* (restored/expanded)

 

‘Aki Kaurismäki sits in his heavy black coat, grimacing. The miserabilist’s miserabilist is looking more miserable than it is possible to imagine. I have been told it is best to interview him first thing in the morning, because he starts to drink after that. It is now four in the afternoon, and he seems to have been glugging back the white wine for a good few hours.

‘He is waiting for a member of staff at Soho House in London to tell him to put out his fag, and he is not disappointed. “I’m sorry, sir, we have told you, you can’t smoke in here.” Kaurismäki looks surprised, as if this is the first he’s heard of it, apologises and throws his lit cigarette into a glass of water. The waitress picks up the glass to take it away. Kaurismäki shouts, as if he’s just been mugged. “That’s my water! That’s my water!” She runs away. Finland’s greatest film-maker smiles.

‘Kaurismäki, now 55, is one of my favourite directors. For 30-odd years, he has been making the bleakest comedies – films that reflect his own soul, and that of his mother country, perfectly. They are dark and joyless, starring men who look like walruses and women who look like rats. His characters work away at dull jobs in factories or down coal mines or washing dishes, and rarely talk to each other. (In 1990’s The Match Factory Girl, there are 13 minutes before the first line of dialogue, and the whole film is only 68 minutes long.) They usually drink too much and the more decisive ones kill themselves: in Ariel, a father and son sit in a bar; then the father gets up, goes to the loo and shoots himself. The best his protagonists can hope for is escape, usually by boat.

‘But, amazingly, these films are funny and romantic. In fact, the bleaker Kaurismäki the man has become, the more tender his films. It’s simple, he says: “When all the hope is gone, there is no reason for pessimism.” The Man Without a Past, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2002, is typical of his latter-day ability to find hope in the hopeless: an unnamed man is mugged, left unconscious, loses his memory and is left to rebuild his life, befriended by dossers and drifters.

‘Kaurismäki lights another fag. His new film, Le Havre (set in France, though as Finnish as ever) is his first in six years, and his most weirdly optimistic. In fact, he might well have created a new movie genre: the asylum fairytale. It begins with the police stopping a lorryload of asylum seekers; a young boy runs away, takes refuge in the shallows of the freezing sea, and is discovered by an elderly shoeshine who takes him home. Yes, the characters still drink in silent misery, but Le Havre is also an astonishing affirmation of the power of love.

‘What inspired the film? “I read more and more articles, watched more and more TV news about people who have been drowned in the Mediterranean, when they’ve been promised the golden land of Europe. They come full of hopes, and it started to disturb my mind a lot. So what can I do? It’s a film. I might look like a cool guy, but I am most sentimental. I care about others, not too much about myself.”

‘There is a wonderful exchange in the film when the shoeshine asks his wife, ill with cancer, if he can visit her in hospital. She tells him to stay away until she is through the worst. “After two weeks come back and bring the yellow dress that I wore at La Rochelle,” she says. I tell him it’s my favourite line in the film. He smiles. “My favourite, too. I cried when I wrote that.” Why La Rochelle? “Because I had a nice moment with my wife there.”

‘Kaurismäki continues to smoke in the near dark, waiting for the inevitable tap on the shoulder while telling me about his solution to life’s iniquities. This is a philosophy which might have been co-authored by Samuel Beckett and Osama bin Laden. “For mankind, I can’t see any way out,” he says in his deadly monotone, “except terrorism. We kill the 1%.” Which 1%? “The only way for mankind to get out of this misery is to kill the 1% who own everything. The 1% who have put us in the position where humanity has no value. The rich. And the politicians who are the puppies of the rich.”

‘Has he ever thought of going into politics? “No, never. Politics are corrupt.” You wonder if he would say any different when sober; I suspect, if anything, he would be more extreme. Of course, it could all be a pose but I don’t think so. His own life has been even bleaker than his films. He tells me about the men in his close family who have killed themselves, and asks me not to name them. That was their personal choice, he says, and it is not something he wants to intrude on.

‘The manager of Soho House walks into the room. “I’m sorry, sir, but this really is the last time. We have told you twice you can’t smoke in here.” Kaurismäki looks at him with doe-eyed innocence, and apologises again, while we are moved to the verandah. By now we are both knocking back the wine, the only difference being that Kaurismäki tends to empty the glass in one gulp. Is it true that he can only direct when drinking? No, he says, that’s rubbish; he can’t write or edit when drinking, but it makes no difference when directing, so he does drink. But he doesn’t have to.

‘What would he say defines the Finnish character? “Melancholy,” he says instantly. Why does Finland have such a high suicide rate? “Lack of light. Light in every way. The sunshine. Now it is proven medically that people need vitamin D. It is always dark, and when it is dark, it is also dark in the mind.” Does this worry him? He glugs back another glass. “I more or less know I will kill myself, but not yet.” What would make him do it? “Misery.” I am beginning to feel protective of him. You are too much of a romantic, I protest. “Yeah, yeah. So I don’t shoot myself in my head, I shoot myself in my heart.”

‘Still, there might be hope for him. He and his wife now spend half the year in Portugal. Did they move there for the light? “It is the furthest place from Finland in Europe.” We talk about family, and he mentions his wife, an artist who doesn’t like exhibiting her work. After 26 years of marriage, he is obviously still besotted. Is she as miserable as him? He smiles. It’s a lovely, sweet smile; you have to earn it, but it’s worth the wait. “No, she loves life. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.” I bet you are the most attentive, romantic husband there is, I say; I bet you buy her flowers and that she’s got that yellow dress still. “Yes, she does. In my last three films the female characters are all my wife.” Does she like that? “She didn’t even notice.” Do they have children? “Too many.” How many? “None.”

‘He lights another cigarette, and tells me he has only just started smoking again. How many a day? “Three boxes, 60. My record is 12 boxes. When I have to deal with idiotic questions like yours I have to smoke more.” That’s a bit rude. He grins like a little boy who knows he’s gone too far. “Well, I wanted a reaction. I didn’t mean to be rude, I just wanted to provoke you.”

‘Kaurismäki has never been a great respecter of convention or the law. As a young hippy he drifted from job to job. For a while, he was homeless; he often spent the night in police cells after being arrested for bad behaviour. You sense he’s still not quite sure how he became a film-maker (as did his brother Mika; for a time they ran a production company together, but haven’t spoken for 20 years. “For reasons you don’t have to know. Never have economic relationships with your so-called friends”).

‘He certainly loved movies as a child, and found solace in the silence of Keaton and Chaplin. Homages and allusions to past masters are woven into his films: Le Havre nods to Marcel Carné (the shoeshine is called Marcel, and his wife Arletty, after the star of Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis); there are also nods to Jean-Pierre Melville and Robert Bresson.

‘His love of film is equalled only by his despair at contemporary cinema – not least his own. He insists no director has made a masterpiece since the 1970s. What about Scorsese? He snorts, and glugs. “Goodfellas is bullshit. It is the lousiest film ever, ever made. After Raging Bull, he was a lousy amateur.” Terrence Malick? “The first one [Badlands] was OK. That was in the 1970s. After that they were Christian bullshit.”

‘There is just time to top up with a beer. I ask Kaurismäki why he has not made a film in six years. Because his films are dreadful, he says; he is getting old and slowing down, and he has already given too much of his life to cinema. What has he been doing with his time? “I prefer to wander around mushroom areas in the forest.” Eating them? “Of course. Finland has the best.” He gives me a handy hint on hallucinogenics. “Cook them before you put them in the tea. I don’t give recipes, but I only eat the ones I pick.”

‘Kaurismäki sparks up one last time, and we toast the good things in life: drink, mushrooms, death, his wife, love. I ask him what he thinks of his most recent film. “This one?” He looks shocked at the question, and asks again. “My own?” He pauses. “It may be the first one I don’t hate.”

‘That’s brilliant, I say. “Give me five. On the side. Up above.”

‘”Down below. You’re too slow,” he says.

‘And he actually laughs. “I don’t like the film, but I don’t hate it either. For me, that’s progress.”‘ — Simon Hattenstone

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Aki Kaurismäki @ IMDb
KAURISMÄKI tumblr
‘Seven rounds with Aki Kaurismäki’
Aki Kaurismäki @ The Criterion Collection
‘Aki Kaurismäki: The Uncut Interview’
‘Aki Kaurismäki, Great Director profile’ @ Senses of Cinema
Aki Kaurismäki: “I’m not interested in the upper class.”
‘Library Aki Kaurismäki’
Podcast:’THE ECLIPSE VIEWER – EPISODE 35 – AKI KAURISMÄKI’S LENINGRAD COWBOYS’
‘Aki Kaurismäki: The Melancholy Master of Finnish Film’
‘”Le Havre” : le marxisme selon Kaurismäki’
‘Entretien avec le cinéaste Aki Kaurismäki’
‘Un long jour et une courte nuit avec Aki Kaurismäki’
The Official Site of Mika Kaurismäki
‘Les perdants magnifiques d’Aki Kaurismäki’
‘Scenes from the Deadpan Life’
‘Deadpan Poet: Director Aki Kaurismäki in interview’
James Quandt on Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre
‘[Reflections on Abortion in the Films of Aki Kaurismäki]’

 

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Extras

11 Precious Minutes with Aki Kaurismäki

Aki Kaurismaki on Ozu

Aki Kaurismäki needs an electronic cigarette

Aki Kaurismäki singing finnish folk song

Aki Kaurismäki – Hopeful Cynicism

 

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Interview

 

First of all: Why all the trilogies?

Aki Kaurismäki: I’m so bloody lazy that I have to tell everybody I make trilogies. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t do anything but play cards. But the kind of plan I have will take 10 years. It’s called “The Harbor Town” trilogy. I even have a name for the next one. It’s called The Barber of Vigo. Vigo is a harbor town is Galicia, Spain. That’s all I know. So I’ll make another in five years and a third in 10 years so I can retire.

Do you find it harder to make movies now?

AK: Yes, it’s quite different from when I was younger and the fastest filmmaker in the world. I was even faster than Tsui Hark, who was bloody fast. I was certainly faster than Jim Jarmusch. Now he’s becoming faster than me, which is a bit worrisome, but not enough for me to speed up. I think I’ve said mostly what I had to do say. I have no ambition to rush.

So many of your films revolve around working class characters in life-changing predicaments. How do you avoid writing the same people over and over again?

AK: Well, look at Howard Hawks. Is John Wayne the same person in Rio Bravo and El Dorado? Is he playing himself? I always go to Howard Hawks when I’m asked about using the same characters, actors and situations. Or Ken Loach, he’s always doing the same kinds of films. Also, I’m not interested in the upper class. I don’t know how to write dialogue for them. I don’t know how they talk. I’ve always been working, working, working, so those are the characters I know. And I don’t travel so much.

And you don’t come to the U.S. very often anymore.

AK: I love New York. It was my favorite always, but my passport doesn’t have my fingerprints on it, so I can’t get in. And they want to take a photo of my eyes, which I don’t want. I’ll be watched on every street corner. I’m a bit protective of my privacy.

Your movies often pay homage to older American movies. What do you think of recent ones?

AK: Modern Hollywood, to me, is a shame, but independent movies are getting better and better. I’m a big fan of old Hollywood. I’ve been influenced by everything going back to The Great Train Robbery. And Bogart’s technique, and Raoul Walsh. You name it, I’m a fan of it. But that kind of Hollywood has vanished.

How do you know when a scene you’ve shot is funny?

AK: I have a theory about what’s funny and what’s not, but it doesn’t always work with the audience. I think with this one it works quite a lot, but I’ve made several films where people laugh at the sad moments and cry at the funny moments, and it was a bit surprising. But it doesn’t matter. If someone cried, it’s OK. Who am I to say when to laugh or cry?

Is Le Havre a personal film for you?

AK: This is not a very personal film. I have tried to put my skill of the last 30 years to make a film that a Chinese lady could understand without any subtitles.

Do you think you’ve accomplished that here?

AK: Yes, with the normal mistakes I always make. But I was very happy with this film because people were coming out of it feeling happy.

In another recent interview, you said that in the scene where police discover the immigrant in hiding, you wanted to surround him with the bodies of dead relatives. Why did you change your mind?

AK: There’s a serious a problem with immigrants suffering in forgotten containers while traveling 120 kilometers or more. They can die there. I didn’t want to fa
ce that problem because I was making an uplifting film. When there’s no hope, there’s no reason to be pessimistic anymore.

Do you see any major changes between the climate for making movies in Finland now and when you first started?

AK: I don’t. I’ve always worked with the money I had. We didn’t have salaries during the first 10 years, but nobody had any money either. I’ve always walked my own path.

Le Havre was chosen as Finland’s Oscar submission for Best Foreign Language Film this year. When The Man Without a Past was nominated, you refused to attend because you opposed the Iraq war. If nominated this year, would you still voice your opposition?

AK: At that time, it was hopeless, because the war was starting and everyone knew it, so I wasn’t really in a party mood. Now it’s different because the government, Cheney, Wolfowitz, those idiots are all out. The United States have a democratic government. I don’t know if it’s a good or bad government, but my boycott is over.

There’s no question that you’re a critical darling, but how important is it for you that your films perform well?

AK: I’m a producer, so of course I get the box office numbers every Monday morning. I hope for the best. There isn’t any sex or drugs so my expectations aren’t too high, but I trust a lot of adult audiences with civilized tastes. That’s why my budgets are so reasonable. I’m always happy when people watch my films, but I’m not a skyscraper.

 

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17 of Aki Kaurismaki’s 39 films

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Crime and Punishment (1983)
‘Crime and Punishment is a modern adaptation of the classical crime story by F.M. Dostoevsky – but faithful in its spirit to the original. The principal character – a young slaughterhouse worker – commits a senseless crime. Through his act he finally drifts out of society and into loneliness. Only a young girl who accidentally arrives at the scene of the crime wants to follow him. Guilt and the tightening net of the police throw a shadow over their desperate love affair. The nocturnal concrete jungle serves as a backdrop for the struggle for intellectual supremacy between the police and the murderer. Rahikainen’s only weapon in this struggle is his total indifference to everything. Crime and Punishment is, however, first and foremost a film about the last desperate rebellion of a young man against society. The society that – as we know – is a merciless machine. Perhaps we are all guilty – guilty of what? This unbearable question faces us everywhere, hands on hips, sneering at us. As you wish. We’ll die anyway.’ — The Match Factory

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Calamari Union (1985)
‘Aki Kaurismäki’s career began with the masterpiece Crime & Punishment. However, instead of making something similar immediately afterwards, he chose to follow it with an unconventional, black and white satire, Calamari Union. The film begins in a bar, a pivotal place in Kaurismaki’s movies. It is here we first meet our sixteen protagonists: fifteen men (including Matti Pellonpää, Kari Väänänen and Sakari Kuosmanen) all named Frank (apparently, the director was too lazy to come up with different names for everyone) and a guy named Pekka (Markku Toikka). These people represent the lowlife of Helsinki and, aware of this fact, they decide to go to Eira, the decent part of the city. The journey is described as if it were perilous, and in fact things will take unexpected turns. Calamari Union is a strange film, as it doesn’t follow the rules of conventional plotting. What we see is rather a series of separate, quite amusing incidents involving the Franks and Pekka, the dry, very Finnish humor being an anticipation of Kaurismäki’s musical satire Leningrad Cowboys Go America (speaking of music, there’s an interesting use of the song “Stand By Me” – a year ahead of Rob Reiner’s eponymous movie). This may not be the kind of movie people watch on a regular basis, but once it’s been seen, it doesn’t escape your memory. Perfect for a “different” cinema experience.’ — Max_cinefilo89

Opening scene

Excerpt

 

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Shadows in Paradise (1986)
‘Despite a disdain for Hollywood and recent American foreign policy (he has declined Oscar nominations and U.S. festival invitations to protest the Iraq War), Kaurismäki has shown a keen adeptness at ingesting American genres, and then slyly upending them. Shadows in Paradise (1986), his third feature and the first of the trilogy, could be considered his rendition of a romantic comedy—although one that opens with an image of a blank wall. Soon enough that wall is revealed to be a garage door, through which enters a procession of less than gregarious garbagemen. Scenes of physical labor eventually give way to the story of a charmingly cheerless love affair that serves as an unexpected lifeboat for its down-and-out principals. The romance between direct but directionless trash collector Nikander (Kaurismäki’s close friend and collaborator Matti Pellonpää, who died in 1995) and cynical supermarket checkout girl Ilona (Kati Outinen, in her Kaurismäki debut), played out amid the gutted streetscapes and sparse, ramshackle apartments of Helsinki’s less fortunate areas, is hopelessly tentative, depicted as a series of minute gestures, timid and lovely.’ — Michael Koresky

Excerpt

Watch the film

 

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Ariel (1986)
‘In a sense, the Finnish director was giving classic neorealism a twist. But in Kaurismäki’s hands, the quest for secure work that provided the drama for De Sica’s Shoeshine and Bicycle Thieves becomes fleet, droll, if equally compassionate, comedy. Like Shadows in Paradise, Ariel begins with a still frame into which workers march—this time, it’s a group of coal miners on demolition duty, ascending a staircase. With his mine shut down, Taisto (Turo Pajala) accepts some final words of wisdom and the gift of a used Cadillac convertible from his father and co-worker, who then shoots himself, and leaves his Lapland home for Helsinki, with the vague hope of something better. Luck would have it differently, however, and Taisto finds himself a small fish in a big, muddy pond.’ — Michael Koresky

Excerpt

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Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989)
‘Are the Leningrad Cowboys for real? With pointy pompadours reaching to impossible heights above their expressionless faces and needlelike winklepicker shoes that could have been torn from the feet of oversize elves, they might be a hungover collective dream of Elvis and Monty Python. And judging by their music, a so-earnest-it-must-be-ironic amalgam of polka, punk, rock, and Russian and American folk, they would seem to be strictly parodic, something like a Finnish rockabilly Spinal Tap. Yet for all their self-conscious eccentricity, the Leningrad Cowboys, put on the map by Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, are no joke. They’re a genuine band, and the stars of a throng of Kaurismäki films, including a concert documentary, music videos, and two comic features that grant them their own mythical, fish-out-of-water narrative.’ — Michael Koresky

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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The Match Factory Girl (1990)
‘THE MATCH-FACTORY GIRL, the third and final film in Aki Kaurismaki’s “Proletariat Trilogy,” offers similar themes to Kaurismaki’s previous work, with some slight alterations. First, the protagonist is no longer a sullen, working-class Finnish man, but a sullen, working-class Finnish woman. Second, there are no random acts of brutal violence. The transgressions beset upon and by Iris (Kati Outinen) are much colder, purposeful, and calculated. THE MATCH-FACTORY GIRL is not necessarily about a Finnish woman, but a woman. She is used and abused, utilized only if she can offer something tangible, be it money or sex. When her circumstances inconvenience those around her, her hard work and devotion are ignored and she is cast out like yesterday’s trash. This goes beyond feminism to include Karl Marx’s view of the fate of the blue-collar worker. But this time, the workhorse is no longer the burly male proletariat, but a mousy female factory worker. And just as Marx encouraged the workers of the world to stand up and unite against their oppressors, Iris seeks justice on a micro level. The people around her are the oppressors. They are the ones who pushed her. Why shouldn’t they be pushed back?’ — Nick Nobel

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I Hired a Contract Killer (1990)
‘This droll thriller displays the same melancholy vision as Kaurismäki’s brilliant Ariel. After 15 years as a London waterworks clerk, French émigré Henri (Jean Pierre Léaud) is made redundant. Lonely and friendless, he hires a hit-man to put him out of his misery; but after meeting flower-seller Margaret (Clarke) in a pub, he tries to cancel the contract. Shot in English on barely recognisable London locations, the film’s oblique camera angles, moody colours and short, sharp scenes create a stylised world which still has the feel of everyday life. Kaurismäki’s plots and dialogue often give the impression of having been improvised at the last moment, but his framing and narrative concision are extremely rigorous. He also allows lots of space for some sympathetic performances, in particular the laconic Léaud, Colley as the hangdog assassin, Tesco and Cork as a pair of small-time villains. Meanwhile, Timo Salminen’s atmospheric images once again catch the seedy ambience of a B movie world where talk is cheap but love is precious. In short, it plays like an Ealing comedy on downers.’ — Time Out (London)

Montage of scenes

Excerpt

 

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La Vie De Boheme (1992)
‘Based loosely on Henri Merger’s mid-19th-century series of short stories and, by extension, the celebrated Italian opera adaptation La Bohème, Kaurismäki’s postmodern reinterpretation of these parables both reconciled many of the thematic notions he’d been working with over the years as well as refined the stylistic shorthand with which he’d become so proficient. No stranger to tales of the downtrodden, disaffected, and dishonored (he’d previously devoted an entire trilogy of films to the proletarian plight), Kaurismäki instead took concerted advantage of his exotic environment while managing to maintain his inherent tragicomic insight. Concerning the day-to-day travails of a trio of outcast artists—in this case a writer, painter, and composer, all of unique descent—living below the poverty line in an old-fashioned approximation of modern-day Paris, La Vie de Bohème both reveres and repurposes its source material, ultimately resembling a typically earnest Kaurismäki fable rather than an insincere example of cultural appropriation.’ — Slant Magazine

Excerpt

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Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana (1994)
‘Take Care of your Scarf, Tatjana is a road-movie about the unbelievable adventures of two Finnish men, driving a black Volga station wagon through Southern Finland some time in the mid-sixties. Valto, the owner of the car, drinks enormous amounts of coffee, Reino, a mechanic, drinks booze and blabbers endlessly. Already at the early stages of the journey, two ladies come along, one Estonian, the other Russian, and, in spite of understandable difficulties in communication and the obvious incapability of our men to approach the opposite sex, this absurd comedy gains, towards the end, some sentimental tones. Take Care of your Scarf is a film about the amazing state of mind of the Finnish man, and an almost surgically cutting investigation into the Finnish-Estonian- Russian relationships.’ — The Match Factory

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Drifting Clouds (1996)
‘Aki Kaurismäki presents an incisive, subversively funny, and compassionate portrait of love, marriage, and perseverance in Drifting Clouds. Using signature elements of deadpan humor, vivid color palette, kitschy mise-en-scene, and irony of situation, Kaurismäki reflects the disillusionment, crisis of identity, and existential angst of a country struggling to cope with the impact of a post Cold War-induced recession: the chef’s alcohol abuse (which is amusingly commented on as an occupational hazard), Lauri’s reluctant sale of his disproportionately oversized Buick automobile, and the restaurant owner’s resigned acceptance of her failure to modernize. In an understated and poignant scene, an anxious and distracted Ilona immovably stands beside a picture of their lost young son, represented by a childhood photograph of the late actor and Kaurismäki regular, Matti Pellonpää (whose own weakness for alcohol contributed to his untimely death), for whom the film is dedicated. It is a reflection of the personal toll and sense of despair that pervades the film’s bleak and oppressive urban landscape, and the inexorable bonds of love, hope, and community that galvanizes the human spirit in the face of overwhelming pain and insurmountable adversity.’ — Strictly Film School

Trailer

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Juha (1999)
‘Based on a much-filmed Finnish novel from 1911: a farmer’s wife is seduced into running away from her stolid, older husband Juha by a city slicker, who enslaves her in a brothel. This plot is an ideal vehicle for Kaurismäki’s riotous miserabilism – dour characters in dire situations – but for once the glum Finn goes beyond one-note comedy. He shoots it as a neo-silent movie and turns it into a sophisticated reflection on the evolution of silent cinema, from its heavily intertitled, melodramatic beginnings to the rarely equalled visual expressiveness of its maturity. (The soundtrack similarly evolves from a musical base, gradually adding sound effects and then a fragment of sync-sound as a woman sings.) The result curiously resembles parts of Twin Peaks, but it plays as an oblique indictment of the mediocrity of most modern cinema.’ — Time Out (London)

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The Man Without a Past (2002)
‘The Man Without a Past occupies the nebulous realms between emotions and moods. It’s deadpan-comic and entropic-tragic, ironic and optimistic, detached and intimate. Its characters speak with such icy remove that they make Coens brothers side players look as animated as Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. And don’t let the title fool you: though we have no background information on the unnamed protagonist or the Finnish seaside around him, the past is everywhere, from the postindustrial rust where he rebuilds his life to the rough lines and vaguely haunted look that hangs around the edges of Markku Peltola’s face. Precisely composed with shots that seldom move, Aki Kaurismäki directs with simplicity yet artistry. This is the kind of movie that can wholly lack a plot yet still unfold with a sense of internal logic that makes every diversion inexplicably inevitable. That’s no mean feat for a film where even the dialogue routinely floats out of comprehension, with the lead character suddenly going off on a tangent about visiting the moon as another humors him. When asked whether he met someone, the man replies, “Not really, it was a Sunday.”‘ — Not Just Movies

Trailer

Excerpts

 

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Lights in the Dusk (2006)
‘Lights in the Dusk (the Finnish title, Laitakaupungin valot, is inspired by Chaplin’s City Lights) is a quite unusual Kaurismäki movie, mostly because of the absence of his regular acting ensemble (the exception being Kati Outinen in a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo, reminiscent of Shadows in Paradise). In fact, the leading thespian is the rather unknown Janne Hyytiäinen, who had a minor role in The Man Without a Past. He plays Koistinen, a lonely, naive night watchman with no social life. The only “real” relationship he has is his friendship with the female owner of a hot dog stand, but then again it’s all limited to small talk about how boring his life is. Imagine his surprise, then, when one night a woman decides to keep him company in a cafè (when told she sat next to him because he looked lonely, the night watchman’s priceless answer is “And now what? We’re getting married?”). Overenthusiastic, Koistinen asks this lady out and brags about his “luck” with the hot dog woman. If only he knew, poor fella: his “girlfriend” is actually connected with the Russian underworld’s Helsinki branch, and the only reason she’s dating the unlucky fool is to help her superiors frame him for a crime. You can imagine how things go from this point on. Lights in the Dusk is all we could expect from Kaurismäki, but fails to reach the levels of previous masterpieces for two reasons: first of all, the whole thing about a guy being sent to jail for a crime he didn’t commit sounds all too familiar (Ariel, anyone?). In addition, there are moments where the director’s pessimism gets too frustrating for the audience, as he seems to have no intention of making his antihero’s situation a little more bearable. That’s why we’re caught completely off guard when he finally offers redemption and hope, all made more effective by the extremely bold decision to save it for the very last shot. His intriguing analysis of solitude, expressed through many beautiful symbols (the abandoned dog above all), climaxes into one stunning, undeniably powerful image, the best ending the Finnish master has ever come up with. For that shot alone, Kaurismäki deserves universal plaudits.’ — Max_cinefilo89

Trailer

 

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Le Havre (2011)
‘In what he intends to be a trilogy of movies set in ports, the Finnish moviemaker Aki Kaurismäki turns his affectionate, whimsical eye on the impoverished but generous folk of a run-down, waterfront community in the Normandy port of Le Havre. Led by the emblematically named Marcel Marx (André Wilms), a one-time bohemian who has given up novel-writing to work as a shoeshine boy, these outsiders protect a Congolese teenager in flight from the authorities after escaping from a container taking him and other refugees to London. The movie is a homage to French cinema, shot and acted in the flat, carefully composed style of Bresson and celebrating les petits gens, those kindly ordinary people who populate the poetic, popular-front movies of the 1930s associated with Renoir, Clair and Carné. One of the characters is called Arletty, and a benevolent local detective dresses like a cop in a Melville thriller. Nouvelle Vague star Jean-Pierre Léaud and Pierre Etaix –, comedy director, Tati associate and actor in Bresson’s Pickpocket – have walk-on roles.’ — The Guardian

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Centro Histórico (segment) (2012)
‘By design, omnibus films tend to be unbalanced, with some segments clearly working better than others. In the case of the Portuguese-produced Historic Centre (Centro Histórico), which includes pieces by top-notch auteurs Aki Kaurismäki, Pedro Costa, Victor Erice and Manoel de Oliveira, there is some truth to that statement, although the filmmakers manage to create a fairly consistent ensemble in these four shorts set in the northern city of Guimarães, which was designated European Capital of Culture for 2012. In the strong opener Tavern Man (O Tasquiero), Finnish auteur Kaurismäki (Le Havre, The Man Without a Past) offers up a dialogue-less, deadpan comedy about a forlorn bar owner (regular Ilkka Koivula) trying his best to attract clients in the city’s historic central neighborhood. Although the story feels a bit truncated, there are plenty of cleverly drawn sight gags involving the man’s efforts to beat a competing tavern down the street, while the quiet shots of customers drinking alone underscores a certain leaden sadness, despite some otherwise hilarious bits.’ — Jordan Mintzer

Excerpt

 

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The Other Side of Hope (2017)
‘The movies of Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, with their deadpan drollery and aquarium light, have long been a habit-forming pleasure. But increasingly they are something else, or something more. The issue of migrants and refugees from the Middle East may still be something from which cinema mostly averts its gaze. Not Kaurismäki’s cinema. With his previous film Le Havre, and this very sympathetic and charming new work, The Other Side of Hope, Kaurismäki has made refugees his focus – and done so without appearing to change style or tonal tack. His humane comedy, with its air of unworldly absurdity, has absorbed this idea, but not undermined its seriousness in any way, in fact embraced it with almost miraculous ease and simplicity.’ — Peter Bradshaw

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Fallen Leaves (2023)
‘Sweet-souled in story, scalpel-sharp in filmmaking precision, this enchanting love story from Finnish virtuoso Aki Kaurismäki circles around two financially strapped Helsinkians who keep finding and losing one another in a world that seems to be falling apart. Evoking dark-comic romances from his early career such as Shadows in Paradise and Ariel, the sardonic yet exquisitely melancholic Fallen Leaves devotes its wry, humane gaze to grocery clerk Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and construction laborer Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), who commence an on-again, off-again relationship of extreme tentativeness, while seeking employment and stability. As with the greatest of Kaurismäki’s films, everyday details register as grand, meaningful cinematic gestures. This filmmaker has scrupulously carved another fictive universe out of a handful of specific, vivid locations, yet Fallen Leaves very much takes place in the world we’re living in, which makes its surrender to hope all the more affecting. Winner of the Jury Prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. Finland’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 2024 Academy Awards.’ — Film @ Lincoln Center

Trailer

Excerpt

 

*

p.s. Hey. Heads up to any p.s. quality control watchers, I’m feeling the same today bordering on a little worse, and today’s p.s. will likely follow suit, with my apologies in advance. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Not so far, but hopefully by tomorrow. Love’s idea of spoilage would really help, thank you/him. Love explaining what this Olympics-adjacent thing that appeared in the Tuileries yesterday is for, G. ** jay, Hi, thanks. I suspect it’s just ugly head/chest cold, but if it doesn’t fade out pronto, I’ll check. When I was a young writer living in NYC and hanging out with famous older writers like Ashbery and Bartheleme and White and that lot, Riding was much talked about and seemingly adored, so I tried her. Def. on Serkis’s mega-input into those movies’ goodness. ** Lucas, Hi. Yeah, I’m a bit relentless in my theme park related searching. Beautiful geese at a beautifully scenic moment. Thank you, pal. I’m hoping to finally get/see ‘Flunker’ this week, I hope. ** _Black_Acrylic, I didn’t know ‘Private Eye’ still existed. So, did the Shackleton live up? ** Deisel Clementine, Hi. What an interesting combo: Riding and Lispector, yeah. So … the redraft? What’s its state? ** David Ehrenstein, That could well be re: my Stritch encounter. Thanks re: the health stuff. I’m trying to walk it off. Hasn’t proved to be a miraculous cure so far, but … ** Charalampos, Happy the post pulled you in. And thanks for the Cretian vibeage. Paris returns the favor. ** Tosh Berman, Thanks, Tosh. ** Steve, I remember post-9/11 being very serene compared to now, at least pre- the invasion. I don’t think I’m doctor worthy, at least not yet. My body’s pretty talented at ridding me of bugs, or has been. Thank you. ** Uday, Hey. Always feel more than free to say what needs to be said. I can handle it. I did get your email card! Thank you! That’s so sweet of you. xo. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. I don’t really buy the rest as cure method, or maybe not ‘buy’, but my body can’t stop wanting to go-go-go. Rock whatever today brings. ** Harper, Hi. Glad you arrived safe and not too sweatily. Oh, right, British tourists famously flock to Spain. I’ve read that. I never really notice the British tourists here unless they’re here for a football match, and, then, yes, they do seem to be a drunken, violent mess. Ashbery translated a book of short Roussell pieces as you probably know. Thanks, I’m fluiding up and otherwise trying to pretend it’s not happening as best I can, rather unsuccessfully though. Have huge fun. What did you do today? ** Pascal, Cool. Thanks, pal. I’ll hit ‘Twisters’ the very minute I’m not sniffling and blowing my nose and interrupting everything around me. Tomorrow maybe? I actually can’t stand honey. I don’t know why. But maybe I should bite/drink that bullet. ** James Bennett, ‘Kind of’ can be enough, no? Under certain circumstances. Yours, I would certainly imagine. Thanks. I think my goal is phlegm dematerialisation. I think that’s possible? ** Dev, Thank you very much, Dev. ** Darby☃, He is, yes, I agree. I wrote a poem series about him which isn’t half bad. I feel confident that you can make lavender purple a shining beacon. Follow your muse, for sure, and switch genres when the muse instructs, for sure. I don’t think I doodle. I should find a doodle app. 23: the magic number. I did a post once a long time ago about 23’s less popular younger brother 22. It wasn’t very interesting. I have been to the Louvre, yes. Uh, I don’t remember any taxidermied mice. Just tons of yellowed, supposedly great paintings. Another big art museum-y place here, the Pinault Collection, has this poking out of one of its walls. The Louvre is more huge than nice. Like, huge. ** Justin D, Hi, J. Grumbles: No, not yet, but tomorrow is out there waiting hopefully for me. I don’t do sickness well. I fight it. I went for a very long walk yesterday and ate things that people with colds aren’t supposed to eat. And a fat lot of good that did me! You have any sickness -> health tips? ** Oscar 🌀, Disaster movies are my comfort food, or one of my foods. Even the shittiest ones. In fact I should watch a very shitty one today. I just said ‘Hi Oscar’ aloud but due to my sinus problems it sounded like ‘Hiatus, cuz’. I do like soup. Now that’s an idea. Split pea soup! Do you like split pea soup? I sure do. And it makes good pasta sauce even, if you’re really weird like me. Thank you. Soup it is. And cigarettes! A million of them! You’re a miracle worker, my fine friend. ** Right. For some reason I decided to restore and expand an old post about the wonderful wonderful Finnish film director Aki Kaurismäki, whose most recent film, ‘Fallen Leaves’, was one of the best films of 2023, if you ask me, which I realise you didn’t, See you tomorrow.

 

‘…one of the most important works of twentieth century fiction… When the history of modern literature is written some years from now, it will have to take [Progress of Stories] into account…’ — John Ashbery

‘Laura Riding’s Progress of Stories is something of a litmus test for readers. For some, it is a neglected masterpiece, a revolutionary work in the development of fiction, a book like no other. For others, it a book like no other … in its pretentiousness, its relentless interruptions to remind the reader that he/she is reading a piece of fiction, and its refusal, in many stories, to follow any conventional narrative pattern.

‘Riding first published Progress of Stories in 1935, when she was living with the poet Robert Graves on Majorca and running the Seizin Press. She had already made a name as a modernist poet in the U.S., divorced her first husband, had an affair with the poet Allen Tate, attempted suicide and broken up Graves’ first marriage–although she cut off sexual relations with Graves early in their time as a couple. If Riding comes across as a woman inclined to take things to extremes, that comes across in her fiction.

‘In the words of Graves’ nephew and biographer Richard Perceval Graves, “Her plenipotent intellect and personality swept away all resistance, reducing to discipleship, abject servility, or virtual madness anyone who could not manage to shake him/herself free from her mesmerizing, tyrannical influence. Her most subjective responses to experience were translated (by her as well as her followers) into world-historical imperatives and aesthetic universals, while her insight into the multiple layers of human personality enabled her to manipulate everyone around her intellectually, emotionally, and sexually.” (There is a striking resemblance between accounts of Riding by people who knew her–and her responses to them–and those of another litmus-like figure, Ayn Rand.)

‘I must confess defeat through exhaustion in dealing with Riding’s life and a good deal of her opinions. This is a woman who, in her eighties, could chastise Harry Mathews over four lengthy paragraphs for referring to her in a New York Review of Books article of the 1982 of Progress of Stories as “Laura” rather than “Laura (Riding) Jackson” (her preferred name after her 1941 marriage to critic Schuyler Jackson). She also made sure to note that “my work and myself” were subjects “which no professional literary man or woman can afford to disregard in his or her position-taking.” And I nearly surrendered before even reaching the stories in Progress of Stories thanks to 33 pages of prefaces (the one to the 1935 edition, followed by a second for the 1982 edition).

‘From the start, Riding draws a stark line between her work and those of virtually all her predecessors: “There is a quaint cult of story-writing which practises what is called ‘the short story’; pompous little fragments in whose very triviality, obscurity and shabbiness some significant principle of being is meant to be read.” Instead, it is time, she declares, that “we should be telling one another stories of ideas.” This is no earth-shaking assertion, but soon after it, Riding challenges the reader to digest the following sentence: “Thus the story-telling model of human speaking, or, as speaking recorded for silent apprehending is literarily named, ‘writing’, persists, in its natural casting of speaking or writing as reduplicating the live processes of happening, into the open areas of knowledge and understanding that all minds share as the world of intelligent being—partaking, in their unitary reality as minds, of the identity of mind.”

‘I balked for a moment, but plowed on (write me if you can explain what she meant). Or rather, detoured past the rest of the preface material and headed into the stories themselves. The book is organized in three major sections: the stories from the 1935 edition, followed by a selection of stories from Riding’s first two fiction collections, Anarchism is Not Enough (1928) and Experts Are Puzzled (1930). It concludes with “Christmastime,” a story she wrote in 1966 and her own reflections on some of the preceding stories.

‘The Progress of Stories section represents something of a journey out of conventional story-telling into the new territory Riding proposes to discover. The seven stories in Part One, “Stories of Lives”, a written in a very spare style but still somewhat represent other short stories one might be familiar with, although rather as if being viewed under a microscope like a specimen.
In Part Two, “Stories of Ideas,” however, Riding sets the reader down in wholly unfamiliar material. “Reality as Port Huntlady” opens with a simple, traditional narrative sentence: “Dan the Dog came to the town of Port Huntlady with two friends, Baby and Slick.” OK, no problem there. But then Riding tells us that, “Port Huntlady was not a town as other towns are towns. It was rather like a place where one felt a town might one day be, or where one felt that perhaps there had once been a town.” Port Huntlady, in other words, is not your usual seaside resort town. No, it is a town that–like the story itself–hovers between life in the real world and life in a world of ideas: “Port Huntlady was a place where things might happen; not the things that happened in the world proper, which were personal experiences, but universal experiences, such as the end of the world, or great turning-points in the course of human events.”

‘At the center of Port Huntlady affairs is Lady Port-Huntlady–herself an orphic figure who might well be a fictional counterpart for Riding herself: “Never seeming to say anything—and yet, after one had left her presence, it seemed that she had said a great deal, at least that one had understood a great many things that one did not really understand.” Indeed, a cynic might say the same thing after finishing Progress of Stories

‘But it doesn’t really matter what Lady Port-Huntlady might or might not say during her soirees, since, as Riding soon tells us, “We are all aware that there is no such place as Port Huntlady. It may well be that there is a place to which Port Huntlady stands as a lie stands to the truth. In fact, this is not far from being the case.” The inclusion of details is, for Riding, part of the attempt the story-teller to be believable, but this is ultimately equivalent to hypnotism: “this true-seeming is the power of the story to keep your interest until you have abandoned, quite frankly, those rational standards of interest with which we all prop up our chins when our thoughts scurry between brain and heart and we can do no better than be proud. It is the moral pretence of the story created by our joint vanity in being conscientious, orderly and truthful creatures—before we give ourselves up to its gentle idiocy….”

‘“But, indeed,” she asks further on, “is our story very important? Is any story very important? I assure you that no story is of much importance; and I think you will agree with me. Are we not all agreed that only a few things are really important?” Though she introduces other characters and engages them in various actions, she notes that these matters are both pointless and, therefore, infinite in their possibilities: “… how Lady Port-Huntlady would have consoled the cats by bringing down the remains of their lunch from the lounge; and how Miss Bookworth would have left Port Huntlady soon after to take up a post as secretary to a wealthy invalid whose hobby was corresponding with patients in tuberculosis sanatoria, in which he had spent much of his own life; and how a story may go on indefinitely unless there is perfect understanding at the start of the limitations that keep a story from being anything but a story….” In the end, she writes, driving a last stake through any pretense of honoring the “laws” of fiction, “no amount of ingenuity can save a story from seeming, in the end, just a story–just a piece of verbal luggage, belonging to anybody who cares to be bothered with it.”

‘In an interview, the poet Lisa Samuels, who edited the University of California Press 2001 reprint of Riding’s 1928 collection, Anarchism Is Not Enough, argued that Riding was challenging the very conceptual basis of fiction itself, rather like Brecht breaking the fourth wall between the play and its audience: “Her tone can be crisp in those stories, as you say; but her combinations of the fantastic, fairy tales, interrogating language as power, investigating what it means to draw and disassemble characters, challenging the reader to be aware of their desire for narrative and syntactic seduction, and so on, make for a situation, in my reading, of multiple possibilities (rather than precision) and messy genres (excess – I mean that in a good way).”

‘If you wanted to know whether or not you would get anything out of Progress of Stories, you could actually just go straight to “Reality as Port Huntlady” and draw your conclusions from that. For me, reading it was rather like the experience of looking at a Magic Eye picture, where you can feel your visual perception of the image switching back and forth between what seems like noise and then, a moment later, becomes coherent. It was both disorienting and, in a way, almost thrilling.

‘Continuing on in this manner for another two hundred-plus pages, however, was a like being trapped in a gallery with nothing on the walls except Magic Eye pictures. A little bit is an exciting novelty; dozens of these pictures, one following the other relentlessly, was mind-numbing. Reviewing the 1982 edition in New York magazine, Edith Milton concluded, “All this self-consciousness makes for quite difficult reading, and, despite their formal brilliance, the stories pall.”

‘On the other hand, Harry Mathews–himself a veteran challenger of the conventions of fiction–considered Riding’s venture among the most ambitious in 20th century literature: “Riding’s aim in writing this carefully structured series of stories was to make articulate in the experience of her readers a knowledge of life that is both true and nonconceptual. It was as if she wanted to make the mechanisms of language, usually so approximate and reductive, accurate enough in the effect of their working to initiate the reader willy-nilly into an awareness of what she felt to be the pure, unmediated truth.”’ — The Neglected Books Page

 

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Further

Laura Riding Jackson Site
Laura (Riding) Jackson Foundation
Laura Riding @ Wikipedia
My Poetic Side
Beyond Poetry
Laura Riding Roughshod
Laura Riding @ Ugly Duckling Press(e)
Telling Laura (Riding) Jackson, reply by Paul Auster
Laura Riding @ goodreads
Looking for (Mrs) Laura (Riding) Jackson, the anti-social people’s poet, from Jamaica (Queens) to Woodruff Avenue (Brooklyn)
‘The Promise of Words’
Against the Commodity of the Poem: The Poetics of Laura (Riding) Jackson
LAURA RIDING TO THE WORLD: “WHAT SHALL WE DO?”
Experts are Puzzled
Laura Riding’s Quarrel with Poetry
Laura Riding’s Extraordinary 1930 Letters to an 8-Year-Old Girl About Being Oneself
Code of Silence: Laura (Riding) Jackson and the Refusal to Speak
Diving Deep Into the Letters of Laura Riding and Gertrude Stein
With Thanks to Laura Riding
“I Will Not Give You an Answer”
Laura Riding’s bold plan to stop time

 

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Extras

Laura (Riding) Jackson gives a lecture for the Poetry Project

Tour of Laura (Riding) Jackson’s House

Laura (Riding) Jackson recorded at University of Florida 1975

 

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To the Editors

 

‘Poet, seer, muse, and occasional Fury, Laura (Riding) Jackson is back among us, mercifully and pitilessly, as a writer of fictions. A new edition of her Progress of Stories, first published in 1935, reprints the original text unamended, together with twelve other early stories, one later one, and a new preface and commentary by the author. The book has long been unavailable, and its reappearance is to be welcomed; indeed, in a wiser world, its publication date would be declared a national holiday. There seems no point in trying to conceal my own enthusiasm. … ‘ — Harry Mathews, NYRB

To the Editors:

I am writing to you in special relation to a particular feature of Mr. Harry Mathews’s review of the new edition of my book Progress of Stories, which appeared in your issue of April 29th. This feature is a supposed difficulty Mr. Matthews represents himself as encountering in referring to me by name, and the caper of arguing a necessity of resolving it by referring to me in his review’s developing course as, just, “Laura.” The freedom-taking in this country with first-name calling that has been adopted as a professional necessity in television and newspaper quarters, and doctors’ and dentists’ establishments (I have been met, in the last, in requesting address not automatically intimate, with the query “Are you British?”) has not yet, so far as I know, extended to literary journalism: I feel justified in describing Mr. Mathew’s resorting to it in his review as a caper. His arguing it a necessity is based on a rather cavalier neglect of the facts as to naming data in my regard within easy reach of one as exploratorily energetic as himself. Why, then, this caper? I believe the reason to be in there being a purpose in his writing his review, to write an unqualifiedly good review of the book. This, within the tradition of literary attitudes to my work and myself, which no professional literary man or woman can afford to disregard in his or her position-taking as to these subjects, tempts to conversion of the entire performance into a caper—a procedure for outwitting, with gaiety and deft mobility in critical commentary, the prevailing literary world bestowing on me of the character of a bugbear flouting the normal presumptions of “best” literary-world opinion, a rather unreal but sufficiently present nuisance to require occasional dismissal as non-existent. The incidental caper of calling me “Laura” lends to the caper in-the-whole of the treating of the book under review, and my work and myself all, an effect of enthusiastic involvement of personal acquaintance with and feeling about my writings and their life-history protecting the reviewer from accusations of partisan favoring: he wants to be understood as unashamedly meaning all that he avers as to this particular book, my writings generally, and myself personally.

To consider the familiarity of the first-name calling of me, represented as provoked by my making myself difficult in the matter of names, and Mr. Mathews’s frank will to demonstrate that I can be treated as easy to treat of rather than bugbearishly difficult.—In so far as the matter of my names is concerned, Mr. Mathew’s is weirdly in error. The open bibliographical record has no “Laura Gottschalk” or “Laura Gottschalk Riding.” My first publications bore the name Laura Riding Gottschalk: from 1920 to 1925 I was the wife of Louis Gottschalk. After the publication of my first book in 1926, I divested myself of that surname, “Riding” becoming my authorial and legal personal name.

The assertion that “Miss Riding” and therefore Laura Riding “no longer exists,” and the implication that “Mrs. Jackson” and therefore Laura (Riding) Jackson have no literarily legitimate indentificatory validity, the name “Jackson” authorially used, he alleges, as a matter of sentiment, are effronteries to which Mr. Mathews feels himself entitled because of the bold gallantry of his undertaking to write a good (!) review of a book of mine (!). All that is proper to his reviewer problem of dealing with these two successive surnames is a decision on the basis of good literary-behavior manners. The second of these, preceded by my first name, and a parenthesized middle element “Riding” to facilitate reader-awareness of continuity of authorial identity for writing extending over six decades, seems the choice of those having some lively awareness of my later writing; the first seems favored by those having mainly, almost exclusively, awareness of the earlier. The best biographical or literary reference-volumes cope with courteous scholarly nicety with the two authorial names; none of them have thrown up their editorial hands in despair and given me alphabetical place in the “L”‘s. Besides a few verse-indecencies by male poets of early century-periods, there has been no “Laura” literary calling of me. A book of scurrilous character of not many years ago engaged in would-be assassinative “Laura”-calling of me thoughout; but this falls outside the category of literary-behavior manners or policy. In all the bad literary-behavior manners to which I have been subjected—Mr. Mathews introducing into his caper-tactics the appeasement of literary-world colleagues who have found bad manners a convenient mode of dealing with the difficulty for them of facing the requirements of intellectual conscience posed by my work, and by my literary principles, with a characterizing of my treatment of bad manners as bad as the behavior of a “Fury,” and an attributing to me the defect of being, also, besides a poet and a “seer” and a “muse,” that weakling phenomenon, a human being—there has been general avoidance of privilege-assuming of first-name calling of me as warranted by an astutely intimate personal knowledge of me. Mr. Mathews has gone farther in pretending to have such knowledge than many without other will towards me than the denigratory. The pretence, with him, entangles him in the denigratory, as in the characterization “muse,” which he snatches from an area of bad-willed, indeed wicked, concocted, pseudo-narrative.

But what of this review, in what relates in it to Progress of Stories itself? I have encountered considerable interest in knowing what I thought of it, as a piece of criticism. It has been impossible for me to separate the critical portion of the review from the introductory portion, in which the capering spirit Mr. Mathews has obviously thought essential for the production of a “good” review takes its start, and impetus is built for the intended conversion of the capering energy into serious effects of critical enthusiasm. The crucial pass-over point is the leap, from the centering of a history of near-oblivion ascribed to my work and myself, as at least in part a consequence of my incivility to literary-world bad-manneredness, in a most poignantly tragic obliteration of Progress of Stories, to a miracle of rejuvenation of my buried work and self in the republication of this collection of stories. The attempt to cast this subsidiary element of my life’s work in the role of a major element, and key of first importance to the purport and potency of the whole, has a certain flippancy in it, a light-weight enthusiasm, for which the bestowal of honors of attributed literary descent from Poe and Flaubert and Mallarmé cannot compensate. The background of derivation of the stories is in the background thought and sensibility of all my writing; and the celebratory isolation of them into a ground for the setting of a national Laura Day is eclipsed in the Harry Day that the “good” review precipitated into actual literary occurrence.

Laura (Riding) Jackson
Wabasso, Florida

Harry Mathews replies:
Mrs. Jackson’s reaction to my review of Progress of Stories seems beyond dispute. I regret the mistake made concerning her name.

 

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Book

Laura Riding Progress of Stories
Persea

‘This expanded edition of the 1935 classic collection includes the original eighteen stories, which “progress” from “Stories of Lives” to “Stories of Ideas” to “Nearly True Stories,” plus twelve more early stories and one late story, all selected and arranged by Laura (Riding) Jackson in 1982. Though the principle of all her writing is that “words are for truth,” she has said these “made-up” stories are designed to appeal to our universal love of storytelling, “the zest, the yearning, for the true”.’ — Persea

‘…unique and uniquely delightful…. One has to suspect these modern fairy tales of being perhaps quite a lot wiser than the ordinary realistic novel’. — Rebecca West (1935)

Excerpts

Privateness

They have a small bedroom. The bed is small, but they are not fat and they love each other. She sleeps with her knees neatly inside his knees and when they get up they do not get in each other’s way. She says, “Put on the shirt with the blue patterns like little spotted plates,” and he says, “Put on the white skirt that you wear the purple jacket with.” They have no prejudices against colours but like what they have.
—-Their other room is not larger, but it is cleverly arranged, with a table for this and a table for that. He makes the sandwiches at one table while at another she writes a letter to a friend who needs money. She writes promptly to say they have no money and sends their love. It is not true that they have no money; but they are both out of work and must be careful with the little money they have. They are thinking of renting an office and selling advice on all subjects, for they are very intelligent people. The idea seems like a joke, and they talk about it jokingly; but they mean it.
—-They go to a large park. It costs little to get there and they know the very tree they want to sit under. It is more like a business trip than a holiday. They eat their lunch in a methodical way and afterwards look through the grass around them as a mother looks through her child’s hair to see if it is clean. Then they think about their affairs and change their minds many times.
—-They walk about on the grass and feel sensible, but when they walk on paved paths they feel they are wasting their time. Finally they decide to commit suicide. They talk about it in natural tones because they may really do it -and they may not. There is an oval pond in the park with solemn brown ducks paddling in it, and they sit down by it, sorry for the ducks paddling in it, and they sit down by it, sorry for the ducks but not for themselves.
—-They go out of the park at a different entrance from the one they came in by. There are strange restaurants all around they would never think of eating in. It makes them feel lonely, so they speed home in a taxi, though they can ill afford this. At home there is the electric light, which makes them look at each other peculiarly. It is worth going out to be able to come home and look at each other in such a way – not a loving way or a tragic way, but as if to say, “It doesn’t interest us what our story is – that is for other people.”
—-We, then, having complete power, removed all the amusements that did not amuse us. We were then at least not hopelessly amused. We inculcated in ourselves an amusability not qualified by standards developed from amusements that failed to amuse. Our standards, that is, were impossibly high.
—-And yet we were not hopeless. We were ascetically humourous, in fact. And so when Mademoiselle Comet came among us we were somewhat at a loss. For Mademoiselle Comet was a really professional entertainer. She came from where she came to make us look.
—-But Mademoiselle Comet was different. We could not help looking. But she more than amused. She was a perfect oddity. The fact that she was entertaining had no psychological connection with the fact that we were watching her. She was creature of pure pleasure. She was a phenomenon whose humorous slant did not sympathetically attack us; being a slant of independence, not comedy. Her long bright hair was dead. She could not be loved.
—-Therefore Mademoiselle Comet became our sole entertainment. And she more than amused; we loved her. Having complete power, we placed her in a leading position, where we could observe her better. And we were not amused. We were still ascetically humourous. Thus we aged properly. We did not, like mirth-stricken children, die. Rather we could not remember that we had ever been alive. We too had long bright dead hair. Mademoiselle Comet performed, and we looked, always a last time. We too performed, became really professional entertainers. Our ascetically humourous slant became more and more a slant of independence, less and less a slant of rejected comedy. With Mademoiselle Comet we became a troupe, creatures of pure pleasure, more than amused, more than amusing, looker-entertainers, Mademoiselle Comet’s train of cold light. We were the phenomenal word fun, Mademoiselle Comet leading. Fun was our visible property. We appeared, a comet and its tail, with deadly powerfulness to ourselves. We collided. We swallowed and were swallowed, more than amused. Mademoiselle Comet, because of the position we had put her in with our complete power, alone survived. Her long bright dead hair covered her. Our long bright dead hair covered us. Her long bright dead hair alone survived; universe of pure pleasure, never tangled, never combed. She could not be loved. We loved her. Our long bright hair alone survived. We alone survived, having complete power. Our standards, that is, were impossibly high; and the brilliant Mademoiselle Comet, a professional entertainer, satisfied them. Our standards alone survived, being impossibly high.

 

An Anonymous Book

An anonymous book for children only was published by an anonymous publisher and anonymously praised in an anonymous journal. Moreover, it imitated variously the style of each of the known writers of the time, and this made the responsibility for its authorship all the more impossible to place. For none of the known writers could in the circumstances look guilty. But everyone else did, so this made the responsibility for its authorship all the more difficult to place. The police had instructions to arrest all suspicious-looking persons. But as everyone except the known writers was under suspicion, the department of censorship gave orders that the known authors should be put in prison to separate them from the rest of the population and that everyone else should be regarded as legally committed to freedom. ‘Did you write it?’ everyone was questioned at every street corner. And as the answer was always ‘No’, the questioned person was always remanded as a suspect.
—-The reasons why this book aroused the department of censorship were these. One–it imitated (or seemed to imitate) the style of all the known authors of the time and was therefore understood by the authorities to be a political (or moral) satire. Two–it had no title and was therefore feared by the authorities to be dealing under the cover of obscurity with dangerous subjects. Three–its publisher could not be traced and it was therefore believed by the authorities to have been printed uncommercially. Four–it had no author and was therefore suspected by the authorities of having been written by a dangerous person. Five (and last)–it advertised itself as a book for children, and was therefore concluded by the authorities to have been written with the concealed design of corrupting adults. As the mystery grew, the vigilance of the police grew, and the circulation of the book grew: for the only way that its authorship could be discovered was by increasing the number of people suspected, and this could only be done by increasing the number of readers. The authorities secretly hoped to arrive at the author by separating those who had read the book from those who had not read it, and singling out from among the latter him or her who pretended to know least about it.
—-Therefore the time has come to close. I am discovered, or rather I have discovered myself, for the authorities lost interest in me when they saw that I would discover myself before I could be officially discovered, that I would in fact break through the pages and destroy the strongest evidence that might be held against me, that is, that “An anonymous book”, etc. I understand now that what they desired to prevent was just what has happened. You must forgive me and believe that I was not trying to deceive, but that I became confused. I over-distinguished and so fell into satire and so discovered myself and so could not go on, to maintain a satiric distinction between authorship and scholarship.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. I’m feeling worse today — a bad head/chest cold, I think. I’m going to try to do the p.s., but it’s probably not going to be very thoughtful and attentive, sorry. ** Dominik, Hi!!! If only inspiration paid the bills. Love didn’t manage the immediate help I need, but there’s still time. Love with a handful of tissue at his nose and watery eyes, G. ** Lucas, Hi. Oh, yeah, I love Defunctland, of course. I traverse there very often. Thanks, pal. I’m going to need to get my head well before I dare explore your zine further, but I’m excited to and will share thoughts. But I think it’s safe to say the world is giving it a warm welcome. ** jay, Thanks, jay. Yeah, Defunctland and I are good pals, let’s just say. I’m glad you liked the Apes movies. Surprisingly so, right? ** _Black_Acrylic, I would have gone to that museum. They really should have had rides though. I’ll poke around in MUBI for that film when my world de-blears, thanks. ** Misanthrope, Hi! There you are. Sorry for this zonked welcome back. My head is unfriendly. To me, hopefully not to you. That is a nightmare. Jesus, that guy. I still haven’t laid eyes on a single copy of ‘Flunker’. One of these years. Love to you too, and I’ll be sharper next time. ** Pascal, Hi, P. Yeah, try, I mean, what have you got to lose and all of that. I too do find that an exciting film can wake up the old prose machine as well. Antonioni certainly works in theory. My day is destined to suck, but yours won’t, I sure hope. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. The World’s Fair as cruising grounds, wow, well of course. All those nooks and crannies. I’m avoiding all Tr*mp related everything at the moment, but thank you. I saw Elaine Stritch in some play when I was a kid, I cant remember what though. ** Uday, My head cold is definitely not sexy, so I guess that’s your answer. Nice about your friends. All of my friends are away on summer jaunts, but at least I won’t pass along my malady. Thanks, pal. ** Malik, Hi! Thank you. Me too, and definitely about your heatwave. Thank god we’re still temperate here. Oh, I forgot to send you my email. Wait, it’s [email protected]. Thank you so much about ‘Flunker’! That means a ton, and my head cold is now incrementally better. Ha, I too was surprised that I allowed a Five Nights at Freddy’s reference in here. I must have been deranged by my amusement park fixation. I hope you’re doing really well. ** Don Waters, Thanks, Don. Oh, right, the legendary infectiousness of parenthood. I’ve read about that. Thanks so much about ‘Flunker’. Bret and I have always been friendly and mutual supporters. Being on his show was fun. He talks a lot, so it’s a very easy gig. Take care, D. ** Steve, Hi. Thanks. Resting is not something I have any skills at. I just get kind of slouchy at most. The atmosphere of hysteria in the States right now is way beyond anything I have experienced. ** Harper, Hi. I feel like shit, but I guess we’re on similar pages. Barcelona today! Safe, swift trip there and all of that. Cool. I sort of don’t mind the tourists. Tourists in Paris tend to be very romantic and look around in wonder and go ooh and ahh a lot, and I can relate to that. I will ask my three-book friend next time I talk with him. I hope your health is made tiptop by your new surroundings. ** James Bennett, Hi, James! I’m unfortunately feeling very crappy, but such things happen. I knew/know Steve Roden’s work and saw him play live a couple of times, but I don’t think I ever met him. He was friends with artist friends of mine. Very interesting artist. Cool you’re listening to him. Uh, generally I don’t notice the seasons re: my writing’s ups and downs, but if summer was its doldrums, I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised. Did you write something surprising? Surely? ** Charalampos, I’m not quite yet, but thanks. Uh, I don’t know what you mean about a Lorie Moore technique? I don’t know of such a thing, but I am very hazy right now. Good luck with the meditating. Vague by default vibes from Paris. ** Justin D, I agree with you completely. I’m not better, for sure, but I figure it has to be peaking today. The Z Channel, yes, indeed. I remember it and remember watching a lot of things on it. Huh, I forgot all about that channel. Really adventurous compared to any comparably sized ‘cable’ channel nowadays. I’ll go find that doc. I’m glad you’re well and good. ** Oscar 🌀, Sounds worth being in a busy crossing for. Uh, my brain is toast, but, uh … Very hi(gh) weed toking dude trying to send you a smoke signal made out of smoke rings but whose mouth can’t design a recognisable ‘S’ so he gives up early. I did see Godzilla X Kong’. I remember thinking the first, like, hour or something, and the last, like, hour or something were really fun, and I remember the rest of it being rather spotty but totally doable. The fish cutting board is better than money. Okay, maybe not, but it’s a score for sure. I’m kind of sick. It sucks. I never get sick, so it’s an unpleasant and rare surprise. But oh well. I was planning to go see the opening day of ‘Twisters’ on IMAX today, which would have cured me for sure, but I don’t think I’m up for it ultimately. Darn. I am donating what would have been the fun aspects of my Wednesday to you so you can have a doubly fun Wednesday. I hope it works. ** Right. Today I ask you to read about Laura Riding’s legendary yet divisive novel and see what you think. Do that, yes? See you tomorrow in hopefully better mental shape.