It is not impossible to imagine … a novel whose fiction would be exciting enough so that the reader intensely felt the desire to know its last word which precisely, at the last minute, would be denied to him, the text pointing to itself and towards a rereading. The book would be thus, a second time, given to the reader who could then while rereading it, discover everything in it which in his first mad fever he had been unable to find. — Benoit Peeters

The photo is still famous. Signed Mario Dondero, it shows the writers of the Nouveau Roman, taken in 1959 on rue Bernard Palissy, before the offices of Editions de Minuit. Claude Ollier, who died Saturday, October 18, 2014 at the age of 91, was the last survivor of the team of eight authors immortalized that day — the movement itself is now left entirely in the hands of its two surviving proponents, Michel Butor and Jean Ricardou.

However Ollier’s unclassifiable work, having been nourished by an exploration of many different genres, must not be reduced or completely assimilated to this literary trend.

A year before the famous photograph was taken, in 1958, Claude Ollier had published his first novel, Mise-en-Scene. It was immediately awarded the Prix Médicis, which had just been created: the story of a French engineer sent to France for the care of the construction of a road in the Moroccan Atlas, who discovers the mysterious disappearance of several of his predecessors.

The context was inspired by Ollier’s stay in Morocco, in 1950, as an official of the administration Sharifian in the High Atlas and in Casablanca, where he kept a diary and began to write short stories, and where his dream vocation as a writer was affirmed.

Born in Paris in 1922, the writer Claude Ollier had studied at the Lycee Carnot prewar, and he received a philosophy degree in Montlucon in 1940. Then followed law studies and a management position at the École des Hautes Études Commerciales.

Sent to Germany by the STO in 1943, he fled before being taken hostage near Lake Constance and shipped in Swabia. After the war, he worked in insurance, then as official. After 1958, he finally left public service to devote himself to writing.

Ollier’s second book, Le Maintien de l’ordre, was rejected by publisher Jérôme Lindon in 1960 and was published a year later by Gallimard. In 1963, he published Été indien, with Minuit. He then wrote radio plays, and the respected novel cycle of Jeu d’enfant, whose four books were published from 1972 to 1975. In 1967, he published with Gallimard L’Échec de Nolan et Navettes, and Mon Double in 1979-81, inspired by a trip to Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia in 1977.

Car trips were a central part and major inspiration of Ollier’s life and work: United States, Germany, Quebec, and Marrakech in the 1960s and 1970s; Europe and Morocco still in the 1980s; Australia and New Zealand in 1990; and finally Jordan. Also beginning in the late 1960s, Ollier for a short time worked as an actor in films, most famously in Robert Bresson’s masterwork Un Femme Douce (1969).

In December 1997 he was elected into Écrivains à Paris, and a symposium in honor of his work, which at that point numbered nearly fifty books, was held in Paris. He subsequently launched into writing the novel cycle “quatre récits de couleur mythologique”, which was published by Editions POL between the years 2000 and 2007. A tireless traveler, Claude Ollier lived in Provence and Marrakech before settling in Maule in the Yvelines, where he lived until his death. In 2013, he published his last book book, Cinq contes fantastiques (POL), which was nicely subtitled: “Choses vues de ma fenêtre au deuxième étage de la maison.” –– Sabine Audrerie

_____
Further

Claude Ollier @ Wikipedia
‘Claude Ollier (1922-2014), écrivain’
Claude Ollier @ France Culture
‘L’écrivain Claude Ollier s’est définitivement évadé’
Claude Ollier @ goodreads
‘Claude Ollier, le roman toujours renouvelé’
‘POUR CLAUDE OLLIER par Christian Rosset’
Audio: ‘Un avant-goût de “Régression” de Claude Ollier’
‘Claude Ollier, fracas de l’existence’
Book: ‘LES PARTITIONS DE CLAUDE OLLIER’
Buy Claude Ollier’s ‘Mise-en-Scene’

____
Extras

Claude OLLIER et Le Nouveau Roman

Claude Ollier- Der neue Zyklus (SDR 1973)

Claude Ollier, Réminiscence

______
Interview
from The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Cecile Lindsay: I have always been struck by the absence of the Second World War and the Algerian War in your fictions.

Claude Ollier: If we exempt the fleeting and marginal “return” to European soil in L’Echec de Nolan, as phantomlike, muffled, nocturnal, and haunted by bad memories and nightmares, then all the other books are situated outside of Europe and far from Europe, farther and farther. On the one hand, it became almost impossible to “think” lucidly about what had been that sort of self-destruction of Europe between 1930 and 1945; on the other hand, it is clear that what is important in the evolution of the world since then is no longer taking place there. The obstinate and persevering hero of Le Jeu d’enfant senses and knows it from the beginning; it is the terrible knowledge acquired in adolescence, an admitted, outmoded fact of which he will never speak; the Second World War destroyed all he had been taught, humanism included, along with his whole inherited childhood universe. He is trying bravely, ingenuously perhaps, to take everything back to zero, in the beginning of La Mise en scene just as the book’s author tries, by a sort of narrative tabula rasa, to take back to square one all the elements of narration: observation of a country, a civilization, a foreign language, an unknown story. And all the primordial questions are asked there in a single movement: what is seeing, hearing, interpreting, exploring, reflecting, remembering, dreaming, writing, speaking? His instruction begins again, his life is reeducated elsewhere, on an “exotic” soil, extra-muros, far from the ruins of his childhood and his native land, far from the other side of the walls of a Europe whose Second World War culminated in a sort of cultural suicide. This war was for him the equivalent of that inaugural catastrophe that the hero of so many science fiction tales has trouble remembering or measuring but that conditions the entirety of his new universe. For him, it is as though this catastrophe “upstream” could not be recounted. And he tries anew to see, to tell, to write, having come into contact with foreign languages unknown to him—languages which, by their difference from his own, will allow him to look upon his mother tongue differently and to use it anew.

CL: A strong current in American literary criticism and critical theory of recent years has been a call for a more “political” approach to both writing literature and writing about literature. Experimental fiction has often been critiqued for what is seen as its “hyperformalism.” Were this charge to be made about your writing, how would you respond?

CO: I would answer that this accusation, which is superficial and banal, rests upon a regrettable lack of reflection on the question of language and of its relation to the body; upon the question of form and of the evolution of forms; and, more generally, upon any question that is epistemological, philosophical, or aesthetic in nature. Or I would answer, more simply, that those who make this charge have probably not read the books of which they claim to speak. For to use the term experimental is to misconstrue completely the very nature and practice of the act of writing such as they are manifested in books like mine. My work has absolutely nothing to do with “experimentation.” In the exact, scientific sense of the term, experimentation consists of isolating certain elements and conducting upon them duly controlled experiments, systematic manipulations, skillful alterations. I have nothing against this kind of work, and some of its results can be interesting and instructive. But my kind of intervention in respect to language and narrative forms has nothing to do with that. You could even say that it is the opposite: indeed, genuine experimentation necessarily tries as much as possible to eliminate chance, while my whole practice consists in provoking, in narrative invention, the greatest possible degree of chance, soliciting at every moment the irruption of elements which are more or less diffuse, forgotten, or firmly buried within the unconscious. I can only write, can only feel the pleasure of writing, if I reconnect with past emotions. I have an absolute need in the beginning for a precise setting, a setting in which I have lived; I need it so that the sensations, perceptions, and emotions can flow. Even on an “imaginary” planet, my writing can function only if it is plugged into memories, dreams, and intuitions. The phantasmic scenes of Epsilon and Enigma are closely derived from lived scenes from the recent or distant past. This is what I call the anchorage of a fiction. Everything in my texts arrives there by way of this anchorage in a place, by way of the paths, the journeys, the adventures, the dramas linked to this place. This is the source of the elan which allows for the development of a story: this story is launched on emotional traces, that is, on the reviviscence of the body’s displacements in a space known and forgotten, and on linkings of synesthetic, kinesthetic sensations whose recall and inscription in adequate terms regroup all the other sensations—visual, auditory, tactile. And for me the auditory sensations are much more important than the visual ones; the sounds connected with a place evoke that place for me, years later, much better than images: the tape recording is by far superior to photography. The tracing of lines is linked up to this play of recall and resurgences; the words, sentences, paragraphs, and blanks between lines must be fused by the permanence of this elan.

Each day, I start out on an impulse of this sort, which may only last a few minutes or can sometimes stretch out into several hours, but when I no longer feel its action within me, I know there is no point in insisting because there is no longer any vital necessity to continue, and it is only for that that I write. This necessity must be inscribed in each word, between the words, palpably. Only then can the reader feel an emotion of the same nature and force. If a sentence fails to transmit the emotion, it’s no good, it must be rejected or transformed. This work of palpable re-creation thus takes place through work upon forms: of vocabulary, of syntax, of typical and coded narrative formulas. This implies a putting into form of assonances, of relations of sonority, of rhythms, of silences, of the tempo intended for each piece. Here it is principally a question of music, a music of the text which is composed a bit like a musical score; I listen to it, I play it to myself, play it again, modify it, listen again, until the “musical phrase” is perfect, untouchable. If this work upon forms is called “hyperformalism,” then Bach, Schubert, Cervantes, Debussy, Rabelais, Flaubert, Bartok, Henry James, Proust and many others are remarkable hyperformalists.

It could be added that the necessity of an evolution of forms is inscribed within the exhaustion resulting from the prolonged use of these forms. By dint of being endlessly repeated, such forms become cliches, forms emptied of emotion. It is in order to reactivate emotive reactions (which form the basis of all the others— argumentative, critical, ethical) and to produce new ones that writers, musicians, and painters periodically “disconnect” from an ambient academicism diffused and lauded by the media, and compose works which appear to be completely apart, completely marginal and unassimilable. But these works create, there, a new poetics, and I would willingly speak of poetics in relation to my books, which are not novels. Finally, this necessity of disconnection and upheaval always rejoins at a certain point a sort of irrepressible curiosity, submitted to a mysterious logic of plastic transformations, and linked to meaning, to the relation of the body to meaning and form. All this, which should be developed point by point, clearly has nothing to do with the activity of some experimental laboratory.

CL: What are the “politics of fiction” in France in recent years? Why do we see a resurgence of more conventional novelistic forms and a rejection, from some quarters, of experimentation in fiction?

CO: I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “politics of fiction.” Who enunciates, advocates, or applies this “politics”? What I know of are fashions, which are launched or sustained by the modem media and which are in a state of constant disjunction in respect to stages of creation such as they are lived by writers. By disjunction I mean a delay. I think that there was a remarkable series of narrative innovations in France after the end of the Second World War. One can study this series historically and formally, analyzing its currents, works, filiations, and influences. One can also, if one has the taste for it, study its echo (if there is one) in the media of the same period. One will note that the delay in providing information, to say nothing of analysis and criticism, is between two and ten years. And the principal objective of the accumulated power of the media is, today, to blur and confuse the paths, to tend to efface them, retaining only one slim trace for show, while awaiting the next show. This volatilization of reality takes place on a large scale and is motivated by the quest for quick sales and high ratings. All of this could give the impression of a “resurgence” of the traditional novel. But it has no more “resurged” now than it had foundered in the era of the New Novel, from 1955 to 1960. It has been in good health for the last forty years, and that’s perfectly normal. Every era is marked by a very major conservative current and a very minor innovative current. What characterizes a given era is the particular difference, the singular gap that it reveals between these two currents. The gap can be rather minimal in certain eras and considerable in others. It has tended to grow, in my opinion, over the last half-century, to a great extent because of the Second World War, all of whose consequences in the cultural domain have not yet been weighed by most of our contemporaries. And also because of the fact that in all the compartments of social life, evolution since the beginning of the century has been extremely sudden and rapid and unexpected, surprising everyone, creating in every domain—technological, military, political, ethical- enormous simultaneous upheavals which could not have been avoided, abated, attenuated. One submitted to them and continues to submit to their full force; one is obliged to adapt, and one adapts badly. So our Western society today strives to preserve intact the cultural sector and, above all, that of the narrative: it is absolutely imperative that this vital activity—the auto narrativity of a society, the “representation,” if you will, or the “recitation” of this society to itself—remain sheltered from this wave of questioning. And this sector can be stabilized; mastery over it can be maintained (it may well be the only one today). All that need be done is to uniformly marginalize any innovation, especially threatening manifestations of rupture. Thus it can be confirmed, curiously, in this fin de siecle, that any social change is finally admitted quite soon, even if it constitutes a break with secular customs, except in the narrative domain. Everything else can “blow”—the atom, the family, ideology—but literary genres must hold! Thus the novelistic still shines today as the enduring quietude of consciences, the glowing repose of the citizen who is buffeted on all other sides and who is frightened. The major media, plus computerization, in the service of generalized literary academicism: this is the burlesque cultural project in which we have been engaged for quite a while. This will function for a certain time. For a long time perhaps, longer than we think. And then, one fine day, the gap will resurface, in broad daylight, in all its violence.

CL: At the end of your essay “French Version,” you signal the need for a new reading, a different way of approaching the kind of texts you and others have written. Can you elaborate further on what specific directions or forms this new reading might take? How could this new kind of reading translate into literary criticism? How does this proposed accent on “le biographique,” on the person of the writer, differ from standard biographical criticism?

CO: When I suggested “new gestures of reading, ones which are attentive to metamorphoses,” at the end of “French Version,” I meant something like this: to place oneself in the movement of the text, that is, in its creative movement, in the same path that the text’s inventor was in the process of opening up, of clearing away, of exploring when he chose his words, cadences, punctuation marks, silences. In other words, to listen to the music of the text attentively enough to perceive its assonances, its resonances, its close or distant rhymes, its allusions, and at the same time the tensions, the differences between the passages that came easily (one can sense it) and those where the phrase nearly broke or hesitated or went off in an unexpected direction (one can sense this, too, in any finished text). Or again: to “get inside the skin” of the author, to adopt his apprehensions, successes, pleasures, doubts. This is the only way to feel the words vibrate fully and to deliver them of all their meaning—their manifest meaning as well as their hidden, yet perceptible meaning. This is not a new attitude, you will say, and that’s true: it holds for any truly organized text. I therefore linked “gestures of reading” to “metamorphoses.” And there I wanted to make reference to two contemporary events of extreme importance: the insistence of psychoanalysis on the play of the signifier, on the one hand, and on the other, the breakdown of European cultural ethnocentrism. There is no time to develop these two points in detail here. I will simply say that all my books, on the whole, call for an opening onto the Other, and this Other is as much the unconscious, the “double,” as it is the Other repressed by European writing for centuries—the Islamic civilization, for example. My books in which this aspect is most manifest are Marrakch Medine and Mon Double a Malacca, both subsequent to Le Jeu d’enfant. But in all of Le Jeu d’enfant the purpose is the same, the aim is identical. These books thus call for readers who will also be open and capable of abandoning, if only for a time, their prejudices and presuppositions-not only those about reading (the “character,” the “story,” pre-Freudian psychology, the taste for tragedy, etc.) but also the ideological ones, that is, all the customary cliches prevalent in the culture. This is not so easy. For example, it is significant that most of the French readers of Marrakch Medine, who claimed to be sensitive to a certain poetic quality of the text, did not, however, feel themselves mobilized by the text’s effort toward Islam; they thus recuperated for themselves, under the iridescent colors of exoticism, all that this book tried to do in order to break down the wall of exoticism and specifically of “orientalism. ” The Moroccan readers, on the other hand, judged the book to be important in this connection.

As for the critic, he is a reader like any other, even if he is overwhelmed by his readings. What I just said is valid for him as well, neither more nor less. A literary criticism applied to these books must exhibit the same openness, the same availability, which clearly requires a rupture with certain modes of behavior, too, imprinted with Eurocentric ideology.

Finally, I think I stressed that “le biographique” in “French Version” is intended as “symbolized,” rather than directly enunciated. This is to say that it is a “biographique” which is filtered and transposed by the author, the “instance” which organizes, chooses, and writes, and which is representative of a place, a period, and of the currents, intersections, practices, feelings, ideas, and voices which make themselves heard there. It is not a “biographique” which simply incorporates events in the life of the citizen who bears the same name as the writer. And these are, really, two distinct characters-another reality that the “media” fiercely deny and repress. This duality is difficult to explain and analyze, and is the source of many misunderstandings. I really should have thought, back then, of taking a pseudonym.

CL: How are other media—radio and film—related to writing fiction for you?

CO: First, allow me an objection: for me, radio and cinema are no more “media” than are language or the book. They are materials, ones that are different from those on which is exercised the writing of a book: sounds, noises, music, spoken or sung dialogues, fixed or mobile images, etc. For several years radio and cinema accompanied the writing of my books: in radio, in the form of “radiophonic pieces” composed at the request of French or German stations and broadcast all over Europe; in cinema, in the form of f
ilm critiques published in La Nouvelle Revue francaise, Le Mercure de France, and Les Cahiers du cinema (a selection of these articles was published in 1981 by Gallimard-Cahiers du Cinema as Souvenirs ecran); and also in the form of film scenarios, two of which have been produced. Writing for radio or cinema is something entirely different from writing a text of literary fiction. The former are more social, more sociable activities. I practiced them with pleasure, as a welcome diversion from the absorbing work of writing—even a pleasant recreation. Most of my radio pieces are developments or “enlargements” of the short texts collected in Nebules and Navettes. Having said this, I don’t think that these exercises effected upon composite materials have ever had any influence on my writing. They are different domains.

__
Book

Claude Ollier The Mise-en-Scene
Dalkey Archive Press

‘First published in France in 1958 and winner of the prestigious Prix Medecis, The Mise-en-Scene takes place in the mountains of Morocco when the French still controlled North Africa. An engineer named Lassalle has been sent from France to plan a road through the mountains. Although Lassalle seems to be successful, he finds out that another engineer, Lessing, has preceded him, and that Lessing, as well as others, may have been murdered. In part a detective novel and in part an investigation into the nature of knowledge, The Mise-en-Scene is controlled by a tone and style that are truly remarkable.’ — Dalkey Archive Press

____
Excerpt

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I’ve heard that. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Fripp can be a total a wizard. Oh, yeah, I understand re: ‘sober’. I guess I know people who refer to themselves as sober who’ve never drank alcohol or used drugs, so the term’s hazy to me. No, I haven’t heard the new Ozkharp & Manthe Ribane LP. Hm, when music is described as eclectic that’s often a warning sign to me for some reason, but I’m also intrigued now, and I’ll have a listen. Thank you. I know Coloured Balls, but maybe not that track. On it. ** Jamie, Thanks, man! Yeah, a slew of good news recently on PGL, so we’re, yes, chuffed is the right word. Ha ha, no, I ultimately don’t care who wins the World Cup really. I just thought it was odd that some part of me had a second-long ‘hey wait’ moment re: your elbow towards ‘our’ team. I think I mostly want them to win because it’ll get really exciting and joyously apocalyptic in the streets of Paris if they do, and all that much happiness is very beautiful to sideswipe. Mm, I think Z and G, like me, are trying to psyche themselves into a state of productive optimism while tamping down the feeling of ‘rescue me from this relentlessly hungry script’. Oh, Jarret Kobek is putting out a Baal book, that is very interesting and a big lure. Huh. Okay, I’m even more on it. I don’t know the Creepers version of ‘BoF’. The first Feelies album, that’s a really good call, yeah. And Television, of course. Those are really structured solos. I like that kind. I guess I was mostly thinking of show-offy ‘look at my mastery’ kind of guitar soloing or the ‘jamming’ kind of Grateful Dead and billion offshoots type of meandering groove-maintaining play or something. I don’t know. Yeah, the Brussels thing sounds quite complicated for totally rational reasons. Very good luck with the weighing and sorting. Thursday was … okay. I had to draft up some TV script revision notes for Z and G and I to discuss at a meeting today, so I did that for a fair amount. Z and I have to select the film that will close out the first evening of the Lincoln Center event, a film that ‘resonates’ with PGL, by Monday, and I hunted my memory for ideas because he and I are going to spend a day talking and watching possible films and deciding this weekend. Not much else. It wasn’t overly hot outside, which was a boon. Did you de-gliutch the software? And what did you do during this day tagged Friday? I hope it put its money where your heart is. Peanut saucy love, Dennis. ** _Black_Acrylic, Thanks a lot, Ben! The Deller film sounds very promising indeed. I can’t imagine it won’t flood some corner the net. Gucci and Frieze … why does that marriage both spook me and constitute no surprise whatsoever? ** Misanthrope, I don’t know if she knows Kessler’s work, actually. I’m seeing her shortly. I’ll ask. I think she would. Like it. Eek, ugh, shit, car trouble. I think when cars fuck up, it’s very disrespectful to their owners. So I guess I would be a master rather than a slave if I were one or the other. Man, hoping for the best for it/you. And for your oven. And for your novel even if it doesn’t need my god damned hoping. ** H, Hi. I’m glad you had fun! And thank you about the posts! Take care. ** Bill, It’s true I had pre-pegged you as a possible co-interested party re: Kessler’s work. Right again! I wish your work was fun. I wish my work of the moment was fun. Why is work being such a prick to us at the moment? (That’s a rhetorical question). ** Right. Need an interesting book to read? How about the one up above? Claude Ollier is the least known and most under-celebrated writer/member of the Nouveau Roman, and that book up above is one of the very few novels of his that has been translated into English, and, yeah, I recommend it. See you tomorrow.

‘Bob Flanagan, a performance artist and poet whose writing and sadomasochistic performances centered on his lifelong battle with an incurable illness, died on Thursday at Long Beach Memorial Hospital in Long Beach. He was 43 and lived in Los Angeles. The cause was cystic fibrosis, said his companion and collaborator, Sheree Rose. Mr. Flanagan was said by doctors to be one of the longest-living survivors of cystic fibrosis, which is genetic and usually kills before adulthood. An older sister, Patricia, died of cystic fibrosis in 1979 at the age of 21.

‘A former cystic fibrosis poster boy, Mr. Flanagan recalled that he grew up being told that he had only a few years to live. And he attributed his longevity in part to his ability to “fight pain with pain,” by which he meant that he took control of his suffering through the ritualized pain of sadomasochism. In time, he made his art out of this proclivity. His work related to the often painful performances of such early 1970’s body artists as Chris Burden, Arnold Schwarzkogler and Carolee Schneemann. Mr. Flanagan’s work was the subject of a disturbing exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in SoHo in the fall of 1994.

‘Mr. Flanagan was born in New York City on Dec. 26, 1952, and grew up in Glendora, Calif., a suburb of Los Angeles. He had little formal art training but began painting as a teen-ager and then switched to poetry. He studied literature at California State University, Long Beach, and at the University of California at Irvine. After moving to Los Angeles in 1976, he became involved with Beyond Baroque, an alternative literary center in Los Angeles, where he gave readings of autobiographical poems about his illness and his sex life.

‘In 1978 he published the first of five books of poetry and prose, The Kid Is a Man. He also worked as a stand-up comic with the Groundlings, an improvisational theater group that included Pee-wee Herman. His readings and comedy routines gradually evolved into performances involving masochistic acts in which Ms. Rose, a video artist and dominatrix with whom he worked for the last 15 years, participated. The New Museum show, first organized by the Santa Monica Museum of Art, was Mr. Flanagan’s only exhibition and it generated widespread debate about its claim to be art. In it, he displayed sculptures, videos and also spent time in a hospital bed in the middle of the gallery, talking to visitors.’ — Roberta Smith, NY Times, January 6, 1996

___
In action

_____
Further

Excerpts from Bob Flanagan’s ‘Pain Journal’
‘Bob Flanagan’s Body: Ecstasy and/or Self-Annihilation’
Philippe Liotard ‘Bob Flanagan: ça fait du bien là où ça fait mal’
Interview w/ Bob Flanagan
Lisa Carver on Bob Flanagan @ nerve
Bob Flanagan & Sheree Rose @ WESTERN PROJECTS
Transcript of the film ‘Sick: The Life And Death Of Bob Flanagan Supermasochist’
Bob Flanagan & Sheree Rose Collection @ ONE
‘Ode to Bob Flanagan’
‘Masochism for Masses’
Bob Flanagan’s ‘The Kid is the Man’
Bob Flanagan & Sheree Rose ‘The Wedding of Everything’
‘Sheree Rose: A Legend of Los Angeles Performance Art’
Bill Mohr ‘Bob Flanagan’s Birthday Bash’
‘Listening to Sheree Rose’
2 poems by Bob Flanagan & David Trinidad
Book: ‘Bob Flanagan: Supermasochist’
Book: Bob Flanagan ‘Pain Journal’

____
Extras

Why? by Bob Flanagan

Bob Flanagan: Visiting Hours

Bob Flanagan ‘Fuck Sonnet’

Trailer: Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997)

From The Dead: Bob Flanagan (Supermasochist)

__________
FLANAGAN’S WAKE: RIP Bob Flanagan
by Dennis Cooper

Bob Flanagan and I met in the late ‘70s. At the time he’d published one thin book of gentle, Charles Bukowski—influenced poetry entitled The Kid Is the Man (Bombshelter Press, 1978). We were both in our mid 20s, born less than a month apart. I was sporting a modified punk/bohemian look and hated all things hippieesque. Bob looked like one of the Allman Brothers: thin, junkie pale, with shoulder-length hair, a handlebar mustache, and an ever-present acoustic guitar that he’d occasionally strum while belting out parodies of Bob Dylan songs. His style put me off initially, as mine did him, but I found his poetry amusing, edgy, and odd, and his clownish, sarcastic personality belied a deeply submissive nature.

There was a new, upstart literary community forming around Los Angeles’ Beyond Baroque Center, where Bob was leading a poetry workshop. I had met the poet Amy Gerstler in college, and she and I began to hang out at Beyond Baroque in hopes of meeting other young writers. After a few months of hunting and pecking through the crowds, a small, tight gang of us had begun to form, including, in addition to Bob, Amy, and myself, the poets Jack Skelley, David Trinidad, Kim Rosenfield, and Ed Smith, artist/fiction writer Benjamin Weissman, and a number of other artists, filmmakers, and the like. We partied together, showed one another our works-in-progress, and generally caused a ruckus in the then-dormant local arts scene.

Very early on, Bob told us he had cystic fibrosis, and that it was an incurable disease that would probably kill him in his early 30s—if he were lucky. But apart from his scrawniness, his persistent and terrible cough, and the high-protein liquids he constantly drank to keep his weight up, he was, if anything, the most energetic and pointedly reckless of us all. At that stage, Bob’s poetry only obliquely described his illness, and barely touched on his masochistic sexual tendencies. In fact, it took him a while to reveal the details of his sex life to his new chums. I think the fact that my work dealt explicitly with my own rather dark sexual fantasies made it relatively easy in my case, and I remember his surprise and relief when I responded to his confession with wide-eyed fascination.

Bob was working on the densely lyrical, mock-humanist poems that would later be collected in his second book, The Wedding of Everything (Sherwood Press, 1983). He began to encode within his poetry little clues and carefully offhand references to S/M practices, and gradually, as his vocabulary became more direct, the sex, and in particular his unabashed enjoyment of submission, humiliation, and pain, were revealed as the true subjects of his work.

Writing was difficult for Bob. One, he was a perfectionist. Two, with his sexual preferences finally out in the open, he was more interested in talking about and enacting fantasies that had already played themselves out in daydreams and in private autoerotic practices. It was around this time that Bob met Sheree Levin, aka Sheree Rose, a housewife turned punk scenester with a master’s degree in psychology. They fell in love, and, profoundly influenced both by her feminism and her interest in Wilhelm Reich’s notions of “body therapy,” Bob changed his work instantaneously and radically. For the rest of his life, Bob, usually working in collaboration with Sheree, used his writing, art, video, and performance works to chronicle their relationship with Rimbaudian lyricism and abandon.

Bob began to live part-time at Sheree’s house in West Los Angeles, along with her two kids, Matthew and Jennifer. Bob was an exhibitionist, and Sheree loved to shock people, so their rampant sexual experimentation became very much a public spectacle. It wasn’t unusual to drop by and find the place full of writers, artists, and people from the S/M community, all flying on acid and/or speed, Bob naked and happily enacting orders from the leather-clad Sheree. During this period Bob published two books, Slave Sonnets (Cold Calm Press, 1986) and the notorious Fuck Journal (Hanuman Books, 1987). He also began an ambitious book-length prose poem called The Book of Medicine, which he hoped would explore the relationship between his illness and his fascination with pain. At his death, the work remained incomplete, though sections had been used in his performances and have appeared in anthologies.

I was programming events at Beyond Baroque in those days and, as we were all interested in performance art, I organized a night called “Poets in Performance,” in which we tried our hands at the medium. Bob and Sheree’s piece involved Bob, clad only in a leather mask, improvising poetry while Sheree pelted him with every imaginable food item. It was such a hit, and Bob was so thrilled by this successful merging of his fetishes, his art, and his exhibitionist tendencies, that he and Sheree began doing similar, increasingly extreme performances around town. Perhaps the most famous and influential of thee works, Nailed, 1989, began with a gory slide show by Rose and concluded, after various, highly stylized S/M acts, with Bob nailing his penis to a wooden board. The performance made Bob infamous, and he was subsequently asked to perform in rock videos by Nine Inch Nails, Danzig, and Godflesh, as well as being offered a role in Michael Tolkin’s film The New Age. Nailed also interested Mike Kelley, who later used Bob and Sheree as models in one of his pieces and wound up doing several collaborations with the duo.

Coincidentally, interest in S/M and body modification was growing in youth culture, especially after the publication of Modern Primitives (RE/Search), which profiled Sheree’s life as a dominatrix. Bob was a hero and model to the denizens of this subculture, even as he found much of their interest to be superficial and trendy. Bob was always and only an artist. He never cloaked his masochism in pretentious symbolism, nor did he use his work to perpetuate the fashionable idea that S/M is a new, pagan religious practice. His performances, while exceedingly graphic and visceral, involved a highly estheticized, personal, pragmatic challenge to accepted notions of violence, illness, and death. For all the obsessive specificity of his interests, Bob was a complex man who wanted simultaneously to be Andy Kaufman, Houdini, David Letterman, John Keats, and a character out of a de Sade novel. So his performances were as wacky and endearing as they were disturbing and moving. For example, at the same time he was making a name for himself as a shockmeister, he was performing on Sundays with improvisational comedy troupe The Groundlings, in hopes of fulfilling his lifelong ambition to be a stand-up comedian.

By the early ‘90s, Bob’s physical condition was worsening. He was having to hospitalize himself before and after performances just to get through them. He and Sheree proposed a performance/ installation piece to the Santa Monica Museum of Art, which was accepted and became Visiting Hours, a multimedia presentation comprising sculpture, video, photography, text, and Bob himself poised in a hospital bed acting as the work’s amiable host and information center. Visiting Hours was popular and critically well-received, eventually traveling to the New Museum in new York and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 1993, RE/Search published Supermasochist, a book entirely devoted to Bob’s life and work. Also that year, filmmaker Kirby Dick began to shoot a feature-length documentary film about Bob and Sheree entitled Sick, which will be released this fall.

There was some hope during this period that Bob might be able to have a lifesaving heart and lung transplant, but, after months of tests it was determined that his lungs has deteriorated too much to allow him to survive the operation, and he began to accept that he had maybe a year yet to live. He and Sheree concentrated on visual art pieces, some of which were exhibited at Galerie Analix in Geneva and at NGBK Gallery in Berlin. The duo collaborated on a last installation work, Dust to Dust, which Sheree is currently completing, and Bob kept a year-long diary of his physical deterioration, Pain Journal, which will be published in the future. Even as most of Bob’s life began to be taken up with stints in the hospital and painful physical therapy, he was still on the scene, frail but good-natured, using his omnipresent oxygen tank as a comical prop just as he had once used his acoustic guitar. Right after Christmas, Bob went into the hospital one final time and died on January 4, 1996. In the 15 years I knew him, Bob grew from a minor poet into a unique and profoundly original artist who accomplished more than he ever imagined he could, and whose loss, predictable or not, is one of the greatest difficulties those of us who knew and loved him have ever had to face.

_____
Gallery

__
Book

Bob Flanagan Slave Sonnets
Cold Calm Press

‘An unpaginated poetry chapbook collection of eleven brief sexually-charged prose works by Bob Flanagan with cover art by Mike Kelley. One of five hundred trade copies. Though his first volume of poems was published in 1977, it was not until “Slave Sonnets” (1986) and “Fuck Journal” (1987) that his idiosyncratic work gained respect — and notoriety.’ — collaged

_______
The entirety

*

p.s. Hey. If you don’t keep up with the PERMANENT GREEN LIGHT page, we just announced that the film will screen in NYC during a two-day special event focused on PGL at Lincoln Center on September 5th and 6th. More details coming soon. I’m really excited, and, if you’re in that neck, I hope you’ll come. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Yeah, right, re: Dern vs. the parents. Ah, I see, about the Schrader. Well, I’m sure I’ll see it when it gets here. ** Ken Baumann, Hi, Ken! It’s so true. Excited to read more by Johanna, and I apologise for the misgendering. Very big up and respect on your political organizing and direct action. Cool, a new book by you! I’ll watch FB for the pub info. If the blog can assist by doing a ‘welcome to the world’ post, I’m more than happy to. Have you sent ‘A Task’ to Ira Silverberg at Simon & Shuster? St. John’s College … I thought you meant you were moving to the UK for a sec. Awesome on the full-time gig as long as full-time doesn’t eat your work. I’m sure you’ll find the way. Give Aviva my love, and take a bunch for yourself, buddy! ** Josh, Long time indeed! Good to you see you, pal! My weekend wasn’t quite that varied, but what weekend could be, I guess? Your year sounds to have been intense. But you sound pretty good and strong, actually, so fuck the immediate past ultimately. Yeah, excellent to see you, J! Hope to get to do that more often. ** Mark Gluth, Hi! I know this is lunatical, but I haven’t watched ‘The Return’ yet. I keep imagining it will eat me up, and I keep waiting for space when I’m not busy outputting, but I never get any, so I have to just get dangerous and go for it. I’m really excited about your new book with Michael! Listen, he does not suffer writing fools irregardless of their friendly proximity, so if he’s way into it, you can take that prop to the bank. I do know that Burial track, yes. Fascinating. I always try to the do that ‘total forgetting’ every time I start something. It’s impossible, obviously, but the imposed filtering seems to ward off laziness and expectedness, and that’s usually plenty. Great! Yeah, the TV project involves levels of the hierarchical that I’ve never quite experienced before, and, man, I cannot recommend it, although I’m still hoping it’ll end up to be a progressing experience. We have a big meeting with ARTE, and also an intense showdown with our producer, today. Take good care, man and maestro! ** Steve Erickson, I haven’t seen ‘The Tale’ either for the same reason. I have heard ‘Errorzone’. I’m intrigued but not quite excited yet. ** JM, Hi. Oh, I greatly disagree about Anderson’s symmetry. It drives me crazy with excitement and inspiration, and I tend to spend months afterwards trying to unlock it. Hm, yeah, you might have to tell me more about why you like ‘Speed Racer’. I thought it had some pizazz-y visual ideas, but I thought its core and structure were really dumb and conventional. ** H, Hi. Get the busyness totally. Thank you a lot for your lists. I’ve noted what I don’t know and will seek out their experiences. Thank you about the Lincoln Center event. Yeah, Zac and I are over the moon excited about it. You have a nice week too. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Thanks about ARTE. I really don’t know what to expect, and I’m a bit worried, but we will see very soon. I’m hoping for a France vs. England final, which doesn’t seem remotely far fetched. Safe trip to Leeds if I don’t talk to you before you take off. ** Jamie, Jamie! Hey hey hey, pal! I’ve missed talking with you too, man. I’m glad for your, and, of course, my sake that you chose socialising as your curative. ‘Them’/NYC went really well, yeah. Better than I’d imagined. Since then … finishing the new film script mostly, and we’re ultra-close now, and about to face the music with ARTE today about how close or far they think our script is. I unfortunately suspect there is a lot of work ahead. I’m fairly happy, yes, thank you. Have you managed to work on any of your projects? Are you firmly upswinging from low to high or already high, I sure hope? May Monday turn everything beneath your feet into either a moving sidewalk, escalator, or elevator. Hot fudge sundae love, Dennis. ** Misanthrope, Ha ha, you card. Thanks for infecting more people with ‘Try’. The multi-birthday shebang sounds big fun. Good way to cast out the melancholy that birthdays can bring to lonely celebrators. Yeah, I guess those boys are making it out of that cave bunch by bunch. Don’t want to speak too soon though. ** Alex rose, Hey, Alex! Your list is pretty in the good/best way. The moon, perfect. ‘Lucky’? I don’t know that film. I’m on it. And other stuff. A book on beheadings. Zac and I almost had a beheading in our next film, but decided against it, mostly ‘cos it actually costs a pretty penny to make it look real-ish, and it would need to in our film. Seriously fuck the sun and everything it stands for, my God. Love avalanche (the snowy kind), Dennis. ** Corey Heiferman, Hi, Corey! How very nice to see you, man! Thank you very much for the link to The Public Domain Review. I bookmarked it almost the very fraction of a second I saw it. Very glad your life there is still feeding you everything. I remember how high you were on it when you first relocated, and that its still working is a sign of true love, I’m sure. I hope NYC isn’t boiling hot when you’re there. Boiling hot in NYC seems more boiling than it does in other comparably boiling places. Lots of words coming out of me for Zac’s and my new film script and, much less interestingly, for the proposals necessary to fund it, and some TV script stuff. That’s the nutshell. I don’t know Warsaw at all, but, hey, just in case someone here does. Everyone, fine guy/DL/etc. Corey Heiferman has a layover in Warsaw coming in August. Anyone here know (or know of) that city well enough to suggest some interesting local time consumers to him? Thanks! Take care. Hope to see you again soon. ** Right. Not only have I focused on Bob Flanagan’s ‘Slave Sonnets’ today, I’ve also included the whole thing, which is good because it’s massively out of print. Enjoy. See you tomorrow.