Spotlight on … Danielle Collobert Murder (1965)

 

‘“I’m well versed in murder. I invent several each day. I bring different people to death, old ones for the most part, I don’t know why.” — Danielle Collobert

‘Danielle Collobert committed suicide when she was thirty-eight years old. It’s amazing to think that her first novel, Murder, which she began writing in 1960 at age twenty, didn’t receive an English translation until 2013—amazing in the true sense of the word, as in, like, causing wonder. Because reading this book will make you wonder why it took so long to find its way into English; it will make you wonder how Collobert could have extracted something so deep, so haunting, while still so young.

‘Murder was originally published in 1964 by legendary French publisher Éditions Gallimard and championed by none other than Raymond Queneau. Collobert’s style is unique. Her sentences are often heavily segmented by chains of commas, intensely lyrical and enigmatic, effortlessly elevating personal experience to the realm of broader, more universal truths. The “chapters” in Murder, for lack of a better word, are rarely longer than two or three pages. Because the text is so fragmented, it often feels like a cross between a series of short stories and prose poems, or like fleshed-out and gaping photographic stills. There is a sense of the writing functioning both above what’s written, and below, calling to mind the charged and spooky images of Francesca Woodman or the gritty and blood-soaked snapshots from a book on the Algerian War.

‘Such an analogy isn’t meaningless, either. Collobert was a supporter of Algerian independence and she wrote Murder while in political exile in Italy. This is an important point. Because her writing is so enigmatic, it isn’t always clear what Collobert means—at least not on the surface. But there’s no doubt that the backdrop of the war heavily informs Murder.

Returning, with the brutal passage of time, in the rupture of space, toward this city, suddenly arisen, without reality—our trajectory through it—and its immense disappearance, without reason, because we are going to leave.

What happened in the city is still there, at our feet, without our having given a purpose to that death. Here, now, there is silence, above the city. But over there we can hear a siren wailing.

‘The translation by Nathanaël is done cleanly and with great nuance. Pains have clearly been taken to retain the sheer and simple quality of Collobert’s language. It’s this delicate balance between real-world horror—i.e., Algeria—and a sort of hovering omniscience that separate Collobert’s writing from lesser material covering similar themes. In an interview with HTMLGIANT, Nathanaël touched on this point, saying “[Murder] is tempered by the residues of such histories; but the work’s strength is in its ability to evoke them without resorting to explicit accounts, or naming. The generalization of historical violence is embedded in the intimate accounts presented to the reader—seemingly placeless, nameless, they nonetheless achieve historical exactitude through relentless repetition—a reiterative (mass) murder (one is tempted to say: execution), which afflicts and incriminates the gutted bodies that move painstakingly through these densely succinct pages.”

‘Nathanaël’s use of the word “incriminate” is of particular interest, considering Murder’s implication that the witness is also guilty: “If the eye looks suddenly behind itself, if it turns around on itself, then there is the rise of each edge of the aqueous and malevolent substance that clouds it, blinds it, and terrifies it, until it can once again forget everything that happened, for it, deep down, without having that great invasive fear to overcome with each degree, with each new step, scaled like the highest of mountains, the steepest of summits.”

‘Collobert left behind a handful of books, all produced in only twenty years. Like many writers who have chosen to end their own lives, her voice occasionally takes on a gravity that is, if nothing else, alarming, urgent.’ — David Peak, The Rumpus

Stop. It’s important—important—you mustn’t miss this, the last moments. But you don’t like that. You want to go quickly. You let yourself be carried, removed, killed. And me, in the world that veers behind you, only later will I have the strength to hold you back, only later, after the others—forgive me—when they will have taught me how to stop a piece of earth torn off by the wind—a finished man, a failure, a shadow, a song, a last song—a whole dumbfounded world …

 

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Further

Reading Danielle Collobert
‘Blake Butler on Danielle Collobert’s “Murder”‘
‘Murder’ reviewed @ The Brooklyn Paper
‘Murder’ reviewed @ Fjords
‘Danielle Collobert’s Aux environs d’un film: Poetic Writing On the Brink of Cinema’
‘Murder’ reviewed @ lost gander
‘Slammed into Walls: Violence and the Impersonalized Subject in Danielle Collobert’s “It Then”
‘Writing (at) the Limits of Genre: Danielle Collobert’s Poetics of Transgression’
‘Violence and Identity in the Poetry of Danielle Collobert’
‘Oh fuck. I didn’t know Danielle Collobert was dead.’
Danielle Collobert @ Editions POL
‘TOUJOURS LENTEMENT LE MÊME TEMPS’
xcerpts from the Journals of Danielle Collobert, 1960-1961
re: ‘Danielle Collobert | Œuvres 1’
Danielle Collobert @ goodreads
‘[anthologie permanente] Danielle Collobert’
Audio: ‘Rencontres des solitudes, Danielle Collobert & François Bon’
Buy ‘Murder’

 

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Extras

Danielle Collobert, Meurtre, Gallimard, 1964. Excerpt read by François Bon.

Danielle COLLOBERT – Redécouverte (France Culture, 1978)

Danielle COLLOBERT – Paysages d’une Bretagne intérieure (France Culture, 1989)

Un extrait de “Il donc”, de Danielle Collobert, lu par François Bon.

Un extrait de “Meurtre” de Danielle Collobert, lu par François Bon.

 

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Handwritings

 

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Interview with Nathanaël
translator of ‘Murder’
from HTMLGiant

 

Kit Schluter: To begin, what drew you to Danielle Collobert’s work? How did you discover it?

Nathanaël: I want to say that it was accidental, but I’m quite sure it wasn’t. Unless one understands friendship as accident. I entered, as did many, into Il donc, and Collobert’s Carnets, though with an eye turned away – perhaps out of a desire not to seek the life in the work, however much it is written there, and with such determinacy; the ‘twenty years of writing’ set against the impending suicide. Still, it is a hazard of hindsight to be able to set the life against the work, though this is so obviously a deformation of the reader, and so I resist as much as I can the tidy narrative of a life fallen from letters. The short answer to your first question is: Collobert’s language. But if the virtuosic remnants of Il donc are almost a perfect epitaph to the twenty years, I was much more viscerally and immediately impelled by Meurtre; I even borrowed an epigraph from this work into We Press Ourlseves Plainly much before the idea even of translating it had presented itself to me. Perhaps most immediately because of a shared concern, or conviction, that the distinction between murder and death is unconvincing and too readily upheld.

KS: What were the circumstances surrounding Danielle Collobert while she was composing Murder? Do you find that the book draws material or imagery from her experience?

N: My knowledge of Collobert’s biography is quite limited. Not unlike her parents and her aunt, who were all actively engaged in the Résistance during WWII, Collobert, a supporter of Algerian independence, was a member of the FLN (Algeria’s Front de libération national) at the time of Meurtre. She chose exile in Italy, where she completed work on the manuscript. It may be worth underscoring the importance of 1961, for the outcome of the war, which, in French contemporary society was never acknowledged under the name of anything other than the euphemistic “les évènements” (“the events” – to do otherwise would have been, not only to have acknowledged, if only semantically, Algeria’s nationhood, but the repressive force employed by France to resist – and as it happened, to defer – decolonization and independence). On October 17, 1961, a peaceful demonstration of many thousands of Algerians living in Paris, protesting the curfew imposed exclusively upon them, and the acts of police violence to which they were systematically subjected, was violently suppressed by Vichyist Maurice Papon’s police force, resulting in the arbitrary deportation of large numbers of Algerian demonstrators, and the summary execution of up to two hundred Algerians, many of whose bodies were pulled out of the Seine in the following days; several thousand Algerians were rounded up during the demonstration and distributed among prisons, the Palais des Sports and area hospitals. Several months later, on February 8th, 1962, what has come to be known as the Charonne Massacre took place at the eponymous Paris métro station; this demonstration, organized by the Left against the paramilitary OAS (the reactionary Organisation de l’armée secrète, which violently opposed Algerian independence), and often conflated in people’s memories (and in historical accounts) with the October massacre, resulted in the death of eight demonstrators at the Charonne métro station. It is not insignificant that French FLN supporter Jacques Panijel’s 1961 film, Octobre à Paris, which documents the moments before, during, and after the October demonstration, was censured by the French government and only shown for the first time in a French cinema in 2011 – half a century after it was made.

The photograph on the cover of Murder accounts, obliquely, and somewhat prochronistically, for these activities – it is a photograph of a bombed out building in Madrid, taken in 1937 by Robert Capa, during the Spanish Civil War.

Meurtre is tempered by the residues of such histories; but the work’s strength is in its ability to evoke them without resorting to explicit accounts, or naming. The generalization of historical violence is embedded in the intimate accounts presented to the reader – seemingly placeless, nameless, they nonetheless achieve historical exactitude through relentless repetition – a reiterative (mass) murder (one is tempted to say: execution), which afflicts and incriminates the gutted bodies that move painstakingly through these densely succinct pages.

KS: The language of Murder‘s passages is slippery, but in a productive kind of way. Although Collobert’s later work seems almost entirely irreverent of traditional genres and forms, the language of this early work, written around the age of twenty, seems to skirt the boundaries between the short story and the prose poem. Nobody is named, no locations are specified, no motives for actions are explained. And yet these prose pieces seem to function toward the development of short narratives that retain these traditional tools of the “short story,” however non-traditionally they might be getting used.

How would you address the issue of genre in this book? What are we dealing with here? Do you sense any influences informing the form of the pieces in Murder, or does this seem to be a mode of writing that Collobert can call entirely her own?

N: I would resist attempting to attribute a generic definition to Meurtre; I would not seek to inscribe it in a lineage, either. Which is not a rejection of eventual antecedents – often Collobert’s work is read against Beckett, for example. But a habitual reliance on lineage as a way of reading seems limiting to me, and a decidedly academic concern. Before even beginning to attempt to make this kind of attribution, one would need to recognize the distances the text has had to travel between French and English, and then acknowledge the divergences between generic constructs in those two (much more than two) literary cultures (though there is increasing adherence to English language delineations in French, which is indicative, perhaps, of a desire for change, but more cynically, of the global influence of specifically American industry, since this direction is distrustful of the generic fluidity for which French literature of the twentieth century came to be known), and take some note of the development of those movements over time, because, like anywhere else, they are not static, whatever limits are imposed to prevent alterations from loosening them from their categori
cal holds. Which is to say that the bolstering of the boundaries governing generic territories, such as they are defended, is in large part contextual. I would argue that it is no less accurate to categorise Meurtre as prose than it is to categorise Il donc as poetry; Meurtre has a strong poetics, as is Il donc continuing to grapple with the sentence. But one might suggest just as convincingly that all of her work has something of the film script (her language is at times much more succinct than passages in some of Antonioni’s film scripts, for example, which read like prose). I might offer these lines of Derrida’s as more eloquent provocation: “ ‘What / is…?’ laments the disappearance of the poem – / another catastrophe. By announcing that which is /just as it is, a question salutes the birth of prose.” (Tr. Peggy Kamuf)

KS: Collobert, in the final passage of the book, defines the book’s namesake, murder, as follows: “One does not die alone, one is killed, by routine, by impossibility, following their inspiration. If all this time, I have spoken of murder, sometimes half camouflaged, it’s because of that, that way of killing” (96). This, for me, is provocative and explosive language. And, I should say, that goes for the whole book: this isn’t a neutral work, but one that digs in its heels and takes a firm political stance. What political urges do you find central to Murder?

N: You have identified what is for me perhaps the most powerful passage from the work (these are the same lines I borrowed into the afore-mentioned epigraph). Out of this passage, I would signal the unlikely conjunction of routine and inspiration. There is here the suggestion of the sublimation of emotion into bureaucratisation. “That way of killing” is not distinct from the way of language, from a poetics or an aesthetic impulse; ‘inspiration’ is the incipit of murder – the very breath of it. This admission walls the text off from anything resembling hope. And yet it is also anything but nihilistic. It is snared by its own realisations – with emphasis on the real.

KS: It seems [to me] that [Collobert] is arguing that to embrace life one must embrace mortality; that to embrace mortality one must embrace the absolute solitude of living; that to embrace this solitude one must confront the fear of what she calls “losing oneself,” even if that lostness be irremediable.

However, something about her understanding of the relationship of life and death reminds me of Rilke’s concept of Das Große, or “The Big Thing,” which he develops in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: the inexpressible fear of the death that is, to paraphrase, growing within us from our birth as a ripening fruit. And yet, there is perhaps a crucial difference between Collobert’s “getting lost” and Rilke’s “The Big Thing”. While Rilke’s term figures death as an existential inevitability of life, Collobert’s term is more politicized and argues that our deaths are imposed on us by social forces over which we have no control. Rilke’s death grows from within and thus one must die alone, while Collobert’s is imposed and thus one is forced in death into the company of an enemy. That is the sort of solitude she is discussing—the solitude we are forced to find when in company we cannot allow ourselves to tolerate, company that is expressly against the freedom of our wills.

N: Your question seems to be calling up an irrevocable rift in the apprehension of death; some would argue that the boundary lies at Auschwitz, others, that it is endemic to modernity. Certainly, Benjamin writes of the loss of an important function of the house once people cease to die within their own walls; Rilke distinguished between ‘serial’ and ‘proper’ death; in the same Notebooks you quote from, he writes: “Now there are 559 beds to die in. Like a factory [fabrikmässig] of course. With production so enormous, each individual death is not made very carefully; but that isn’t important. It’s the quantity that counts.” I am quoting Rilke as quoted by Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz, in which he writes: “In Auschwitz, people did not die; rather, corpses were produced.” (tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen) In my own stubborn misremembrance, Vladimir Jankélévitch writes (my translation), “Death died in the death camps”. (His actual claim is that forgiveness [le pardon] died in the death camps). The mortality Collobert is grappling with in her work is post-mortal, I would say, in that it is stripped of its ontology, and offered to cold scrutiny (the so-called empiric scalpel); whatever intimations exist in Rilke, and may be fastened to an understanding of modernity, Collobert’s language comes after WWII. It is imprinted by it. But the political dimension of this morbid actuality is not, I would argue, unilateral: the enemy is also oneself. The figures moving through Meurtre are murdered and murderers, they are both executioner and victim; the force driving them to deaths sustained or committed is never made explicit or specific; one might go so far as to say that the vital impulse of this work is stifled by the permanent recognition that one stands ever before a firing squad (a perhaps more temporally torqued version of the vital corpse is Ortega y Gasset’s man who enters into battle with a wound in his temple). I am not convinced however that Collobert’s ‘we’ ever designates a collectivity; there is no indication of a shared plight of solitude; when she writes ‘we’, the we is inhuman in that the individual elements that comprise it have no individuation, they are hulls of selves, like the scraped crab on the beach; they have abandoned themselves to a cadaveric assembly line cum funeral procession.

KS: One of the distinctive traits of Collobert’s work is her play with the grammatical gender of French. There’s a nice story, told by Jean-Pierre Faye, in the foreword to first volume of her Oeuvres (P.O.L.), in which he, upon receiving a copy of Collobert’s Dire, begins editing the text by circling inconsistencies in the narrator’s gender. In one sentence the narrator is referred to with male adjectives; in the next, female; in some, the narrator is referred to with both, by turns male and female. It is only after reading further in the text that he realizes that, in fact, this is a very deliberate part of Collobert’s language, perhaps its singularizing trait. Do you see Collobert as part of a larger tradition of Francophone writers experimenting with gender in their texts? What distinguishes her play from the others’?

N: One might see continuities between Collobert’s refusal to settle on a single gender – a way, perhaps, within the confines nonetheless of French grammar, to unsettle the ‘I’, pluralize and fragment it, and resist the facile habit in the reader to conflate the narrative ‘self’ with that of the writer – and Nathalie Sarraute’s neutral ‘il’. Collobert’s ‘il’ becomes depersonalized (it), while the intent of Sarraute’s ‘il’ (he) is to generalize away from gender specificity, and away from the French grammatical intention which determines that ‘il’ stands in for (erases) ‘elle’ (even when bias indicates otherwise). In an interview with Simone Benmussa, in which Benmussa asks Sarraute to qualify her thinking about ‘le neutre’, Sarraute replies: “For me, the neuter [le neutre] is the human being. There is a word for that in Russian, it’s tcheloviek and in German Der Mensch, the human being, male or female, regardless of age, regardless of sex. In French ‘être humain’ is ridiculous. In fact, in Elle est là, I say: ‘It’s a human being, it’s ridiculous but it must be said.’” Sarraute is adamant her concern is not androgeneity, nor, do I think it is a concern of Collobert’s. Away from the syntactical injunctions of Romance languages – for monolinguistic English speakers, for example – it is nea
rly impossible to appreciate the grammatical dictatorship under which one lives in such linguistic regimes (Sarraute’s further discussion of Russian indicates the impossibility of avoiding gender altogether in language; and as Benmussa points out, Der Mensch too is gendered masculine). To misapprehend the specific violence done to the mind, and by extension, to thought, under such a regime is to misapprehend much of what has taken place in French thought over the course of the twentieth century, whether Sarraute’s neutre, Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style, Glissant’s Antillanité, Derrida’s Monolinguisme or Jeanne Hyvrard’s Pensée corps, to name but these. To return for a moment to the brief passage quoted from Sarraute, it is utterly telling that these problems become most evident in translation; it is through recourse to other languages (Russian was Sarraute’s first language) that she is able to articulate her concern. A grammar wishes itself to be hermetic; but is rendered porous (or revealed to be thus) precisely through the work of translation.

KS: In your own text, “(Self-)translation: an expropriation of intimacies,” you write, “Syntactically speaking, the sex of the sentence is not (necessarily) transferrable. A body thus destabilised loses sight of its referent when transversing into another language. English’s pronominal preoccupation, for example, singles out the subject’s gender as part of speech, which in French, again for example, is severally located in the sentence. Where one benefits from the ambiguity the other falls into normality. To dislocate gender’s stranglehold in French, one must strive for discord, grammatical disagreement in the place of English’s mis-fitted neutering.”

Did you find these grammatical differences between French and English coming into play in your translation work on Murder? Did you have to bend the rules or experiment with English grammar to make it speak the sense of Collobert’s prose?

N: In translating the Collobert, I resisted such acrobatics, which I tend to resort to far more sparingly in the translations of other authors’ works than I do of my own. To try to reproduce the movement between genders in Collobert’s text would have been to falsify it in English (largely in light of the fact that they are marked adjectivally with the first person pronoun as referent). Because the larger questions of the work remain otherwise transmittable. This may appear as something of a conservative decision, but to have done otherwise would have been to have submitted Meurtre to contortions it itself doesn’t resort to; it would also have been to treat English grammar as though it were interchangeable with French grammatical concerns. It is also worth underscoring the degree to which this tendency is much more prevalent in Collobert’s later works. If I may speak for a moment of Je Nathanaël, a work I published in both French and English versions, the very impetus of the French work, which was to hermaphrodise French (an impossible project, and one which necessitated enormous constraint, such as limiting myself to invariable adjectives, the imperative and the second person singular in the present tense), all but disappears in English in which gender is differently marked – and often suffers from (and is at times priviledged by) being unmarked (the so-called neutral). Rather than try to force the English into a discourse and grammar that weren’t its own, I allowed the text to become something else – at the risk of introducing a possibly (false) universalising strain in the work. In the case of a work like Collobert’s Il donc, Norma Cole’s decision to translate “il” as “it” is a perfect rejoinder to Collobert’s French impersonal pronoun. In Meurtre, there is only one instance in which, mid-passage, I let the sea’s pronoun slide from the more habitual “it” in English, to “she” as it becomes increasingly anthropomorphized in the text.

KS: Françoise Morvan, in her introduction to Oeuvres I (P.O.L.), speaks of a community of French poets who have, since Collobert’s passing, kept her memory alive: François Bon, Jean Daive, Ludovic Janvier, Bernard Pingaud, Jacques Roubaud, Claude Royet-Journoud, Alain Veinstein. Now, Collobert passed away in 1978, and it wasn’t until twenty-six year later, in 2004, that the first edition of her complete works was published in French. In this light, it seems that though her memory has not been dead, it has existed more in the underground. How do you understand Collobert’s influence, in France and abroad? Are there any key figures who have especially helped to keep this influence alive?

N: I’m not in a good position to answer this question, though I am suspicious of the homogeneity of the list of writers such as it is presented. Norma Cole, for example, might have been included among the keepers of Collobert’s memory – her translations have been tremendously influential on poetics and textualities specific to the United States, much as Paul Celan’s have been – producing departures from their initial languages, and localised styles. Collobert’s work was very marginal when she was alive; though Meurtre was originally published by Gallimard with the support of Raymond Queneau, after having been first rejected by Éditions de Minuit, her subsequent works did not meet with such favour; and in fact, Survie was first published in Italian translation before it was published in French. This is indicative of nothing, except that the vagaries a work can be subjected to are legion. One need only sample other near buried works that have met with subsequent irrefutability (Kafka, Benjamin, Robert Walser, etc.)

KS: It seems though that now this work is getting attention from the younger generation of French writers. For example, I first found out about Collobert from two young poets, who live in Marseille and run a wonderful journal of poetry, politics, and aesthetics, La Vie manifeste. One of these poets has actually dedicated much of her personal studies to Collobert’s work, recently writing both her undergraduate and masters theses on her works.

Given this sort of attention from certain contemporary poets and publishers, do you sense that Collobert’s work is experiencing an increase in readership or influence? If so, what about her work do you see as keeping her a vital figure for poets at work today? What alternatives does her work offer that can’t already be found in someone else’s poems? What can we learn from her that we can’t find elsewhere?

N: I would hope that Collobert’s reach would exceed that of so-called poetries, and circulate unencumbered through and outside of prescribed genres (even those which wish themselves to be encompassing – even these end up inventing asphyxiating constraints). I do think, however, that the demands of the text are not consistent with the consumptive speeds our worlds are submitted to today. This may account for some of the time it has taken for Collobert’s work to reach this far. It is quiet, and committed to a degree of precision that language seems nearly incapable of at this time of bulimic production. It may not even be useful to resort to comparatives in search of its specificity. Because this is something it claims without invention; and in my reading it is in time, in the time of (her) writing, and all that it has subsumed into it.

 

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Book

Danielle Collobert Murder
Litmus Press

‘A haunting and dense text that occupies a liminal space between short story and prose poem, Collobert’s first novel, originally published in 1964, is presented here in a stunning and precise translation by Nathanaël. Though the scenes created by Collobert are seemingly placeless, the characters nameless, the action mundane and without motive, the legacy of World War II and the reality of the Algerian War loom heavily over her prose. In one section, the narrator stalks her doppelganger, an old Holocaust survivor. Elsewhere, the reader is witness to a murder of crabs, men petrified by quarry dust, and a woman who compulsively carves her name into walls with her fingernails. Through her depictions of habitual and indifferent violence, Collobert has crafted a uniquely political work, writing towards the end of the book, “One does not die alone, one is killed, by routine, by impossibility, following their inspiration. If all this time, I have spoken of murder, sometimes half camouflaged, it’s because of that, that way of killing.” While Collobert may baffle or frustrate those who expect a traditional novel, any reader interested in experimental fiction and poetry will find this a challenging but captivating text.’ — Publishers Weekly

 

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Excerpt

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** seb 🦠, Hi. Yeah, sorry, not sorry, haha. What started this? There used to be this active website about my work, and the guy who ran it polled the people who looked at the site about they would most want me to do, and one of the choices was a blog, and that won, so I just decided I’d try, even though I had no interest in doing that, and I guess I liked doing it ‘cos it’s still barreling along twenty years or so later. Strange. I don’t know how, but I just feel like being able to regurgitate random facts about ciliates would come in handy. I still have a handful of smoking friends, but they keep quitting. Weirdly, I don’t have one vaping friend that I can think of. You’re good at baseball? Another handy talent. Well, not if you lived over here, but … How about if I make a miraculous seeming catch of that batted godspeed and give it to some angelic little kid watching from the stands? Or hurl it back at you, your choice. ** Misanthrope, I still smoke Camel Lights, yes. I did love the Wides, but when I got over here where they don’t have them and started smoking normal lights, they seemed too intense. You made my mouth water. Your cake did, I mean. So, well, technically you did because you wrote the description, I guess. Living over here, I miss shitty chain restaurants. They used to have Pizza Huts here where you could sit inside and eat, but now it’s just take away PH. Ha, there actually was a crabs outbreak at Pitzer when I was there, but I was spared. ** T. J., Hey! Are you back? We should galette soon if you are. ** Mark, High, discoloured fingered five. The current Black Flag is just Ginn and a bunch of newbies, right? 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I’m not surprised about the large LGBTQ aspect of the coaster enthusiasts only because most of my friends who share my coaster love are LGBTQ. I hope your sense of emergency was indeed misplaced. High hope. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yep. I think I would happily be a billionaire because I really wouldn’t change anything about my life or living situation other than probably traveling more, and I could fund my and all of my friends’ and even exciting strangers’ art projects, and, yeah, I don’t worry about being corrupted at all. I’m really not a materialist type at all, and that’s not because I can’t afford things. Luxury isn’t interesting. It would be cool to just be able to decide, ‘I want to go stay at some extremely expensive hotel for a few days’ though. When I sent to pick up our buche from this ultra-fancy hotel the other day, I did think how nice it would be to sleep in some suite there and have room service and stuff for a night or two. Anyway, blah blah … Love, if you’re listening, I can responsibly handle being a billionaire, I promise. And so can Dominik, I can vouch. Ha ha, cheese plate indeed! Love adapting SCAB into a groundbreaking video game, G. ** Darby 🫁🚬, In Frankreich ist es heute Morgen nur mäßig kalt, aber nächste Woche sollen es jeden Morgen minus zwei Grad sein. Having a penis is just whatever. It’s there, you deal with it, you know? Oh, damn, about your mom’s power there. So … will she let you? Do I need to contact this friend of mine who claims his brother is in the mafia to … persuade … her? It would take me many, many paragraphs to describe Antartica. It’s really like nothing else on earth. It’s also like nothing and beautiful at the same time. You don’t want to sleep with penguins. They shit and piss right where they’re standing, and they smell horrible, and you can smell them from practically a mile away. Oh, being in the bad psychedelic band was fun. I wish we’d stuck to it and gotten less bad. We only played two gigs, both disasters. I was the lead singer. That’s how bad we were, ha ha. I guess we were ostentatious stoners. Yeah, I guess so, relatively speaking. Later gator. ** Bill, Ah, great. His work is wonderful, especially the later, more recent works, I think, starting with ‘Rock Hudson’s …’. But even the earlier ones are cool. ‘When Evil Lurks’ is not a charismatic title, it’s true. I just watched a 4 1/2 hour documentary about the history of the FPS (first person shooter) video game which was nothing much as documentary but very interesting if one is drawn to the topic, as I am. ** Right. I guessing that most of you haven’t read the Danielle Collobert novel I’m spotlighting today because it’s bizarrely under-known, but it’s really something, and so is she, and do have a look today please. See you tomorrow.