called Marguerite! Otherwise there is not an iota of connection between them.

Some people have seen a feminist bias in your work.

SARRAUTE: Imagine! But I hardly ever think of gender when I write about my characters. I often prefer he to she because he is neutral but she is only female. In The Planetarium there is an old woman who is anxious because a door-handle has been badly put on her door. Well, a young man wrote to me and that “this old lady is me!” He explained that he had just been married and moved to a new apartment, and that he was just as worked-up about some details as my character. You can imagine how pleased I was!

Some time ago I received a doctoral thesis whose subject was woman’s condition in my novels! I was flabbergasted! But if I had wanted to discuss woman’s condition I wouldn’t have written the sort of books I have. Woman’s condition is the last thing on my mind when I write.

To return to tropisms, do you feel there are other writers who have found certain lessons in that domain?

SARRAUTE: I don’t feel I have any imitators. I think it’s a domain that is too much my own.

Would it be possible to use the tropisms in a more traditional novel?

SARRAUTE: I don’t see how. What interest would there be? Because in a more traditional novel, one shows characters with personality traits, while the tropisms are entirely minute things that take place in a few instants inside of anybody at all. What could that bring to the description of a character?

As if at the moment of the tropisms, the character vanishes.

SARRAUTE: He disintegrates before the extraordinary complexity of the tropisms inside of him.

 

___
Book

Nathalie Sarraute Tropisms
New Directions

‘Hailed as a masterpiece by Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Tropisms is considered one of the defining texts of the nouveau roman movement. Nathalie Sarraute has defined her work as the “movements that are hidden under the commonplace, harmless instances of our everyday lives.” Like figures in a grainy photograph, Sarraute’s characters are blurred and shadowy, while her narrative never develops beyond a stressed moment. Instead, Sarraute brilliantly finds and elaborates subtle details―when a relationship changes, when we fall slightly deeper into love, or when something innocent tilts to the smallest degree toward suspicion.’ — New Directions

 

_____
Excerpt

XI

She had understood the secret. She had scented the hiding-place of what should be the real treasure for everybody. She knew the ‘scale of values.’

No conversations about the shape of hats and Rémond fabrics for her. She had profound contempt for square-toed shoes.

Like a wood-louse she had crawled insidiously towards them and maliciously found out about ‘the real thing’, like a cat that licks its chops and closes its eyes before a jug of cream it has discovered.

Now she knew it. She was going to stay there. They would never dislodge her from there again. She listened, she absorbed, greedy, voluptuous, rapacious. Nothing of what belonged to them was going to escape her: picture galleries, all the new books… She knew all that. She had begun with ‘Les Annales’, now she was veering towards Gide, soon she would be going to take notes, an eager, avid gleam in her eye, at meetings of the ‘Union for Truth’.

She ranged over all that, sniffed everywhere, picked up everything with her square-nailed fingers; as soon as anyone spoke vaguely of that anywhere, her eyes lighted up, she stretched out her neck, agog.

For them this was unutterably repellent. Hide it from her – quick – before she scents it, carries it away, preserve it from her degrading contact… But she foiled them, because she knew everything. The Chartres Cathedral could not be hidden from her. She knew all about it. She had read what Péguy had thought of it.

In the most secret recesses, among the treasures that were the best hidden, she rummaged about with her avid fingers. Everything ‘intellectual’. She had to have it. For her. For her, because she knew now the real value of things. She had to have what was intellectual.

There were a great many like her, hungry, pitiless parasites, leeches, firmly settled on the articles that appeared, slugs stuck everywhere, spreading their mucus on corners of Rimbaud, sucking on Mallarmé, lending one another Ulysses or the Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, which they slimed with their low understanding.

‘It’s so beautiful,’ she said, opening her eyes in which, with a pure, inspired expression, she kindled a ‘divine spark’.

 

XII

During his very well-attended lectures at the Collège de France, he amused himself with all that.

He enjoyed prying, with the dignity of professional gestures, with relentless, expert hands, into the secret places of Proust or Rimbaud, then, exposing their so-called miracles, their mysteries, to the gaze of his very attentive audience, he would explain their ‘case’.

With his sharp, mischevous little eyes, his ready-tied cravate and his square-trimmed beard, he looked enormously like the gentleman in the advertisements who, with one finger in the air, smiling recommends Saponite, the best of soap-powders, or the model Salamander: economy, security, comfort.

‘There is nothing,’ he said, ‘you see I went to look for myself, because I won’t be bluffed; nothing that I myself have not already studied clinically countless times, that I have not catalogued and explained.

‘They should not upset you. Look, in my hands they are like trembling, nude little children, and I am holding them up to you in the hollow of my hand, as though I were their creator, their father, I have emptied them for you of their power and their mystery. I have tracked down, harried what was miraculous about them.

‘Now they hardly differ from the intelligent, curious and amusing eccentrics who come and tell me their interminable stories, to get me to help them, appreciate them, and reassure them.

‘You can no more be affected than my daughters are when they entertain their girl friends in their mother’s parlour, and chatter and laugh gaily without being concerned with what I am saying to my patients in the next room.’

This was what he taught at the Collège de France. And in the entire neighbourhood, in all the nearby Faculties, in the literature, law, history and philosophy courses, at the Institute and at the Palais de Justice, in the buses, in the métros, in all the government offices, sensible men, normal men, active men, worthy, wholesome, strong men, triumphed.

Avoiding the shops filled with pretty things, the women trotting briskly along, the café waiters, the medical students, the traffic policemen, the clerks from notary offices, Rimbaud or Proust, having been torn from life, cast out from life and deprived of support, were probably wandering aimlessly through the streets, or dozing away, their heads resting on their chests, in some dusty public square.

 

C.PARTNER

Those who have followed him [Gide] and have wanted to try and make these subterranean actions re-live for the reader as they unfold, have met with certain difficulties. Because these inner dramas composed of attacks, triumphs, recoils, defeats, caresses, bites, rapes, murders, generous abandons or humble submissions, all have one thing in common: they cannot do without a partner.

Often it is an imaginary partner who emerges from our past experiences or from our day-dreams, and the scenes of love or combat between us, by virtue of their wealth of adventure, the freedom with which they unfold and what they reveal concerning our least apparent inner structure, can constitute very valuable fictional material.

It remains nonetheless true that the essential feature of these dramas is constituted by an actual partner.

For this fresh and blood partner is constantly nurturing and renewing our stock of experiences. He is pre-emionently the catalyser, the stimulant, thanks to whom these movements are set in motion, the obstacle that gives them cohesion, that keeps them from growing soft from ease and gratuitousness, or from going round and round in circles in the monotonous indigence of ruminating on one thing. He is the threat, the real danger as well as the prey that brings out their alertness and their suppleness; the mysterious element whose unforeseeable reactions, by making them continually start up again and evolve towards an unknown goal, accentuate their dramatic nature.

But at the same time that, in order to attain to this partner, they rise up from our darkest recesses towards the light of day, a certain fear forces them back towards the shadow. They make us think of the little grey roaches that hide in moist holes. They are ashamed and prudent. The slightest look makes them flee. To blossom out they must have anonymity and impunity.

They consequently hardly show themselves in the form of actions. For actions do indeed develop in the open, in the garish light of day, and the tiniest of them, compared with these delicate, minute inner movements, appear to be gross and violent: they immediately attract attention. All their forms have long since been examined and classified; they are subject to strict rules, to very frequent inspection. Finally, very obvious, well-known, frank motives, thick, perfectly visible wires make all this enormous, heavy machinery work.

But lacking actions, we can use words. And words possess the qualities needed to seize upon, protect and bring out into the open these subterranean movements that are at once impatient and afraid.

 

*

p.s. Hey.  ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! My pleasure re: the slaves. Did you go to the NYE party? I literally did nothing. I kept thinking I should go out and find something festive, but it was just too cold, and, like I’ve said, I don’t like drinking alcohol very much. I like cold, and deep winter is my favorite season, but the cold is really biting here in Paris this year. Either that or my body heater is broken or something. So I just stayed home and worked and traded some festive well-wishes via the phone. It was perfectly acceptable. How has 2017 started for you? ** MyNeighbourJohnTurturro, Hi, man! Oh, I’m ultra-pleased to have successfully turned you on to Cheap Trick. Yes, they’re a very great band, and one whom a lot of people take for granted without actually exploring and grasping what they do. Strange, that. Anyway, obviously, I’m thrilled that you’re on board. And, yes, as I’ve said, I don’t think there’s a greater singer in all of rock than Robin Zander. On a visceral level, of course, but he can also invest his voice with such complex tones and attitudes, and he can locate this space where even completely contradictory emotions and intentions can share his voice and transmit simultaneously. Amazing. My Xmas and NYE were kind of indistinguishable from the days surrounding them, which was completely okay with me. Oh, yes, you can email me your CCA contact, that would be great! Thank you! My email, if you don’t have it, is [email protected]. Have an excellent today! ** David Ehrenstein, I’m giving that slave the benefit of the doubt that he was clever enough to know that would be an alluring head scratcher of a statement. I saw that about Kevin Sessums, and that he was allowed back, but I haven’t heard if David Drake got reinstated. David’s a lovely guy. ** James Nulick, Since every day is a Cheap Trick celebration as far as I’m concerned, you are not too late. I certainly agree that you need to start on that novel. When it gnaws, it’s ready. Very nice Cheap Trick story, buddy. I think the puppy’s outfit might have a thing or flap or doohickey on it that can be inserted into the anus and coat it in such a way that his asshole becomes an inlet of the costume? Maybe? ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. I do think Russell Mael did a vocal with Cheap Trick at some point. The rock lineage that starts with The Move is one of the most interesting and fruitful ones in rock. My personal rock god Robert Pollard (GbV) is in that lineage from The Move and also counts both Cheap Trick and Sparks among his most inspiring forebears. Yeah, I think that’s good way to think about Zander’s approach, inhabiting characters. Also, one of the genius things about him, and the credit goes to Rick Nielsen’s lyrics too, is that Zander can create and channel a character while also using his voice to critique and/or pass judgement the character he’s performing from outside the character. I can’t think of anyone else in rock who can do that other than maybe Ray Davies and, yes, Russell Mael. I hope your NYE did whatever trick you wanted it to do. ** Steevee, Hi. The first Cheap Trick album is hard to beat, although ‘Heaven Tonight’ really is a masterpiece. I started seeing Cheap Trick live from the beginning when they were playing very small clubs, and they often played with punk bands. It wasn’t an odd combination at all. Their initial audience before they blew up with the Budokan album was very much among people whose main interest was in the general punk rock area. Yes, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned, I saw Tom Petty very early as the opening act for some well-ish known punk band at the Whiskey A-Go-Go, and he got violently booed offstage after about three songs. I’m getting the feeling that when ‘Silence’ opens here I’m going to have to push myself a little to go see it. Gisele has made mix-tapes for performers in the theater/dance works to use as reference points sometimes, yes. Zac and I haven’t done that for the film work, yet anyway. It’s an idea. ** Kyler, A late HNY back to you. You mean have I been to see things at the Opera, the original one? Many times, yeah. Weirdly, I live literally a 90 second walk from the new Opera at Bastille, but I’ve never been inside. Ah, a new apprarance of your non-fiction. I’ll go read that, obviously. Everyone, author and d.l. and much more Kyler has a non-fiction piece he wrote invitingly called ‘Actor Turned Psychic; Setting Out on the Path of Magic’ newly up online and readable by one and all. Here. Need I even say that I recommend you hit that link post-haste? Your can be an opera queen if you want. I have many close friend who are ‘opera queens’, and they are perfectly fine and admirable people. ** Sypha, Hi, James. Picky. I think that slave’s outfit isn’t leather but maybe neoprene? I’m not sure. But, if so, maybe it can hosed off or something. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I hope your 2017 has begun splendidly. My NYE was as lowkey as a NYE could possibly be. And we both survived. ** Bill, HNY to you, Bill! I think my jaw might have literally dropped when I found that Pina Bausch expert/slave and, moreso, found his PB expert/commenter. Once in a lifetime. My NYE was nothing. Kind of literally. I think Zac did it up properly and tied it on with some friends. Which fetish Coil vinyl? Good morning. ** H, Hi. And a very HNY to you and all of yours! ** Misanthrope, Hi. It does seem like some kind of social media-induced form of bipolarity. I don’t think I really understand why people find the outputting of outrage and grief so addictive. Or why they feel the need to prove how outraged or grief-stricken they are by relentlessly linking to news items no matter how spurious the sources. It’s interesting, but it’s equally exhausting to observe. Anyway, you put it very well. I feel like for me personally 2017 is going to be a good one, but for everyone in general, maybe not so much. Who knows, though. ** Montse, Hey, Montse! Awesomeness-incarnate to see you, dear pal! My NYE, as I said up above, was a perfectly quiet and acceptable non-event. I stayed inside and used the fact that it’s freezing cold here as my excuse. Your NYE sounds lovely. Yes, we are beginning the big work on our new film. It’s going to get crazy busy very soon. We’re kind of on the cusp of becoming swamped in a great way with all the things we need to do to get ready. Very exciting! Yes, I, of course, have three other projects I’m busy with, but, luckily, they’re mostly on hold for the moment. Zac is doing really well. I will give him your love today, and I can 100% guarantee that he will send his love back to you. Has your 2017 begun well? I think mine has. Take good care, and please hang out here whenever you have time, and give my love to Xet and Mick too! Mega-love, Dennis. ** Joakim, Yay, an illustrated HNY! Thank you! Ha ha. Yeah, just let me know whenever you guys get your Paris plans sorted, and we’ll nail it. It will be so, so nice to see you whenever it is! I like the sound of your celebration. I … uh … worked, stayed in, turned the heater up as high as it would go, watched a little TV, wished some inebriated friends HNY on the phone, stuff like that. No big. Oh, I’ll check my email. Thank you! Hugs and love to you, my friend! ** Okay. I’m spotlighting the great Nathalie Sarraute today. Strangely, I feel like people aren’t writing and thinking about her that much at the present time, at least relative to some of her fellow Nouveau Roman writers, which is odd since she’s both among the greatest of them and essentially invented the Nouveau Roman when the book I’m spotlighting was first published years before the movement existed. Enjoy, I hope. See you tomorrow.