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The blog of author Dennis Cooper

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Spotlight on … François Augiéras The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1964)

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‘François Augiéras was born in Rochester, New York, where his father taught the piano at the Eastman School of Music. He moved to Dordogne in France with his mother after his father died while he was still a child. At the age of thirteen, at the public library, he discovered André Gide, Nietzsche and Arthur Rimbaud. Attracted to art, he left school at the age of thirteen years to take courses in drawing.

‘At the age of fourteen, he left home and started on a nomadic life. In 1941, he enrolled in a youth movement that proliferate under the Vichy regime , but in 1942 he breaks away to become an actor in a traveling theater. In 1944, he joined the French Navy.

‘Augiéras spent some time in a psychiatric asylum and in a monastery. He later moved to El Goléa, where his uncle lived. During his stay in the Sahara, Francois Augiéras was sexually abused by his uncle, discovering through this his own gay inclinations. His first novel, The Old Man and the Child, is loosely based on the avuncular rapport that ensued. The book drew the attention of André Gide, who a few months before his death, met the young writer after receiving two letters from the young man. Augiéras later imagined himself as the “last love” of the great writer.

‘Augiéras’ novels deal with incest, homosexuality, sadism and even bestiality. They also describe his trips to North Africa and Greece. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, perhaps his most famous novel, is his only work not based entirely on his autobiography.

‘In 1960, he married his cousin Viviane, but their relationship did not last. His lifetime of wandering, insecurity, and loneliness began to seriously affect his health. He began to spend lengthy times in hospitals and sanitariums. In the late 1960s, he lived in caves in the mountains of France hoping to be undetected and escape further life in hospices. Undermined by poverty and malnutrition and prematurely aged by his terrible living conditions, he moved into a nursing home in Ferns, France, and soon thereafter died in a public hospital in Dordogne in 1971.

‘Augieras is not a household name. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, arguably his masterpiece, is a gallant, almost magical book that is one of modern literature’s esoteric, underground texts. The novel is set in the Sarladais (the Dordogne region of France). An adolescent boy is sent to live with a 35-year-old priest, who becomes his teacher and spiritual mentor, and exerts a powerful control over the boy. He abuses him physically and sexually, but the boy willingly accepts his ‘punishment.’ The boy falls in love with a slightly younger, and very beautiful boy, meeting in secret and having sex.

‘This disturbing story is much more than a tale of a sexually violent predator. The adolescent himself experiences sexual activity with the other boy, but this relationship is one of genuine love and affection, rather than the coercive, harmful abuse he is subjected to by the priest. Augieras rivals Genet for the clarity of his writing, for the ordinariness of his understanding of human nature, for his acceptance and fearless confidence.’ — collaged

 

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Further

Association Littéraire François Augiéras
François Augiéras @ Pushkin Press
Bibliothèque Gay: Le Vieillard et l’Enfant, de François Augiéras
‘François Augiéras – peintre (1940-1949)’
‘La voix de François Augiéras’
‘François Augiéras, le dernier primitif de Serge Sanchez’
‘Lettre à François Augieras.’
‘François Augiéras, el artista que enterró su obra magna en el desierto’
Buy ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’

 

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Extras


François Augiéras, un essai d’occupation. 26′. 16mm. 1998.


François Augiéras : Extraits du “Vieillard et l’Enfant” lus par l’auteur


François Augiéras : Extraits du “Voyage des morts” lus par l’auteur


Augiéras,le peintre.

 

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Super 8 films


François Augiéras : Devant l’église de Saint-Amand-de-Coly (Film 8 mm)


François Augiéras : La Chasse Fantastique (Film 8 mm)


François Augiéras : L’Île du bout du monde (Film 8 mm)


François Augiéras : Ambiances de Tanger (Film 8 mm)


François Augiéras : Planeur à Bassillac (Film 8 mm)


François Augiéras : Vues d’un Sarladais abandonné (Film 8 mm)

 

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Paintings

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Interview with François Augiéras’s biographer

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— François Augiéras est un auteur qu’on redécouvre tous les dix ans. Mais jusqu’à présent il n’y avait pas de biographie « grand public » et pas grand chose en dehors de rares travaux universitaires. Pensez-vous que votre François Augiéras, le dernier primitif va changer cela ?

Serge Sanchez: Il ne faut pas oublier de saluer les efforts de Jean Chalon et Paul Placet. C’est grâce à eux que la mémoire d’Augiéras a été conservée jusqu’ici. Il faut en particulier rendre hommage au livre de Paul Placet, François Augiéras, Un barbare en occident, aujourd’hui réédité par La Différence.

Je n’aime pas le terme « grand public » accolé à mon livre. Il n’y a que deux sortes de livres, les bons et les mauvais. Stevenson, Balzac, Giono, Dickens… Des auteurs « grand public », en effet. On pourrait en citer mille. Les écrivains importants ont ceci de commun qu’ils peuvent être lus par tout le monde. Cela dit, et en toute modestie, je pense en effet que mon livre a permis de faire mieux connaître François Augiéras. Mes efforts ont été relayés par mon éditeur, Manuel Carcassonne, chez Grasset, qui a fait preuve d’une compétence et d’un enthousiasme sans faille pour éditer ce livre. Le résultat, c’est qu’Augiéras est sorti du ghetto, qu’il est délivré de l’étiquette d’auteur maudit comme le montrent les nombreux articles parus dans la presse ainsi que la présence du Dernier Primitif dans la sélection de printemps du Prix Renaudot, catégorie essais. C’était le principal but visé.

— Par « grand public » j’entendais « pas universitaire ». Et même si elle trouve son lectorat mérité, l’œuvre d’Augiéras reste difficile d’accès, par son exigence même. En cela, très loin au dessus des Marc Lévy et consorts, il n’est pas un auteur « grand public ». D’ailleurs, et c’est un vieux débat, certains textes de Balzac (Louis Lambert par exemple, et les romans inspirés par Swedenborg) sont très difficiles d’accès… En ce sens, il faut rapprocher François Augiéras de Victor Segalen, lequel, même s’il a une université à son nom et un « passé » d’auteur au programme universitaire, reste largement méconnu en dehors des fervents.

Serge Sanchez: Je vous laisse la responsabilité de ces remarques. Je ne connais pas Marc Lévy. Je ne trouve pas Balzac si difficile, en revanche ce que vous dites de Segalen me semble juste. En tout état de cause, je pense que l’accès à la pensée demande toujours un effort et que la qualité du lecteur joue autant que celle de l’écrivain, quel que soit le texte.

— Votre biographie ne fait pas référence aux précédents travaux sur Augiéras. Pourquoi ce choix du silence ?

Serge Sanchez: Il me semble avoir cité toutes mes sources. Les travaux intéressants ont été mentionnés scrupuleusement, que ce soit les écrits de Paul Placet ou les articles publiés à l’Île Verte ou au Temps qu’il fait.

— Sauf erreur de ma part et sans vouloir chercher la petite bête, vous ne mentionnez pas les travaux comme le François Augiéras, l’apprenti sorcier de Philippe Berthier (Champ Vallon, 1992) ou l’essai plus suggestif de Joël Vernet François Augiéras : L’aventurier radical (Jean-Michel Place, 2004) On ne peut pas tout lire, certes, mais Augiéras n’est pas Sartre et la bibliographie est succincte… Ces travaux ne sont pas intéressants ?

Serge Sanchez: Ces travaux sont intéressants et sensibles. Je les ai lus, mais ne m’y suis pas référé dans le cadre de la biographie, qui n’est pas une analyse mais le récit d’une vie. Voilà pourquoi je ne les ai pas mentionnés. Cela dit, j’en recommande la lecture qui peut donner un éclairage intéressant sur l’œuvre.

— Vous parliez de Paul Placet, l’ami et co-auteur de la Chasse fantastique. Dans quelle mesure Augiéras avait-il besoin de cette fidélité magnifique pour porter son œuvre ?

Serge Sanchez: Augiéras vivait très isolé, mais il avait aussi besoin de contacts. Paul Placet se montra pour lui l’ami idéal. Après sa disparition, il a organisé des expositions importantes de ses peintures, manuscrit, etc. Il a travaillé inlassablement à faire connaître son œuvre. Signalons l’exposition Augiéras qui se tient à Cahors du 15 juin à fin juillet. C’est encore grâce à lui.

— J’ai rencontré Augiéras par hasard. Un professeur m’a tendu son exemplaire défraîchi du Voyage au mont Athos en me disant que j’allais m’y retrouver, ce qui fut, et je n’ai plus quitté son œuvre. Comment la rencontre s’est passée avec vous ?

Serge Sanchez: Jean-Jacques Brochier, qui dirigea longtemps le Magazine littéraire tenait l’œuvre d’Augiéras en très haute estime. C’est grâce à lui que ma connaissance de cet auteur s’est approfondie. Il m’a demandé d’écrire plusieurs articles sur Augiéras pour le Magazine. Je ne connaissais alors que le Vieillard et l’Enfant ainsi qu’Une adolescence au temps du Maréchal. Ensuite, les choses ont suivi leur cours. Ma connaissance d’Augiéras s’est faite progressivement. Je retrouvais dans ses livres des paysages que je connais bien : la Grèce, l’Afrique du Nord, la Dordogne… Cela a créé un rapprochement supplémentaire.

— Ce rapprochement fait, vous restez en sa compagnie ou vous passez à « autre chose » ?

Serge Sanchez: Les deux. J’écris actuellement un livre sur les chasseurs de têtes de Nouvelle-Guinée, à paraître chez Payot. Encore des primitifs ! Ce livre se nourrit de mes travaux antérieurs. Il n’y a pas de rupture.

— Une œuvre comme la sienne ne souffrirait-elle pas d’être par trop connue ? N’est-elle pas de ces petits secrets qui se transmettent et qui font le sel de la littérature ?

Serge Sanchez: Je ne vois pas en quoi la notoriété pourrait nuire à un auteur. Augiéras mérite plus d’audience qu’il n’en a eu jusque-là et lui-même pensait que son œuvre serait reconnue après sa disparition. Et puis, rien n’empêche que chacun ait sa propre lecture. Tout rapport à l’art est un rapport intime, quelle que soit la célébrité de l’artiste. Les grandes idées, la beauté… tout le monde y est réceptif. Il n’y a pas de grand art sans générosité, sans don total de soi-même.

— On en revient à la question de la littérature galvaudée… le secret n’est pas nuisible, par exemple, Rimbaud, le nom est fameux, certains poèmes très connus, mais beaucoup encore n’en peuvent citer un seul vers. C’est une littérature de gourmet et pas de buffet.

Serge Sanchez: Rien n’empêche de s’y précipiter. Je ne fais pas ces distinctions. Disons que c’est une littérature de gourmet si vous voulez…mais accessible à tous. Question de volonté.

— Augiéras fonde son œuvre sur son expérience quasi mystique de la vie. C’est le premier auteur d’autofiction ?

Serge Sanchez: Il y en eut d’autres avant lui, même si, vous avez raison, c’est une de ses caractéristiques. Tout auteur recrée la réalité qui l’entoure. Il est la matière de ses propres créations. C’est le résultat d’une chimie mystérieuse qui fait intervenir à la fois l’égocentrisme et la dilution de soi dans le domaine des idées. Je ne crois pas en une vérité universelle. Un artiste est obligatoirement « visionnaire ».

— Augiéras, primitif ? Dans quel sens ? Primordial ? Il n’est d’aucun temps réel, ses écrits nous le montrent engagé dans le temps mythique, voire mythologique. Comment le monde a-t-il pu, en plein XXe siècle, enfanter un sauvage magnifique ?

Serge Sanchez: Augiéras était un grand instinctif, en particulier dans son rapport à la nature. Il s’identifiait aux éléments, aux arbres, aux animaux… Comme les primitifs. Il était aussi très séduit par l’art des anciennes civilisations, comme l’Égypte pharaonique, ou des peuplades d’Océanie, qu’il avait découverts à travers la lecture de Malraux. Pourquoi un sauvage ? Pour plusieurs raison, mais d’abord par rejet d’une civilisation occidentale matérialiste qui ne lui convenait guère et dont le moins qu’on puisse dire aujourd’hui, sans être pessimiste, c’est qu’elle court vers sa propre perte avec un acharnement et une vanité qui n’eut jamais d’exemple par le passé.

— L’expérience du mysticisme, de la quête initiatique marque son œuvre et sa vie même. Un tel parcours est-il encore possible de nos jours ?

Serge Sanchez: Toute vie est un parcours initiatique, autrement dit un apprentissage incessant. C’est la grandeur de l’homme et sa malédiction d’être tourmenté par des questions dont les réponses lui restent cachées. Il n’y a pas d’époque pour cela. La seule différence, c’est qu’aujourd’hui le monde occidental est devenu si obsédé de mercantilisme que les repères importants se sont perdus. L’Église catholique elle-même a bradé les symboles dont elle se nourrissait pour entrer de plain-pied dans la société du spectacle. Il convient à chacun de recréer individuellement son monde intérieur, d’opérer sa métamorphose. La lecture d’Augiéras, mais pas seulement celle-ci bien sûr, peut y aider. Un de ses qualités, c’est de mettre en résonance l’âme et le monde, comme deux instruments bien accordés.

— Il y a quand même une différence notable entre toute vie et celle d’Augiéras, voire celle des romans d’apprentissage comme L’Education sentimentale de Flaubert ou Wilhem Meister de Goethe. Son expérience est assez exceptionnelle, et d’autant plus qu’il a eu le génie littéraire pour la restituer.

Serge Sanchez: Bien sûr. Mais précisons à nouveau que sous une apparence de fiction les livres d’Augiéras parlent de son expérience vécue. Son œuvre est une fresque spirituelle qui prend racine dans sa vie même. On est loin des études psychologiques du siècle passé.

— En quoi, à vos yeux, Augiéras est-il essentiellement magique ?

Serge Sanchez: Augiéras pensait que la vie avait un sens. Il s’est offert corps et âme à son propre destin. La vie est un pari sur l’absolu, ce n’est pas le marathon social dans lequel on nous pousse aujourd’hui. Elle tient compte d’autres valeurs, qui doivent continuer à faire notre fierté. Si le mysticisme à outrance, l’intégrisme spirituel qui ouvre la porte à toutes les tyrannies sont illusoires, le matérialisme est l’imposture la plus néfaste qu’ait connue la civilisation. Sagesse, patience, conscience de sa propre vanité sont indispensables pour avancer… Mais il faut aussi savoir préserver en soi un don d’émerveillement quasi enfantin pour découvrir la magie du monde.

— Que peut nous dire, aujourd’hui, une œuvre comme la sienne ?

Serge Sanchez: Je crois que l’œuvre d’Augiéras prend toute son importance aujourd’hui. Comme je l’ai dit précédemment, elle ouvre une porte sur l’absolu. Elle a le don de changer la vie en nous ramenant à des valeurs essentielles. Sa noblesse, c’est le dépouillement.

— Par quelle œuvre recommanderiez-vous la découverte d’Augiéras ?

Serge Sanchez: J’aime beaucoup Domme ou l’Essai d’Occupation. Mais chaque livre d’Augiéras dévoile une facette de cet étrange personnage. Certains préféreront le Vieillard et l’Enfant. Laissons en ce domaine agir le hasard… ou la magie.

 

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Book

s-l225 Francois Augieras The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Pushkin Press

‘In the depths of the Sarladais, a land of ghosts, cool caves and woods, a teenage boy is sent to live with a thirty-five-year-old priest, but soon the man becomes more than just his teacher. Published in the United Kingdom for the first time. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is a gallant, almost magical book that is one of modern literature’s esoteric, underground texts.’ — Pushkin Collection

‘This tale of spiritualised depravity is genuinely erotic. Whatever one might think of the strange division of morality and spirituality in this novella, it shows that descriptions of generous, world-encompassing desire are not solely the preserve of women.’ — Murrough O’Brien, Independent on Sunday

‘The story has a spiritual as well as a sexual, dimension, and it is essentially pantheistic. None of the characters are named, and that’s relevant to the novelist purpose, for they are vividly realised and shadowy by turns. It is flawlessly translated by Sue Dyson.’ — Paul Bailey, Daily Telegraph

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Excerpt

IN PÉRIGORD there lived a priest. His house stood high above a village made up of twenty dilapidated dwellings with grey stone roofs. These houses straggled up the side of the hill, to meet old, bramble-filled gardens, the church and the adjoining presbytery, which were built on rocks reflected in the River Vézère, flowing past at their base. Few people lived there; this priest served several parishes, which meant that, since he spent all day travelling round the countryside, he did not return home until evening. He was aged around thirty-five, just about as unpleasant as a priest can be, and although this was all my parents knew about him, they had entrusted me to his care, urging him to deal strictly with me. Which indeed he did, as you will see.
On the evening of my arrival, the sky was a soft shade of gold. He did not offer me any supper; the moment I turned up on his doorstep he took me straight to my room, which was located in a corridor as ugly as himself. Leaving the door ajar, he abandoned me without a word, if you discount a few unanswerable phrases, such as: every cloud has a silver lining; the tables are turned; come what may; sleep well in the arms of Morpheus; and other such drivel. I heard him go into the next bedroom, moving about, doing God knows what, talking to himself, then there was silence.
I had been asleep for less than an hour when I was awakened by a terrible howling. Sitting bolt upright in bed, my eyes wide open, I waited for what seemed an eternity, petrified that I would hear another sound as terrible as the first. But nothing else disturbed the silence of the night. The moon picked out a few leafy branches among the shadows in a wild garden behind the presbytery; its beautiful rays shone through the panes of my little window, lighting up the corner of a table covered with my blue school notebooks, and a whitewashed wall, and faintly outlining the rim of a water jug. I was sleepy; I drifted off again without worrying too much about my extravagant priest’s odd ways, for it was he who had shouted out in the next room, which was separated from mine only by a thin partition wall.
In the morning, when I went downstairs, I found my parish priest in an almost good mood, making coffee. I owe it to him to mention that at his house I drank the best coffee in the world, delicate yet strong, with a curious taste of embers and ash. He took a great deal of care preparing it according to his own method, all the time muttering away, not to me, but to the flames which he blew on gently, rekindling the embers, talking to them as if they were people. He removed the coffee from the heat as soon as it began to bubble, returning it for a brief instant to the burning coals which he picked up in his bare fingers, as though he derived enjoyment from the act, and without noticeably burning himself. The whole process took a good quarter of an hour, and he spent the entire time crouched in the hearth, with his cassock bunched up between his thighs.
After we had drunk our coffee, we went out into the garden. Sitting on some steps, at the intersection of two pathways, he got me to translate some Latin passage or other from my school books. As far as I could see, he had a rather poor grasp of Latin. He had the unpleasant habit of vigorously scratching his horrible black hair, and that got on my nerves. What’s more, he kept reminding me how grateful I should be to my parents, who had had the excellent idea of entrusting me to him. If my attention wandered, even for a moment, he seized me by the ear and I felt two hard, sharp fingernails sink into my flesh. He wore a disgustingly dirty cassock, for he was extremely mean with money, and thought he looked good in it. He addressed me by the sweetest names, while at the same time poking fun at me; he displayed the polite manner one might use when celebrating a small Mass; he kept calling me “Young Sir”; it was as if he were saying: I’m only a peasant, I owe you a little politeness; and there you have it, all in one go; try to be content with it, young Gentleman. This Latin lesson, punctuated with little courtesies, lasted no more than a page; he stood up; I did likewise, and both of us were delighted that it was over—in my case the Latin, in his, the politeness. To tell the truth, in that June of my sixteenth year, what I really wanted were language lessons of a different kind, for love is a language, even more ancient than Latin (and there are those who say even that defies decency).
Leaving me to Seneca and Caesar, he strode off into the countryside. He had charge of several parishes; very well then, let him leave me on my own, this solitude would not be without its attractions; I was perfectly capable of passing the time and getting by without my priest.
As soon as he had gone, I put down my books and gave up trying to follow Caesar’s conquests; instead, I opened my eyes wide and took a long look at my new life. All along the banks of the Vézère ran the vast, thickly-wooded hills of the Sarladais. Closer to me, our garden was broken up by little low walls made of heaped-up stones, and by steps and pathways. All kinds of plants were jumbled up together, growing wild, almost hiding the once-ordered layout of a rather fine formal garden. Everything flourished higgledy-piggledy, rose bushes and brambles, flowers, grass and fruit trees. This lost order reinforced the garden’s charm, as well as the anxiety which you felt as you tried to find your way round that tangled mess, whose traceries of flowers were bizarrely watched over by a pale blue plaster statue of the Virgin Mary. She rose above the wild jumble of plants, looking just a touch simple-minded, with her tear-filled eyes, her insignificant, veiled face like a blind woman’s, her gentle, soft hands and her belly tilting forward. Beyond her it was all emptiness; our garden, which was perched at the very summit of the rocks, tumbled down towards the azure sky, the waters of the Vézère and the village rooftops.
Our church shone in the sunshine. It was a former monastery chapel, with thick walls pierced by narrow windows like arrow-slits. But the thing which commanded my attention was the presbytery, which I had caught only a glimpse of the night before. It seemed very ancient, with its lintelled windows and its substantial stone roof. As I was alone, I decided to get to know it better.
On the ground floor was the kitchen, where we had drunk our coffee. The dominant feature was a vast fireplace, which filled the whole room with smoke. I pushed open a little door beside a cupboard, and was surprised to see that it led into a stable, occupied by a sparse flock of bleating sheep. I found log-piles and a kind of forge.
A flight of stone steps led up to the first floor. The previous evening, as I got ready for bed, I had noticed a large, beautiful seashell in my room, and some naval swords, bows and arrows piled up under a dressing table. Did my priest have a nostalgic longing for the sea? I opened the door to his bedroom; the thing which struck me particularly was that there was no bed, just a pile of blankets in one corner. Nearby, I found exactly what I might expect to see in the way of basic conveniences and piety, except for some more weapons, hanging from nails on a wall, and several collections of butterflies. I noted also that there was no clock, calendar or newspaper; in fact nothing at all to tell you the time of day or the date.
The other bedrooms, further down the corridor, were used for storage. They were unusable and dark because of the piles of assorted objects accumulated by generations of parish priests. It would have taken several days to get to the bottom of the various heaps.
I opened the shutters of the first room I entered, so that I could see more clearly. It turned out to be a chaos of prie-dieux, desks, benches, broken chairs bowed beneath the weight of gaping chests of drawers, and pea-sticks, heaped so high they touched the ceiling.
In the second room, which had whitewashed walls like all the other rooms in the presbytery, I bumped into another chaotic jumble of furniture, chests and baskets filled with long-forgotten clothes. There, I found clothing for housemaids and priests, cassocks and heavy cotton skirts, lavender sachets, linen, sun-hats, and white “Bâteau” knickers, slit up the sides, as worn by the Young Ladies you see on a Sunday morning, lifting their skirts behind country churches, while the bells are ringing for Mass. I counted more than fifty pairs in one trunk, all clean and new. Further on in a willow basket, I found faded skirts, soldiers’ uniforms, theatrical costumes; enough clothes to dress myself a thousand times over. Near to a nice little cradle, a picture of the Burial of Christ was rotting away in a corner, and a swarm of maddened wasps was buzzing ceaselessly inside a wardrobe.
The third bedroom was used as a drying chamber for corn cobs, which had been laid out on the floor. I was going to close the door without going in, when I realised that these corn cobs had been arranged to form a number of perfectly geometrical shapes: circles, squares, suns, and more complicated figures, structured according to gradations of colour, which must have taken my priest several days’ work and infinite patience.
The final room, at the far end of the corridor, was used purely as a drying-room for tobacco. Bunches of long tobacco leaves hung from the ceiling, and their sweet, pungent scent impregnated the whole house.
A ladder and trapdoor provided access to the attic, which covered the whole of the first floor. The glimmers of sunshine which filtered between the stone roofing-slabs and the traceries of beams and laths cast an almost adequate light on a scattering of old books on the floor: the complete Virgil, Lucretia, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Cervantes, a copy of Plutarch’s Lives of Famous Men, devotional texts. Rotting portraits of priests, stored away without their frames, looked at me with their large, wide eyes, like judges who were either benevolent or stern, meek or evil, watching me, following every move I made. That made me feel awkward for a while, I couldn’t do a thing without them immediately swivelling their eyes towards me.
I was reading, sitting comfortably—or as comfortably as one could in a stuffy roof-space—when I heard someone climbing the ladder. My priest pushed open the trapdoor with his head. He did not see me, for it took several seconds to get used to the semi-darkness of the attic. I did not move. A delicious anxiety clutched at me. He climbed up the last few rungs:
“For God’s sake, are you there?”
No reply. So as not to have climbed up for nothing, he set about removing the dust which covered the old books, striking the volumes with the flat of his hand, so frequently and so hard as he grumbled to himself that he stumbled and fell on top of me:
“Ah!” he exclaimed, “so that’s where you were.” Yes! I told him, in the same tone of voice. But could he see my smile? Already he was pulling me towards him. As I was on my knees, he too knelt down to give me a good thrashing. After taking most of my clothes off, he struck me roughly, as he had struck the books. Did I weigh heavy in his arms? He made me get up and lie down across a low beam which ran across the attic; then, pushing my head down, he finished beating me in comfort. After that he went away, leaving me half-naked, panting, covered in sweat, my flesh burning against the rough beam. Once the trapdoor had closed, I regained my senses, telling myself that my fate was not really cruel, that the boys of Ancient Rome had undergone the same punishments and had not died; at last, rather cheerfully, I got down off my beam with my dust-blackened knees and my scarlet torso, put my clothes back on and went back to reading Plutarch.
By the time I too left the attic, I could tell from the silent house that I was alone again. I went into my room and washed myself in cool water, which took the entire contents of my little water jug, as I was so dusty. Then I rested my elbows on the window ledge and gazed out at the trees and the sky. Birds were singing, hens were pecking around in the yard; a fine, strong smell of weasels drifted up from below. Worn-out from the beating I had endured, and feeling feverish, I was drawn by the calm of the garden.
At the far end of a pathway was a little murmuring spring, where I drank. In those early days of June, I found the power of the growing plants exhilarating; the scent of the carnations and roses troubled my young flesh. The warm air caressed my face. Evening fell. A sound of violently rattling saucepans told me that my priest had returned. A few logs tossed into the fireplace suddenly crackled and burned all at once. After he had called me two or three times, and since I was mischievously refusing to reply, he appeared in the kitchen doorway, which was all lit up by flames, his tall, thin silhouette stark against the firelight. Finally he came towards the clump of leafy vegetation where I had hidden myself. From my hiding place, among the leaves of a box tree, I saw his hand feel around for me, and finally encounter my face.
“Right,” he shouted, “get into that house. I’ll teach you to disobey me, you cheeky young…” How had I offended him? We left the moonlit garden and I followed him up to my room, where, after tying me across a chair, he thrashed me with a switch. Then he knelt down next to me and—as peculiar as ever—covered me with caresses, tenderly rocking me in my rush-covered clothes. He put out the light and remained there, beside my chair, in perfect darkness, saying nothing, kissing my face, for a whole quarter of an hour, before freeing me from my bonds.
*

p.s. Hey. So, tomorrow I have to get up incredibly early to catch a train to the Normandy region of France where Zac and I will try to persuade a funding committee to give us some financing for our new film. What that means for you is that I won’t be able to do the p.s., and I will be giving you a restored post from my former, murdered blog instead of a new thing. But please leave your comments today and tomorrow because I will interact with all of them when the blog returns to normal on Friday. Thanks. ** Todd Grimson, Hi, Todd. I really have to read ‘SWAY’ because I obviously haven’t. Thanks for the tip, which hit home with a bunch of others folks around here, as you probably saw. ** Slatted Light, Hi, Davido. Oh, okay, I’ll backpedal my interest in ‘American Translation’. Dreamwork is where the real work happens, if you ask me. It’s usually a mistake to rush your strategizing dreams along or cut them short unless they start to feel grabby. Your strategies-in-progress sound extremely interesting. The Sarraute inspiration is exciting. Her work is oddly underutilized by writers seeking possible advancements. Self-hatred is a fascinating area/ subject/ groundwork. Extreme encouragement from me to try. If it matters or helps, every time I start a novel, I make sure that it seems like something I won’t be able to handle given the parameters of what talent I have. Having that hard stretch ahead of me is absolutely required or something. And it’s weird how one doesn’t know one’s own talent well at all. Nonfiction-specific publishers in the indie press scene? Interesting question. I can’t think of any, just of presses that cover the bases. Huh. I don’t think I know Punctum, or else I do and don’t know it. I’ll investigate. And I’ll set my mind and browser to that general question and see if anything comes up. Thanks, man. ** Scunnard, I know, right? She’s kind of unrecognizably who she used to be now. Oh my goodness, J., of course that ‘bunch of sound experiments with video that is constructed entirely from bonsai instructional videos on youtube…’ is massively interesting to me. Wow. I’ll go hear whatever you linked me to a little later. No, really, that’s a corker of an intriguing project. I’d love to hear anything more about it. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. I gotta read ‘SWAY’. I agree with you vis-à-vis Harrison and ‘Wonderwall’. It’s interesting that both he and Lennon went full on avant-garde at one point then pulled their work back to the song form and seemingly never searched too far afield artistically again. ** Ferdinand, Excellent. Oh, I see, about the Flemish/Dutch. I remember that about Afrikaans now. I’ve taken to French theoretically, and I understand more than I think I do, but it’s true that I haven’t buckled down with it, although I have to start learning it in earnest now because Zac’s and my new film is in French, and I’m going to have to work with the actors, so … Amsterdam is a lovely place to visit. Having lived there for two years, I’m not so sold on how it works for resettlement. I have a ‘Smot’ investigation in the cards for today. How and what was your day? ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, good morning, and all good things. ** Steevee, Tricky. Yes, trusting your instincts seems like a good place to start. Fingers very crossed for much restfulness and contrasting clarity. Ha, I like to burn mp3s onto CDs too. High five. ** MANCY, Hi, Steven. Great, awesome, about the near finishing of the Rollerball video. Do link me up. Zac and I are prepping and strategizing madly re: our imminent music video shoot. I’m good. You good? You’re good. ** Sypha, Hi. I haven’t had any thoughts about reading that Alan Moore novel. I mean, you never know. I’m not a reader/follower of his stuff really, and that book’s length is pretty off-putting, I have to say. I think I’ll probably wait to see what you think first. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I hadn’t either until she crossed my mind, and until I just sort of randomly checked out her IMDb page and was very surprised. Just yesterday I was thinking how I would sacrifice someone to Satan to have a hot fudge sundae sitting in front of me. So I get it. ** Raymond, Hi, man. That’s very interesting about that West London type. That’s beautiful somehow. Looking like Elias Bender Rønnenfelt is a very good start, I must say. Hm, ‘Dream Boy’ sounds familiar, but I guest that’s one of those oft-employed titles. You weren’t rambling, or you were rambling rivetingly. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Good and better about the crystallization of your thesis. Those interviews should be interesting. Do you know people you can interview, or will you search them out. Will they be ‘in person’ interviews? Your day sounds to have been really good! I always like when you say you met with your writer friend. Yesterday’s prep session was very sobering, and not in such a good way. Our producer gathered together four film producers he knows to act like a mock funding-committee, and we had to present the film project to them. A couple were pretty cool and interested, but two of them obviously didn’t like what we’re trying to do and were very hard on us. They obviously dislike the kind of adventurous, strange film we’re going to make. Lots of eye-rolling and talk about what a ‘real’ film is and isn’t. While we thought they were prejudiced assholes, it did make us realize that our film is a hard-sell, and we feel a lot less hopeful about how it’s going to go with the real committee tomorrow. But it’s good to know. It’s really weird to me how conservative people in the film world can be. But it’s the same in every medium. So, that was not so great, but we’ll see what happens. That meeting and then Zac and I trying to figure out how and if we can try to circumvent that problem tomorrow was pretty much my day. My back ever-improves. It’s still sore, but it’s far more usable. Thank you for asking after it. Did Wednesday work out wonderfully for you, I hope? ** Chris dankland, Hi, Chris! Me too! And I’m so happy to see you here! The two month hell is starting to feel like just a bad dream or whatever. I knew Pallenberg from ‘Performance’ and ‘Mr. Lonely’, but, honestly, before I searched out her resume, I mostly and embarrassingly thought of her as the one-time druggie girlfriend of two of the Rolling Stones. Yeah, it’s really easy to forget how incredible the Rolling Stones used to be. I’m in the fairly large camp who thinks they were always either great or very close to that up through ‘Exile on Main Street’, after which there was a gradual and eventually severe drop off. If I had to pick a favorite album of theirs, hm, I think I would say ‘Between the Buttons’. I really liked the period where they were toying with psychedelia and writing very clever songs that weren’t just riff contexts with come-hither lusty come-on-style lyrics. My favorite song? An odd one, but nonetheless, ‘We Love You’. Exploring their early to early-mid catalog is a great thing to do, I think. Cool. How’s stuff? Are you writing? How’s it going? ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. I saw ‘Michael Kohlhaas’ ages ago. I don’t remember being so interested in it. Oh, Kiefer? Mm, I just don’t buy what he’s selling and how he sells it. I get what it’s supposed to do, and I get that its heaviness and bombast and earthiness is supposed to be meaningfulness-derived, but it just feels like big, illustrative, self-consciously weighty, kind of macho stuff to me. I either don’t believe in its mythology, or I’m just not interested in it, I guess. No, I haven’t seen your Kp book yet. I’m going to early-score a copy as soon as I see Michael, so maybe even today if I’m lucky. ** Mark Stephens, Mark! Dear among dear buddies! I’m sure I made that post for you subconsciously because that’s just logical. How are you? What’s up, my man? Give my big love to Julie as well as grab a significant portion for yourself! ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. I am very practical, it’s true, it’s weird. I don’t know how that happened. Beingness is so mysterious. Zucchini is an excellent vehicle, it’s true. Even, like, zucchini bread. Now that’s some good bread right there. I just hate mushy vegetables, and too often when people cook/serve zucchini, it’s all watery and blah. It’s true that you can vex or hex yourself by using descriptions like ‘lazy bones’ when thinking of or describing yourself, so nix that from your autobio, yes. ** Kyler, I believe you. I don’t know why, but I do. Well, of course I know why I believe you, but I also strangely believe that a rehab place could have excellent food. Greetings to boring Florida! ** Right. The author/artist in the spotlight today is pretty obscure, strangely even here in France, but he’s quite interesting, and his life story and his work’s concerns might be intriguing to you possibly. Or that was my hopeful calculation. Like I said way up above, the blog will see you tomorrow, and I will see you in a fresh and immediate sense again on Friday.

4 books I read recently & loved: Nathalie Léger Suite for Barbara Loden, John Colasacco Two Teenagers, Sean Kilpatrick Thank You, Steel China, Joy Williams Ninety-nine Stories of God

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nathalie-leger_980208

‘A Sunday Daily News article from March 27th, 1960 reports that Alma Malone was sentenced to twenty years in prison for her involvement in a botched bank robbery. She was supposed to drive behind her partner “Mr. Ansley” to the bank, wait for him while he completed the robbery, and then act as the getaway driver. But Malone took a wrong turn, and by the time she arrived at the bank, the robbery had gone wrong. Ansley was dead. After she was sentenced, Malone thanked the judge.

‘In 1970 the film Wanda won the Pasinetti Award for Best Foreign Film at the Venice Film Festival. It tells the story of Wanda, an apathetic, docile woman who leaves her impoverished husband and children and casts herself adrift in the world. She asks a neighbor for money, begs for a job, gets picked up by a man in a bar and then abandoned by him at an ice-cream stand the next day. She’s frequently humiliated. She doesn’t have much to say. When she finds Dennis, she doesn’t realize he’s just robbed a bar. He calls her stupid. He yells at her for forgetting he doesn’t want onions on his burger. He has an idea for robbing a bank and he decides that she’s going to drive the getaway car. You know how the story goes from there.

‘Barbara Loden was born the same year as Alma Malone. Like Malone and like Wanda, she was born into Appalachian poverty. At age sixteen she left home to work as a showgirl in New York. She became a pin-up model, then an actress. She married the famed director Elia Kazan (A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, East of Eden) and, at the age of thirty-eight, she wrote, directed, and starred in Wanda. “It’s like showing myself in a way that I was,” she said in a 1971 interview in Madison Women’s Media Collective.

‘Nathalie Léger was asked to write a brief entry about Wanda for a film encyclopedia. Léger is an impressive French person whose publications include a book-length personal essay entitled Les vies silencieuses de Samuel Beckett. “Convinced that in order to keep it short you need to know a great deal,” she embarked on a course of in-depth research for the encyclopedia entry, and the result was the book Suite for Barbara Loden, or at least that’s how Léger tells it in Suite for Barbara Loden, translated by Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon. It’s a book about Loden, but also about Wanda and Kazan, and a little about Malone, but definitely about Léger herself and her mother.

‘When I set out to review Suite for Barbara Loden, I realized I didn’t have much to say, exactly, beyond what Léger says. I wanted to show how she shows how one woman’s experience is filtered through another, collapses into another. And I wanted to show how we (women) connect with Wanda—even extraordinary, glamorous, intellectual women like Léger or Loden, and even women generations younger than Wanda, like myself—how the book sucks in every woman who approaches it.’ — Amanda Demarco, The Rumpus

 

Nathalie Léger @ Editions POL
Translator Natasha Lehrer’s Site
A MINIATURE MODEL OF MODERNITY: SUITE FOR BARBARA LODEN
K. Thomas Kahn on ‘Suite for Barbara Loden’
Buy ‘Suite for Barbara Loden’

 

suiteforbl-cover-front-235x299-1 Nathalie Léger Suite for Barbara Loden
Dorothy, publishing project

‘First published in France in 2012 to critical and popular acclaim, this is the first book about the remarkable American actress and filmmaker Barbara Loden. Loden’s 1970 film Wanda is a masterpiece of early cinéma-vérité, an anti-Bonnie-and-Clyde road movie about a young woman, adrift in rust-belt Pennsylvania in the early 1960s, who embarks on a crime spree with a small-time crook.

‘How to paint a life, describe a personality? Inspired by the film, a researcher seeks to piece together a portrait of its creator. In her soul-searching homage to the former pin-up girl famously married to Hollywood giant Elia Kazan, the biographer’s evocative powers are put to the test. New insights into Loden’s sketchy biography remain scarce and the words of Marguerite Duras, Georges Perec, Jean-Luc Godard, Sylvia Plath, Kate Chopin, Herman Melville, Samuel Beckett and W.G. Sebald come to the narrator’s rescue. As remembered scenes from Wanda alternate with the droll journal of a flailing research project, personal memories surface, and with them, uncomfortable insights into the inner life of a singular woman who is also, somehow, every woman.’ — Dorothy

 

Excerpt
from 3:AM Magazine

Nothing remains of the miniature theme park but an overhanging cross and a few plaster stumps sticking out of the underbrush. The hill is overgrown with vegetation. Holy Land. Hard to imagine that in the 1970s this place was thronged with thousands of visitors. Families strolling around the model temples and picnicking amongst the miniature mausoleums, archways, statues and ex-votos, with loudspeakers concealed here and there among the pine trees sputtering a stream of a cappella psalms. Somewhat petulantly, I wonder aloud whether these ruins are the remains of a theme park, an American specialty in applied mysticism, or an impressively bombastic allegory of the dire fate of all human activity. The young man laughs. He’s always laughing. We have squeezed through the metal gates that are meant to keep people out, and – this is what I wanted, this is what I told him I wanted – have found ourselves inside a very old, crumbling dream. Don’t bring anything with you that you can’t replace – your life, for example – went the whispers in town. We are in a glitzy, fake holy land turned no-man’s-land on the edge of town. Now the young man is standing in the middle of a small esplanade that I think I recognise. Reflexively, he buttons up his jacket, clears his throat and begins. The man behind the creation of the Waterbury Holy Land in 1956 (I could leave him there, I could wander off down the hill) was called John Greco (I could walk down sunken paths, peer into crevices). With the help of hundreds of volunteers, John Greco built this new Bethlehem (I could look inside the ancient caves and I would still be able to hear him from afar), for John had heard the call of an angel (I would still be able to hear his strong voice ringing out, even from a distance), who had ordered him to build a holy place right here in Waterbury (I could go down into the putrid tunnels of the catacombs, where the cracks in the cement structure let in barely any light), and John, known to be an expert on nativity scenes, showed the others how to construct nativity scenes (but I stay by his side, I look around, waiting and staring at what’s left of the Holy Land). The old warped scenery, a shabby biblical imitation, a pastiche of some ancient tale. July 1970. Wanda and Mr Dennis step onto the Holy Land esplanade that overlooks the town. In the distance we can see the lines of a motorway flyover. The strangeness of the place is surprising, the awkward buildings, the carefully tended asymmetrical coppicing, the crackly recording of a syrupy choral medley. Soon we will see colourful crowds of hurrying families rushing forward under the spring sky, red and orange, children in short yellow trousers, a middle-aged woman in electric blue cutting across the screen; she must be dead now, all those bodies that are already old, all those outdated fashions. Perhaps everyone is dead now, even the children who would be about my age today, like that ten-year-old in short red trousers, my exact contemporary. Now everyone is waiting at the entrance to the catacombs after wandering around the gardens in search of who knows what, amongst the tiny temples and the fake tombs. The esplanade is empty. Mr Dennis gestures to Wanda to move away. He walks on his own towards an old man working at something at the base of a cross-section of Herod’s temple, almost impossible to make out against the colour of the stone. He is absorbed in his task; perhaps he has a low wall to finish, some stones to lay, letters to carve into the plaster, the final touches to the word god at the foot of the tower. The old man is bent over, motionless, slowly completing his voluntary work, hey Pop! an awkward embrace, it’s the first time they’ve uttered these workaday pleasantries, good to see you again, borrowed gestures. Then they walk, the son supporting the father, crossing the lopsided miniature holy land, walking past the pyramids, pillars, biblical verses, and I WILL PUT ENMITY BETWEEN THEE AND THE WOMAN, AND BETWEEN THY SEED AND HER SEED. The father falters, the son puts his arm around him. Chants, a celestial chorus. Thinking they have things to say to each other, they sit down under an awning plastered with worthy inscriptions, GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD, it’s getting cloudy, it is the first grey day, FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES AS WE FORGIVE THOSE WHO TRESPASS AGAINST US. The father sits down, the son stands in front of him, pale, already exhausted by mutual disappointment, Have you been looking for a job? Yes, Pop. You found one yet? Not yet, Pop. And when the son hands him some money, a few crumpled notes nervously pulled from his pocket, the father refuses, you’ve done something stupid again, I don’t want your dirty money. The son explains he’s hoping for a job and will be back in a week. So I’ll love you and leave you. No doubt the father will go and etch his own epigram about offence and forgiveness at the foot of the low wall.

Wanda is making her way down in the dark. We can just about discern a few scattered objects, the gaping maw of an animal, a hand, something that looks like an arm, rags, faces emerging from the shadows. At first we don’t understand and then we do: behind the metal gratings are fake relics, broken dolls, plastic masks, a celluloid body crucified on a cross, a jumbled pile of manmade relics. If you would care to follow me. A voice leads them into an underground gully lit by bare bulbs. The volunteer guide explains that these are graves, Christian graves, martyrs’ graves, and we know that martyrs are people who died for their faith, he leads them through a kind of sacred junk shop, everything is mixed up with bits of rubble, a veritable religious bazaar, old adverts, ‘The Illustrated Life of Christ – from the Cradle to the Cross’, old press cuttings stuck down under glass, advertisements for miracles. His voice is confident and reassuring, here is Saint Thecla’s tomb, she was one of Paul’s disciples, his account is not remotely concerned about being credible, its sole purpose is to show that the story he is telling is so true that it can get away with being presented as fake – so true, so insanely true in fact, that it must actually be falsified in order to be understood. Wanda follows the group that is now crowded into the gully, sinking into the damp subterranean gloom – all we can make out of Wanda Goronsky is her mass of blonde hair and sometimes, when she gets close to a light bulb, the big white flowers on her headscarf seem to glow. We might imagine that perhaps she is at last finding a little solace in this dark space, letting herself be guided by the earnest voice that is constantly investing meaning in the most insignificant gestures and objects. She is like everyone else – she just wants to believe, she thinks she will find relief from her sadness if she can find something to believe in, like Flaubert’s Félicité – a simple heart who needed familiar objects to reconcile what she didn’t understand, who imagined she saw the Holy Spirit in the features of her beloved stuffed parrot.

 


Nathalie Léger Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden


Nathalie Léger – Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden


Nathalie Léger à la Librairie Banse à Fécamp

 

 

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VLUU L200 / Samsung L200

‘With one hand I was stirring a gallon of pink paint. I put my whole arm in to break up clots at the bottom with my fingers. Happiness came and went as I stirred the paint. Heavy black snow made of human beings began to seep into the ground. An hour later I was still sitting there, after the gallon had been mixed and taken away. No one ever told me what they did with the paint. My arm was still covered in it. It was resting on my lap now, with the thick paint drying to a crust and leaving chalky pink stains on my pants. I brushed at them halfheartedly with my other hand a few times to try and clean them off, but the chalky scabs came away and there was fresh wet paint under them. I wiped it on the side of my chair until it felt dry. As I sat there, I noticed a coolness in my mouth, almost as if there were an ice cube in it. It started as a cold ridge down the middle of my palate and spread out from there. I felt a calm certainty and an inner harmony radiating from that spot. Then I shifted my weight a little bit and the feeling went away. When it was time for me to go I crossed the bridge and went toward the bend in the path where I could see the sun going down. I was supposed to meet a friend of mine there so that the two of us could walk home from work together. A few minutes later my friend arrived, looking a little bit uncomfortable. He kept glancing around from side to side and scratching at the back of his neck. We started walking, but there was an unnatural tension between us, and when I asked him what was wrong he said that on the way here he had died by the side of the road and just now come back to life. He said he had no idea how it happened, or what could have brought him back from the dead. He said he’d been walking to meet me at the bend as usual when he saw something lying in a ditch, thinking at first that it was a pile of clothes someone had dropped there by accident. When he bent down to get a closer look he saw it stirring slightly, moving back and forth, rustling the leaves. Then it started turning, in a circular motion–with difficulty at first, then more smoothly–and he became frightened, because at that moment he was convinced that someone had snuck up behind him while he was distracted. When he spun around, though, he saw nothing, just dust hanging in the orange light. He stood there for a moment. As warmth colored the branches he could feel all around him the emptiness left behind by whatever passed through that space before. That’s when he fell backward into the ditch, unable to get out. In the darkness, he saw a massive river of sand. People knelt at the edge of it, dipping their hands into it as it rushed by, leaning down to gather it against their chests, weeping. In the middle of the night he heard a woman pass by the ditch. She had a cat walking with her, and every once in a while he heard the woman whisper something to the cat. Then for a long time he saw and heard nothing. He stopped feeling his back against the bottom of the ditch. During this time he couldn’t perceive or think or imagine anything. Then he had the vision that he was walking along the path with me, but I always stayed a few paces ahead, and wouldn’t look at him. When we came out of the woods we were thirsty, so we stopped at a gas station just outside of town, in a place where everything was called “crow.” When we opened the door and went inside it was “crow”. To get something to drink was “crow,” too, as well as the drink itself, and even the thirst we felt “crow.” Each of us went to the cooler and took out a bottle of water. My friend wandered around the store for a while with his water looking for a clerk and almost getting so caught up in it that he forgot about where he really was. Meanwhile, I was on the other side of the store, examining a rack of baseball hats. I had taken one of the hats off the rack and was staring into the lining. Then I took another one down and turned it inside out, as if to compare the two. When my friend came over to ask what I was doing I still wouldn’t look at him; I looked off to the side when I answered him, saying that I couldn’t figure out how much the hats cost. He told me that we could decide that later. Then he said if we really wanted the hats we could try putting a little bit of money down on the counter while the clerk wasn’t looking; if he wasn’t content with what we gave him, all he had to do was ask for more from us, and if he was, then he could just take the money for himself and we’d be free to go off into the darkness again. I didn’t say anything in response to this. I was distracted by a man on the floor of the gas station writhing on his back with his limbs in the air. He kept twisting and flailing as though he were falling, and letting out little yelps of terror. I turned to my friend and said You know what? Let’s not go home after all. Let’s go back on that path and look for the woman who was following us earlier. He didn’t want to go, though, and so I went by myself, and I found her, and when we were alone I heard her say, “You’ll burn a hole in yourself, like you always do!” She didn’t say it to me, though; she said it to herself, while looking back over her shoulder at a field of massive crystals.’ — John Colasacco

 

John Colasacco @ Facebook
John Colasacco @ goodreads
JC’s ‘The Information Crusher’ reviewed @ Angel City Review
JC’s ‘Antigolf’ @ Civil Coping Mechanisms
Buy ‘Two Teenagers’

 

two-teenagers-front John Colasacco Two Teenagers
Horse Less Press

‘I like this book a lot. I found a lot of surprises in the way the sentences worked. I was taken down a path cognitively and then thrust into a situation that made me use my psychedelic brain. I like being asked to do that. TWO TEENAGERS seeks the dust and doorways that evoke emotive meaning. Each sentence unfolds new emotions through a kind of paced, unique, symbolic logic. Measurable phenomena + the liquid in which the answer skinny dips. Verificationism + a tree that survives on echoes. This book is full of feelings I’d forgotten I’d had.’ — Sommer Browning

 

Excerpts

Two teenagers turn around quickly expecting to see blue sparks or a person walking toward a house in an open field.
The rest of the day moves slowly while a paper lantern floats off and a young girl with graying hair bends down to kiss the sand.
There is a wound somewhere filling up with the sound of silent letters and the feeling of being too far away from a bridge.
By the time the fireflies come out someone has died on their way back to a great body of water but no one has been able to sense their absence yet.

*

Two teenagers come outside for a while and sit in the sun where people talk about what they’re going to do with the rest of their lives.

In the distance the white car they’re all driving travels along a suburban road at a tremendous speed.

When they get to the beach there’s a window that’s not attached to a house and the ocean makes the sound of footsteps running up stairs.

They stop to take a breath not knowing that somewhere they are being thought of under moonlight by a twelve-year-old with a face like evening.

*

Two teenagers in bed with someone they have never seen in the light open their hands and dream of the souvenir shops.

They stop thinking about what it’s all right to like while a rabbit stands among trees watching over them.

The colors in their heads and the smell of the backyard are like an old friend pretending to kiss a shadow trapped in glass.

They want to say something about walking across the world from one sea to the next through the all the emptiness that’s been taken out of them.

*

Two teenagers run away together to a place where all the lonely are slaughtered.

When they get there, they find a table and a tree.

They leave a piece of bread on the counter in a bit of shadow, thinking that it expresses something they can’t articulate.

Soon an argument starts over whether the table has been brought outside or the tree is growing indoors.

On the table, an empty wine glass trembles.

*

Two teenagers disappear into a parking lot looking over their shoulders as though they are afraid someone has seen them.

Next to the parking lot is a three-story house with a faint grinding noise coming from inside.

A warm breeze blows as a woman with an accent whispers something to the whole world, first into one ear, then the other.

The wind dies down just long enough to make out what she’s saying.

“I used to live in that house.”

*

Two teenagers accidentally separate from each other somewhere in the parking lot.

Then night falls, and the parking lot empties, leaving only seagull feathers and broken glass.

By the light of the moon they track each other’s footprints the wrong direction until they are too tired to walk anymore.

“I’ll just wait here by this seagull feather,” one says.

Miles away the other rubs half a lightbulb until it glows.

 


ANTIGOLF by John Colasacco – Book Trailer

 

 

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www.loogix.com_26TV4

Nicholas Rys: Sucker June was one of the strangest, most uncomfortable and most singular reading experiences I’ve ever had. I mean that obviously in the best way possible. What bloody river or slumalley did these characters crawl out from? How did you pin down or find or create that gasoline honey narrative voice?

Sean Kilpatrick: The intentionally amaurotic practitioners of cursed poetry stole the gas from caves until the applied science of carrying a fire seemed gauche to us and we embraced the label “charlatan.” No gods, no sight, no system, just the brain catering itself to the scream of our collapse. Plato erected his toe in our scalp, the big tent pole against not knowing (philosophy/ethics, religion, then psychology, all of which, when done well, incorporate the void a poet lives) took control and encouraged a massive breed, upscale natural selection. How we misuse knowledge can be the reducing border of a property. We’re just a franchise of knowing where our dangers lie. The more people survive the easier it becomes to mock the death trance. Cave juice death trance ain’t made to suffer its audience; it’s just one’s desperate display, volume eleven.

We do welcome any appreciators of our take on choking. We’re still base humans that way. I want to be out there with my head in an alligator’s shitstar, but I’ve been too raised here, trying to reduce a page to my urgings. So everybody rewards the embrace of a comfortable exploration. Who could blame their giggles? The need for logic is to shout back about impending predators. Poets kiss their predator. Your explicative novelist whose characters reflect social dangers in order to enhance our possible improvement, as if we ever have, or will, meet our potential (anyone touting their alms in group format is about finance and coo to them), your comedian poking the air out of everything with their stakes on truth, I can love all these, but I don’t want or deserve theirs back. I don’t deserve love beyond the totem that has to be so unfortunately, with all effort or lack thereof, rendered how we live now, or lived ever, together, regardless, but look at the struggle to capture being captured now. I’m living out my fucking butterfly net.

NR: Do you see yourself primarily as a poet? Was writing prose challenging or more difficult or just a different experience for you?

SP: I’m of an ill career, fat with the repressed anxiety of not being allowed to speak in rigor mortis tongue. I ain’t referencing some Iron John penial victory. What I mean is way deeper perverse, way even worse and stunted in the genitals than bored richboys might rub their guidelines on. Drum circle hen men or their snarky opposites. Some find-your-place-or-self-and-succeed positivity. The Nerf ball with glasses shit. I’m saying I have to backwards engineer anything coherent. The hate’s about being pinched breathing and the genius of its hell. By hell I mean people as a people will forever be unrealized and are soothed by knowing how ironically close we stumble near it on occasion. We see how we’re almost capable. We’ll always be hunched beneath the glass ceiling of what we’re capable of, the reason why we’re such a culpable and unforgiven species. Proof that we’ll never grow hooves beautiful as Satan’s is we can draw their likeness without wearing them.

NR: You are from Detroit. Did that have any influence?

SP: I was raised somewhere one might show slight bravado about once they escape, but I don’t think I care to escape, or perhaps I have so hard it doesn’t matter. Nothing’s easier than a white complaining. The croak of saying sets my plate. Play ball is how America teaches kids to kill imagination. My politics aren’t in line. Everyone’s kissin’ babies these days.

 

Sean Kilpatrick
Interview with Sean Kilpatrick
James Greer on SK’s ‘fuckscapes’
Sean Kilpatrick @ goodreads
Buy ‘Thank You, Steel China’

 

tumblr_oahlr7CUyo1s924fho1_500 Sean Kilpatrick Thank You, Steel China
Schism [2] Press

‘A brilliant, serious and goof-rendered life cycle punctuated, constantly, with castration, abortions and suicide. Pageantry, clichés, cynicism and Catullus-like military exercises dedicated to and dragged over time’s tender acne. A sordid and jaded love story (“we rubbed our anuses together in a field”) garnished with bosses and workers who fuck everything, bubbling up shared panic and annihilation in “the urine of a girl who already forgot you.”‘ — Rauan Klassnik

 

Excerpts

Thank You in the City of Steel China

My mother aborted me on someone’s doorstep.
I dreamed of coat hangers. I cried at thrift stores. The people who raised me worked in oil.
We ate vats of it for dessert.
We were accused of minstrel antics.
We were accused of playing violins.
They cut us a little bit and promised more.

At the hospital, the doctor showed me slides.
“These are slides of what you would look like if you were better.” They were slides of road kill, slides of pregnant women killed by fire.
“Everything drips if you hate it long enough.”
“I want to go,” I said.
“You big tease,” the doctor said, “Please cough for me.”

The window showed buildings without spines.
In a bomb space, children cornered their dinner. Dinner was shaking and drawing them a treasure map.

Children in Steel China are not tickled into believing. Dinner lost its hind legs first.
I used mine to walk home (what was left of home) and worshipped random objects.
I thought I was funny.
Someone saw me in the backyard
and threw a large rock at my lap.
I dreamed of a girl who had a bruise between her legs where something else was meant to be.

 

I’m Sorry

Most abortions in Steel China were performed through interpretive dance.
The high school debate team always turned into a masturbation contest.
At my probation hearing, I showed them my talent for throwing knives.
I was released immediately and given a free house
filled with taxidermy heads and bombs that had stopped ticking. Everyday I watered the landmines, went back in, and stared at a different head.
Small country presidents, former popes, animals
—but those were too beautiful to watch stuffed.
They looked like they were going somewhere.
“Would you like a sandwich?” I asked them.
“I only eat sandwiches now and sit down when I want.”

Black jaws in the living room showed me outside.
A girl was running through my landmines.
She had big red fist prints from punching herself.
She was naked except for a yellow blanket around her waist. “Stop,” I said. “There are bombs where your feet want to be.”
“I know,” she replied. “This is how Steel China girls pick suicide.” “But my lawn . ..” I said.
“I can already tell we’re in love,” she replied. “So, instead, I’ll come in.”
“Let me draw you a map of the landmines.”
“If they love me, they love me,” she said. “You should let them have me,
if they want me that bad, and stop whining.”
I winced every time her bare foot touched the ground. Since this was love, and we were to be married,
I knew a tragedy would come soon and be great.
The first tragedy was that her toes were painted black.

Thank You, Steel China: My Panic Is Your Panic Too
“Dear, what have they done to you?” I asked.
“There is almost nothing left,” she sighed. “And I’m sure you’ll want the rest.”
“I have to write you a love poem now,” I said. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Is that your name?”

But she had already stopped talking to other humans.

 

Goodbye Steel China

I felt like my own bacteria were tired of my voice.
Or they were listening, but they were listening with headphones on. I laid money on my chest and told them to take it.
I pretended there was a catalogue from which I could order tiny microphones. I watched through a microscope.
They were constantly eating. “Chew me faster,” I said. “You’re so petite.”

So,
the girl was answering Steel China’s prayers.

So,
the girl was out there parting her smile around another cock.

So,
I donned a blindfold and tangoed alone.

So,
all over the front lawn I went with my indignant shoes.

So,
I dreamed people had guillotines instead of torsos.

So,
no one had any hands left to pray.

So,
things got better.

So,
I condemned myself to sitting and grew a beard. The rent was cheap inside my beard.
Still, everyone refused to live like that.

 


Sean Kilpatrick reading


AWP LOS ANGELES 2016 DARK FUCKING WIZARD READING


Poète maudit: Weldon Kees – Sean Kilpatrick

 

 

______________

150911_BOOKS_PRIVILEGE_top.jpg.CROP.promo-mediumlarge

The stories in Ninety-Nine Stories of God were partly inspired by Thomas Bernhard’s similarly hilarious, philosophical, and dark collection The Voice Imitator. Can you talk about the influence of that “cranky genius of Austrian literature” on your writing?
Joy Williams: William Gaddis introduced me to the works of Bernhard. I first thought he said an Australian writer, and I said, “Oh, like Patrick White, I really like Patrick…” “God, no,” Mr. Gaddis said, “Austrian…” I never understood how Bernhard could be a successful playwright when he disapproved so of engagement with people. Anyway, he’s marvelous, delicious, his work can’t be broken down. His little book The Voice Imitator certainly inspired me. A few of the early ones were rather in his voice—”#32″ and “#82,” for instance. I’m not sure where I found my own voice for this venture. Perhaps it was “#2” or “#70.” I’m most pleased when God makes a thorough appearance—when he’s hanging with the bats or a demolition derby or at the pharmacy, but I resisted this being the primary approach. Many different tones are struck in Ninety-Nine Stories of God. He’s everywhere at once of course, but he must get tired of showing up all the time.

Many of the stories seem to be based on excerpts from newspapers or other real-world texts. Do you collect striking anecdotes or interesting snippets of text to use in fiction?
JW: I keep notebooks. “#54” came directly from a newspaper headline. “CANCER DOESN’T STOP HUNTER, 86, WHO KILLS MOOSE FROM HIS RECLINER.” There’s everything in my notebooks, from the advice in James Cain’s Mildred Pierce—”Never sell the beach house” to the photo of the adoptable dog Filo who “is well-behaved while out and about and is interested in a home where he’ll get moderate attention.”

Your stories are filled with biting humor, and are some of the funniest works I’ve read. The humor often comes from the syntax and language itself. Do you edit and revise toward humor, or does it arise more organically in the writing?
JW: I don’t revise much. I work too slowly. Am I funny? Writing gives me no happiness, I’ve said this before, but once I told a group that a sentence I wrote in a story called “Hammer” made me laugh. A man had a pet beaver who lived in his house in its own little house made of twigs. “When you broke bread with my friend you broke bread with that beaver.” There was silence.

 

Joy Williams @ Wikipedia
‘Good Writing Never Soothes or Comforts’: Joy Williams on Writing
A Mysterious and Unparalleled Vision
Flash Friday: 3 Stories of God by Joy Williams
Buy ‘Ninety-Nine Stories of God’

 

99-Stories-of-God-RGB-387x600 Joy Williams Ninety-Nine Stories of God
Tin House

‘This series of short, fictional vignettes explores our day-to-day interactions with an ever-elusive and arbitrary God. It’s the Book of Common Prayer as seen through a looking glass―a powerfully vivid collection of seemingly random life moments. The figures that haunt these stories range from Kafka (talking to a fish) to the Aztecs, Tolstoy to Abraham and Sarah, O. J. Simpson to a pack of wolves. Most of Williams’s characters, however, are like the rest of us: anonymous strivers and bumblers who brush up against God in the least expected places or go searching for Him when He’s standing right there. The Lord shows up at a hot-dog-eating contest, a demolition derby, a formal gala, and a drugstore, where he’s in line to get a shingles vaccination. At turns comic and yearning, lyric and aphoristic, Ninety-Nine Stories of God serves as a pure distillation of one of our great artists.’ — Tin House

 

Excerpts
from The Paris Review
79

There was a famous writer who had a house on the coast. He was entertaining another writer for the weekend, this one less well known, but nonetheless with a name that was recognized by many. A third writer, whose husband had died unexpectedly only two days before, had also been invited for the evening. This was done at the last minute, an act of graciousness, as the woman was on her way south, on a trip she and her husband had long intended.

This writer was the least famous of the three. People couldn’t get a handle on her stuff.

The famous writer and his wife made fish baked in salt for supper. There were many bottles of wine. The third writer’s husband was remembered off and on, fondly.

There was a guest house on the property, and she was invited to spend the night there. Her dog, however, would have to stay in a kennel that was also on the acreage. Or, if she preferred, her car. But not in the guest house.

But she wanted the dog to be with her. It was only the third night of her husband’s death. She probably just should have driven off and found a motel somewhere. But it was late. So late.

She didn’t want the dog to sleep on the cold earth of the kennel. He was old, almost thirteen years old. She and her husband had had him all that time.

Finally, irritably, the famous writer allowed them to stay in one small room in the guest house. The rather known writer said nothing during this battle of wills. She smiled and shrugged. She herself had never had a dog, though she used them freely in her fiction, where they appeared real enough.

The widow lay in the smallest room of the guest house with her dog. Never had she felt so bereft. She had signed a number of papers only that morning at the funeral home. Cremation is not reversible, someone there said. She couldn’t imagine why they would say such a thing. She wished she had requested his belt. And the black cashmere sweater the medics had ripped in half when they first arrived.

He had worn that belt every day for years. Sometimes she’d put some leather preservative on it. And now she didn’t have it.

Oh God, she thought.

Example

 

80

Over the years, our succession of beloved dogs were always losing their identification tags.

Since we traveled frequently and often chose areas to pass through where the dogs could run free and tussle, our dogs lost their identification tags in at least a dozen states. Frequently these tags, which included our home address as well as a telephone number, would be returned to us through the mail with a short note of greeting and good wishes.

With the exception of one finder who was not a realtor or an insurance agent, all the finders who contacted us were realtors or insurance agents who enclosed their business cards.

Opportunity

 

93

The Lord was in a den with a pack of wolves.

“You really are so intelligent,” the Lord said, “and have such glorious eyes. Why do you think you’re hounded so? It’s like they want to exterminate you, it’s awful.”

“Well, sometimes it’s the calves and the cows,” the wolves said.

“Oh those maddening cows,” the Lord said. “I have a suggestion. What if I caused you not to have a taste for them anymore?”

“It wouldn’t matter. Then it would be the deer or the elk. Have you seen the bumper stickers on the hunters’ trucks—did a wolf get your elk?”

“I guess I missed that,” the Lord said.

“Sentiment is very much against us down here,” the wolves said.

“I’m so awfully sorry,” the Lord said.

“Thank you for inviting us to participate in your plan anyway,” the wolves said politely.

The Lord did not want to appear addled, but what was the plan his sons were referring to exactly?

Fathers and Sons

 


Joy Williams reading “George & Susan”


Joy Williams reading her essay ‘Why I Write’


Joy Williams’ “Baba Iaga and the Pelican Child” – An Electric Literature Single Sentence Animation

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Jonathan, J-man. Thanks, bud. Yeah, funny you said that about Diarmuid and then at the end of the weekend he writes that you guys have made plans to meet. Weekends are good for mini-narratives. Cool re: the collecting for work. I like to hear that. ‘The Wolfpack’ was really good, wasn’t it? I keep thinking about it. Happy Monday. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi, D! Thanks about the post. Oh, faves of mine in there? Let me check back on it. Hold on. Mm, Vito Acconci’s ‘Seedbed’ is an all-time fave. The one photo doesn’t do it any justice at all, but Charles Ray is probably my favorite artist, and that ‘Oh Charley …’ piece is incredible in person. I like Jimmy De Sana’s photos a lot. Maybe those? My back pain is very gradually getting better like it always does, but that’s a lot better than nothing. We’re having the first of our two prep sessions for the film commission thing today. Unfortunately for him, Zac will have to do the vast majority of the schmoozing because my French severely sucks, and we’re only given 25 minutes to make our case, so we can’t waste too much time on me talking in English and then Zac having to translate. I can let you know how it felt like it went on Friday, but I don’t know when we’ll hear the word. I hope your weekend was a total boon. Was Monday fun? ** Dadoodoflow, Thanks a lot, sir! ** David Ehrenstein, Morning, David. Ah, interesting. Thank you for the wisdom. ** Kevin, Hi, Kevin. Welcome! Huh, wow, it does seem like we might have known each other, doesn’t it? When were you at PCC? I mostly just took poetry workshops there and a filmmaking class. Advanced Folksinging sounds like a great class, or is so unexpected that it does something really nice with the imagination. Or mine. The Psychedelic Psychotherapy Forum sounds and looks very, very interesting. I’m going to study the state/page further when I get out of here. I credit my youth spent largely on psychedelics for causing me to be as relatively sane as I seem to be sometimes. Very nice to meet or maybe even re-meet you. ** Tosh Berman, Thank you very kindly, sir. **  Bernard, There you are. Well, well, well, it’s art, right, so … Ha. That’s right, between the painted bears and the Bear himself aka Nayland, not a bad quotient, I guess. How the hell are you? What are you doing? ** Thomas Moronic, Thank you, T. That’s a nice point of comparison: John’s and Bruce’s book. Cool, thank you for spending so much time with the show and seeming to get stuff out of it! Now I’m really, really excited for your new novel, ha ha. Even more so even. You’ve been to Frieze, okay, you know the drill. How’s stuff? ** Steevee, Hi. Oh, gee, that ‘Abandoned’ show sounds both really good and up my alley. I’ll make a concerted effort to find out how I can watch it over here. Thank you. Well, you had one good night and one not so good night since the last time I saw you. So, a bit rocky but maybe edging into the okay and ;could be worse’? ** Sypha, Hi. Oh, yeah, I was just being funny or trying to be or something. I haven’t read Leon Bloy. Huh, okay, I’m definitely going to go find out how he is and what does. Interesting. ** Raymond, Thanks, man! I owe you an email. I’ll write to you today. Wow, that is an amazing image: that Japanese ‘The Joy of Sex’ thing. Japanese porn can be so curious, I don’t know if you’ve ever watched any, but it can be really into substitution in this way that’s anti-erotic but manages to transmit what it’s reimagining and softening in such a perversely erotic way. That does sound like a sweet couple of days you had. Raking leaves sounds like heaven to me at the moment, which is strange? ** Bill, Thank you, Bill. No, I hadn’t come cross that New Yorker piece, and I am curious to know more about him and his thing, so thank you a lot for that. No, I had never even heard of The Kid until his work came up in my search for work for that post. Did you get caught up enough to get to do what you really wanted to this weekend? ** Ferdinand, Hi. Nice to meet you. Lovely riposte to De Sana’s work. It’s true, isn’t it? How are you? What are you doing? ** Griffyn, Hi, Griffyn! How nice of you to come in here. It was very cool getting to meet you in London too. I hope we get talk and visit more, here and/or hopefully over there or even the real here if you guys come visit Paris, which I insist you really should. Thank you a lot for saying that about the film. Super interesting thought about artists’ discourse with sex. Yeah, it’s super tricky. It’s always been really odd to me how the idea or subject, etc. of sex tends to make artist build walls instead. Bob Flanagan was one of my closest friends and truest comrades. I think his work did influence those parameters, yes. Not only his work, of course, but also the field or context back then in which his work was very comfortable, as strange as that is to say about his work. He has a great long writing piece called ‘The Book of Medicine’ that has never been published in full. His surviving partner and collaborator Sheree Rose was trying to get it published a few years ago, but I don’t know what happened. Anyway, I think that work might be of real interest to you. I’ll see if I can find out what’s up with that. Thank you so much for saying that about my work. I’m so sorry you had an illness-affected summer. Are you improving and feeling better, I hope? I’d be very interested to hear about your work and what you’re working on if you feel like saying. In any case, so good to see you. Please feel very more than free to hang out here as much as you like. It would be a great pleasure. ** Marcus, Hi. Oh, ToF, huh, how did he get by me. Cool about the score. Yeah, I don’t even have copies of all of the issues of Little Caesar myself. I was such an idiot not to horde a bunch of copies. Nice day to you. ** Armando, Hi. I’ve never seen that Warhol/Velvets film, strangely enough. Vaguely because it seems liked a mixed bag? It’s so tiny, which is interesting and not too. It looks kind of pretty. It’s full of almost nothing but very rich people, I think, which is curious but not hugely appealing. I don’t know. I think that for whatever reason it’s kind of a place for me where if I was going somewhere else and it was on my way, I would want to check it out. I’m not a big fan of Brussels. No, I really don’t have a favorite Kate Bush song. I’ve never paid all that much attention to her work. Of course I’m glad you loved ‘Knight of Cups’. There aren’t that many of us who do, but those who don’t are … foolish? Ha ha. I want to see the new ‘Independence Day’ because I want to see any disaster film. I have no scruples when it comes to disaster films. They’re all good even when they’re bad to me. I only saw the first ‘Jason Bourne’. It seemed good. I thought ‘The Neon Demon’ was just awful, sorry. No, no real interest in the new ‘Blair Witch’. The original is the only horror film that actually scared the shit out of me as an adult, so I have respect for it, but I’m not interested in a reboot of it at this late date, I guess. Or no more semi-interested than I am re: every horror film. I really want to see ‘The Assassin’ too. I hear it’s incredible. Good luck and good day to you! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Thanks! Yeah, I actually considered including that Murakami, but I thought maybe it was too familiar? That piece, which I saw in NYC when it was new, was the first work by him I ever saw, and I really liked it, and I was excited about his work, but then I never really liked anything else of his as much, and now I kind of think what he does is fun enough, but I guess I don’t really care or something? You know I got the post, and I love it, and it’s set to go, and thank you again so much! ** Math, Mathster. Cool, that’s the good kind of rich. Oh, Wolfe Barrett. That guy is such a trip. I only know him through FB, and I find he does there really interesting and confusing in a perking way, and I like what he does in music. I’ll share your thing just in case some prospective, non-writer bottom is reading this. Everyone, Well, not everyone, I guess, ha ha, but here’s the great Math with a brilliant offer for one or more or many of you out there. See if you qualify. Here’s Math: ‘yea i dont expect anything to come of this but its a real offer- if yr a bottom tryna look sexy on a website in english i will help you edit yr profile +you can pay me w a selfie or not pay if you prefer- f4ggotencoder at gmail’. Have a cool day, buddy. ** MANCY, Thanks a whole lot, S! ** Misanthrope, Hi, George. Do you? I have this weird thing where I always keep my windows kind of small, like the size of an average piece of paper, and people who look at my screen always say they think I’m weird, and I am. Moderation is really underrated. Well, moderation in life. Well, in certain aspects of life. Okay. ** H, Hi. Yes, Torbjorn Rodland seems to have been kind of the hit of the show. I would never have predicted that, not that I was predicting any outcome at all, of course. That’s interesting. My weekend was pretty work-y. Preparing to face the film funding tribunal. Working on Gisele stuff. Being gentle with my back. Not too much. But it was good. I love banana cake. And with vanilla gelato. Oh, jeez, I might have to go find some now. That’s good though. Interesting about the difference vis-à-vis your psyche and work in NYC. That makes sense. You’ll nail it. ** Schoolboyerrors, Hi, D. Aw, thank you for sharing that great Schjeldahl poem. I’m sure you know that it’s from the book of his that I published with Little Caesar, ‘The Brute’. I wish Peter hadn’t given up on poetry. I think he was a very excellent poet. Right, you’re right, it’s the bears who drew Bernard back in here. Minor mystery solved. Have fun with Jonathan, natch. I’ve been good except for a fucked up but now getting better lower back thing. Working, working. The usual. ** Robert Siek, Hi, Robert. Thank you for using your brain to concentrate on writing something here within that onslaught. That sounds like a kind of perfect art class. Right? I’ll be very curious to find out what kind of drawing you find out that you’re custom made for. Cool. Good deal. ** Paul Curran, Howdy, Paul. Thanks, man. Yeah, I kind of like how it looks too. And I’m gradually getting used to the interface or whatever it’s called, meaning how it organizes how I make the posts. It’s a little less simple and easy than Blogger was. But, yeah, I think it’s okay. Nice about Taipei. I’d like to visit it someday somehow. I miss Tokyo so much. Zac and I had semi-planned to go before year’s end, but we’re going to be too swamped, it turns out. You can’t force the drive, you know? I never do, well, unless it’s for a collaborative work where others’ needs are involved. My writing right now is all geared towards the possible TV series and the opera project. I just can’t find the spot available to reenter the novel for real, as much as I’m dying to, so it’s still shapeshifting and daydreaming in my head, but at least it’s doing that. ** Jonathan Parker-Bryant, Hello, JP-B, A lot of people do that with the escorts and slaves. It’s fairly common. I’m not sure exactly why, but it interests me that people do that. Harrowing, I bet. I’m so glad, obviously, that you’ve gotten past that. Jesus. I definitely recommend taking a taste of Genet and seeing if you like the taste. ‘What the heck was that?’ is the ideal respond to DeAundra. Cool. Thanks a bunch about the post and for your great attention to it. Anything detail-y you can say about that fantasy story/novel? Warmest regards to you in return! ** Okay. There are four books I .. well, the title of the post spells it out, as usual. See you with something else tomorrow.

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