Category: Uncategorized (Page 207 of 1070)

Philippe Cote lived and worked in Paris. He made over 20 Super 8 films beginning in 1998 which were screened in festivals and film series in France and other countries. He curated experimental films programs and was on the selection commitee of the Festival International des Cinemas Differents et Experimentaux in Paris. He was a member of the film cooperative L’Etna, an artisanal and member-run film development laboratory founded in 1997 in Paris

A filmmaker with a sensitive and radical vision, his earlier works focused on the themes of the body, matter, light and color with techniques that range from cameraless filmmaking to painting on celluloid. After 2005, he moved towards a poetic and contemplative approach to documentaries and travel films.

For Philippe Cote, cinema revealed itself as a space of self-invention and of the other one, plastic exploration of the limits of subjectivity and an attempt to establish links. In a desire to take a permanent risk, his work wove and transformed from one film to another, seeking what occurs in the gaze’s movement, constantly transformed by the prints. — Violeta Salvatierra

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Philippe Cote | Cinéaste
Philippe Cote @ Facebook
Philippe Cote @ Dérives autour du cinéma
Philippe Cope @ l’Etna
Philippe Cote @ Collectif Jeune Cinéma
Carte blanche à Philippe Cote : Cinéma visionnaire, cinéma poétique

 

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Notes on a film in the making (2008)
by Philippe Cote

I look at my images, in search of an experience, a story, a feeling… perhaps a sketch of a future film.

The shadows

An alley filmed at night, a line of light is reflected on the ground and exposes a certain part of the image. A young woman enters it, with a hesitant gait. Throughout the journey, it reveals itself and escapes our gaze, passes into the light or disappears into the dark.

Other shots of narrow streets framed by houses, buildings… vanishing lines where ghostly silhouettes are born and vanish, of an elsewhere that is not in the present of the filming.

Certain motifs return… a residence, an entrance, a small balcony. Through these identical returns, a curious reversal takes place where these images seem to challenge us, to look at us from a place, from a time that escapes us. In the dark, in the distance, a screen of light, in which spectra with ill-defined contours are inscribed before dissolving. On the front, in the shade, we guess a presence… texture of a mirror reflection, which we revisit later in these passing shadows which are reflected on the water, an upward movement begins the crossing of the mirror and reveals the surrounding landscape: a river, banks, a city.

Lighting plans

A street vendor, people surround his stall cluttered with heterogeneous objects. There is a clock. Onlookers wander around, without a precise trajectory, leaving and entering the field. The merchant grabs a pair of sunglasses, puts them on. Finally, he spits violently on the ground.

A boy repairs a bicycle.

In the background, behind him, appear children, teenagers, out of school, who gradually invade the space occupied by the young man… duration redefines a new division in the image, displaces its meaning. This foliation inside the image is found in this shot where a religious painting appears on a wall and next to it the unfolding of a street, a place of passage.

The edges

A coffee counter, two people installed on the left edge of the frame… for the rest, our gaze stumbles on the back wall… these people discuss passionately with one or more people who have remained outside the frame.

A boat, three young men leaning on their elbows, we can’t make out their faces… there, they are inscribed on the right edge of the frame, looking in the same direction, taking photos, towards places that remain secret to us.

A market, tools, objects placed on the ground. Filmed from above, on one side, we can see half of the saleswoman’s face, on the other the hand and arm of a buyer… in the center the place of the transaction, immutable, disturbed for a moment by a person who crouches… the shot ends abruptly with the end of the reel.

Presence of the off-screen, duration, strangeness of the composition there, transport of the center of gravity towards the edges, open up new adventures of the gaze.

Your loneliness

Self-portrait of the filmmaker.

Lying down, the camera frames her body leaving an empty space at her side. The speed of recording imparts a jerky movement to his breathing, comparable to shortness of breath. He gets up abruptly to sit on the edge of the bed before disappearing into the white of the overexposure of the end of the reel.

The inside

Inside a bedroom, a small open skylight in one of the walls of the room lets us guess something else, differently, in the form of the blue of the sky, the white of the buildings. Then, in an upward movement, our gaze slowly advances towards this opening, a desirous attempt to abolish the distance that separates us from this elsewhere.

A window is open, a person enters the frame, leans over, then closes it… at the end, only a thin thread of light remains.

The trace

The detail of a wall: a white square with a tortuous surface, then another square, in black and white and in color, cracked, indented… posters, announcing a religious festival, partially block the surface.

A wall overlooks a street. We distinguish a fresco: a Christ on the cross and the name of the street Castelar. It receives the projected shadows of passers-by, surrounding houses… the shadows move with the sun.

A degraded wall and an opaque window.
Screen surface that supports shadows, pages open to the world traversed by the traces of time, limits dotted with various openings like so many calls to future promises.

Epilogue

This Sunday, at a fair, I acquired an old batch of super 8 films, on one of the boxes was written Andalusia.

 

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14 of Philippe Cote’s 28 films

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Émergences (1999-2004)
‘Resulting from performance projections of films painted directly on film. The film literally confronts pure abstraction and the unrolling of the film loaded with materials.’ — Philippe Cote

 

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Ether (2003)
‘Liquefied images are transformed into substances of volatile light. The eye has no hold on shapes with an unstable contour. By successive generations, these gradually rush into different states of color until they become incarnated in the completion of an image.’ — Collectif Jeune Cinema

 

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L’en dedans / les ombres (2005)
‘Crossing of the frame and passage inside.
The image is transformed, reconstructed and revealed by concrete and unstable movements, elementary forms, lines of force, points of light and deep blacks.
The film oscillates between constituents of the image (grain, line …) and its representation, revealing underground and forgotten figures.’ — Derives

 

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L’ange du monde (2006)
‘The angle of the world allows us to see the real as an outer and inner presence at the same time, an opaque otherness, yet capable of becoming an intimate space. These incommensurable lengths and distances of an interior that opens up: The mysterious movement of the clouds, the cadence of the waves against the light, or the silent slippage of a barely identifiable human silhouette, everything seems transfigured, derealized and reinvented by light in a poetic world that evokes the paintings of Turner or Friedrich, the writings of Poe or Baudelaire.’ — Violeta Salvatierra

 

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Des nuages aux fêlures de la terre (2007)
Du noir et blanc, puis une teinte entre couleur et noir et blanc
Vert bronze
Du grain de la gravure de la photo c’est fixe puis on sait qu’on regarde du cinéma
Le temps de l’invention de l’image photographique nous est à nouveau présent nous revient en mémoire
Ether toujours
Géométrie de la terre et géométrie du nuage le sens des nuages
Ça donne envie de lire des pages sur les nuages on en a écrit tant de toutes sortes littérature art plastique philosophie science cinéma et d’autres
Tous les domaines de la rêverie et de la réflexion humaine ont été innervés par ces vagues voluptueuses
Tous ont été surfaces reflétantes miroitantes
Le cinéma seul montre ces voyages ces défilements
Le bleu soudain et l’étoile à la lucarne
Géométrie des formes lignes rayures triangles rectangles noirs blancs
Monts noirs monts blancs en miroir reflets du ciel
Puissance du gris nuances des commencements
Cîmes
Regards tendus corps de la lumière silhouettes furtives
Effacements successifs
On peut ouvrir grand les paupières
Si l’on veut.
— Catherine Bareau

 

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Va regarde (2008)
‘… I go to Thailand and then to northern Laos (Luang Prabang then normally further north), surely then to Cambodia. At the origin of this departure, it is an aspiration in a renewal of my cinema, in the search for new lights, new spaces, new relationships … I initiated it with my film L ‘ ANGLE OF THE WORLD turned on the islands dear to Jean Epstein, others will follow … Let’s say to a cinema closer to the poetic documentary: to be there and to look, to inscribe the duration, not to try to force the things that present themselves. I am dreaming of the images of Peter Hutton (Images of Asian Music and André Sauvage (iconoclastic documentary filmmaker, who knew how to film these countries with love and humanity in the 1930s). Touching this point of contact between a personal reality (let us say of the order of the intimate) and this otherness present in front of oneself Space of the others) …’ — Philippe Cote, May 2006

 

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Va regarde 2 (2009)
At the origin of these departures,
There is aspiration in a renewal
Of my cinema, in the search for new lights,
New spaces, new relationships …
Towards a cinema closer to the poetic documentary:
Be there and watch, record the duration, not
Seek to force the things that present themselves …
— Philippe Cote, May 2006

 

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19, Espíritu Santo (Andalucía) (2010)
‘Originally, there were the words you wrote to me to initiate the images to make, far away, alone, over there in Seville and Andalusia. Then, after a silent first montage …: “I wanted (this is the first time that it happens to me in front of one of your films) to hear voices. In spite of myself I thought of a sonorous montage, made of long silent beaches alternating with a few moments of voice, words, and perhaps a little sound, rustling. It seemed to me that this way of sounding the film gives a presence (presences) whose function would be mainly to invite to listen to the images. It would also give more alterity to the object … ” The film then found its definitive form, an intimate and shared essay between your voice, choices of poems read, listening, and my images.’ — Philippe Cote

 

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Orissa (2010)
‘The story of an encounter…’

 

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Le Voyage Indien (Partie 1 & 2) (2011)
‘The film unfolds in parallel the images of two travels to India and Nepal, following one itinirary and two crossings. 8mm images, shot by an annonymous traveler at the beginning of the seventies and that I discovered at a flea market, punctuate my own Super8 images that I shot at the occasion of recent stays in 2008 and 2011. Some post production ambiant sound, recorded on site during the shoot, have sometimes been added on top of the orginal footages. Others remain silent. The film exposes instants revealed by a gaze caught in a geography dreamed by the author. Not a travel journal.. but travel as the desire for a poetry of sound and image.’ — Philippe Cote

 

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Images de l’eau (2012)
‘This film describes different forms and manifestations of water. The experience of the filmmaker’s body immersed in water, sunken into the liquid element, represents the main theme of this poetic essay on the imagination of this element.’ — CJC

 

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Jardin d’été (2012)
‘A moment spent in a garden. Bursts of light, flowers tremble, life passes.’ — Philippe Cote

 

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Le Chemin des glaces (2013)
‘By feet, by boat, by train, this film, shot in super 8mm, leads us from the old New York to the snowed and iced lands, farther in the North, through a white progression.’ — CJC

 

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Timanfaya (2015)
‘Lanzarote, a volcanic island in the Canaries was shaped in the 18th century by a series of eruptions. It preserves its memory through semi-desert mineral landscapes.

‘In 2015, I traveled this territory in search of cataclysm. In this devastated landscape, traces of a return to life were emerging.’ — Philippe Cote

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Well, on the bright side, they have a lovely place to come visit you? Sorry, I’m an eternal optimist. Yes, true about headphones and the personal experience. I think maybe I really like that too. No, love didn’t help me out yesterday, but I forgot we had a big zoom meeting at dinnertime, so it wasn’t his fault. Maybe tonight. That song is about strawberries? But, honestly, I’ve only heard the song once, as impossible as that seems, ha ha. Love making one of the people in charge of our film turn into a decent human being, which is unfortunately a task so impossible that I fear even love can’t handle it, G. ** tomk, Hi! First, huge congrats on the Big Other prize nomination! So heartening! Fingers very, very crossed about the job prospects. Very nice that you have that trip in the offing if nothing else. Let me know when ‘Hiktum’ has its release date. Fantastic! I can’t wait for you to see the film. Zac and I are so excited about it. Love, me. ** David Ehrenstein, Agree, agree, and thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. ** Cody Goodnight, I’m … let’s say good. It’s a really treat-like novel. I, of course, agree with you about ‘Daughters of Darkness’ to the T. The Anne Francis/mannequins episode is one that has stayed forever in my memory. ‘Fallen Angels’ is my favourite WKW film. I hope you like it. I would say you had a pretty rich day, man, especially compared to mine which was just film editing from top to bottom. Happiest today! ** Dee Kilroy, Hi there, Dee! Fascinating research you’re doing there, needless to say. I totally get you about the script writing. The lure and nag. I’m looking forward to starting a new one when the film is locked in. I only wrote one script for a graphic novel, and the challenges were super interesting. Not totally unlike film writing, but the total freedom at other, illustrative end was quite inspiring. Thanks! ** Misanthrope, I’m glad you do. I like how superhero movies make time semi-fly by on flights, but otherwise not much. I am curious to see that new Spiderman animation thing. Diligence is always a great approach. Just so long as it doesn’t get infected by procrastination. ** alex, Hey, alex! I’m good, just editing editing almost non-stop, but hugely enjoying it. Oh, right, those fires in Canada. Strange how when you’re physically far away from something like that you forget about it as soon as the news media loses interest. I can juggle multiple projects, or at least two at a time, but one of them is always using up about 90% of the oxygen. And the others need to be different enough to be places to escape. I’m doing the blog while consumed with the film work for instance, although I must say putting together the blog posts is much harder right now. I haven’t read Sarah’s ‘The Child’, no. I don’t think I ever know about it. Huh, I’ll investigate when time arrives. Lovely to talk with you. ** _Black_Acrylic, It’s a goodie. I really think you’d like it. ** john christopher, Bowles’s prose is pretty delicious. Joy Williams wrote about her? Wow. I gotta try to find that. I had to google search quorn, so, no, I haven’t tried it. I wonder if you can buy it over here. Probably. I’m way, way behind on movies right now because I literally have no non-film editing time, but that’ll ease up. I watched a bunch of Philippe Cote’s films while making this post, and I really liked them. ‘O Fantasia’s’ great, yeah. I don’t know who the other lad is. I wonder if anyone knows? Take care. ** Jim Pedersen, Hi, Jim! Oh, how interesting about the grandmother. Has anything been written about her? How are you? Amazing, I hope. ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff. I have read some of her short stories. They’re terrific. I haven’t read her play, no. Cool about Song Cave. I’m ready anytime. Oh, yes, Saturday is good. What time works? Same as last time? ** Brian O’Connell, Howdy, Brian. I find it hard to believe those submersible people are still alive, yeah. Horrifying. That sounds like pretty much nothing but bright side from here too. You have to justify using the funds? I mean, it sounds pretty justifiable? But I’m not a school official by any means. I liked the opening section of ‘Annette’, and I love it once the puppet became the centerpiece. I was less into the middle, relationship centric section. But I understand that Carax was kind of forced to emphasise that by Netflix. But, yeah, it was a very audacious film, and that’s good enough for me. Enjoy those films. I’ll be watching a film assemble, which should be pretty good too. ** Okay. Today the blog concentrates on the late French filmmaker Philippe Cote who made very beautiful, very personal short films mostly using Super8. I think you might find them dreamy if you give them a look, but who knows. See you tomorrow.

 

‘The shock of discovering that a blazingly original writer has antecedents: the shock of turning from Shakespeare to Marlowe, from Tom Wolfe to Céline. In the zoo of last century’s literature, Muriel Spark has to be classed as one of the Great Cats, a slinking killer, cold and carnivorous, a wise fear in her gait. She was weird in ways her contemporaries only pretended to be; I got the sense that she was genuinely weird, floating almost alone in a sea of feigned weirdness, and also genuinely afraid of existence, in a time when her rivals were only just taking correspondence courses in canned Existentialism. Her concision and style, her grasp of the comedic principle that the characters can’t know they’re funny, and her religious contempt for characters that ended up seeming more compassionate than the cheaper, more earthbound compassion — all this establishes her claim to uniqueness, despite the century of British comic tradition at her back.

‘So it was strange to open Jane Bowles’s only novel, Two Serious Ladies, and find the Spark atmosphere hanging there in 1943, more than a decade before Spark began publishing her fiction. Something bizarre and monastic and sexual lurks beneath the unassuming narration. Dread, too, but an amused one. A wry dread, which blooms at the fringes of human activity.

‘No less than musicians, authors have particular sounds, and often these sounds are less a product of their creative effort than of their inculcating milieu. Dostoevsky didn’t invent the way drunken Russians speak; neither Dickens didn’t invent the way pompous lawyers speak; and Charles Portis blowhards are available to speak to you on diverse matters at every rest stop of our republic. What milieu could have produced the sound of both Spark and Jane Bowles? Both had complex links to both Judaism and homosexuality — could that be the recipe?

‘I suspect no. Their books instead concern this subject matter: a woman branching off from regular society, powered by a kind of Ahab madness; or maybe the better image is of a Brothers Grimm child lost in the woods. In The Driver’s Seat, our heroine takes the eros-thanatos link to unprecedented lengths on her unnerving Eurotrip; in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the crème de la crème curdles into a one-woman fascist movement.

‘In Two Serious Ladies, we have two parallel narratives, one of motion and the other of stasis. Mrs. Copperfield and her husband travel to sunny Panama, where the bright colors and sassy sex workers unlock her Anglo heart; what the pendulous fruit of Key West did for the frosty insurance executive Wallace Stevens, the street shouts and impoverished splendor of Central America do for Mrs. Copperfield: they fire her imagination. She’s a napper woken by the crawling sunshine.

‘Meanwhile, stateside, Christina Goering encounters the tubby and childlike Arnold, his more charismatic father, and ends up living with both plus her friend Miss Gamelon, in a house on an island, accessible only by ferry. Why? For no reason, and for every reason. In both narratives, the women form connections and then feel subject to the opposite impulse, to dissolve these connections, to get away, to go live in a strange hotel. Both women enact a fantasy, imbued with large and private significance, of going out to a bar, alone, and meeting new, mysterious people, not exactly for sex (neither of these Serious Ladies seems particularly horny in the physical sense) but in pursuit of some species of emotional commerce, spiritual currents.

‘One of the toughest tasks for a critic is to convey the experience of actually reading a novel. Summarize the themes all you want; talk about the author’s life, but some kernel remains out of reach, and that kernel is the whole point; it’s why the readers keep coming back. After four hundred years, no one has quite managed to say just what the nightmare essence of Hamlet is, its weird rage about sex and cowardice. If anyone had explained that kernel, probably no one would read the play.

‘In Two Serious Ladies, events drift into the fantastic, while maintaining their own hidden logic. Glass perfume bottles get thrown with blood-drawing force; people leave home and move in together with total casualness, almost involuntarily, like sleepwalkers. The novel begins with a Spark feeling and ends up feeling like Luis Buñuel or David Lynch.

‘”[R]eality was often more frightening to her than her wildest dreams,” writes Bowles about Miss Gamelon. Fear, and the overcoming of fear, seem central to the author’s imagination here. Claire Messud writes in her introduction, “Bowles was famously indecisive, in part because she fretted that each decision, however small, might have lasting moral implications. She was also, in youth, extremely fearful, constrained by an impressive catalogue of anxieties and phobias. But she pushed hard against her nature.” Reading this, and the novel that followed, it was hard not to think about Valeria Ugazio, and her description of a “semantics of freedom,” in which life is divided between those who travel and assert themselves and gain independence and those who cling to a circumscribed home life, so cautious they seem cadaverous. Underneath the dream atmosphere of Two Serious Ladies, we can sense a soul wavering between fear and boldness, but unable to choose either. One character writes a letter stating, “I can only say that there is, in every man’s life, a strong urge to leave his life behind him for a while and seek a new one. If he is living near to the sea, a strong urge to take the next boat and sail away no matter how happy his home or how beloved his wife or mother.”

‘Two Serious Ladies is a rare vision. If I had adapt this story to another medium, I think I’d choose ballet; that would provide the requisite gesture (sometimes jerking, sometimes flowing), the dread, the sense of the primitive, the frail and the fierce combining together in a spectacle that’s nearly human.’ — Nicholas Vajifdar, Bookslut

 

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Gallery

early 1940s

1943

w/ Paul Bowles, Truman Capote, a.o., 1944

w/ Oliver Smith, Paul Bowles, 1947 (Irving Penn)

w/ Truman Capote, 1949

1951 (Carl Van Vechten)

w/ Tennessee Williams, Lilla Van Saher, early 1950s

w/ Leonore Gershwin, 1964

w/ Cherifa, late 1967

1970

Malaga, 2010

 

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Further

Jane Bowles Official
THE MADNESS OF QUEEN JANE
Les femmes borderline et désaxées de Jane Bowles
A brief survey of the short story part 17: Jane Bowles
“LOCKED IN EACH OTHER’S ARMS”: JANE BOWLES’S FICTION OF PSYCHIC DEPENDENCY
Jane Bowles’ ‘Two Serious Ladies’ Gone Wild
Nothing is Lost or Found: Desperately Seeking Paul and Jane Bowles
2 August (1947): Jane Bowles to Paul Bowles
American Dreams, 1943: ‘Two Serious Ladies’ by Jane Bowles
THE GATHERING SPIRIT OF JANE BOWLES
Two Serious Ladies confounds with sinister humor and dark delight
Jane Bowles: Inventory of Her Collection at the Harry Ransom Research Center
Un(der)known Writers: Jane Bowles
Lost & Found: Alice Elliott Dark on Jane Bowles
It’s Time to Start Taking Jane Bowles Seriously
Buy ‘Two Serious Ladies’

 

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Extras

Documentary – JANE & PAUL BOWLES (English/Spanish)

Paul Bowles y Jane Bowles, su mundo entre Tánger y Málaga

Visit to the tomb of Jane Bowles

Letter to Paul Bowles from Jane Bowles, 1948

Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane: “A Quarreling Pair”, based on the puppet play by Jane Bowles.

Jane Bowles, último equipaje

 

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Interview
with Bowles scholar Millicent Dillion

 

So let’s talk first about Jane’s life as a writer, because it was not easy. Jane published before Paul did, and it was his work with her on Two Serious Ladies that inspired him to try his hand at fiction. Yet she sank rather quickly into literary obscurity and put her energy into assuring Paul that she didn’t mind if he was the more successful or if people at her publisher [Knopf] pretended not to know whom she was. What do you think her real feelings were about being overshadowed in the world of literature by her (very talented) husband?

The relationship between Jane’s work and Paul’s work was as complex as the relationship between the two of them. In that relationship she looked to him for support (including economic support) as well as early on, as with Two Serious Ladies, with shaping the work in terms of form—so that he suggested taking out the third serious lady, and she readily agreed. In her early letters, when he does start publishing, stories at first, and then getting the novel contract, you can hear the anguish in her voice. She admits to jealousy and then tries to smooth it over, but it’s obviously there. In the same way she suffered from his relationship with [his long-term lover] Ahmed Yacoubi.

As for Paul, he continuously encouraged her to work, and even said once that he would not see her if she did not work. I would guess, though of course, it is only speculation, that it was not his publishing his own work that made her own work so hard for her, it was a whole host of problems that she had to deal with. The rivalry, the jealousy could have been overcome. But the forces within her that she was fighting were never appeased.

Incidentally, Jane’s play was produced several years after Paul had been publishing. He wrote the music for the play. She anguished over that play for years, tried one version, then the next, and could not ultimately make it cohere. There are wonderful things in it, but it too suffers from her anguish about her own decisions.

If Jane had been a man, do you think her fiction would be more widely-known today? Do you think she would have been classed with the more famous male experimental writers, whom she in many ways completely surpassed?

Jane, as you may know, has never been taken up by the feminists. In fact, I don’t think you can strictly speaking regard her as a feminist. If you remember, she thought in very conservative terms about marriage, her marriage to Paul. He was to provide for her, and she was to take care of the house, etcetera. She never seemed to have any objections to that. Here again I am speculating, but I don’t think feminist ideas as such play a large role in her work. She did not think in general terms, in any case.

You ask if a man who wrote as she did would be more famous? A man, of course, could not write as she did.

As for fame, Victoria, think of the many wonderful writers who have fallen into obscurity in this time of no-lasting impact.

How did she do it—how did Jane achieve such economy, insight, and sheer comedy, while simultaneously giving the impression she was an amateur simply playing around with words? Have you ever tried to imitate her work to see how it’s done?

Once Jane got into the writing of Two Serious Ladies, she never thought of herself as an amateur. In some strange way, she knew how good she was, compared herself favorably to Carson McCullers, for example. Yet even though she knew how good she was, the anguish was always there. I was not and am not into literary psychoanalysis, but she opens herself up in the work and in the letters so that you can see all these forces within her. And at the same time, her terrible anguish about any decision.

No, I have never tried to imitate Jane’s style. I am not into imitation. I’ve spent forty years trying to find my own style.

It seems to me the forces within her were based largely upon her relationship with her mother—with her role as Claire’s “million-dollar baby.” Jane’s work appears to be about exploring that relationship from myriad angles: from that of the daughter who retreats in submission and longing; the daughter who rebels and runs wild; the mother with an iron will; and the mother blind to her own extreme dependence. In much of her work these relationships appear as intimate relationships between peers—even sisters—yet the grappling with the power imbalance is always there.

Yes, it does seem clear that was a very powerful force for her in the way you describe it. Yet I also feel that the struggle in her, as in any human being, is more complex than any single issue. This is where literature begins to depart from psychoanalysis, which is after all a therapy intended to bring the patient into a greater adaptation to the world.

I cannot speak of this in very simple straightforward terms because of the complexity of human emotions. That is what I see so strongly in Jane. It is as though multiple forces assail her, and she is continuously buffeted by them from all sides. What makes her different from others, in a certain sense, is that she has no defense against the multiplicity. If she could have said, “My mother did this to me or that to me,” it would have been simpler for her. But instead, I suspect, she would think of herself as assailed one way and then by another.

Jane’s work is replete with insight into paradox. Whenever she finds a fundamental truth, she immediately progresses beyond it to its antithesis. I think the basis of this must have been in the overwhelming duality of her feelings about her mother—the pampering that gave Jane, ultimately, her faith in her abilities, along with the blatant use of Jane for Claire’s emotional well-being.

My immediate response, with respect to Claire, is to recall the strangeness of Claire taking Jane to Switzerland for treatment in the sanatorium [when 13-year-old Jane contracted tuberculosis of the knee shortly after her father died] and then going off and leaving her there while she went to Paris. In Paris, Claire was pursuing her own version of finding a new life, romantic and otherwise. I could bet she didn’t see anything wrong with this, though it is difficult for me to reconcile that choice with Claire’s constant expression of devotion for Jane. No doubt there was something in Claire that could deceive herself easily.

I do think about Jane that her relation to her family of women and its authoritarianism makes her a figure that is in some way incomprehensible to young women now. I remember giving a talk about the book to a group of women, many of whom were irate because she did not break away, they thought, from the constraints upon her, and, in fact, blamed her.

What did they think she was doing in Morocco in the 1940s, making excuses to Moroccan women [as she described in “Everything is Nice”] when they asked, “Why do you not sit in your mother’s house?” I remember Paul saying that they got married partly so Jane could travel, as she could not have traveled alone in that era. She went to enormous lengths to escape, to the extent that she eventually died of her extremist life in Tangier, suffering terrible pyschiatric handicaps due to that stroke and ensuing difficulties, many years before her time.

When I would talk to Paul about Jane in her later years when she was so ill, I would say, with a certain hubris, “But she was still Jane, wasn’t she?” Paul would deny it. Now, so many years later, after going through experiences with friends who suffered from conditions similar to Jane’s, if not exactly the same, and after being torn by grief, anger, etcetera, etcetera, I think I was both wrong and right.

I would like to think some more about Jane’s physical vulnerability, about her relationship to her own body, or at least try to speculate about it. Jane at times seemed almost oblivious to her body. When she called herself “Crippie Kike Dyke,” did she think it was funny? Or was she being more bitter than funny? Think about what it would be for a teenage girl to be in bed in traction for months upon months.

I think she was both fearless and very fearful at the same time, and this would result in her paying no attention to her body at times and at other times being obsessive about it, worrying about it and how it could be damaged.

Why was writing so terribly hard for her? She was pushed to do it and yet pushed not to do it. She is always, I think, subject to opposing forces and cannot choose what side she is on. Decisions of any kind are a torment to her. So in some way, I suspect, despite her anger at her mother, there also existed in her tenderness, if not love, rage, despair, maybe even sympathy.

I suppose what I’m saying is that the multiplicity is there for all of us, but she could not placate it, keep it quiet.

There is also this about Claire. She seems to have been of ordinary—even limited—sensibility, someone interested in clothes, propriety, middle-class values from her family, a family that she never escaped from, maybe never even knew the impulse to escape from them. One of the ways I see it is that Claire was not an equal antagonist, and as a result Jane had to build her up more and more in her mind to create a true antagonist. This she did with her imagination, and by so doing, was more of a prisoner of that imagined Claire than the real one. But how could Jane fight her own imagination? It is in this realm—the realm of her own imagination—that Jane had to fight out her most serious battles. And no one could help her with that.

And yet, despite all that was so dark in her life, it is important to turn again to her work. Reading it, one sees how remarkable and how innovative it is even after all this time, how funny and surprising it is and profound. Perhaps that’s the most surprising thing of all, how profound it is.

 

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Book

Jane Bowles Two Serious Ladies
Ecco

‘Two Serious Ladies is the only novel by avant-garde literary star and wife of legendary writer Paul Bowles—a modernist cult-classic, mysterious, profound, anarchic, and funny, that follows two upper-class women as they descend into debauchery—updated with an introduction by Claire Messud, bestselling author of The Emperor’s Children and The Woman Upstairs.

‘Two serious ladies who want to live outside of themselves, Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield embark on separate quests of salvation. Mrs. Copperfield visits Panama with her husband, where she finds solace among the women who live and work in its brothels. Miss Goering becomes involved with various men. At the end the two women meet again, each transformed by her experience.’ — Ecco

 

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Excerpt

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yeah, your family, of course. I’m either lucky or unlucky that I was never very close with my family. ‘Latte’ is a real stickler, but I think I’ve managed to dislodge it. So, thank your love. Generally I listen with headphones, but mostly because I don’t really have very good speakers. You? That would make for a very interesting challenge for the blowjob giver. Love convincing Zac to take a short lunch break during our editing today to eat at this great Mexican place near his house, pretty simple, G. ** Jack Skelley, Is that you? You look … so … different. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Thanks, and, yes, the Facebook comment threw me for a loop. A good loop, mind you. ** Darbz 🦒🍜, It feels painful. I think really short people are exciting. It makes me daydream about their lives. Being tall isn’t such a big deal, I don’t think? Obviously there are guys who would pay a lot of money to look like a 13 year old boy, but I know that doesn’t help. I think the power of your personality and impressive mind will easily transcend whatever height you wind up being. Depressive rants are no prob at all. I didn’t even think it was depressive. Whatever the book I recommended was, I hope you end up agreeing with me. That would be sync. Goodbye from inside the headache that my coffee seems to be giving me. xo. ** _Black_Acrylic, Oh, ‘The Other’. I remember really liking that movie a lot when it came out. Some friends of mine and I used to make this list of the best delivery of the phrase ‘Oh, my God!’ in movies, and the utterance of said phrase in ‘The Other’ was, I think, our number 1. I’m gonna rewatch it. ** Misanthrope, I don’t think I’m very into genre movies. Or genre novels that much either. Rigby’s right, but you’re also right that you shouldn’t rush it. What a dilemma. ** john christopher, Hi, john! I’m fine and somewhat dandy. Being a near lifelong vegetarian, that smell in your room its making me kind of nauseous even way over here. Thanks for listening to my Bookworm thing. And even more so for the kind words about ‘I Wished’. Chasing Bookworm’s Joy Williams interviews something I myself have done too, naturally. It’s been thundering a lot here lately. Thanks about the blog. I hope it’s a good Japanese take away. Commenting, saying hi, lurking … it’s all good around here. Although it is a special treat to actually get to talk. But no pressure. Take care, man. ** Cody Goodnight, Hi. I’m between goodish and good, you? Yes, RIP Teresa Taylor. I need to pull out some Butthole records too. Especially ‘Locust Abortion Technician’. Did your day pan out as planned or did it throw up some surprises. I hope it ruled. ** alex, Hi. Yeah, I still look at things like that. I think I did a spontaneous combustion post here, but I can’t remember. Funny smut story. Nice. Bit of an X-rated ‘Twilight Zone’ vibe going on. All great with you? ** A, Who, me? I mean thank you. Um, no, I don’t think my novels become alien to me afterwards. I guess I think of them as marking a time that has passed or something. For most of my writing life, I always was working on a new novel by the time a novel was published, so I was into that, and that definitely helped. I’ve been kind of a workaholic creative guy since I was a kid, so I think my friends have always known that about me, and our friendships shaped themselves accordingly. But I do think that’s why I was never very good at having a boyfriend. I’ve never fit in. I say enjoy the hell out of that. Cool, thanks for the link to those listings. I’ll try to investigate post-editing today. Buck up, buddy. ** Brian, Hi, Brian. That is really unnerving, isn’t it: the submarine situation. Definitely not how I hope to die. But I hope those people won’t. Although … Okay, yeah, that is confusing about the fellowship. But maybe there’s a bright side, I can if it’s meant to be just an interim project pre: actual project? Anyway, I hope you get clarity. ‘The Servant’ is wonderful, yeah. I know the name Kalil Haddad, or I think I do. Huh. I’ll investigate his work. Ozu: dreamy! Yes, the editing has pretty much devoured everything in my life right now. I saw Sparks live, and they were sublime. I’m going to make room to see the new Wes Anderson ASAP. They’re screening that last Godard short film that premiered at Cannes, and I’m dying to see that. But, yes, I’m pretty much all output and ultra-minimal input right now. Great to see you, pal. How was today? ** Okay. The blog spotlights Jane Bowles’s so wonderful cult classic novel ‘Two Serious Ladies’ today if you know it or don’t. See you tomorrow.